Nathaniel Mackey and Lost Time: "The Phantom Light of All Our Day"

As Nathaniel Mackey has shown us, the fundamental experience of music and jazz in particular involves its own time, distinct from the mathematical subdivisions of the clock. From the pendulum and escapement to the caesium standard and International Atomic Time Scale (TAI), Enlightenment thought has imperialized time as well as space, spreading out from the Greenwich Meridian a universal, homogenous temporality. In music, on the other hand, time repeats in the restatement of a theme, or expands in its variation. Musical time might be charted in circles or spirals more effectively than in the infinite, unidirectional straight line of our conventional historical discourse. One of the hallmarks of modernity is the erasure of lived time from our world. Through music, Mackey's writing often suggests, one recaptures the true heterogeneity of time in a most palpable form.

In his bold dismissal of what has been prohibitively called the musical fallacy, Mackey would seem to be celebrating a similar sense of time in literature. From Four for Trane (1978) through his most recent writing, the improvisatory and open forms in post-bop jazz inform his adventurous sense of contemporary poetry. In regards to this aspect of Mackey's work, one might think of Louis Zukofsky's formulation, lower limit speech/upper limit music, behind which hover the Modernist ambitions of Joyce or Eliot to translate musical forms into poetry. Yet Mackey's invocations of music in his writing often function as markers of loss. If music itself has the ability to transform present time, writing follows after the fact of music. Mackey's fictional series concerning jazz is, after all, given a most Proustian title: From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. As Julia Kristeva has argued, "language is acquired in childhood only after the loss of a primal object: verbal sequences turn up only if a trans-position is substituted for a more or less symbiotic primal object, this trans-position being a true reconstitution that retroactively gives form and meaning to the mirage of the primal Thing" (41). Language, in other words, serves as but the phantom remainder of an originary experience. Writing is thus haunted, the poem "installing the others vault in oneself" (148). The relation drawn here between language and fallen time is, as I shall argue, a pervasive concern in Mackey's work.

In order to examine the relation between time and transcendence in Mackey's poetry, I would like to provide an analysis of "The Phantom Light of All Our Day," published in Septet for the End of Time (1983). The chapbook's very title presents a crucial paradox in relation to time: it refers to Olivier Messien's Quator pour la fin du Temps (1941) (Scroggins 44). In addition to the slippage between septet and the eight poems therein, the musical term describes seven instruments playing in unison, while the poems can only be read one at a time. In a similar sense, the title suggests, the eight poems are unified at the end of time, or perhaps, it is the end (or purpose) of time to unify. It is appropriate, in this regard, that each poem begins with the phrase, "I woke up," placing each poem on the border of sleep, a realm of composite temporality. As Mackey observes, this phrase was the original structuring principle of the sequence: "the poem sequence Septet for the End of Time . . . for a long time was just that one poem 'Capricorn Rising,' which is the first of the eight. But I found that those three words that begin each of the poems, I woke up . . . , just kept coming back" (Funkhouser 329). Bordering on a dream state, the repetition of "I woke up" can be read as a symptom of mourning for its loss. Yet it is this very repetition which, in Mackey's poetics, carries the potential for transcendence of loss.

In "The Phantom Light of All Our Day," the...