Broken English: Poetry and Partiality

The Store

The Store "God knows what will happen, butpermits himself toforget." -Anatole France "Myobject is not what I'm lookingfor, but what I've found." -Picasso * we come to acts of experience, in particular to acts of art, with a store of unexamined premises-time and space among them. At the moment we speak of a we create a pas;. ("Just n o ; , ' ' says an American, and means a certain moment in the past.) In the very act of language we incur the language's forethought and afterthought; and generally, to that extent, we abrogate for ourselves an independent or unpredctable present. As a grammaticalcategory, that is, as a taxonomic entity, the present operates as a range within the temporal field: accorded for its operations one thud of the stretch, it works like the past and future, and is distinguished from them only by its operations' imputed location-in-time.But even as we say it, we know a greater mystery is involved. For the future feelsinherentlyunpredctable to us; that unforeseenness is its essentialincommensurabilitywith the past, in this triad of wronglyparallelizedconstructs .The present extends not even a split-secondbackward or a split-secondforward, and has the feel of a constantly slipping location. It is enormous (wecan never get out of it) and yet tiny (it can't for a second keep from becomingpast) and seems, at times, to mark only the-split-border between past and future, and not a separate range at all. The space of time is thus, as phenomenal experience, suggestive 6 Broken English of a very different kind of construction, with none of the &visibility or structural equitabilityof the tidy grammaticalfie1ds.l For the writer, as for the photographer, the paradox of the attempt to capture the Now arises immediately and pointedly. In many senses, the finest feature of art is its raising this paradox to view, that it offers to the looker (the audience) the prospect of another looker (the artist) whose presence is both gone and going-on.The "store" which I take for mIrtitle here is, first and foremost, that store or ~varehouseof prescriptidns or recapitulations\irebring to the experience of a moment. For the present is both a monumental moment (from~vhich we get the sense of the momentous ) and a molten flo\~r or constant loss, which breaks down unities and gives us the nomenclaturesof seconds, always already split. Though we sense these paradoxes, no\$.and then, and must face them in the moment in the act of art, we operate as a practical matter in the world as if looking for~vard were symmetrical with looking back. We frame the moment in the economies and containabilities of the grammatical taxonomy, and forget that, framing our way of seeing, we've framedsomepossibilitiesout. For all our wish to cover and recover everything in language, still it turns out what's missing isn't nothing (we've covered nothlng, too): something, not nothing, is missing in the way we see. Asked where endlessness is located, what the realm or home of endlessness might be-the visible or the invisible-most of us would locate endlessnessin the unseen; we'd do, that is,what we &d as children,populate eternity with ghosts and say the sensible has the natural limits. But it is exactly that presumption, that prejudce, that blinds us. We cannot see all of the visible, ever; that is where the ache of the endlessis greatest. We can't say all we do see, and, worst of all (because it needn't be) we're always missing much of what's in front of us, under our noses, before our eyes. Our mythographies have always placed the past behind us, and reserved the space ahead for the future. I always loved the reminder that in some mythographies the past is construed to be ahead, where it's visible, and the future behind us, since it can't be seen. Such variances in the visualization of temporal space serve to remind us, with a shock of recognition, of the underlying power of our own fictions of construction . When Picasso says his object isn't what he's loolung for, we have to rethrow our thinlung about the jectified (jaceremeant to throw, from the first).When Rilke stules a ball in air, he observes how it throws its handlers ;when Robert Capa watches the watchers at an event, he seessubject and object not bordering but abounding-in each other. In studying a few [18.224.149.242...