Reading of Jay Wright's Dimensions of History, part 1

Introduction: Wright by way of Heidegger and Prynne

I've always wanted to write about Jay Wright's poetry. It's meant a lot to me over the years. I've often felt like I do not have the background or erudition to offer interpretations of his poems, and this reservation still stands. But there seems to me to be such a glaring paucity of interpretations of Wright, whose poetry seems important to me and worth the time spent reading and understanding. So, over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to offer interpretations of the various sections of Dimensions of History, published in 1976. It's a fascinating book, and demands (and deserves) more attention.

Before I begin, I wanted to also say that the idea of this project came from reading the poetry of J.H. Prynne, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. There is something about place and space in Prynne and Heidegger that fascinates me, and that I suppose we could describe as sacralizing, or ritualistic. Heidegger famously pointed out that a bridge creates the banks of a river in a different way, and I think a poem does this as well, meaning it creates a place for one's spirit. But spirit here is intended to mean something local, something attached to the earth, that falls for neither forms of naive realism nor disembodied idealism, but retains a philosophical flavor of seeking. To consecreate space, make it over to place, to praise the local rain, to feel the seasons change and to sense one's smallness in the daily, these seem like ritual acts that Wright, in his own key, seeks to enact and perform. And of course Wright, like Heidegger, (although he might not phrase it this way), wants to understand the meaning of being, and perhaps might even characterize the meaning of being as care. So, that's what got me going on this project. Now: Dimensions of History.

1. Dimensional Triptychs and Forms of Shamanism

Dimensions of History begins, through its title, with a claim: there are dimensions of history. Readers of Robert Brandom will remember that making a claim means observing a commitment, so we could say that Wright is committed to an idea of history, although we have not waded deep enough into the book to be able to sufficiently characterize this idea, or even perhaps to label it an "idea." But there is an abiding sense here of the importance of history, yet how do we define this history, what does it mean in the context of the book? We are historical beings, we might read in Heidegger, but how should one understand this? What role does the past play in our lives, and the future, let alone the present? Wright will tackle these questions, but he does so through a complex weaving of texts, a dramatic texture of language, that makes the answers to this question thick and redolent and suggestive. He also, we might say, incorporates these questions, or these answers, through symbolic means. Therefore, to understand the meaning of history in Wright's fourth book, we are going to have to take into account both symbol and texture as we make our way through the text.

How do we describe the structure of the book? If we look at it in the table of contents of Transfigurations, a collected poems from 2000 (Wright has published much since), we see this (I have ommitted the names of poems to focus on more structural questions for now):

DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY

The Second Eye of the World: The Dimension of Rites and Acts

I. The Eye of God: The Soul's First Vision

II. The Key That Unlocks Performance: Vision as Historical Dimension

III. The Second Eye of the World

Modulations: The Aesthetic Dimension

I. Rhythm, Charts and Changes

II. The Body Adorned and Bare

III. Retablos

IV. Logbook of Judgments

Landscapes: The Physical Dimension

What do we notice? First, there are here three dimensions of history: the dimension of rites and acts; the aesthetic dimension; and the physical dimension. This is already interesting, as we can see that Wright's understanding of history diverges from a more conventional understanding of history as large political events on particular dates that shape our lives. But how then does Wright understand history? History is made up of ritual, art, and the physical. But what does this mean? Ritual connotes something symbolic and religious, or at least something repeated and structured. But this seems a strange way of thinking about history, as a form of ritual or rituals. Or is it strange? It also seems strange to think about a dimension of history as aesthetic, which is typically about art, about sensuous things, and not history per se. Aesthetics itself is broken down further, into things like "Rhythm, Charts and Changes" and "The Body Adorned and Bare," which further problematizes our naive thinking of history. And finally, we commonly associate history with human beings, and not the physical world. So it is clear from this dimensional triptych that Dimensions of History is going to argue for a way of thinking about history that is different from what we are accustomed to.

Notice too that "The Second Eye of the World' is repeated twice, as the title of the first part, and the title of the third section of the first part. This resonates, or jars, with the title of the first section of the first part, "The Eye of God: The Soul's First Vision." There is an emphasis, in other words, on forms of seeing - a way the world sees, or a way God sees, which seems to bear a relationship to the way the soul sees. One feels we have another triptych - world: God: soul - that mimics or echoes or reflects the triptych - physical: ritual: art. But what is the meaning of "the second eye"? Well, what is the first eye? I suppose, if we are religious, we could say the first eye of the world is God's. When we say this, we are foregrounding a kind of religious vision. The second eye would then be the human eye. If we are less religious, we might say the first eye is nature, the natural world, and the second eye is what John McDowell has termed "second nature," meaning our ability to inhabit a world of meaning that is neither reducible to biology or supernaturalism. Two potential interpretations, though there are definitely others.

Here is how the first section of the first part of Dimensions of History begins (remember the title juxtaposes the eye of God with the soul's first vision, therefore making a statement about how we see being tied to God's own vision, in what appears to be a sort of advocacy for radical agency):

Brightness is a curse upon the day.

The light has turned the plain cave dark.

Who chooses me

to rise river-burdened, here,

where the sun has bent itself

and sprinkled ash about our doors?

To be a river spirit

I would have to burn this ash again

to moonrays and sunlight,

control the waves that push us higher

on the land.

I strain to clasp my dust again,

to make it mine,

to understand the claims the living

owe the dead.

This is an inversion of Plato, where the light is the curse, and darkness the blessing. To make darkness the blessing is to also invert Christian stereotypes about whiteness as innocence and darkness as evil, as well as racial stereotypes. And for the cave to be a blessing as dark is to praise a form of hunkering down, or making a home where one is, rather than seeking for some abstract transcendence. The cave is described as "plain," which is an interesting choice. I tend to associate that word with Wallace Stevens, and his "The Plain Sense of Things," which has to do with a kind of imaginative austerity. Then the poet rises up, and there is the sense that the speaker has been awakened somehow, chosen, and that the act of reading rolls the rock away from the mouth of the cave, per se. The speaker is described as "river-burdened," which is a fascinating compound word that suggests an intimacy with the earth, but also a strangeness, a burden, and so in a different way the "second eye of god." The speaker is no river spirit, for to be one, he would have to control the very waves. Yet he does "strain to clasp my dust again, / to make it mine, / to understand the claims the living / owe the dead." To strain to clasp one's dust again is to strain to make one's life intelligibile to oneself. It is to, therefore, attempt to understand, and interpret, history, to explicate it to oneself.

History then, we could say already, is something personal for Wright. And it is personal the way ritual is personal, the way the claims the dead make on us is personal. But what does that mean, the claim the dead make on us? Is this an invocation of the authority of tradition, whatever tradition finds us, and our wrestling with it? We might think of the claims the dead make on us as familial, a way a person wrestles with his own family, history, and culture to make sense of her life. For me, as a Jew, I struggle to understand the Shoah; this is a way the dead make claims on me, on what I consider important. I also live with schizoaffective disorder, and that makes claims on me in a different way, because I see myself in a community of people living with the illness, and I strive to represent this illness in cartoons in a way that makes my life intelligible. Here we are talking about community, and tradition, and one wonders how these are connected to Wright's poetry, for Wright incorporates many tradiitons in his work, African-American, Dogon, European, Native-American, Hispanic, and one senses that tradition itself is a kind of real and imagined community.

Let's look at a longer excerpt of this opening part, and then we'll end for today:

Like the master of the spear,

I cross my river now,

always to return to one beginning,

which may be one or no beginning.

Under the tightly bound arms

and the spirit of masks,

I return to you,

to name,

to own,

to be possessed and named myself,

following the movement of the eye of God,

whose lids will close upon your greater claims.

And so I start in search of that key,

the ankh,

that will unlock the act.

"Much have I strained to make my soul obey."

Not in the perfect understanding of submission,

my feeling given form

to ride upon your judgment.

Unusual lights are at our altars.

Unusual hands go 'round our pots,

and dip into the blood that we alone can shed.

But

"I have made an end of my failings,

I have removed my defects...

I am purified in my double nest."

Is this only in death?

Where did I learn to present myself

to the cut of some other voice,

substitute in a mime

my body breaks to contain?

But

"I have become a prince,

I have become glorious,

I am provided with what is necessary."

These are the signs of understanding

that I assert, but cannot reach alone.

This is not an easy poem to understand, but there is such a capaciousness to it, an extraordinarily rich symbolic manner, and we are pulled into it, as we are pulled into a ritual. Wright seems to be asking what the difference is, between a poem and a ritual. There is much mention of things we might associate with an initiation ceremony, involving suffering, death, and resurrection: crossings, masks, naming, movement, altars, purification, death, presentation of self, the breaking of body, and signs of understanding that cannot be reached alone. We get a sense of this in Mircea Eliade's Shamanism, where he writes about hierophanies that they are "nothing but a radical ontological separation of some object from the surrounding cosmic zone; some tree, some stone, some place, by the mere fact that it reveals that it is sacred, that it has been, as it were, "chosen" as the receptacle for a manifestation of the sacred, is thereby ontologically separated from all other stones, trees, places, and occupies a different, a supernatural plane." (p. 32) We can turn to George B. Hutchinson, and his Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union, to also get a sense of what Wright is interested in representing: "it is the phenomenon of ecstatic role-taking itself that can be considered primal, not any particular form of shamanic practice." (xiii) This idea of ecstatic role-taking is crucial for understanding Wright, and I hope to explore it further in later blog posts.