The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson

Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

312 The Films of Stan Brakhage quantity in verse that led Olson to reject accentual metre and to develop the idea of Projective Verse—verse whose metres arise from the poet's physiol­ ogy, as they reflect the flow of breath into and out of the body. Furthermore, D.H. Lawrence was ordinarily as acutely attuned to the complete reality of the demotic particular as ever William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein were. And, like Olson and Brakhage, Lawrence com­ mitted himself to bringing us the news of what he knew first­hand. Poems like "Piano" present a concrete situation with such accuracy,particularity, and intensity that it lifts it into the order of an aesthetic transcendental. Lawrence's poetry presents objects as complete, self­sufficient entities existing within a complete, perfect aesthetic order; it does not subsume the individual object in aesthetic structure in any way that lessens its reality. Medieval writers and philosophers pointed out that the beautiful stands forth, luminous in a resplendence of form; but in Lawrence the luminous particular is not beautiful because it participates in divine beauty as medieval thinkers believed—it is resplendent in itself. And while in Surrealist paint­ ing, the resplendent appearance of the demotic object often seems a trick, Lawrence's poetry gives us the real thing. So, too, do Brakhage's films. In Brakhage's films, each observed thing is "valued absolutely, totally,beyond time and place, in the minute particular," as Rexroth writes about Law­ rence's poem from his Rhine journey with Frieda.457 For Marilyn (1992) even suggests, as Lawrence's poems of the period of the Rhine journey do, that the light of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage illuminatesall that the eyes of the seer sees, in much the same way as a devotee brings the god to pres­ ence in a statue. For Brakhage, as for Lawrence, the craft of makingis iden­ tical with the art ofvision. That identity, more than anything else, is responsible for open form. Rexroth, with characteristic brilliance, recognized this fact, and offered the following comments by way of contrasting Lawrence's working methods with those of T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire, who spent long periods in quiescence, producing nothing, but brooding on the substance of their visions: Lawrence meditated pen in hand. His contemplation was always active,flow­ ing out in a continuous stream of creativity which he seemed to have been able to open practically every day. He seldom reversed himself, seldom went back to re­work the same manuscript. Instead, he would lay aside a work that dissatisfied him and re­write it all from the beginning. In his poetry he would move about a theme, enveloping it in constantly growing spheres of significance. It is the oldantithesis: centrifugal versus centripetal.458 No one who is aware of how prolific Brakhage is can fail to be impressed by the speed and spontaneity of his production. His works, like Lawrence's, Influences on Embodied Poetics: Whitehead and Merleau­Ponty 313 possess a magnificent vitality that comes from being created at electric speed. More that any other filmmaker's, Brakhage's working methods are centrifugal. Another word for it would be "projective." TWo Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau­Ponty With Whitehead we come to a central figure of our age, but one whose writ­ ing style is so dense and so fraught with neologisms that most people know his work only secondhand. This is really a pity, since getting past the chal­ lenges is really only a matter of getting over an initial period of discomfort, and when that discomfort has passed, his writing has a marvellous Victorian charm all its own. His metaphysical system is among the most beautiful of modern times. Poets such as Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (1910­70) studied his original texts—Olson, for example, first went to San Francisco to deliver a series of lectures on Whitehead's magnum opus,Process and Real­ ity (1929), at Duncan'shouse. Both the density and the idiosyncrasy of Whitehead's writing style have created enormous problems for his interpreters as well as many misunder­ standings regarding his metaphysical system. Unfortunately, fewcommenta­ tors have attempted to link his metaphysics with the theory of relations he developed in collaboration with Bertrand Russell.459 Not to make that link, however, is to neglect the synontic cast of Whitehead's metaphysics, which holds that being is a relation between entities. The central categories...