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

Olson's Energetics of Embodied Existence

A.N. Whitehead's Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux 347 ordinary physical object, which has temporal endurance, is a society."526 In fact, he specifies 'an enduring object,' or 'enduring creature' is a society whose social order has taken the special form of a personal order; by this he means that it is a society whose genetic relatedness involves a serial order­ ing (that is, an order such that any member of the order except the first and last inherit from earlier members in the ordering, but not the later mem­ bers). Accordingly, only a single line of inheritance constitutes an enduring object.527 Enduring objects, therefore, are strands (i.e., linked transitions) possessing a self­identical pattern. Whitehead told us this about the order that characterizes such a 'social order' or society: (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusionof positive feelings of that common form.528 Olson conceived of the actual world as a field of energies and of the poet (like every human—and in fact every existent, all of which we might con­ sider in Whiteheadian terms, as actual entities) as a route of concretions which preserves individualcharacter by grading the energies that act upon it (an activity that, according to Whitehead, requires Eternal Objects). Thus one of his most Whiteheadian remarks states: I am not able to satisfy myself that these so­called inner things are so sep­ arable from the objects, persons, events which are the content of them and by which man represents or re­enacts them despite the suck of symbol which has increased and increased since the great Greeks first promoted the idea of a transcendent world of forms. What I do see is that each man does make his own special selection from the phenomenal field, and it is thus that we begin to speak of personality,however I remain unaware that this particular act of individuationis peculiar to man, observable as it is in individuals of other species of nature's making (it behooves man now not to separate himself too jauntily from any of nature's creatures).529 The Projective Poets admired Whitehead's idea that an actual entity responds to the environing field of occasions and develops through its com­ plex co­ordination of the influences of that field. Take the emerging actual occasion Whitehead speaks of to be a poem and you get an inkling of what the Projective Poets took from Olson. He gave a concrete, definite, and philosoph­ ically respectable form to the idea that a sensibility or perspective is consti­ tuted by its place within an aesthetic field and the relations it possesses by virtue of that location. Furthermore, he showed how this perspective noted the value, the aesthetic worth, of each occasion within this field and co­ ordinates it within its own being. Olson's idea ofa circuit in poetry, ofthe poet 348 The Films of Stan Brakhage taking in energy, incorporating into it his or her own being, and then project­ ing that value outward,is very close to Whitehead's ideas on the formation of actual entities. Olson's idea that the poem is a field of energy resembles one of the fundamental ideas of Whitehead's system. Furthermore, Whitehead's description of a society as a historical route, that is, as a series of linked tran­ sitions, provided an extremely valuable model for Prpjective poetics' concep­ tion of the open form poem as an entity whose features emerge from the process by which it comes into being. So we shall turn to these ideas and examine the waythat Olson developed a corporeal poetics from them. Olson's Energetics of Embodied Existence The basis of Charles Olson's manifesto"Projective Verse" (1950) was a con­ cept of energy similar in character and role to the concept of energy in A.N. Whitehead's system. He proposed that poets not think in terms of time or rhyme or symmetry or form, but in terms ofthe complete field (a notion that in most respects is analogous to Whitehead's conception of the electro­ dynamic field). About his method of "composition by field," Olson proposed this...