This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Proprioception

130 T H I S C O M P O S T John. Everything pretends to be just the place where we find it. We find it sighing, we kiss it singing, we call it Real & measure with our newfangled minds the distance from that glistering Real to those heavenly twins our eyes, & call that theworld. That is, the place whereJohnwas when he wrote or said, John washere. Such glimpses are not only signatures, but momimenta. In nature are signatures needing no verbal tradition, oak leaf never plane leaf.John Heydon. as to hsin i\\ In short, the cosmos continues. Proprioception The living word masks the crossroads where a mystery prevails, blending corporeal substance with inscrutable breath, apparent premonition of aspirit world corresponding , at the somatic level, with the equally inscrutable depths of the body. How can a body bemadefrom the 'word?—language, a shivaree of transparence—jigsaw—glass immensity Proprioception has to do with the cavity of the body, the body's cave, ward of dark matter, where there are not only functional organs but a phylogenetic inscriptive P R O P R I O C E P T I O N 131 insistence: "the 'body' itself as, by movement of its own tissues, giving the data of, depth" (Olson, Additional Prose, 18). The proprioceptive is the body's cave, and the sense of human history finally attends to the social organization of what goes into, and comes out of, allthe aggregate bodies and bodily cavities. Proprioception refers the dark of our own bodies to a ground of tropes (tropes are the babies of imaginal fecundity). Writing, yoga, music, medicine, and prostitution share proprioceptive overlap. All tell what can be turned into body, what turns are taken in bodies, what ends up in bodies, and what bodies themselves end up as in the end—the heart sent "boldly travelling, / on the heat ofthe dead &down" in Gary Snyder's poem "Toward Climax." Proprio- as prefix underlies the sense of what is proper, appropriate. Proprio pertains to one's own, as does idio (idio -graphic, -pathic, -syncrasy, -lect). Identity is the differentiating principle we deploy to hitch a ride on that discourse. It appropriates without proprioception, however; identity is "other directed" in David Riesman'sterms (likepersona and personality). For Charles Olson thinking of absentee ownership encroachingon Gloucester fishing, or Pound fretting about usury interposing "interest" between lovers and other agents of natural production (e.g., Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of market forces), polis is always propriously configured. Pound's axe handle—adopted by Snyder as a book title—is a Neolithic signature of craft sensibility, but also a model of statecraft. To represent a constituency as one's own is (or should be, Pound and Olson felt) to nurture belonging—member/ship—as a political dimension that precedes any specific political alliance. From this perspective, "property" begins a long withdrawal from, and eventual abdication of, fellow feeling (particularly where the fellows are not human, and the humans are not owners). Property without proprioceptive tact is adanger William Carlos Williams warns against in Paterson, linking writing to monumental malfeasance. It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully, and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its wayinto a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. It's a tricky recommendation, of course, not only for its hyperbole, but because it risks overvaluing "plain speech"—darling of demagogues. What Williams is really advocatingis an orientation to process, the dialectical fertilizing of moment by moment and part by part. By reprinting Olson's "Projective Verse"in his 132 T H I S C O M P O S T Autobiography, Williams endorsed composition by field for a generation heedful of his own practical care for poetic ecology. And if Williams's authority in the 19505 seemed thoroughly eclipsed by Eliot's, in retrospect it's obvious that his preface to Howl and his acclaim of Olson were decisive events in the erosion of postwar neoclassicism. "Liberate the words" he had proclaimed in "The Great American Novel" (Imaginations, 166); but while many retained only a momentary enthusiasm for this dada provocation, for Williams it was an ever-renewing perspective. Composition...