The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics

I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys Named Shakespeare, or; Why I Don’t Own this Language

78 I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys Named Shakespeare, or; Why I Don’t Own this Language Benjamin Paloff have you ever heard a bad cover of one of your favorite songs? Did you declare—to yourself, to a friend, and perhaps a bit petulantly—that you prefer the original recording? Did you learn (later, on your own, if you were lucky; immediately, from that friend, if you were not) that the version you first came to love is actually the cover, and that the perceived interloper, still dripping with inadequacy, is the original? This experience, whose universality only amplifies the sense of the uncanny we express when we ask, “Really? That one came first?”—also encompasses one of the key demands our critical readership makes on poetry. “Originality” is good; “inimitability” is better. I put these terms in quotation marks because I distrust them, and so have borrowed them from the thousands of book reviews that have used them in the last hundred years or more, rarely questioning what they mean or the hierarchy of value they imply. That is, when it comes to lyric expression, one strives to be the first, but one hopes to be the last as well, the alpha and the omega in one. I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys / Benjamin Paloff 79 Essays into Contemporary Poetics “Language, the mother of reason and revelation, its alpha and omega,” Walter Benjamin quotes Johann Georg Hamann, the eighteenth-century mystical philosopher, in his posthumously published essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” But for Hamann, as for Benjamin, what is called “language” need not have anything to do XJUI
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)FSBDMJtus , everything in it is at once expression and concealment, veiling and unveiling. All creation, nature as well as history, is nothing other than a message of the creator to the creature through the creature.” And back to the Creator: as Benjamin puts it, “in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God.” “Poetry”—Hamann again—“is the mother tongue of humankind.” And so everything that there is to say is already here, in this world, waiting to be said, or said again, in a line of communication that merely reflects back to the Infinite that which the Infinite already contains. This point about originality, or the impossibility thereof, is hardly original. We hear it from the mouth of the Preacher in the Old Testament, which I like to read in the King James Version, if only because it is constantly reminding how little of my language, how little of what flows from my mouth or my keyboard and to which I might ascribe no origin before myself—how little of this begins or will end with me: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9). Poetry, lyric expression, is therefore not divine revelation, but a form of participation in a world that does not need our participation in order to keep on spinning. No, it is we who need to instantiate our connection to the world, and not the other way around. Thus Bruno Schulz, in a formula that reconfigures Hamann to emphasize our participation in making meaning over our claim to meaning as birthright, says, “Speech is the metaphysical organ of man.” 80 I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys / Benjamin Paloff The Monkey and the Wrench At which point one of the editors of the present volume warns that all of these quotations at the beginning “occasionally felt a bit heavy.” I feel it, too: when I am writing or speaking, the words of others, living and dead, weigh heavily upon me, and I want to make them invisible, except insofar as dropping one name or another might make me appear more attractive to the opposite sex and more imposing to my own— insofar as it might accentuate my originality. Otherwise, I might put Benjamin, Cassirer, and Schulz aside and pretend not only...