Harold Carr

My brother-in-law, Guillermo Antonio Cervi‰o-Wood, recommended George Steiner’s Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought. I found his essay of that title (originally published in Salmagundi) here and here.

I can’t say I like Steiner’s writing. It seems unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, all his points were made earlier by Bataille and Bataille’s writing is much better, even in English translation. He even uses some of Bataille’s phrases (e.g., “sadness unto death,” “laid bare”).

The movement from a view of life as essentially simple and orderly to a view of life as complex and ironic is what every individual passes through in becoming mature. ... Amid simplicity and order rationalism is born, but rationalism proves inadequate in any period of upheaval. Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites. Such inner peace as [we] gain must represent a tension among contradictions... A feeling for [dramatic] paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exists side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.

We ourselves are alive and seem to escape death like Odysseus under the ram, but our family, friends and we ourselves, die - thus the tragic sense of life.

The trick is to turn this tragic sense into a source of joy and wonder. Into the infinite now.

On Saturday I heard Thomas Cahill, Rebecca Solnit and Sam Hamill speak at the Great Salt Lake Book Festival that took place at city library. On Sunday, Tony Weller and Ken Sanders had a "rare book roadshow" at noon. I almost decided not to go since I was still laying in bed reading at 11:30am. Even after I did get up and drive down to the library I had to wait in my car for 15 minutes for a thunderstorm to pass.

I brought my signed copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and my Totem Press/Corinth Books edition of Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts. Ginsberg did a reading in the Union Ballroom in February 1989 (with Steve Fletcher accompanying him on guitar). Later in the evening I was fortunate to sit with him at the table of Anselm Hollo (now teaching at Naropa), who was living in Salt Lake at the time. Ginsberg signed my facsimile Harper & Row edition of Howl "for Harold Carr at Anselm Hollo's table - Salt Lake 2/22/89" - illustrating it with a Buddha, Skull and Crossbones, sun, crescent moon and stars. Tony and Ken valued it between $300 and $500 dollars. Myths & Texts was valued at between $40 and $200. Of course, I've had these books for a long time, especially Myths & Texts and I didn't buy them for their future value - I obtained them for my interest in the author's work - particularly Myths & Texts - one of the seminal works in my poetry collection and in my own poetry.

In his essay, "Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics" Pierre Joris points out poets of interest:

Nataniel Mackey - foundational noise
Valere Novarina - theatre - ludic nomadology of names that dissolves character into a fluidity...
Robert Kelly
Melvin Tolson - bifacial multi-phasic poet
Kateb Yacine - multiple life-long text
Jerome Rothenberg
Don Byrd - leads us through the "mesocosm - the dense locale of the common, that is absorbed by the exaggeration of symbolism, on the one hand, and by mere biology, on the other.
Leslie Scalapino - reading ... so slow ... no content ... motion is a thing in itself
Edouard Glissant - poetics of the diverse
Allen Fisher - investigation into all our knowledges - the great serial constructive derive...
Lynn Hejinian - border worker
Michel Deguy - hospitality
Abdelwahab Meddeb - allography
Muriel Rukeyser - life as necessarily political, as needing to be engaged at all levels
Nicole Brossard - quest for and conquest of meaning
Charles Berstein- invention is not a choice
Nicole Peyrafitte - wild metonymic grammar of desire - no fictional single static point
John Cayley - Indra's Net - cyberpoetics
Jed Rasula
Franco Beltrametti
Anselm Hollo - writing nomadically in a language that is not his mother-tongue

"All language is found -- or given. Language does not belong to us. One does not own language or does not create language, one is invited into it."

"For me poetry is the highest probability of desire and thought synchronized in a meaningful voice." - Nicole Brossard

So I guess I'm a "thinkerer" (Pierre Joris' word), tinkering with words, sounds, structures. Perhaps easily led astray, but persistent, always thinkering.

Despite the raving of some postmodern thought, there is a reality independent of me or you. However, for us, "reality is not simply there, it must be searched for and won" (Paul Celan). (Note the male conquest viz-a-viz Howe's bewilderment.)

"Poetry as a meeting place for all kinds of imagination" (Muriel Rukeyser). (Note the female emphasis on community.)

When you're down or confused "is it depression or justifiable despair? Is it personal anxiety or social outrage?" (Fanny Howe). "I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane." (Muriel Rukeyser).

"... that moment when it is our body/mind that speaks and not that of our progenitors." (Pierre Joris).

So, here it is, all laid out in front of us, surrounding us, immersing us. "We stand in relationship with all the components of the universe, as well as with the hereafter and with antiquity. Which relationships we will cultivate, which for us is preeminently important, and which should be realized, depend only upon the course and duration of our watchfulness." (Novalis). (Note the male determinism. How about stumbling?)

"If language must be considered the only way to enter into a rapport with the Sacred, then every etymology must be "good"; in every metaphor, even the most banal, there should shine a truth. If language is seen as a natural revelation of Truth, then nothing in language should be wrong - even monsters should show the power of God."

Many have tried "to prove that it is no longer a language's autonomy but rather the existence of an original and divine force, the Word, that becomes the source of every language." Adam, the original Name Giver, tapped into this source.

But we must admit that "languages are a historical-cultural phenomenon, that they grow without an order decided by a supernatural will, and that they gradually arrive at their stability through borrowing (deliberate or unconscious), poetic inventions, conventional whims and 'iconic' attempts."

The rediscovery of either a primordial generative grammar or a mother tongue (e.g., Hebrew, Chinese, Indo-European). Primigenial language had: a historical validity (to rediscover the language before the confusion of Babel); a semantic validity (a language with a natural relationship between words and things); and a revelatory value (in speaking it one would recognize the nature of the named reality - like Adam).

The search for a perfect language derived from a sort of neurotic uneasiness, because people would like to find in words and expression of the way the world works, and they are regularly confused.

Attempting to demonstrate that a relationship exists between words and the essence of things indicates the toughness of a dream - an irrepressible need to have some contact with Being.

Continuing on to the second essay in Umberto Eco's Serendipities - Language and Lunacy he speaks of dreams of restoring the language of Adam.

The blasphemy of Babel results in the Babel disaster - - a wound inflicted upon mankind that might, in some way, be healed.

Dante most likely believed that, in naming the animals, rather than speaking, Adam was laying down the rules of language, that Adam's language had a primordial affinity between words and objects, that the principles which permitted the creation of languages capable of reflecting the true essence of things, languages in which the essential mode of things were identical with how they are signified, disappeared at Babel.

Dante, aware that a natural language can be enriched through the creativity of single individuals, aimed to create the language of Adam in which to write his poetry. His goal was to discover the rules of language layed down by Adam and use those rules to create a contemporary language which might heal the wound of Babel.

(Note: the Bible clearly states that God brought before Adam all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the air. What about fish?)

(Note: Genesis 10 speaks of the dispersal of the sons of Noah after the Flood resulting in "the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, ..." - before Babel - suggesting that the original Hebrew spoken by Adam was already lost after Noah.)

(Note: Greeks and Romans identified the structures of their languages with reason (e.g., Aristotle constructed his list of categories by setting out from the structures of Greek grammar). Nevertheless, the Greek culture continued to think of a universality of the Logos beyond the difference between various languages.)

I'm reading the first essay in Umberto Eco's Serendipities - Language and Lunacy. He notes that we still speak Ptolemaically (e.g., the sun "rises" and "sets") and that we need conspiracy theories. Citing Karl Popper he says, "the social theory of conspiracy is a consequence of the end of God as a reference point and of the consequent question, Who is there in his place? This place is now occupied by various men and powerful sinister groups that can be blamed for having organized the Great Depression and all the evils we suffer. Plots and conspiracies are used to explain the failure of our own actions."

He continues, "Tales, true of false, are always persuasive. Narratives explain something that was otherwise hard to understand. They seem more plausible than everyday or historical reality, which is far more complex and less credible.

"There exists a process of verification that is based on slow, collective, public performance by what Charles Sanders Peirce call `the Community.'

"Recognizing that our history has been inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call constantly into question the very tales we believe true. The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia."

First Kaos, a tightly packed ball of mud and seeds. No land nor sea nor sun nor moon with its borrowed light.

Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought

Xmas in Portland with Gwyneth

Rubenshuis - Antwerp, Belgium

Antwerp, Belgium

Prague's Museum of Communism (and Sun's office --- nice juxtaposition!)

Bountiful Peak with Suni

Zurich and Rapperswil

Red Rock Rondo (and Jasmine) in Zion Park (with Laura Bush)

buenos aires

Cowdaddies in Torrey, Utah

Inside/Outside