MULTIPLE FUZZY GOALS AND CRUMPLED CUBES

some aspects of a poetics of generosity

As the century closes and we seem to move ever farther from a familial relationship to our planet, it seems more essential to arrive at a poetics of generosity, not only in poetry, but across the networks of our lives. The narrow, fanatical, single vision proposed by greed does not lead to survival. Elsewhere I've proposed that a poetics of generosity will work itself out through three waves: multiplicity, commonality of act, commitment. Here I'm going to talk about a poetics of generosity as it intersects with the scientific concerns of the age. Because, the poets are the visionaries, the scholars, the inventors, and the questions we set ourselves to answer through prophecy and vision are not different from the questions our colleagues in other disciplines confront. The means differ, but the great questions of an age pose themselves across the entire range of our lives. What questions must we, the poets and the scientists of our age, answer?

A few years ago, as I looked through bibliographies of work by colleagues in the SUNYA departments of mathematics and statistics, I encountered titles dealing with topics like "Multiple Fuzzy Goals" and "Crumpled Cubes." Immediately I thought of some of the poetry, fiction, and intermedia works I and many of my colleagues in the arts create, and how well these phrases, however specialized may be their meaning in their own discipline, suggest also some of the concerns of the arts in this part of the century. I have spent much of my intellectual and creative life trying to put together a range of discourses across the arts and also across the sciences, and it seems to me useful here to speculate about why that has been true, of my own work and of so many others, why, in this time and place and moment of history, the separation of modes of discourse seems no longer as productive as it once did. To see this means that we must speculate about the history of ideas, and about how we have sometimes found it useful to set limits but at other times more useful to break them down.

Neither the discourses of the sciences nor the discourses of the arts are primary. Neither set of discourses merely illustrates or translates the concerns of the other. Both discourses during any sufficiently broadly defined period of history seem to approach similar concerns from the standpoint of differing vocabularies and methods. That being so, sometimes we can gain fresh perspectives within our own discourses from seeing how widely differing disciplines approach similar concerns.

For pre-literate and tribal societies, the single greatest intellectual discovery may have been that of the creative power of naming. One of the central axioms of magic and of early religion seems to have been that the name, or the image, or the symbolic representation, invokes, controls, and in psychological terms, creates the thing. Here, for example is a section of a Kato Indian genesis account, which I've taken from Jerome Rothenberg's anthology, Technicians of the Sacred:

"Woodpeckers were not they say. Then wrens were not they say. Then hummingbirds were not they say. Then otters were not they say. Then jackrabbits, grey squirrels were not they say. Then long-eared mice were not they say. Then wind was not they say. Then snow was not they say. Then rain was not they say...Then clouds were not they say. Fog was not they say. It didn't appear they say. Stars were not they say. It was very dark."

What tribal humanity noticed was that even in the act of listing the things that didn't exist, the act of naming called them into existence, so that, paradoxically, it is not possible to name the things that are lacking without immediately bringing them forth out of nothingness. This act of naming, of imagining, of creating the world through our perception of it, is akin to what Freud meant when he defined the primary process of the imagination as the id's hallucinatory representation to itself of the object of desire. The id makes no separation between the mental representation of the thing and the thing itself. And for human beings dwelling in a magical universe, whether the magical stage of the evolution of the individual's psychology, or the magical stage of evolution of society, those separations of name from thing, of cause from effect, of process from object, have not yet come into being. The science of that stage is what we call magic; its art is ritual; and the science and the art, the magic and the ritual, are not themselves yet separate discourses. The entire world, as well as the individual psyche, may be felt as endlessly in motion, events and objects and perceptions inextricably flowing into each other and into the stream of time and mind.

The great discovery of Classical Greece was that this eternal flow could be halted momentarily by an operation of the mind, that you could draw limits around momentary stages of the process both in time and in space, and give names to your representations of those momentary stages. You could halt Zeno's arrow in flight, you could straighten the lines around an object, you could fix the location and the speed of the arrow, and name the object a triangle. You could represent action rather than performing it, dramatically enact and symbolize a sacrifice without killing the victim, and you could separate the dramatic, verbal, and pictorial representations one from another. In spacial art you could sever sculpture from architecture; in verbal art you could classify kinds of emotional action, forms of feeling, and call them tragedy, comedy, epic, classify types of action, call them rising, falling, call their components plot, character, setting, call the themes topoi and imagine them as having mental locations. You could separate kinds of sentence and phrase and argumentative structures one from another and invent the art of rhetoric. In poetry you could halt the voice in motion, measure the time and vocal force, the energy it took to say a given syllable or a group of syllables in relation to each other, and classify groups of those syllables according to the metrical pattern you had discovered. In biology you could classify the different species, and fix their differences. So we can see how Euclidian geometry, how Aristotelian science and Aristotelian poetics are operationally of a piece, part of that same great discovery of the method of defining, setting limits, looking at phenomena as if they are fixed and separate, not fuzzy and in motion.

The phenomena that humanity could usefully examine by these means became increasingly more complex as the means were refined. But the period during which this approach remains productive, in Western thought, endures, with increasing complexity, through the Renaissance and well into the neoclassical period. For example, in a street scene by the Sienese painter and architect, Baldassare Peruzzi, we can see that he is attempting to render how distance appears to the eye. He does this by taking a static moment of perception, and making a kind of spacial graph. To construct his street scene, he first plotted it out in an abstract, geometrical scheme. Similarly, in Bruneleschi's San Lorenzo in Florence, and in Michelangelo's never adopted plan for St. Peter's in Rome, we can see that a major concern in both works is proportion, decorum, fitness, conforming what the eye sees to an idealized mathematical proportion. The same is true of Leonardo's famous analysis of the correct proportions of the parts of a man's body to each other and to the whole, and of how the ideal human forms fits into a measure defined by the intersections of a circle and a square. Even more obvious is this method in Leonardo's drawing from his treatise on flight, analyzing the motion of the wings of a bird, in discrete instants, like the successive exposures in a film.

Even while Renaissance artists break down motion into discrete instants, the literature of the period is thinking in terms of types of character, the biology in terms of humors and temperaments. Even when showing the motion of an entire army, the thing is geometrically structured and idealized.

I am NOT saying that one discourse is a translation of the other. Leonardo does not paint as he does in order to illustrate the discoveries he makes as a mathematician and engineer, anymore than he struggles to solve various problems of mechanics in order to carry out a program suggested by his concerns as an artist. But as a whole human being, he finds that all his various abilities and interests are inevitably drawn to the same questions, whatever the discipline in which he confronts them. So, the structuring and measurement of the world of objects, whether in motion or at rest, whether in language, art, drama, architecture or mathematics, is being accomplished during those centuries between Classical Greece and the Seventeenth Century (the beginning and ending of this period must necessarily remain fuzzy), in all disciplines, by means of a technique of freezing the moving object and separating it from the continguous environment, rather than by trying the apparently impossible task of moving with it and participating in its motion. The Renaisaance Sonnet moves in a regular pattern of syllables and lines, and structures and proportions the thought and the emotion according to an approximation of that same Golden Section by which Renaisance art and architure proportion space. Even so spendidly complex and kinesthetic a form as Shakespearean tragedy procedes by juxtaposition of separate scenes, by the representation of increasingly complex variations of character types such as the Vice and the Fool, and by a belief that human actions have, however complex, explicable motivations.

But, gradually, Shakespearean tragedy becomes increasingly fuzzy, the neat cubes of character and motivation become increasingly crumpled, and the mind in motion rather than the character type in an idealized scheme becomes the subject of measure. In a parallel development, Cartesian categorization of the world begins to furnish the tools whereby Newtonian mathematics can concern itself with the measurement of the rates of change of change itself.

I'm drastically simplifying here for argument; these developments are not neat and linear, nor does one intellectual methodology supercede or make obsolete another. Rather what happens is that we switch our attention, and as we switch our attention to different phenomena we require different means of observation and measurement.

So the separate discourses, in their separate ways, across some 300 years, become increasingly involved in breaking down the great classical act of categorization, in giving a push to Zeno's arrow and setting it in motion once again. Darwinian biology and the 20th century developments in relativity and in quantum theory all bear witness to this change of focus and of method. We can see the parallel development, in the poetry of, among others, Whitman, Hopkins and Dickinson. Whitman, even while writing his great poems whose subject is the interconnection of all humanity and all life in one world-soul perpetually in motion, devises a line whose measure is not based on breaking down groups of syllables into separate units of energy, but on structuring syllables in moving and overlapping waves, bound together by recurrent patterns of alliteration and consonance.

Slightly later, and to some extent influenced by Whitman, we have Hopkins’ notebooks, in which he draws the motion of waves, clouds, and birds, and increasingly comes to see that what he's drawing is not the motion of the object but of his own eye in seeing it. His drawings look very much like Van Gogh's universe, dancing with brushstrokes that embody an endless flow of points of energy. The motion of the voice in his verse, for example, in "The Windhover" or "The Wreck of the Deutschland" is built on this new way of measuring movement in the voice, analogous to the way his drawings measure movement in space.

Van Gogh's starry night, in which the atoms of the air are charged with energy and represented in moving brushstrokes, in which the haze the eye puts around what it sees surrounds the stars, which are huge because they occupy that much space in attention, is another example. At around the same time, Mallarme is looking at the fuzziness of words and syntax, and, in isolation from these others, Dickinson begins to deal with the multiple fuzziness of words and of meaning, as these move constantly in the moving mind.

To hang our head--- ostensibly---

And subsequent, to find

That such was not the posture

Of our immortal mind---

Affords the sly presumption

That in so dense a fuzz---

You---too---take Cobweb attitudes

Upon a plane of Gauze! [105]

We are now at a point where uncertainty and multiple fuzziness reign supreme. We now know, or think we know, that the idea that we could stop the arrow and measure its speed and location was an empowering fiction, that the measurement is useful illusion, that we may at most, by that method, measure speed or location but never both at once. We know, or think we know, that the act of observation is part of the measurement, that it changes what it measures. We know, or think we know, that naming the thing therefore creates it by defining it, that a different naming will summon into being a different object, that standing on one side of a moving object and measuring its apparent motion without taking into account our motion relative to it gives a kind of fiction, and that moving around the moving object, gives a different fiction, not the neat cube but the crumpled cube. In Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," the outline is fuzzy, her cubes crumpled, occupying, like Zeno's arrow before he froze it, every possible location simultaneously. In current mathematical language, her location is not indeterminate but over-determined, or, as I perfer to put it, mulitply determined, generously determined. We are once again in a mode which sees observation, art, language, as a participation in process and in interaction rather than as measurement of objects in useful but fictive isolation.

Hence our return to blurring of genres in the arts, interactive works, performance works, poetry which, in Charles Olson's formulation, sees itself as a"transfer of energy" from poet to audience by means of the poem, rather than as the creation of a beautiful object, or, in Muriel Rukeyser's formulation, in her discussion of Thomas Harriot, sees each moment not as making a decision between to be or not to be, but occupying a series of spaces along a continuum on which may be found the two extremes, est and non est, but even then, the continuum etends past them in either direction. Quantum mechanics tells us something similar: that on the subatomic scale you don't have particles either there or not there. Instead what you have is a tendency to be there that may or may not hold true, on varying levels of probability, for any specific particle or event. It is of course no accident that while scientists were discoverying how the observer influences the experiment and how therefore the experiment cannot exactly reflect what used to be defined as objective reality, writers have been producing metafiction and hyptertext, fiction that takes into account the fact that it is fiction in perpetual interaction with its readers and with events. To see this fiction, poetry, and art, not as indeterminate but as multiply determinate, not as unlocated but as multiply located, not as blur but as motion, not as excess but as generosity, requires an enthusiasm for cobwebs, a willingness to see the flat plane of the printed text as a porous structure of gauze, and an ability to move in crumpled intellectual spaces.

We are here now, with our crumpled cubes, our multiple fuzzy goals which, in Dickinson's word, are not flimsy but dense, a solid plane of gauze which weaves the cobweb attitudes of the mind. Those webs, although gossamer and fictional, are not flimsy; they are the Web of the world, which the Norse Goddesses of Fate wove, they are Penelope's web woven each day and unwoven each night, they are the Web of life made by the Native American SpiderWoman, they are the web of words of Whitman's noiseless patient spider, they are the palpable lines of thought and energy that hold us to each other and to that great work of fiction and of art, the imagined universe. The task of the artists, who are the visionaries of our age, is to imagine and bring into being those multiple fuzzy goals and crumpled cubes, so that we can get on with the world, which is forever in motion, which is forever spirit, as matter in motion at different speeds becomes solid, liquid, gas, or spirit.

Judith E. Johnson

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