Gus Blaisdell Collected

Rebus

∙ 192 ∙ rebus ■ I have become a question to myself. —st. augustine What follows is unapologetically circuitous, a clearing and testing of ground in hopes of finding a sense of place and measure. My feeling is that the result is a kind of verbal rebus—by definition,“a riddle composed of words or syllables depicted by symbols or pictures that suggest the sound of the words or syllables they represent”—although here words do words’ work, unaided by picture or symbol, and meaning stretches its tether in its effort to explore and understand and extend Stanley Cavell’s startlingly moving characterization of the placing in which we find ourselves after having accepted the implications of the modernist condition, after we have begun to follow out the clues of consequence in “an effort along blocked paths and hysterical turnings, to hang on to a thread that leads from a lost center to a world lost.” Here, clearly, the philosopher demands the muse, asking a poet’s powers of association measured by the qualitative dialectic of unmused philosophy, an ascent that acknowledges the impossibility of essence even as the heart demands it. (Augustine: “It is yearning makes the heart grow deep.”) One peculiar kind of semantic rebus is the rubric, with meanings as coherently coalesced as lasers. But the very idea of a rebus violates one fundamental principle of Robert Bresson’s cinematograph: whenever possible replace an image by a sound. At the same time a rebus might easily satisfy William Carlos Williams’ idea of no ideas except in things. The need for a rebus-like relationship between words and images is attested to in Kant’s rubric that concepts without percepts are empty, while percepts without concepts are blind. The penultimate extension of this idea might be found in Wallace Stevens’ Necessary Angel in whose sight we are to see the world rebus ∙ 193 transformed, a promise unfulfilled by supreme fictions. The final extension and restriction of the function hidden in Kant’s maxim would be in the post-symbolist terms of Yvor Winters’ quest for reality through the forms of discovery available in formalist poetry—a poem of this world shorn of even contingent angels and numinous qualities, a poem one step beyond the bare place of Stevens’ listener in the snow, a poem in which we are what we are and not some other thing, the sparest poem of all that converges on both magic and despair, and that brought the poet here: I had grown away from youth, Shedding error where I could; I was now essential wood Concentrating into truth: What I did was small but good. Orchard tree beside the road, Bare to core, but living still! Moving little was my skill. I shall call the above paragraph a flight. It is typical of its author, myself, and I find upon reflection that I am bothered by it. Possibly avoiding the tendentious, it still falls between the pretentious and the exaggerated. It seems overly ambitious as it works the gap . . . , like the confidence man who stands behind it, lost equally to the world and to himself. (Melville: “. . . a moist rogue may tickle the midriff, while a dry wordling may but wrinkle his spleen.”) Such a flight is an epistemological schtick. It feels as though it uses us, displacing its object. It is experienced and judged in retrospect as knowledge gone astray, stolen and perverted.And this perverse form of knowledge is common enough that I think it is worth at least trying to exemplify, if not criticize. If all this is fairly typical of me is it fair to ask of what I am typical? And with the type once construed (though perhaps not here, “in this labyrinth of sentences that dare not end”), to replace the type in the world and see what sort of character is cut by world and type. At just this point I am reminded of a recent fad among Japanese surgeons. Against the clock and without anesthetic, they performed appendectomies upon themselves. (A bizarre extrapolation of the Samurai’s hara kiri?) For me, the image recalls Hemingway’s obsessively unforgettable gut-shot hyena, maddened beyond endurance in the pain of disemboweling itself. Papa had only derisive contempt for the ignoble hyena while I seem to have compassion mixed with 194 ∙ on reading and writing a fearful disgust. But Hemingway’s presence finally recalls that miraculous epigraphic leopard, once and...