This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Origin

O R I G I N 165 There is—this is the hope in the ache—a way of looking at, attending to, cosmos , that catches the whole arc in the vision of its end, that can perceive in the individual a public yearning, "the Jurassic longing... we are the inheritors of that gaze." Mind exists in the overlap between territory and map, the archaic and the old lore. Chaos is the place of, or force behind, this difficult perplexity of betweenness: "it is in the deep mind that wilderness and the unconscious become one" (Gary Snyder, quoted in Eshleman, Hades in Manganese, 14). "Let a man look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work but to be worked upon" (Emerson, "Montaigne"); or, as Dickinson tells it, to feel the "Omen in the Bone" (no. 532)."I want to see the unknown shine, like a sunrise," wrote William Carlos Williams (in Paul, 192). k the letter cutting a the letter starting o the alarm s the snakeagain All life long you include something that includes your life. You are in the egg. Origin Cid Gorman's magazine Origin helped launch the career of Charles Olson. But what is origin? Isn't origin unthinkable, like the moment of one's birth? Whatever we mean by origin, it alwayscomes back to the earth. Not our good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time gives us to see The beauty of things, nothing can bridle it. God who walks lightning-naked on the Pacific has never been hidden from any Puddle or hillock of the earth behind us. 166 T H I S C O M P O S T The origin is a daily event, daily evident, each day's evidence all that's needed to "make it new." Not good luck nor the instant peak and fulfillment of time; not only, for these are numerous and profound. There is no part of it that does not press its release into the forge of a commanding realization. Primitivism, in Paul Shepard's sagacious definition,is "a reciprocity with origins" ("Post-Historic Primitivism," 88). In Lectures in America Gertrude Stein reflects back on the phases of her writing, discerning not a conceptual itinerary but a series of tableaux, tidepools of feeling and sensation. Her ruminations help us overcome the idea that there are ideas, and make her work available aspalpability, for this is how she remembers herself, remembers the event of her writing as the uniquely registered perturbation of a proprioceptively animated person. Her metier is talking and listening at the same time, during which she finds herself wondering "is there any way of making what I know come out as I know it, come out not as remembering" (181). Decades ahead of schedule, Stein invents projective verse. "Is there repetition or is there insistence " (166): that is the question. And "insistence is different. That is what makes life that the insistence is different" (167). The difference is so consuming that at its most acute it is without need of supplement; its figure encompasses and includes the ground on which it might otherwise be expected to stand out. And "if it were possible that a movement were lively enough it would exist so completely that it would not be necessary to see it moving against anything to know that it is moving. This is what we mean by life" (170). Credo: "if anything is alive there is no such thing as repetition" (174). Stein's practice in her portraits is cinematic; "in the Making of Americans, I was doing what the cinema was doing, I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person wasuntil I had not many things but one thing" (176-77). Everyday life is extemporaneously creative, so "we have living in moving being necessarily so intense that existing is indeed something, is indeed that thing that we are doing" (i8z). Significantly, "It is not repetition if it is that which you are actually doing because naturally each time the emphasisis different just as the cinema has each time a slightly different thing to makeit all be moving" (179). Stein's sense of"moving" expands here like a sponge to include, along with movement, the emotionally moving. It is moving:it istaking us somewhere. We are...