Thinking about lists, with Foucalt, Borges, Eco and W.S. Merwin
'...the non-place of language...'
Again I scuttle into your inbox. without warning, shamelessly hiding the holes in my nervous fluttering with language. These words melanined with guilt nevertheless sense the memory of something that dances. It is strange to come here to this place again; this patch of synthetic land, shapeshifting in the withering light of days that are not full enough, fashioned out of fragments heard and repeated, a singing country that dares to wake the soul with mountain breath and slogan fire. I have been returning to these archives like a thief of time, to snatch some momentary warmth, some forgotten ditty whose trails grow larger in the mind’s eye, even as they fade into sonic oblivion.
I have been busy, since my last post about taking a summer break. I come back here today, with different shoes, and I do not know how long I will stay, but already I can feel the old warmth of doing Poetly, again - the rustling in the fingers, the pause after a bird has just erupted out of the canopy, as this foliage smells the coming of rain. I am reminded of Agha Shahid Ali’s timeless couplet about memory, and love, and the forever bridge of return.
I must go back briefly to a place that I have loved
to tell you those you will efface I have loved
Allow me my whimsy, sometimes I think it is all that tethers me to this cataclysmic real.
Let me tell you, dear reader, why I have been missing from your inbox.
In brief, I have started a new journey of study and work. I am now part of a PhD programme in a department of Sociology at an educational Institute (in India). The last couple of months have passed in such a whirlwind, and I have been so caught in the moving, the settling, the unsettling, and then the coursework, that I barely got time to come here, and write, and love. The first year of coursework as many of you know, is usually hectic. I have got a brief respite, in the form of a short break, but I want to come here as often as I can - and yes share poems, poetic snippets, and my chains of commentary.
I have been thinking, lately, of lists. This is an old fascination, and I have often marvelled at the possibilities of the list as form. There are many things to be said about the list as a site of meaning making, how the apparent order of sequence, tabular consistency, and the mundaneness of morphological inevitability can nuance the very boundaries that are its subtext. It could have many avatars - the shopping list, the attendance register, the to-do list, the list of nations who have signed a nuclear pact, a list of missing persons in a totalitarian state, a will, a menu card, an instrumental or secret list of “Urban Naxals” or “anti-nationals”, a list of past lovers, a list of stars seen in the horizon on such and such a date and time in such and such a place. These range from the obvious to the absurd, the mismatched to the aesthetic. There is the ‘list poem’, and a beautiful example which comes to mind is Aracelis Girmay’s tour-de-force “You are Who I love”.
Civilization’s obsession with counting is the impulse of comprehension, to colonise the inarticulable or the incomprehensible with the familiar tyranny of sequence. Umberto Eco argues in his essay, An Infinity of Lists, about the list embodying the deeply human need to give a form to infinity. The beauty of the list is the movement between what is contained in it - the included - and what it excludes - the etcetera. The list is perhaps the most basic form of the archive, and it constitutes a unit of knowledge, or a series of thought-units.
But Eco devotes more time to listing examples in the history of literature and art than theorising. His analysis is cursory, I believe, in comparison with Michel Foucalt’s explication of the list as precursor to ‘discourse’. In his preface, to Order of Things, that I read as part of my course readings, Foucalt uses the starting point of a fictional list, to theorise his conception of discourse, and to think about the histories of systems of thought, of representation and the phenomenal break from older ways of history-making and knowledge-making that he was proposing.
“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way o! look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
- From Michel Foucalt’s Preface to Order of Things
Foucalt uses this brilliant Borgesian analogy to wean the reader into his questioning of linearity, nearness, resemblance, juxtaposition, and progression (among other things) that dominated the way knowledge was ordered in the ‘human sciences’. Borges’s idiosyncratically fantastical encyclopaedic entry opened a way of thinking about history, not through one uninterrupted, perfect line, but in ruptures and erasures, through “discourse”, and his archaeological method. His propositions are quite complex, but for the purpose of this post and as a segue into poetry, I want to rest at the brilliance of his example, and his analysis. Talking about the impossible existence of the list, Foucalt points out that “the fact that the common ground on which such meetings are possible has itself been destroyed. What is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible. The animals ‘(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’ – where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it? Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language? (Italics Mine)”
The non-place of language - where poetry makes its home. Foucalt in all his analyses refutes the French and the structuralist obsession with language, but his own writing drips with the playful fervour of the linguist. This list, and his subsequent foray into ways of thinking about uncanny connections in the histories of knowledge creation, has echoes in poesis. Think of this project, the method he is developing, the maze that he is crafting, and then read this list poem.
I wanted to celebrate Merwin’s poetry today, also because, it was his birthday a couple of days ago (He would have been 95 if he were still alive), and as you know, he is a favourite. I have featured his poems before: Separation, Travelling Together, Losing a Language, Finding a Teacher.
With Foucalt’s words echoing in my mind these last few days, I thought of the kingdom of Grief, the lonely “subject” (reminding me of The Little Prince along with a conception of the historical, ‘governed’ subject), imprisoned in endless repetition, and the metaphor of subjectivation threw new light on the cosmic insularity of the feeling. Merwin’s use of the metaphor, substituting sovereignty with emotion draws the reader’s attention to the fickleness of the attempt to enclose its affective intensity. This is a trope that Mervin often uses, souring feeling with the speckled leap of the image. In short phrases that move with the sure engine of the sentence, the imagery changes almost unnoticeably, and impressions congeal subterraneously. It is as if the landscape of each poem’s country is being perused through the window of a fast moving train, and while there is a semblance of sameness, it changes rapidly from dry, to verdant, to water body, and mountain. Notice this quality of leaping, and how it works to create an accumulation of humours by the end, even in one of his ‘ecological’ poems. Think with him, about the September that has just passed.
“..and all along the shores/ boats of the spirit are burning”
It is an exercise in itself to follow the little worlds that each of his phrases evokes. The continuous movement from the specific to the universal, the material to the contemplative, and then the sudden tug of craft turning into insight is remarkable. I think, perhaps no poem of his embodies this leaping patience that is distinctly his, than Invocation.
For the sake of those who like to count, let me propose one reading of the breakdown of image beats in this poem - Invocation/ The day/ hanging by its feet/ with a hole/In its voice/ And the light/ running into the sand/Here I am/ once again/ with my dry mouth/ At the fountain/ of thistles/Preparing/ to sing. And, here one could ask again, as Foucalt does of Borges, “Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language?”
Could we think of every poem as a list? Could we read every completeness of narrative, as an enumeration of little worlds, little births and deaths, little movements of thought and body, little fires of feeling? Merwin’s poems lend themselves easily to such a reading, but in this shifting aesthetic terrain, every poem transforms, and we feel the surge of language, and perhaps experience for ourselves why the poet feels so deeply, how the burden of the suffering of the real is the ‘burning of boats’.
I have not shared here, Merwin’s most anthologised works, but then that has never been the project of this newsletter. To conclude, I share two of his poems - the first touching upon the idea of returning to a place that is at once familiar and unfamiliar (connecting to the beginning of this commentary, and Shahid’s poem), and the second, Merwin’s Ars Poetica.
So, yes.. a Belated happy birthday to you Merwinsaab…
If the poetry and the commentary resonate with you, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.
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Note: Those, not in India, who’d like to support the work I do at Poetly, write to me - poetly@pm.me. (Apologies, I will figure out international payments soon)
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