Andoumboulou 17 (continued)

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou from various angles that interest me. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it, many of the poems can be found here.]

The images in the next several stanzas, which are set off from the first couple by a skipped line and a dot, pertain to lakes and rumbling trains.

It would seem that a 'he' and a 'she' spend time at a "Lake they were soon to / leave," then she sees "The he she remebers not/ the he she saw stepping onto" a train.

We finish with another image of drowning: "Water up to our necks."

There are also plenty images of pulling apart, roughness, rockiness, spun, and whooshing. I think this last word, which is repeated several times, has to do with "a wind which wasn't a wind."

These characters do not seem happy about the separation. It is almost like the cutting of twins, a hollowing out, "the Andoumboulou beckoned."

The Andoumboulou live inside the earth and are a "rough draft," as Mackey refers to them, of humanity. With all the images of drowning and going beneath the earth, Mackey is transforming this split between this he and she into an emblem of the connectedness and whoosh disconnectedness of people to one another and to the earth.

Before a long, page length break in the poem which ends with a horizontal line, the "he" pockets a rock. After the line a blacksmith or someone working with blacksmith tools tries to turn the rock into a point. Finally, the "he" is knocked across the head and told not to let tools touch one another.

In the end he may die by choking on a kola nut.

But how can we be sure? This is a poem of such radically fluid identities that we cannot say anything about the characters with any confidence. Their fluidity may even put them beyond death or beyond our ability to see their death.

Instead, we have the verbs: whoosh, drown, pulled under, choked, rumble, and so on.

The poem seems to chronicle the specific ways people get buffeted into having multiple identities. They are so singular.

Such a poem risks incoherence: pronouns that are attached to no noun are then displaced by memory or other pronouns.

I have not decided yet, but this may be an instance where Mackey goes too far in exploring these issues of fluidity. Do we readers need some sort of solidity, however, impermanent, to stand on?

I am still thinking.

Andoumboulou 17 -- Continuation from June 10

[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou from various angles that interest me. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]

[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it, many of the poems can be found here.]

In the second stanza we again run into 'rocks', this time as a weight pulling down, perhaps drowning them.

Once again, the stanza begins with the line 'Thought they were done'. We don't know who is doing the thinking. Also, the thinking is past tense, which removes us a bit from the scene.

Also, in this stanza there is none of the ambiguity created by the use of pronouns unconnected to any noun. Throughout, the entity doing the thinking considers a 'they' identified as a 'Drenched Chorus'. A few stanzas later the phrase 'pulling under' is used.

In an essay entitled "The Mired Sublime" in Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (Northwestern UP), Paul Naylor identifies a horizontal, person to person transcendence. This is, I think, the "Mired Sublime" of the title. Could it be that this transcendence is connected not to going upward, but to going down, under the earth where the Andoumboulou live?

Are we to take it that the "Drenched Chorus" is singing as the ship goes down, Titanic, or finding what Lorca calls 'duende'? Also, 'chthonic' is a Greek word for the underground as a place of abundance and death.

Also, pronouns get shifted around again.

What can we confidently say about the first three stanzas of this poem? The focus is on action, not people. Identity is radically fluid, to the point where the boundaries between us dissolve. Attention is paid to the underwater and underground, both places of abundance and fertility, yet also suggestive of death (both physical death but, more importantly, death of the individual self.)

Like 'the rim of a well' that Lorca discusses in relation to 'duende'.

This 'mired sublime' -- from both Naylor's essay and an earlier Andoumboulou poem -- is the moving 'outside, beside / themselves'. It is the place of one sort of creativity, of the love that makes the teeth chatter, and of the uneven creakiness of existence.

What Mackey seems to be describing is 'worshippers' not tied to Western notions of spirituality with its individuality and hierarchy. It is a fluid 'person' to fluid 'person' interaction, interpenetration, permeability.

Beautifully and terrifyingly mired.

Mackey: Vision and Reflection

Picking up on my thoughts from yesterday, Mackey is more a fast-moving poet who reflects on spiritual, cultural, and ecstatic matters than he is a spiritual or ecstatic poet. He seems also to be a visionary poet. Both visionaries and those who reflect do so from a position on the edge or outside. (Mackey in interviews often speaks of the edge.)

Take the example of Jayne Cortez. Especially in her live work with the Firespitters and other groups, her work has an immediacy that is necessary for both the spiritual and the ecstatic. Is it an absolute immediacy? Of course not. If that were the case it would be wide open to Derridean deconstruction. As Derrida points out, all language slips, but some slips more than others. Cortez typically is too intense and lacking in irony to create a lot of slippage relative to other poets.

Are intensity and a lack of irony sufficient reasons for a piece to be considered spiritual or ecstatic? I doubt it. But it seems to me they are necessary. Even the hilarious ancient Persian mystic Hafiz had an intensity about him.

Mackey is as interested in deferral, stammer, stutter, and slippage as he is with anything. Perhaps much of his work is not spiritual or ecstatic, but shows forth the stuttering and slippage that occurs with such language but often goes repressed or unnoticed.

Some examples from School of Udhra (I choose it because it is next to my keyboard. Any of his books would show the same sort of pattern):

"not yet asleep I'm no longer awake" (3) [Emphasis is on negation, not ecstasy.]

"Took the dust of an eroded footprint" (4) [Self-cancelling image.]

"at the mention of loss a new convert / to light" (6) [Speech engenders.]

"I sit up holding you a / year ago" (7) [Notice how the shift in tense creates slippage.]

"scorched earth looked at / with outside eyes" (9)

"disembodied voice" (10) [Notice how Mackey speaks of a disembodied voice rather than from one, which would be speaking from a state of ecstasy.]

This goes on throughout Songs of the Andoumboulou.

A note of caution: above I have analyzed thematic content. Mackey's form must also be addressed along these lines. I do so in the post before this one.

Paul Naylor in an excellent article in the Spring 2000 Callaloo seems to disagree with me. He references Heidegger as defining 'ecstasy' as standing outside of one's self in language. "The selves that inhabit the poetic terrain of SoA, are able to stand outside themselves...and it is language that is at once the condition for the possibility of such ecstasy and its site."

Now I don't want to nor claim to critique Naylor in a thorough manner, but I must say I disagree with him on this important point. Ecstasy is not the only way to get outside one's self in language. Reflection can do it as well. Vision is a third way. (By 'vision' I am not referring to a coherence that an artist works toward, but a construction by the artist that, while coherent in some senses, is also quite open. For a writers to have an 'artistic vision' in the most extreme manner would be the end of their writing.)

Naylor seems to argue that Mackey's poetry is the site of ecstasy. I believe that it is the site of reflecting on and constructing visions about, among other things, ecstasy.

A future post will need to consider the interrelationship between this reflection and vision building and Mackey's unique form.