You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense

7. Preserving the Possible

7 Preserving the Possible Introducing poems by Aleš Debeljak, Simic writes: ‘‘My sense while reading Debeljak is that this is what pondering one’s life feels like in this waning century’’ (Simic 1994a, 119). Less than a decade later, the century having waned, my thought while reading Simic is that this is what pondering (or better yet, experiencing) the birth of sense is like. Through several poems and the interplay of multiple figures of poetizing, such as the white and History, Simic’s ur-poetry offers one an experience of sense at the point of its origin, of beings within the scenes out of and into which they emerge, loci we have regarded, following Heidegger, as pertaining to origination, to how beings presence. Thought most generally, Simic’s ur-poetry casts the emergence of sense in terms of the arrival of a History of singular, underdetermined, 181 Preserving the Possible co-presencing characters. History is a figure for the arrival of sense out of and into a white, empty dimension that cradles it as the difference between singularities. That dimension itself is extrahistorical, however, for the event of its opening never arrives into presence. Instead, it has always already happened by the time singular bursts of sense co-presence . This fact is traced through the synchronic and diachronic manifold that does arrive as History. Moreover, the empty, differentiated dimension of presencing is such only in virtue of the singular characters that cascade through it. The dimension of presencing, arranged by the white and other figures of poetizing, is thus part and parcel of History, even if it never arrives as a singular, underdetermined character. ‘‘Sense,’’ ‘‘synchrony,’’ ‘‘diachrony,’’ ‘‘presencing’’—these categorical terms are somewhat misleading. As we have seen, there is no sense or presencing per se. It is difficult to overestimate the import of this disclosure , for it turns the entire cosmos into a whirl of singular characters addressing one another in their own unique ways. ‘‘Interlude,’’ from Austerities (Simic 1982), captures and provokes this thought as well as the astonishment it brings. A worm In an otherwise Red apple Said: I am. It happened on a chipped China plate, At a table With twelve empty chairs. The rightful owner Of the apple Had gone into the kitchen To get a knife. She was an old woman Who forgot things easily. Dear me, She whispered. 182 You Must Change Your Life In Simic’s ur-poetry, the cosmos, at the point of origination, the Ursprung , cannot be neatly carved up into subjects and objects, into those who can claim their being for themselves as opposed to some vast range of mute presences that only articulate their essence through narratives scripted by the former. No, here we find ourselves amid a fully animate cosmos. Each burst of sense has its own character, its own way of being, its ‘‘I am’’—that is, its characteristic address through and in the synchronic and diachronic webs that arrange the open dimension of presencing . This is not to say that each being has subjectivity in the sense of selfrelation (i.e., an awareness of its own polyphonic co-presencing) as either a capacity or a distinguishing trait. Simic’s animism, should we retain the term, is thoroughly non-vitalistic. Beings are not rendered animate in virtue of some enlivening power, e.g., ‘‘consciousness,’’ from which they acquire cognitive capacities. As a child of History, sense is not the consequent of any ground, but a leap out of a white emptiness into a differentiated dimension of co-presencing that comes to pass in an underdetermined yet characteristic fashion. The character with which sense occurs is not, however, the characteristic of some substratic entity, a mind or brain’s consciousness. To speak of an animate cosmos, therefore , is not to fill each corner with ensouled matter but to underscore the singular nature that each burst of sense brings into the webs of copresence that are integral to it and its world. It would seem, therefore, that an apple has once again brought startling news: singular characters abound. And it is through this news that I would begin to read the old woman’s ‘‘Dear me.’’ Given the knife, she no doubt had hoped to eat the apple, and that does, to some extent, explain her surprise. But that cannot be all there is to the matter, for this is a worm speaking in the...