Steeplechase: Notes On
John Ashbery’s "Clepsydra"
(with Help from Lacan)
“Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth…Another mode of meaning behind the obvious, or none. Either Oedipa in the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia, or a real Tristero. For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
“Clepsydra” is one of Ashbery’s central poems.
It takes a few readings to get at it.
In it, life (or experience) is understood
as an argument built of successive moments,
and questions are raised with respect to Truth,
which is encountered, a) in the moments themselves,
b) in the shape of the “argument” as a whole,
c) in the connections between moments
(the a priori “connective tissue,” let’s say),
d) in the movement (“serpentine gesture,” he writes)
of thought as it proceeds from node to node,
or (finally and even devastatingly)
e) in a zone entirely inaccessible
to experience, to life’s “argument.”
This is where Ashbery’s great poem begins and ends.
I.
Ashbery starts by explaining that the bounding
of thought from moment to moment in fact
conceals Truth behind its congruent appearance.
He seems to be on the verge of making the point
that “truth” is no more than an illusion
thrown before us by our efforts to get at it,
and that life is an interpretive steeplechase
after a meaning that would make us whole –
a meaning that is forever eluding us,
as it is constituted by the chase itself
(it’s what Lacan calls “little object a” –
something like an unplanned excess or remainder).
This set of thoughts is closely related
to a notion set out in the lines that follow:
As life’s argument unfolds we come to a point
at which it seems that we are the reply
to a question that is the argument itself.
At first glance this may seem like a strained restatement
of a traditional maxim such as,
“The answer helps strengthen the question’s clarity,”
or, “We know where we are going when we get there.”
Yet Ashbery’s more subtle point is that,
while we thought we understood the questions we asked
and sought with mixed luck accompanying replies,
we knew what we were after all along,
in fact, and devised our questions accordingly
and stealthily. We “begged the question,” as they say.
A further point is the identity
of oneself with the answers supplied for oneself –
a seeming variation on postmodern sooth
that “one is nothing more than what one speaks”…
assuming that one does come to speak the reply
for which the logos that is one’s life is tailored
(and which always comes, it would seem, too late),
and assuming that one draws the full conclusions
from evidence that one’s life was so predisposed
(“20/20 hindsight,” as they call it).
Not dissimilar to what William S. Burroughs
defined as “naked lunch”: “a moment in time when
one sees what’s at the end of every fork.”
(This, though, is more in the way of social critique.
Ashbery’s thought is circumscribed within a sort
of phenomenalistic enclosure,
although I find his work to be amenable
to a broadening of its “intersubjective”
dimension, as I’ll try to show below.)
Before we continue, however, more Lacan:
The moment of realization (the “reply”)
is much like Lacan’s point de capiton
(translated as both “quilting point” and “button tie”):
A “master-signifier” (or Big Idea,
to give his grandest term a modest name)
serves to retroactively affix the meanings
of signifiers (words, concepts, etc.)
that were previously unassembled,
ungrouped, unassociated with each other.
When Ronald Reagan in 1979
flung “liberal” at Carter’s Democrats,
he brought together in a single stroke a slew
of concepts that hadn’t yet been made to share beds:
bloated government, weak-kneed pacifist,
pot-smoking atheist, pro-choice baby killer,
lesbians pissing upright into urinals
(you remember the poster?), and so forth.
“Liberal” was the “quilting point” that stitched them all
together. Prior to this they were free-floating
signifiers that sometimes would confer,
though just on occasion and never as a group.
And “liberal,” in itself, of course, means nothing.
Prior to the Great Communicator’s
timely intervention, the specificity
of the term (which had referred to economic
theories and practices) had been weakened.
A quarter of a century has passed since then,
and Americans still give credence to the term,
which hasn’t lost effectuality,
despite its lack of rigor, its dubiety,
its lack of conceptual specificity
(that it’s “just a label,” in common speech).
Yet Ashbery already implies even more,
allowing us to discern in Lacan’s theory,
first, an “ideological” moment,
such as with Reagan’s semantic obfuscation
and the concealed program it ostensibly masks
(Reaganomics, the arms race, and so on),
but second, a potentially salutary,
potentially devastating divestiture
of one’s illusions as one comes to know
the emptiness of one’s self-justifications:
“So this is where it’s taken me – back to myself.”
One hasn’t left the launchpad of a self
to which impediments of age have since accrued.
It is at this point, then, that Ashbery arrives
at the famed Lacanian “barred-subject” [S with a slash through it],
which is both the knowledge that one has been deceived
and the knowledge that it’s time to move on from here.
(Insofar as I’m a living human
who assumes this crucial node within the framework,
I am the remainder, the “little object a,”
the “other object” that the grid coughs up.)
The political lesson to be learned, of course,
is that “things will only continue to get worse” –
more 9-11’s, more frivolous wars –
until something like a majority comes forth
and “says No” to three decades of obfuscation
and intimidation through empty words.
“This is us. This is America. Is this US?
Is this where words, where empty words, have taken US?
Let’s drain their emptiness of its fullness!”
(Unfortunately, we haven’t yet come this far.)
We’ve reached here, it seems, the “naked lunch” of Burroughs
as well as Lacan’s famous dictum that
“the letter always reaches its destination” –
a sort of poetic footnote to his theory,
which highlights the time at which everything
suddenly becomes all too clear. (9-11
should have granted to us such a revelation.
That we’ve not yet understood its “letter” –
should we chalk this up to our illiteracy?)
The Company Agent
The first one likened it to a bumbling porter.
The second imagined it happening
as a generational accumulation
of disorder upon unvanquished disorder.
The third, finally, proposed a mapping
of the porter’s journey from station to station
dispersed throughout the wilderness of the second’s
idea, reconfigured spatially
to allow for a site on which might be reckoned
the failures of the company with the mazy
wanderings of its forgotten agent.
He returns to us years later – toothless, aged –
and recites all that’s left of the damaged letter:
“It was all a question of the weather
and of things that by lots had been thrown together.”
II.
The passages on which I’ve commented above
(on life – its “argument” and its “reply”)
interrelate in the poem like A and B themes,
each with its own diversions and subdiversions.
But at key points we encounter this third
theme or subtheme (something like a stipulation
that appends to the “argument” and its moments):
If the moments play out in such a way,
they will gather into a “final assumption”
in which the falsity of all former systems –
of the words or shells of words which make them,
and of our own position with respect to them –
and the bankruptcy of all previous standpoints
will be vanquished and even made up for
in some scarcely thinkable, constellated grace
of which we know only that “it will all make sense.”
And all our earlier failures will seem
as previsions to this culminating vision
in which seeing is both being and believing.
Here we have one of the poet’s standard
ruses, in which he offers a prefigurement
of something like a utopian bliss or peace,
then immediately swipes it from us,
pulling the rug out from under the reader’s tread
of lines (an apt way of describing the feeling
of working hard and getting nowhere fast,
which is at one and the same time the frustration
and pleasure of reading Ashbery’s poetry).
In this passage, after offering us
a glimpse into some rapturous consummation
in which life and thought, experience, its moments –
the experience of life and of thought –
conceal in a still fluidity (or fluid
stillness) of sense, meaning, meaning-making
(one falters in attempts to describe it)…
just as the point de capiton and the “reply”
are being reconfigured as the previsions
to an ultimate “final assumption,”
we confront the image of an unseen fountain
that both “destroys and refreshes” that assumption.
(An uncanny effect is produced here,
in that the poet describes what actually
takes place in the poem – a sudden pulling away
from a climax (or an explanation,
perhaps) that the recent train of thought has led us
to expect, await, desire, or anticipate.)
How are we to interpret this gesture,
this “punch in the gut” that Ashbery delivers
in many of his most memorable moments?
Ha! Who didn’t expect its arrival?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Phallus.
Now don’t you dare put down this book. I’ll explain it:
First, let’s get one thing straight (for those of you
who don’t know or, if you once did, need reminding):
It’s not the penis (or, popularly: cock, schlong),
though at times it may be its image (or
imago – an anthropological concept
that Lacan utilized in his early writings
in reference to certain impressions
that infants receive before they enter language).
The crucial point in the concept of the phallus
is the separation that must occur
between a child and its mother (anyone who
attends the child’s needs will do, in fact – either sex)
so that speech may be inaugurated
and the child enter thereby the world of symbols
(what Lacanians call the “symbolic order”).
“Phallus” names the hurdle that the child must come up
against in its efforts to gain instant
and permanent maternal gratification.
Traditionally, the father provided this,
intervening between mother and child,
between the child and its source of satisfaction.
“Phallus,” though, lies equally on the mother’s side
and designates her own needs and desires –
the fact that her child is not her only concern.
(I won’t go any further into why Lacan
still insists on calling this the phallus,
which has to do with what and how he takes from Freud.
Suffice it to say that, for Lacan, a number
of Freud’s more controversial notions
(such as the Oedipus complex, primordial
incest, or the notorious “penis envy”)
may not in fact obtain empirically
(apart from rare, statistical aberrations)
yet provide a series of “transcendental myths”
(to put it in philosophical terms)
that must be presupposed (and have been presupposed
in literature) in order to fully grasp
culture in its operativity.
That Freud naively assumed their “reality” –
does this not in part explain his acknowledged charm?
In America, it seems, Freud’s become
a byword for Old World lucubration gone wrong.
This is a shameless disavowal – for isn’t
Hollywood Freud’s most monstrous creation?
He couldn’t have been aware of the wide import
of his famous remark to Jung aboard the ship
that first conveyed psychoanalysis
unto the New World: “Carl, we’re bringing them the plague.”
Not enough of it, apparently, however,
to inoculate against the misuse
of a theory that would spawn dual industries
on the West Coast (Hollywood) and the East (ego
psychology, which reaches its nadir
in self-help literature of the ‘70’s).
Not to be too hard on film…hell, I like it too.
You’ll say I’m exaggerating. Maybe.
Though psychoanalysis surely played a role
in character motivation, lighting, soundtrack,
the various techniques to build suspense
(can a Hitchcock prior to Freud be imagined?)…
And beyond such aspects, there’s the perennial
stock figure of the idiotic shrink
who owes more to Sigmund Freud than to anyone.
That we commonly mistake Freud for this figure
is an example of ingratitude
(specifically Yankee ingratitude, for that),
not to mention a colossal disavowal –
Freudian in the term’s exactest sense –
of the wellspring from which we’ve drawn our sustenance.)
Exodus 31:19-27
- in which God imparts
to Moses Lacan's four laws
of sexuation -
All men, the dirty buggers, will be duly snipped.
Jot that, Moses, in your tableted script.
They'll be reminded at times what their thing was for,
for I'll contrive a phallus that they can't ignore.
One man, of course, will get to keep his thing.
We'll give him a cleaver, he'll make the others sing.
To ensure the master of men does not get bored,
we'll let him have all the dames in the horde.
Moses, you look perplexed. But that's how it will go.
If I let them keep their tails, it'll cause a row.
In this way will power be spread around,
and this little race of fools will not run aground.
To ensure that men with women finally blend,
they'll kill the sceptred ogre in the end.
The rite of circumcision will at last be kenned.
***
Anyway, back to Ashbery’s streaming fountain,
with all its ejaculatory grace
and puissance. (It’s easy to get high-falutin
with Lacanian terminology, I know –
hence the silly phrases to make you laugh.)
It manifests the phallus in that it obstructs
text, poet and reader from attaining a goal
that the poem has been leading us up to –
reminiscent, thus, of a technical device
used in European music and its offspring
(called a “deceptive cadence” in textbooks)
in which the dominant (a chord built on the scale’s
fifth pitch), instead of moving to the expected
tonic (the “home-base” on the scale’s first pitch)
swerves off in the direction of another chord –
generally that built on the sixth scale degree
(“five-six [V-VI] rather than five-one [V-I],” as we say).
This is the device Wagner famously employs
to sustain interest in his four-hour dramas
(see Brangäne’s scream in Tristan, Act Two).
Isolde’s “Liebestod” at the opera’s end
is in a manner Wagner’s “final assumption”
(that’s where at last he lets us “get to one [I]”).
This is not a gratuitous comparison;
Ashbery often directly thematizes
19th-century romanticism
and our present-day need to shun the great allure
that its treasure-trove of motifs still sometimes holds.
Our fountain, in fact, is one such instance,
though such a critique is not indeed explicit.
Think of the role that the fountain plays in cities
such as Rome, Florence, Vienna, Madrid –
diverting children (and many adults, no doubt)
away from the numerous painted assumptions
in the guarded halls that border the square!
While portly bourgeoisie are edified inside,
the rest of us amuse ourselves at the fountain,
gazing on in idiot enjoyment
at the liquid bliss gushing out in the middle.
We, the preterite, will likely be passed over
while the elect sup among the Titians.
But at least we’ll have had our modicum of fun.
(I’m joking. Those assumptions are simulacra.
The bourgeoisie won’t get any further.
Indeed, they won’t have gotten as far as we have.
But let’s go back to Lacan for just a moment.)
This phallus/fountain bars our access
to maternal satisfaction/assumption.
Yet it’s in this very moment of frustration
that we are properly subjectivized,
that we come into our own as independent
subjects of freedom, history, law, and so forth.
Thus, the fountain is like the slash in S [S with a slash]
that indicates that the subject is truly born
only after having been wrested from the womb
of some external gratification,
such as comfort in progress towards an “unreal” goal
(which in this poem is termed the “final assumption”).
Now, this may sound all grand and wonderful,
as if Ashbery were showing us precisely
how we “come into our own,” into our “true selves.”
This crucial subjectivization does
occur time and time again throughout his writings.
Yet we are far from the Enlightenment subject,
and Ashbery shows us what we’re left with –
an agent unable to capably assume
the objects and shards he finds scattered about him,
now indifferent, now filled with nostalgia
for an assumption that he never will assume.
The Dream of the Grand Assumption
I dreamed that I overslept the Grand Assumption –
an event I hadn’t wanted to miss –
a revue of lost orders and their resumption
that took place up on the mound of a filled abyss.
I’d slept and was awoken by a hiss
that I took to be that of people going home.
I moaned to my pillow that I’d slept through the bash.
I’d await the commemorative tome –
limited release, no doubt, but I’d make a dash
to be the first in the procession of buyers,
who’d tell me which of each had been resumed
and describe the songs, the ceremonial pyres,
the staves, the sprites that had been pneumed and then repneumed.
And I’d hope that none of them were liars,
and could tell of the seat, the site that they’d assumed!
III.
Two final points concerning this fountain-phallus:
Number One: its invisibility,
indicating the suppositional aspect
of the phallus: We decide where the bar’s been placed,
and our subjectivization depends
on exactly where we locate our “debarment.”
(Is it not like the black hole, only recently
established in its empiricity
after long theoretical supposition?
Pardon to physicists. I know my science sucks.
You’d likely argue the dichotomy
between theory and practice no longer obtains
in science after Heisenberg, etc.)
Number Two: Remember the monolith
in Clarke and Kubrick’s sci-fi extravanganza?
Those silly scenes of man-as-monkey, unable
to validate Darwin and his theory
until he’s subjectivized into submission
and momentary murmuring idiocy
by the infamous, unearthly black slab?
One of the brutes tosses into the sky a bone,
which transforms, by courtesy of ‘60’s-era
special effects, into a space station.
Prior to this motivating intervention
(or intervening motivation, if you like)
they’d gazed into the sky in mute wonder.
The slab “destroyed and refreshed” their experience
in a “gathering in and an emptying out”
(to quote myself from one of my short poems…
didn’t know I was referring to the phallus).
Primates were thus “enabled” for humanity
(I borrow the term from security
software and from Alcoholics Anonymous).
You can guess which of the two I’m more partial towards
(Ashbery’s fountain or Clarke’s monolith).
So you don’t think the comparison’s too far-fetched,
I’ll remind you: Assumptions are likewise skyward.
(Mary was the first woman astronaut,
though scripture doesn’t tell of her exploits in space.)
I’ll say, though, that Clarke’s slab cashes out on jouissance
(that’s Lacan’s complex term for enjoyment).
Whereas Ashbery’s fountain seems a profusion
of jouissance that is seminal and vaginal,
the monolith is clearly “just a dick.”
This brings us to Ashbery’s “postmodernism”:
While Clarke’s slab demonstrates subjectivization
in respectable “modernist” fashion
(how modern subjectivity is the result
of a number of clean breaks that had to be made,
contra Enlightenment views of progress),
in Ashbery we get so far and no further –
due, precisely, to the whirlpool of enjoyment,
which, in addition to the (barred) subject,
is the other product of subjectivity.
Yes, we progress, but our progress is always checked
by our need for idiotic jouissance –
a reserve of gratification that’s ceded
when we begin to live life “in and for ourselves”
(an und für sich – I refer to Hegel).
(“Reserve,” in fact, is a nice way of putting it.
Think of the contemporary role of nature
reserves. Nature had to pop up somewhere
after Urban Man’s “denaturalization”!)
The Era of Common Fun
Chinese history is one vast attempt to wrest
meaning out of the trigrams of Fu Hsi.
It’s the Yahwist’s conundrums for us in the West –
from Moses through Caesar to Ackroyd/Belushi.
Eons from now they’ll start looking for clues
to the lost pronunciation of ampersands
and hyphens painted in various yellows, blues,
and reds in the caves of Postmodern Man.
And they’ll spend their subsequence working out our charts.
You can be sure they won’t neglect our gory parts –
like TV, our true penitentiary.
They’ll ponder the sacrifices through which were won
improvements in the combinatorial arts
that led to the Era of Common Fun.
Alas, the crass mastery of our century!
IV.
I see I've already devoted a greater
number of lines to a dozen or so
of Ashbery's than in fact fill his entire poem.
But that's how it is with commentary, I guess.
Often you get to a point in a poem
after which it all seems like mere continuance
for the sake of filling a predetermined space -
something like, “chosen form squares with chosen
subject matter, producing a certain volume
(no, that's not right - squaring would lead to area)…
area, then, you don't wish to exceed,
but whose limits and inner contours you attempt
to mark, illumine, vivify, keep free of dust.”
I'm not saying I've exceeded myself,
but rather that I now must renounce exhaustion
(exhaustion of Clepsydra's sense and resources,
that is), ere interest is exhausted -
my interest to the extent that it is yours.
So, rather than striving for a complete precis,
I'll discuss those sections I'm most keen on
and will separate my remarks by asterisks.
***
We've backed away from an assumption we've witnessed
(or almost witnessed, almost took part in)
and our forward propulsion has been sternly checked.
It's at this point (line 95, to be precise)
that we make an about-face back towards Go
and are prompted to immerse ourselves in the theme
of beginning, origin - or rather its lack:
"There was no statement at the beginning."
No messianic coming, hence no creation.
Only the mindless whirlpool in the piazza.
Forget the Sistine cherubs' peachy bums.
Go feed their pigeony brethren at the fountain.
Sadly, I feel less than prepared or competent
to tackle this business of origin.
I would have to leave secure Lacanian turf
and go hounding after Heidegger, Derrida,
Nietzsche and post-Nietzsche, etc.
I could make the attempt, but soon we'd all get bored
(I'm not writing a dissertation, after all!).
I can, however, suggest a few hints:
First, Ashbery's implied mistrust of origins
is conveyed to us through this absence of statement.
I think of Ashbery's missing statement
in musical terms - a motive, theme or subject
that governs a logos from which it's been removed
(logos as both argument and logic).
Indeed, don't many of Ashbery's poems strike one
as variations on an absconding statement?
In fact, "Clepsydra" begins as a mess
or mass or morass of phrases that don't relate
(or don't seem to relate), much like many movements
by the American composer Ives,
which begin in a maelstrom of disconnected
linear declarations, metrical riddles,
and poundings accordant and discordant,
from which distinct or identifiable themes
only extract themselves (or may be extracted)
from the vantage point of their subsequent
development, their working out, their Entwicklung -
in contrast to the procedures of composers
at least since Haydn and the younger Bachs,
where a theme is clearly stated at the outset.
Often Ives will begin with a full minute’s worth
of thematic and motivic non-sense,
to which an end is put via intervention
on the part of a clearly discernible theme -
a theme, however, not of the jumble
of themes that make up the initial confusion
(themes that indeed will later establish themselves
in varying degrees of clarity),
but one that seems to have been launched from a standpoint
external to the motivic jambalaya.
(Often this theme will recur in other
movements, relating obscurely or in odd ways
to their respective themes and thematic logics.)
Isn't it the same, then, in "Clepsydra,"
where the intervention of the fountain-phallus
is the poem's true initiatory moment,
clarifying what has gone before it?
Ashbery contributes, in short, to the modern
(or postmodern, depending on your point of view)
query into things in their beginning
(the query into the query, more precisely -
what it means that we hanker after origins).
I'd like to go on, but frankly I'm stumped.
***
After declaring this absence of a statement,
Ashbery goes on to examine the moments
of which life's argument is constructed.
He explains that each moment harbors a concern
for the history of its "profits and manners…
on which it may base its next decisions."
This is indeed a wonderful, timely passage
in "Clepsydra": After we've been expressly told
that there was no statement at the outset,
we see our moments involved in a frantic search
after their origin and their antecedence,
like the falsely named in a whodunit.
And the interpretation that I'd venture forth
would be that it is here that the moment-subject
is properly hystericized after
being struck dumb in the phallus-fountain’s trauma -
the event which compels the moment-subject's search
for grounds behind the assumption's collapse.
In a sense, each subsequent moment will repeat
the intervention posed by the fountain-phallus.
(Here we could bring in Benjamin's Jetztzeit –
"now-time" – an Augenblick or “flicker of the eye”
during which something in the present resonates
at a corresponding node in the past.
See my theses in "Singapore" from Molly's Song.)
The former quest after a final assumption
is displaced onto a fascination
with the event responsible for its failure.
And again, it is always an open question
whether the assumption isn't indeed
merely an illusion cast, a mirage thrown up
by the event (trauma) of the fountain (phallus).
In other words, origin coincides
with assumption in that neither is registered
in the argument's temporal experience
but is observable in its after-
effects, in traces left in the argument’s wake.
Enough. Already more than I wanted to say.
***
After the poem's "hystericization,"
with its establishment of a narrative voice,
the atmosphere is largely one of exhaustion
and defeat, of a Pyrrhic victory
that has led to a subject of little muster.
This "atmosphere" is evoked via a series
of images and sets of images,
the most memorable perhaps being the "map
of exhaustion," with its telling peninsulas
that mark both failure and fond memories
of Life as it was in advance of the phallus.
I appear on this map as a transparency,
a stencil “of manners and private words…
with the certainty of being about to fall.”
An apt description, for me, of the unconscious -
of psychosis, as well, where the ego,
alienated from the subject, collapses
in upon it in an invasion of objects
stained by the ego in its estrangement.
The Scylla of psychotic alienation,
the Charybdis of some bo(u)re(geois)dom-unto-death…
are these, then, the subject's only choices?
In Ashbery we rarely find alternatives.
***
And last, notes on another of the poet’s tricks,
in which he tosses an "illegible"
image, phrase or sentence into an otherwise
comprehensible block of text, as in our poem's
"and yet her hair had never been so long,"
which doesn’t jive with what goes before or after.
Indeed, some effort would have to be made to find
an Ashbery poem that doesn't include
moments that so controvert interpretation.
Such moments, again, for me, are of the phallus -
of its aspect, "under its bar," let's say.
This poem is a bricolage of sense and non-sense,
and each reader, no doubt, will decide what makes sense
and what doesn't, will draw the map in accordance
with his or her own "profits and manners"
(the aspect of his writing most obviously
"postmodern" - maybe "interactive resilience"
would be a fit designation for it).
A Twice-Told Tale (Or,
What God Decided Not to
Impart to Moses)
Men, let it be said, must be deprived of their nobs -
their flutes tipped off with skin, their gleaming cobs.
For if they are to walk in a line that is straight,
it is decisive that they cease to masturbate.
You see that taller man with bone in hand?
We'll yank his off and have it mounted on a stand.
To keep the others tame, it'll serve as a brand.
It's his and he can use it as he needs
to shepherd the bleating fools deprived of their seeds.
Eventually, of course, they'll slaughter the beast.
Upon his very bollocks will they feast.
The rescued women will have to sleep with their sons
so as to foster a race of diminished ones.
They'll glance back on the event through the pales
and mark it by trimming the posts of newborn males.
V.
I'll try to round this out with some remarks on Truth –
the term, I’d say, that predominates in the poem.
It functions much like the Ivesian theme,
as summarized above - removed to a certain
extent from the work's "official" mechanical
distribution, yet of it nonetheless
(as of a medium in which the work resides),
a reservoir of its own evacuation,
its outstreaming through the fountain-phallus,
origin and assumption its temporal tropes,
twinned manifestation of a linear tread
set in motion by a trauma-event
which is the poem's point of subjectivization.
Hence, the virtuosic caviling about Truth -
about Truth and its exact location,
and about our residence with respect to what
no longer calls itself our transcendental home
(and likely never did, for all of that).
(Note, incidentally, that the Ivesian theme,
at least as I’ve introduced it, appears as both
the trauma-event and the entity
that saturates as universal medium
a work into which at the same time it intrudes.
We might say that Ashbery’s procedure,
in which the various roles are severally
assigned, is true to a postmodern commonplace:
Phallus no longer guarantees our home.)
And Life as the euphemistic doubling of Truth:
this is Clepsydra's tragedy and travesty -
ours as well, Ashbery's, modernity's.
(This is not to say it happens this way each time;
rather, Ashbery plays out one of the dangers).
Life's argument. "The truth of Life," that is.
Truth dirempts into origin and assumption,
eventually draining out from these as well,
leaving Life with jouissance, sticky jouissance -
an upwelling of idiotic enjoyment.
And America? Ashbery's America?
The origin: Manifest destiny.
Assumption: Fukuyama's "end of history,"
final ascendancy of the global market -
"from each according to what he can do,
to each according to what he can't do himself"
(never mind it was Marx who happened to say that -
the global market hopes to get there, too).
The trauma-event, the fountain: 9-11.
And the sticky substance itself? Edutainment,
Walmart and McFood, Adorno's "culture
industry," and, more recently, the Internet…
In short, a doubling of Life, a New World doubling -
an idiot's enjoyment of the Old.
In the end, this is what Ashbery's all about:
A new thing that doubles, stencils a less new thing,
like Stencil in Pynchon's great novel, V.
Pynchon is likewise concerned with repetition.
His five published novels read like variations
on a history that never took place
except as an abandoned possibility
occupying a minor sector somewhere near
the base of Leibniz's vast pyramid.
Unlike Pynchon, Ashbery doesn't go about
the retrieval of alternative histories,
of histories that haven't taken place.
Rather, he's made it his task to make visible
the surface upon which such rewritings occur -
in literature, in Pynchon's novels,
on TV, certainly also in psychosis -
as well as the impetus and the weird logic
we share with such couplings, such rewritings,
in our daily lives as "normal Americans."
For it’s the New World he dresses and addresses
(the same one Thomas Pynchon redresses).
And his blessings to us are qualified and grave.
In his own words: "Long may you prosper. May your years
be the throes of what even now exhausts
itself in its final efforts to outwit us."
Yet may ours, our own, precisely our exhaustion,
our joy that would enjoy itself to death –
may it outlast our outwitting. Long may it last!
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