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SOME seven centuries ago, a Florentine poet began his long poem in the midst of a dark wood, having gone astray from the straight path. Dante's selva oscura is a forest, Norman Finkelstein implies, in which we still wander. But is there a track through these woods, or is the forest a "collage," "an endless expanse of commentary"? The collage is the only versionTrack is trackless. This volume, the first installment of an open-ended project whose title brings to mind Robert Duncan's "Passages," is a single poem - or a series of poems - invoking the obliquities of Dickinson's fascicles or Kafka's parables. Unlike those parables, however, these lines disclaim realistic portraiture or singular "motif": In these operationsThis is an epistolatory poem, one suspects, a series of letters - and this becomes explicit further on in the book, where lines begin "Dear J," "Dearest K," "Dear M" - in which the condition of the dead letter office has become the state of all correspondence. | |
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But even "series" is wrong for the elements of this poem, implying a sequence in which one statement, one image follows another in some logical progression. Instead, the fragments that make up Track constitute a collection of paths, of Holzwege through a dark, trackless wood which gives way to no comedy, divine or otherwise. The book is a "track," but to what end? Martin Heidegger entitled one of his essay collections Holzwege - literally "wood-paths" - , a title rendered by his French translators Chemins qui mènent nulle part, "paths which lead nowhere." It's not that the poetry of Track leads nowhere, precisely, but that each of the various movements - or segments, or sections, or what have you - constitutes a new approach, a new track into a labyrinthine forest: a forest, one ultimately realizes, of language. This historyBut this is only supposition - "Suppose," as well, "there were only numbers" (39), a phrase which gestures towards the kaballistic practice of gematria, or number-divination. (Each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value; according to the Jewish mystical tradition, then, "words or phrases whose letters are equal are at some level meaningfully connected" [in Jerome Rothenberg's words].) But only gestures: "so much for rules / / about words or numbers . . ." So much repetitionFinkelstein is too serious, too Western a poet literally to base his practice on the shuffling of the numerical values attached to letters. Or rather - for gematria can be an endlessly subtle and engrossing practice - he hasn't quite the faith in the numinous qualities of letter and number that would allow him wholeheartedly to count: "everything connects / or nothing does." The sections of Track are indeed numbered, but they are headed not by numbers themselves - 1, 2, 3, etc. - but by the emptied-out sign of number: "#." (Larger divisions are headed "##.") Anti-gematria. | |
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Duncan, late in his life, arrived in a similar neighborhood when he began to leave the poems of "Passages" unnumbered. They would no longer be a sequence - from Latin sequor, "follow" - but a cluster, a constellation of poems that could be entered at any point, read in any order. The "order" of "Passages," then, is something like that described in a sentence of Emerson's Finkelstein paraphrases: "The center is everywhere / and the circumference nowhere" (79). In some versionsA single event-text, about which weave endless commentaries ("Eden gives way to forest")? Or endless initiatory moments ("forest gives way to Eden" [16])? Is there an ur-text on which these fragments of verse comment, or do they gesture towards Eden (a moment in which God would walk in company with his human creations), only to deny that moment any historicity? Of course they do - there is no ur-text to Track, but Finkelstein, in best postmodern fashion, is fascinated with the myth of originary wholeness precisely because it is myth. We have no Acropolis, we latter-day romantics, but the ruins of the Parthenon enthrall us as no whole Parthenon could. Like the Wailing Wall, they take on holiness in part through their very dilapidation: The ruins were holyThe Talmud is an echo-chamber of voices, arguing over millennia. Track is as well haunted by voices, fragments of others' words that enter the poem and unsettle its surface. There are dying words: Jack Spicer's - "My vocabulary / did this to me" - and Emily Dickinson's - "Little Cousins, / Called back" (50). There is T. S. Eliot's claustrophobic description of history - "the contrived corridors / the cunning passages" - and Paul Celan's faux naïf description of his own poetics - "Ganz und gar nicht / hermetisch" (89). There is Genesis: "And the seven lean ones / ate up the seven fat ones" (64). And, in a bizarre moment - all the combinations- George Oppen finds himself where he would never be in life, in company with Harold Bloom. Unlike the rabbis of Edmond Jabès's Book of Questions (and its many sequels), who argue, speculate, and parabolize at a hyper-Talmudic rate, such outside voices enter Track only in bits and pieces, broken sentences picked up on a late-night channel-surf, foundation stones stumbled upon in a weedy meadow or beside an overgrown forest trail. They are, that is, bits of ruins. But ruins are perhaps the fundamental condition of our knowledge, or at least of the ways that would lead us to knowledge: Sightseers should noteDante's ultimate moment of knowledge - we ought not to venture to call it a gnostic moment - came in a vision of the godhead, "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars." Finkelstein's Track, if it can be said to "arrive" anywhere, arrives at a rapprochement with ruination which recalls Ferdinand's joyful cry in The Tempest - "Let me live here ever!" (4.1.122): Only in the presentIn our present wandering condition - textual wandering, mid-life wandering - there is still the opportunity for perhaps the nearest experience to gnosis we can reach: human love. Say in this sentenceIt would be disingenuous, and untrue to the complexities of Finkelstein's poem, to claim that love settles all uncertainties, or serves as the panaceic human consolation in an uncertain world, as if Track were a postmodern rewriting of Arnold's "Dover Beach." The passage I have quoted is far from the last in the book, which ends on a far more unsettled note. But this arrival at love is for me one of the most luminous moments in Track, and its "spooky radiance" consoles one in the "cunning passages" and "contrived corridors" of the poem's darker movements. The darkness is indeed all around us here - in the vibrating, buzzing confusion of a media society, in the still jarring echoes of the Holocaust, and in the chilly "space evacuated / by a retreating deity." But Track, with its impressive array of forms, tones, and voices, excavates an exhilarating variety of paths through that darkness. Only a fool would deny love its enlightening - perhaps preëminent - place in the poem. MFA programs and creative writing manuals, the favorite whipping-boys of the avant-garde, have made suspect the notion of a poet's achieving his "voice": who wants to find a voice, only to sound like everyone else? The voices of Finkelstein's Track, however, as various as they may be, speak to the heart of an unsettled time. Following them, we may not see precisely where the paths are leading, but we know we're getting somewhere. | |
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