All Our Words Are Selfish Genes

Since writing the previous post, I've had the peculiar but very strong sense that my name is Iscariot, and it was supposed to have been all my life. I've always had a disjointed sense of my name and on one hand, I suppose this is just the latest incarnation of that, but on the other, I've usually operated under a vague sense that whatever my name was, it wasn't supposed to be that -- not the sense that here was a name that was actually mine. And, of course, it would be something that isn't exactly a name, and definitely not a first name anyone would ever give to their daughter. Good work.

It's an interesting word, though. Very interesting for a poet. Betrayer. Speech is always an infidelity, to its subject/topic, to its subject/speaker, to its intended recipient. It lies. All down the page. And this is how it propagates itself, through infidelity, through being untrue to its own ends: in its image which isn't visual, in its form which is immaterial, Robert Duncan and the rest of us go on and on making sentences that can resemble but never be themselves.

So: we empty ourselves without bringing anything more to be in the world. It isn't a birth; it isn't even emesis. It's a travail the fruit of which fails to exist, and, which, in appearing as its absent self in the place of the existent, creates the hunger in us on which it depends for its perpetuation. To speak is to devote oneself to something that's only and always a parasite.

Speech and betrayal have at their obscure beginnings identical structures; the most resonant betrayal in Western literature was also an act of speech. The breach from world into word is the aperture where God appears and in that same instant is banished. Judas' crime had nothing to do with the thirty pieces, but was the ineluctable effect of epiphany.

And poetry in particular is a kind of speech bound up in betrayal, or let loose by it. The condition of poesis is that one ceases to care about anything else -- not even as an addict or an obsessive, because it's not exactly that the writer has to care about poetry, but rather a transcendental yielding-up of one's own concerns into a state of possibly violent readiness. One isn't willing; will ceases to be a question. The writer passes from subjectivity into the position of a tool, a thing, which can be named ("poet," "iscariot"), a tool that sounds under appropriate agitation, but which is itself incapable of speech.

What was he doing, the great god Pan? He was turning us all into flutes, carelessly, hastily, and would cast us aside when we cracked. Which happened often, not only on the scale of sacred time, but even in the limited terms of our own chapped lives, disposability no imperfection but ultimately part of our purpose. The dragonflies come back, the waterlilies bloom, and then they don't, and then they do again. We get blown out and aren't in a state to appreciate these things. It's hard to say we're responsible.

Personally, I think Shakespeare's greatest accomplishment might be the way he could still pun on "will" right up into the last of his career.

So we betray ourselves, we betray the fact of our being selves; we betray our beloveds (people or politics or visions or anything) and put them in our poems without even, precisely, wanting to do so; we betray our hearts because we talk about them. In betrayal -- we destroy the tender, raw trust we call a secret by causing it no longer to be a secret. It's whoring out something virginal. Which, then, can no longer be a virgin, but transforms into an economic operative. Grown up into pussy and flashy barely-there clothes and coins.

That's what poetry does; not the coins in terms of getting paid, but reduces things down into the coinage of language. We take perfectly good unspeakable things and speak them anyway -- and they may hide, they may disappear, they may be always on the run, but in the moment of writing, we've caught up to them and we tie them down to the page, we open them wide and hot for language's penetration. And for the most part, we don't feel bad about it, or we feel ridiculous, a little insane, if we do. It's just the work; it's not like we're dealing with human beings or anything.

And then there's the other betrayal, that speaking something replaces its bloody little hole in the world with words. The word "hooker" or the phrase "blowjob in an alley," for example: so much is lost! It's an exchange designed to summon forth very damn good reasons to grieve, and in the same instant to hide them perfectly, to distract us all. To feed us another line.

The crucifixion, then, might be a poem. Or the story of the crucifixion might be the story of poetry.