from “The New Spirit” (John Ashbery, 1972):
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, and contain multitudes.” Walt Whitman wrote this in 1855 in Leaves of Grass. For Whitman, chief cataloguer and bottle washer, it does not seem that contradiction implies a canceling-out effect: it all stays in, more is more and more is more is me. The self proliferates; it expands to include. There is something consuming about it.
image: Kaonashi offering multitudes to Chihiro, whose self is at stake (2001)
Maybe it is cynical to imagine this largeness being similar to Hayao Miyazaki’s No-Face character in “Spirited Away”: a hungry ghost; the more he eats, the greater is his desiring; eventually he has to throw it all up, and after this purge, he is free, and reveals his true identity, and blesses the spa where his detox took place, and whizzes joyously out of a window.
Whitman is often considered to be a direct influence on Ashbery, by Harold Bloom most famously, who set them both in an American-poetry lineage as grandfather and grandson (identifying the father, between them, as Wallace Stevens).
Indeed, Ashbery can be grandiloquently maximalist, in the style of Whitman, and often piles on with the absurdity and decadence of Stevens. He has distanced himself from the turn of the century genuineness the way Modernists and especially Postmodernists have had to do; the absurdity is emptied of almost any remnant of nostalgic significance, and the decadence has a self-correcting bite.
Most importantly in Ashbery, he comments on himself; or, the poetry comments on itself. This to me is the mirroring or reflective feature of Ashbery which has spawned a thousand measly imitators; or, it is the feature most obviously imitated and to my mind the hardest to get away with, because it requires true neutrality in relation to oneself, and in relation to one’s writing.
Most writing does not succeed in seceding (sorry) from its own idea of itself. Most people also do not succeed in seceding from their own ideas of themselves. As far as I can tell, this feature, or this orientation, is key to success (what do I mean by that?). This notion of detachment is the most important of all to the thinking of Meister Eckhart. Eckhart’s thinking on detachment (from self, from world, and, most heretically for a preacher, from God) floated into my head while reading Ashbery, and while reading Rilke. The opening lines from “The New Spirit” (John Ashbery, 1972):
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
The Zen Buddhists’ idea of ‘empty rice bowl’ is here, an analogous concept to Eckhartian detachment. Modernists and Postmodernists love the drama of giving up all signification, and so fetishize, for example, the last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “That which cannot be spoken about must be passed over in silence.” On the edge of paradox, as Wittgenstein often perches, and with just enough of a dose of Viennese melancholy to appeal to the cynics who maintain Academe.
The dominant emotional undertone of decadence is melancholy; long before climate disaster, giving up was, for the educated elite, in vogue. The narrow band of ‘secularized’ post-God intellectuals defining thinking parallel the aristocracy, and are almost equally out of touch, not for lack of information, but for lack of ‘lived,’ experiential wisdom.
Enter the poets. Before one can detach, one must experience. To learn about this, to prepare to do it yourself, you study up, and read all about it—in Ashbery, for example. How to approach this ‘new spirit’?
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.
Detachment does not mean paralysis, armchair ideology, judgment which guarantees inaction. One acts, and is detached. One writes, detached.
And what happens when you leave out, as Ashbery experiments? The next paragraph:
But, forget as we will, something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but—yourself. It is you who made this, therefore you are true…
Truth claims??? In poetry??? Which itself is in lines of prose??? Truly here is a New Spirit ;)
The self floods in, claims Ashbery, the moment you try to leave [the world] all out. Self fills the empty space; abhors a vacuum… Turning on yourself as a leaf, you miss the third and last chance, he warns, a few paragraphs later. The annotation of experience is, to my mind, the best that poetry can do. And whether it is possible or not, detached annotation is, to my mind, the goal of poetry.