This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Generation

20 T H I S C O M P O S T Limits are what any of us are inside of. But as Emerson insists in "Circles," "The only sin is limitation." "We can afford to allow the limitation," he clarifies in "Fate," "if we know it is the meter of the growing man."Meter: measure ofexpansion. Literacy in the compost library isjust such an actualizationthat it takesthe psyche to be real,its actions to be consequent, and life asexpansive."Perhaps it isthe role of art to put us in complicity with things as they happen," writes Lyn Hejinian (Language of Inquiry, 391). "Life recognized as happening restores event," says Olson ("Chiasma," 41), whose aspiration is to overcome the commercialism lamented at the beginning of The Maximus Poems, to be restored to the unmistakable:the consequential reality of generative human event. Generation In a few months of North Carolina spring in 1953 Charles Olson came to articulate fully the shift from the productive to the generative. The generative is, in fact, the weather of existence, of all of it, of every act, as well as those biological dominant acts which engage us all. Generation can be seen literally to be theclimate of our being as decisively as the place of it is that internal environment we call our selves, the individual ("Chiasma,"36). To his poet's sense, one word discloses three: actions are generative, as weather is (he values the Cro-Magnon for "not letting this weather of life fog on them"); generation is the climate of propagation—in which individuals are generated, and in which they pass the world on to the next "generation." The generative nurture implicit in the early Neolithic development of animal husbandry and agriculture is attributed by Lewis Mumford to a rising matriarchal urbanism: generation as womanly modification, particularly in the invention of receptacles. "Under woman's dominance, the neolithic period is pre-eminently one of containers: it is an age of stone and pottery utensils, of vases, jars, vats, cisterns, bins, barns, granaries, houses, not least great collective containers, like irrigation ditches and G E N E R A T I O N 21 villages" (City in History, 16).* The labor of generation, under the dispensation of the matriarch,consolidates vessels of all sorts; in the urbanized setting of statecraft and priesthood, the symbolic amplitude of containers is expanded to the generative devices of social institution. "Each generation could now leave its deposit of ideal forms and images: shrines, temples, palaces" and of course writing (69). Olson's vocabularyis saturated with the masculinist inflectionssymptomatic of the American midcentury—which has given rise to peremptory dismissals of his work—but his struggle to ascertain the primordial dimension of public accountability transcendsthe parochialchauvinismofhis ownjargon.t In aninitial gesture, Olson takes care to distinguish birth and death from the life ofthe individual, since "Those false termini, birth & death as a man's, are thrown down. And a man's pillars are seen to be his acts, his several acts as long as he lives, not that he wasborn (that washis mother's act) or that he also dies—which is nature's" ("Chiasma," 41). Olson's "act" is Emerson's "event": "The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin" ("Fate"). But the actor in a "Human Universe" (in Olson's essay) is variably extensive. The botany and geography Olson knew from Edgar Anderson and Carl Sauer fortified his sense that landscape is contingent on human peregrination . Civilization is at once complete control and remote control (control only in the sense of being generative of consequences—the "willy nilly" of "Human Universe," the helplessness with which man arrogates the world to himself as raw material, what Heidegger names zuhanden, or tohand). Under the prompting of the occasion—now reduced to a moment, yet altogether momentous—"his job becomes quite another: to raise himself" ("Chiasma," 41) (for Williams, too: "somehow a man must lift himself / again— / again is the magic word"): ... asthere isalways a thing he can do, he can raise himself, he raises on a reed he raises his —the possessive pronoun (deliberately suspended by Olson) gestures to an event, a coming-to-be, which is always in process, never finalized, for * Mumford emphasizes the symbolic dimension of protective enclosures as markedly feminine. Indeed, "House and village, eventually the town itself, are woman writ large" (City in History, 13). t Sandra Alcosser evokes the period flavor: "Charles Olson's 'I, Maximus / a...