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V E R T I G O 135 Vertigo Epic and lyric are the extravagant symptoms of an adventure. . .. Dante in my dream went into Occitan in search of a sentence that would flow both ways There is a mill which grinds by itself, swings of itself, and scatters the dust a hundred versts away. And there is a golden pole on top of which is also the Nail ofthe North. And there is a very wise tomcat which climbsup and down this pole. When he climbs down, he sings songs; and when he climbs up, he tells tales. (Santillanaand von Dechend, Hamlet's Mill, 96) If epic is the vision of action and sequence—the polecat's labor in climbing up the Nail of the North—then sliding down is the vision of voice, running the text through (like a tape in reverse) for the sound of it alone, the suddenness of its descent, the splinter in the flesh the perspective of voice becomes, vocalizing graphic stings: that perplexing nudging and suckling of moisture and dryness in the palate. The nasal passages focused in breath explode in the bellows of the throat, contracting the whole body as it impends in this eruption into a yearning, moaning, meaning being or being meaning. Vocal pressures lurk in writing like a vertigo. Tape recorder—tape reason—is that myvoice, It is a philosophical-acoustical question If anyone ever hears his own voice. Such an acoustic conundrum posits self as an epiphenomenon of the text, gregariously extending identity to anyone lending avoice; asifthe wreading body were itself a lens being focused and unfocused by the text—granular textures weighed on the tongue ofthe lines (the lens),releasing and licking each phoneme—dispersing and contracting, meaning meaning approaches, meaning meaning recedes. The respiration of the text depends on bodily conduits between voice and sign, writer and wreader. Sliding its voices down the golden pole of song, mouth and throat become genitals of mind. Poetry is omnivorous in its sensuality: each word, each breath or sign, means in a premise of moans. Tropical poetry animates the body of speech. Favorably 136 T H I S C O M P O S T attracted by a text, we say it moves us: it is moving in the double sense courted by Gertrude Stein, so that "if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it movingagainst anything to know that it is moving" (Lectures inAmerica, 170). "This is what is meant by life," she adds. Language is full of gesture and posture, gestation and expectoration . To read certain poems is to be immersed in a palpability of the tongue and its accumulated sensations and intentions, and it's impossible for the sexual dimension ofthe tongue and the mouth not to be relevant to language and theflow of speech. "Allessential production," Ruskin told the merchants of Manchester, "is for the mouth, and is finally measured by the mouth" (Heinzelman, 6).Language arises in the mouth and intersects there with complex biological cycles, just as the hand as a biological instrument of writing is a vector of manumissions. Insisting that "truth" was symptomatic of specific bodies, Nietzsche wondered whether "philosophy has not been merely an interpretation of the body [but] a misunderstanding of the body" (GayScience, 34-35). Nietzsche's physiological reanimation of the question of knowledge hinges on the somatic urgency of poetry, which is that each act of articulation, in writing or speaking,is an occasion of wisdom , the circumstantial composition of the real. Emerson's insistence that "the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence" becomes Charles Olson's "nothing is anything but itself, measured so," such that the openness of bodily intelligence as the actual agent of knowledge comes clear late in the final volume of Maximus as "This living hand, now warm, now capable / of earnest grasping"—which itself, having been formerly composed by Keats, is composted here by Olson and passed on in the text to our imaginal heat in this phrase or place doubly signified by the vanishingof several warm, living hands, whose only capable earnest grasping is the physical volume of the poem, in which the reader arrives as ventilation, in the manual gesture of opening the book. The vertiginous vocal trace in the glyph—sign or text—precipitates the uncanny as that -which speaks in signs. A hundred years agoI made...

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