The Word of Boris

Matvei Yankelevich:: Boris by the Sea:: Octopus Books

In her book If There is Something to Desire, Vera Pavlova remarks, “may the body stay glued to the soul, / may the soul fear the body.” In Boris by the Sea, Matvei Yankelevich plays with this tension, while also inventing a world for it to be displayed in. The world of Boris is particularly abstract in its inventive attention to what is real. In this poem, turned essay, turned drama, turned raison d’être, Matvei Yankelevich positions his readers in the same way that he positions his leading man: “lay[ing] flat on the ground [beginning] to watch things happen.” Poetry, when it is any good, should always assume the reader in such a state, but Yankelevich takes this position to its most literal extreme. At a first glance, the book becomes a collection of vignettes showing Boris’ actions and reactions to his rather mundane life: thinking of a chair, watering a plant, thinking about writing a book, etc. The cumulative effect of all of these snapshots begins to beg bigger questions of the reader, and even the author himself:

Boris lived in his room and he thought about why people need each other. People need each other, thought Boris, to check each other for ticks. People need each other for solving the problem of what is inside.

Yankelevich shows the reader what is happening while using language in its most flexible and suggestive capacities to suggest almost everything else. This motive force pushes the book beyond the mundane and into the visionary. Are people needed to see what is inside the ticks or what is inside the humans? Is this figurative or literal? Ticks are outward, right? So how is the other being used? These contradictions contribute to the specifically abstract position of Boris in his world, taking on the concerns and problems that we, as humans, face and finding little comfort in the solutions that he either creates, or is offered.

This banal specificity is best represented by the prose sections which book-end the text, Boris’ creation and destruction of a chair:

He thought he might build something else but what.

A chair.

He started by thinking about what it should look like, what is a chair, what makes it a chair. When he opened his eyes he saw it there before him. And when he closed his eyes again he fell asleep and dreamed of things he could never build in his room, things he would never see before him once he opened his eyes.

This passage is countered with the later disassemblage of the chair:

Boris took the chair apart. He made the parts into the pile. He lit a match. As the parts were wooden, they began to burn. Boris threw the matches in, too. They were also wooden and also began to burn.

He watched and watched as the parts burned and burned. He was satisfied, as though it had finally fulfilled its true purpose. And Boris had helped it to do so. And when it was finished there was a charred black hole in the wooden floor where once a chair had stood. And Boris climbed into the hole.

In both the creation and the destruction, Boris actively alters his environment, creating possibilities for himself that failed to exist beforehand. And Yankelevich maintains his position as author by allowing the language to mirror reality as closely as possible. This is not a poetry that attempts to re-envision a world, but instead focuses on seeing the world for what it is. Yankelevich emphasizes that the world is nothing more than a series of coincidences, actions and reactions, and all we have available to us to cope is our language and our body.

In a small passage entitled “The Metaphysics of a Boris by the Sea,” Yankelevich writes, “Boris looked at his hand and could not identify whose hand it was.” Boris becomes a foil for the character of the Author, who we might assume to be Yankelevich, someone who is just as lost as Boris in the world that he is busy creating:

The Second Preface

I hope that Boris will help me in this respect.
Perhaps the theater for us holds an important truth:
that without a role a person is as good as dead.

People want someone to lie beside them.
When there’s someone else under the blanket,
in the dark, then you know who you are
in relation to that someone who lies beside you.

Who am I alone. Missing my role.
I’m afraid I might leave this world behind.
I hope that Boris will help me in this respect.

The introduction of the Author as someone who thinks through and with Boris sends the text streaming into a metapoetic/metadramatic space, a space where language is both art and life. In one of the letters from After Lorca, Jack Spicer writes that

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

In all of his day-to-day activities (including his Spicer-inspired aim to write a book without words), Boris lives in a world that mirrors reality. It is not real, you see, because of the words, which Yankelevich’s Author realizes might be the most frightening aspect of his position as creator living through his creation. This philosophical trajectory carries the book and provides the more important reason that it should be praised: it unabashedly recognizes the artifice of art but refuses to succumb to the fear of its lack of utility.

In fact there was nothing to keep him from opening it. Nothing but the imagined threat of what he imagined might step out once he did it. Sometimes the imagined affects our reactions more than the real. This was the case. Were he to find it empty the doors would have been unnecessary and therefore frightening in their enormous uselessness.

Yankelevich refuses to find his art (be that words, poetry, drama, prose, etc.) empty. Boris is still alive by the end of the book, somehow surviving the precarious nature of his situation as character and mirror for all lives. In her blurb, Rosmarie Waldrop sees Boris as someone “thrown into a world he is ill-suited for,” which seems a bleak examination of a book whose main foci are the actions of the mind, body and art to improve the world, always through the word.

Matvei Yankelevich:: Boris by the Sea:: Octopus Books

A Scribe Turned into a Scribe

Norman Finkelstein:: Scribe:: Dos Madres (2009)

Michael Palmer has said that to read Norman Finkelstein’s book Scribe “is to pass through a series of gates into the paradoxical heart of the poem,” where “the communal and the solitary” come together in the music of the poetry. He’s on to something, I think: what strikes one most strongly in Scribe are the repeated invocations of communal experience, and the ways the influence on collectivity works its way into the forms, as well as the subjects, of the poetry.

We don’t get past the first word of the first poem before we feel that we’re entering a meditation on collective experience: “Like Dates and Almonds, Purple Cloth and Pearls,” the poem that opens the first of Scribe’s three parts, begins with the collective, plural pronoun:

We entered by the middle gate
because the first gate frightened us
with the ox and the pit, the destruction and the fire.
We were old men and we were children
old men disguised as children
long ago and yesterday and the day after tomorrow.

By the time we’re through to the end of the stanza, we’re not just on a physical journey together — we’ve entered into a kind of community over time, bound to the distant past and the future. As we read on, it becomes clear that we are bound in this community less by the experience of a shared journey than by the experience of common texts or stories:

We dreamed of it and spoke of it
dreamed that we spoke of it
spoke of it and wrote of it
upon parchments of deerskin.
With the meat we fed the orphans
and on the skins wrote the five books
and took the books to the city
where there were no teachers
and taught five children the five books
and six children the six orders
and told them: We shall return
but in the meantime let each of you
teach this book and all his order to the others.

What we’re seeing, here, is nothing less than the evolution of the Torah — the five books of Moses — and the Mishnah, or Shisha Sedarim, the six orders into which the oral version of the Torah was first edited and compiled. This compiling, of course, opened up the long, ongoing tradition of commentary, redaction, and interpretation that binds the Jewish people together, through dispersal over space and time, as a people of the book.

Significantly, the poem goes on to tell us that the process of passing on these texts involves “nothing like nostalgia.” There’s no desire to keep a pure ur-text here, no desire to return to a lost authoritative story. Rather, Finkelstein tells us the process of passing on the textual tradition is:

like a word twisted into a ring
and like a ring lost in a deep pool
and like a ring found in the belly of a fish
so it might return to the sea.

What’s valued are the transformations, metamorphoses, and miraculous recontextualizations of a tradition as it travels through time. The proliferation of interpretations and the evolution of reconfigured texts aren’t sources of conflict, in this view: they are signs of a living tradition, and a rich, collective conversation.

Scribe’s title poem enacts the kind of reconfiguration of source-texts we see praised in “Like Dates and Almonds, Purple Cloth and Pearls.” The poem is addressed to us (that is, to the second person, to a “you” with whom readers are invited to identify) by an unknown speaker, and describes “our” experiences in a world that is best described as a free-style reinterpretation of Old Testament symbols, events, and settings. Here, we experience ourselves as drifting through a morphed-yet-still recognizable world, a world made from the free reinterpretation of traditional text. When we arrive at the end of the poem, we are told:

you have heeded the word of the outside god
and you have heeded the word of no god at all,
like a prophet turned archaeologist,
a scribe turned into a scribe.

In these lines Finkelstein draws our attention to our distance from the people who first experienced the events recounted in the Old Testament: we cannot enter into the consciousness of pre-modern prophets any more than they could enter into the scientific consciousness of an archaeologist, even though both types of person are concerned with the same tradition. But he also draws our attention to our continuity with the past, to the modern persistence of the role of scribe as preserver, commentator, and re-arranger of traditional text. In the end, we share an identity with the past, even as we are distanced from it.

The second of the book’s sections is devoted to collaged text and epistolary poetry, both forms of collective creativity. Finkelstein doesn’t simply celebrate collective creativity, though. In “At the Threshold,” for example, Finkelstein addresses the difficult question of imaginative sympathy for a person who would not return that sympathy. The threshold imagery that runs through the poem is clearly drawn from Heidegger’s thinking, particularly his writing on the poet Georg Trakl. One can certainly understand the appeal of Heidegger to a poet like Finkelstein, with his concerns about language revealing and concealing different elements of the truth over time. But the question of Heidegger’s Nazism cannot be shunted aside, especially not for a poet so deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition. Finkelstein doesn’t deny himself the experience of thinking-through, and thinking-with, Heidegger, but he recognizes (in yet another invocation of the collective “we”) that to do so requires a special suspension of historical realities, in which people must act:

As if we
Too had drunk
At the star-well

As if we
Were with him on
The way to language

Yellow stars
In a black forest

I don’t know what’s more resonant here, the line “The way to language,” which brings to mind the title of Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache, or the image of the “Yellow Stars/In a black forest,” a haunting double-vision of the symbol the Nazis forced Jews to wear, and of the Black Forest near Heidegger‘s hut at Todnauberg.

The third and longest part of Scribe consists of poems that quote from, and riff on, passages from architect Christopher Alexander’s famous book on traditional design, A Pattern Language. Alexander’s book, a richly illustrated guide to small and large architecture and based on medieval models, begins with the premise that environment and community form the basis of enduring design. We can see why Alexander’s book has such appeal for Finkelstein: for both men, the emphasis is on collective life. As Finkelstein says in an endnote to the book, he was first drawn to A Pattern Language because of that book’s “idea of community,” of architecture as an art of the social world. Many of the poems discuss the idea of community in urban and domestic spaces, but it is at the level of form that ideas of community and collective creativity come into full flower: the poems read less as Finkelstein’s private thoughts than as a series of annotations and elaborations on substantial quotations from Alexander’s writing. The feeling one gets is akin to that of reading scribal commentaries on a traditional text: there is a kind of collaboration at work, as a source text is elaborated and grows in meaning.

There are many versions of the poet-as-professor in the highly academicized world of contemporary American poetry: the poet-professor as hidebound formalist, the poet-professor as follower of intellectual fads and trends, and the poet-professor as obscurantist, to name just a few. In Norman Finkelstein, we’re lucky to have one of the oldest kinds of academic: Finkelstein is a scribe.

Norman Finkelstein:: Scribe:: Dos Madres (2009)