In my previous post I pointed to Pritchard’s poem, “Love,” and attempted to ask questions of it from a distance. At the center of the crux composed of the molecular particles of the poem (letters) there was nothing. And I couldn’t find it. You can’t find love, even if you are looking. You don’t find love, you find yourself in it. My present working hypothesis is that it would not be too far off to assume that what Pritchard means by “the transreal” has something to do with love, and the finding oneself in it, rather than being able to “look for it.” If you are looking for love you are always looking in all the wrong places.
For a moment I will hold on to this absent center, such a cliché feature of post-modernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. “Centers” and “peripheries” are also crucial for thinking through any “canon” of literature; presumably what is part of the canon is “central” to a given discourse’s value structure. One of the operating assumptions of recent work on Pritchard is that he is in essence non-canonical; wildly understudied relative to the merits of the work in question, not precisely fitting into what Kevin Young identifies as the “WHITE concrete poetry” world composed of austere “immediate” abstractions meant to communicate words as things themselves, nor precisely fitting into what Young identifies as the “BLACK concrete,” meaning a poetry concerned primarily with “concrete experience,” what most mean by “lived experience.” So we must be very careful in approaching Pritchard’s work, precisely because it is not yet “canonical”; and yet, we are at a moment where both of his books have now been recently reissued, and no doubt the critical wave will be forthcoming (from Duke University Press, of course…and here I obviously can’t exclude myself). But if there is a value in anti-canonicity, that is, if there is a certain power retained by the non-canonical text precisely because it is in some way inassimilable to any canon, then uncritically forcing Pritchard into the canon seems to risk naively recuperating the work without sufficient devotion. After the long century of poetics, the case of Pritchard offers us an opportunity for us to think differently about how we engage with poetics texts, and even to refuse any normative or conventional way of doing so.
This is not least of all because clearly Pritchard himself held deep ambivalences about the “poetry world” and “art world,” ambivalences that eventually seemed to have led him further down the “mystical” path than the conventionally understood “poetic” path. We, too, should concern ourselves as “critics” with a similar mystical path, wherein, perhaps, we find that our work does not “describe” the qualities of the poem; but rather that criticism itself is part of the poem understood as an ongoing isostatic process.
Discussing his own experience speaking in tongues, Pritchard says in an interview, “Before I’m a poet I’m a mystic. So that these tongues, these voices which are always with me. The ancient. I don’t know where it comes from.” This is a poet that when asked for a definition of poetry responded with “guttural, bestial, primitive grunts and groans.” Pointedly, Susan Howe calls the separation between the poetic and the ordinary “the mystic,” “There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.” Howe’s version of the mystic separation between the ordinary and the poetic echoes Pritchard’s own understanding of a transcendental, transreal. It is at the transitional place of indifference.
Instead of a center, the mystic, I’m suggesting, along with Howe, is a passage between that is also no passage at all (indifferent); it is the existence of existence, like the existence of the existence of love allegorized by Pritchard’s poem “Love.” The space at the center of love’s crux brings transcendental existence to the poem precisely by filling the poem with nothing to its core. Pritchard’s poetry, like Howe’s, if full of provocative emptiness. Page 134 and 135 of The Matrix, for example, consists of a blank verso and a recto with only a capital “U” in the upper right quadrant of the page, and the page number: “135.” Notably, many pages in The Matrix do not have page numbers on them, presumably because the poem is the entire page, and the convention of page numbering would get in the way of Pritchard’s understanding of “a revolution of the book” he saw himself as helping manifest. For another example, what would be pages 150 and 151 are almost entirely blank, except for lower case “a”s on each page where page numbers otherwise would be. What the relationship is between this alpha-numerical joke (that is also slightly unsettling / unheimlich because they are identical, almost like a variable in place of a page #) and the two pages separated by many more pages consisting of one column of the word “Numbers” repeated down the center I am not ready to say, but certainly they are related.
It is well known, by his own admission, that Mallarmé was a major influence on Pritchard, and given Quentin Meilloussoux’s recent argument about the significance of number in Un coup de dés, The Matrix’s concern with number should not be ignored. I’ve spent some hours attempting various countings in the book: of the number of letters on an entire page, for example, or the number of pages without page numbers. That there is a transbook count occurring in the book at some level I am positive of. Whether it’s a fool’s errand or not to attempt something like Meilloussoux’s investigation into Mallarmé with Pritchard remains an open question for me (and for others, perhaps). I am inclined to believe that no depths are too deep a thought for Pritchard’s poetry, just as the surface of the page can appear to be an infinite depth. Like Susan Howe, I think we need to read Pritchard between the pages, that is, in the “mystical space” on recto/verso sides, as light shines through it to create shapes, thinking of the book as a 3d/4d object (it is) and the poems stacking in ways through that “4th” dimension. These are some of the research trajectories I hope to continue pursuing.
For now, I will close with a thought about the poem “Isostasy.” Isostasy, from the OED, means,
I think this poem might function as a “key” in the text. Even though The Matrix contains many circles, and circles are formed by an infinite number of points equidistant from a center, it is unclear whether that center “exists” or not. Of course it does on the Cartesian coordinate plane in that particular form of abstraction. But what about the question of whether the center forms the circle or whether the circle produces a center? Is there a center and then a line is drawn around it? Or does one draw the line and that tells you where the center is? I think this is the kind of koan-like thought Pritchard’s circles are meant to induce. That question, I want to suggest, is isostatic.
None of the circles in The Matrix contain a marked center. The closest is the “m” in the poem “@” but, tellingly, that “m” is decidedly not at the center of the circle. However, “Isostasy” does contain a center point at the crossing of the eight o’s (and O’s). We will draw from Euclid here:
“A point is that which has no parts or magnitude.”
But this classical definition is not enough. The isostasy of the Earth is an internal equilibrium state that is also in flux. Isostasy is a metastability, not a number, and not a point. While the spherical(ish) shape of the Earth might suggest a center, in fact what it suggests more accurately is a physical zone of metastable invariance. Something like a matrix. It is worth, then, thinking of David Hilbert’s redefinition of Euclid’s elements. Hilbert’s definitions are famously not quite definitional. They are far more relational that Euclid’s austere, but beautiful, proclamations. “A line is breadthless length.” Indeed, Hilbert doesn’t even define points and lines. Rather, they emerge conterminously: “For every two points, there exists a line that contains them.” Here, then, we don’t need to know what points are…if we’ve got two of them, there’s something called a line that contains them.
What I am suggesting is that Pritchard might be guiding us toward an isostatic poetics, unconcerned with centers, not just because of the well theorized post-colonial notion of cultural centers and exploited/recuperated peripheries, but because it is a more scientific poetic understanding of the present, and, perhaps, the transreal potential latent in all definitions. If we understand definitions not as prescriptive acts but as emergent phenomena appearing, always in flux, as the ongoing, continuing result of a word’s use (or a poem’s) and its infinite non-uses, we will have gotten closer to the kind of transreality I think Pritchard advocates for — an ultimate contingency, at least at the level of the social, if not at the transcendental, transreal non-point where dreams and reality mix.