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Title: $Prologue to Language Doubling
Abstract: Boris Pasternak (older than Mayakovsky and alive after the Allen anthology) speaks somewhere of the necessity for writers to disregard the approval of their admirers, lest their writing be tempted to repeat itself. He speaks of the urge for perfection in a mode of writing as the mark of the imitator. Writers of course can imitate their own original maneuvers, what is practically an epidemic in the trade. Pasternak offers that the real exploration of new territory is constantly marked by abrupt change and barbaric intuitions, calling for still other contrary geniuses to appear, intuitively and without notice. The thrust of the argument is that too much rationale can turn an original idea into so much ration, ignoring the richness yet to be mined. The bottom line here would be to intend or demand, to hear or to ask, to turn over as it were, so many sentences a day, multiplied by 360 (our year having roughly days equal to the degrees of the circle that describes it), times again a number of years, and there you have it: a paratactic if not a sympathetic record of the writer's sensation or consciousness. Cast an ancient mathematical superstructure on it, or a not so ancient spatial one, and what have you got? What you have could be Dante or Vergil, or it could be Ron Silliman or Steve Benson. It would be fluent to suggest that silliman and Benson represent the outer and the inner possibility of Twentieth-Century American writing in English at this point in time--a dialectic not unlike that of the not-so-recent projected pairing of Charles Olson (Boss Poet, as Robert Kelly called him) and Robert Creeley (Gray Professor at SUNY-Buffalo), or even that earlier one of Ezra Pound (the great American Fascist poet) and T.S. Eliot (Old Possum, as Pound addressed him)--So I won't do it; or rather, more accurately, I'll stop with the suggestion. Now, of course all art partakes of some usefulness of the artist as recorder and transmitter of an external world or an internal one, according to his or her idea of how best to do it. Limits are what any of us are inside of, find a form to accommodate the mess, etc. There is of course usually some motivating force in operation (what is called an ideology or a moral belief, depending on which side of the sphere you're on ) which is ordinarily more than numerology or circumspection. On the other hand an account of almost everything, inside or out, in any given historical era, is hardly too small a goal for any art to embrace. Perhaps embrace is just the point. Passion, not compulsion, is what is meant. It seems to be the function precisely, say, of the Iliad or The Canterbury Tales, of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or of Melville-at least. …