Editor’s note: This excerpt translated from El Más Crudo Invierno. Notas a Un Poema de Blanca Varela. Fondo de Cultura Economica Peru, 2016.
[0]
The following is the third poem from Blanca Varela’s Concierto Animal
my head like a big basket
carries its catch
it lets the water through, my head
my head within another head
and further inside yet
the not-my head
my head full of water
rumors and ruins
dries its black hollows
beneath the half-lived sun
my head in the harshest winter
within another head
blossoms
[1]
We come to a poem, by rote, like the ancient Greeks came to face the oracular dicta: we are intent on discovering what it meant to say, we want to decipher it, discover its hidden meaning. In short, we try to interpret it. The only way of determining the value of the oracular word is to measure it against its real effects: to ascertain whether it has done as it said, and in what form. We do something similar with a poem. Though we don’t test it against reality (we wouldn’t know how to do that) we do aim to decipher it, discover its hidden meaning, give it an interpretation. In either case (the poem or the oracle) the purpose of interpretation is a sort of disbelief in the apparent. The problem with this is that it invariably becomes a type of transaction between words and something quite distinct from them, between what is manifest and what is not manifest, a trade-off between the material form of the poem (its letters, sounds, prosody, even its literalness) and something else that seems hidden below, behind, at a distance from the materiality of the poem. The problem of interpretation as a trade-off is that there is always something in the poem that cannot be exchanged entirely, an excess in the transaction. For many, the value of the poetic word resides precisely here, in the delicate tension between the exchangeable and the non-exchangeable. If we are able to exchange too much of the poem, we have nothing but a riddle; if we give in to an “excessism,” we end up fetishizing the text. Between the two extremes, the proper tension is capable of revealing the value of the poem’s words.
But we need not give up our interpretive impulse. The poetic word, like the oracular word, points to something and to understand it/decipher it we need only look in the direction (and into the sense) which it points to. The sense of a poem is not its meaning nor is it an object of exchange; it is simply a direction – like when we speak of the sense of transit. The advantage of sense is double: on one hand, there is no wrong sense; on the other, it can’t be construed as an exchange for another thing but rather for what we might call an inquiry (l’inquete) (a “following directions”). Michel Foucault has examined this path in detail: “Rather than an interpretation, it involves an investigation … And this investigation takes the form of discussion…” This inquiry puts the word of the oracle to the test, “not in the domain of a reality but in the domain of a truth…as…logos.”
The truth of knowing, where our language is submitted to the test of reality, is altered by the truth of logos, where our language is submitted to the test of language itself. The value of logos is not determined, therefore, by its encounter with reality but rather through its encounter with itself. The inquiry that has to be understood is language’s own route, not that of an interpretation. And this path is determined by a sense, which is to say, a direction.
Is it possible to encounter the poem in similar terms, that is, without interpreting it but, rather, inquiring with it, discussing it, traveling with it, in a certain direction, in the same language that it was created? Is it possible to give up on the importance of the inexpressible, unexchangeable excess of the poem?
First we should resolve what the logos is exactly. Foucault assigns it four properties, “four forms in which, according to which, and because of which we can say something that is true.” Truth is:
a) That which is neither dissembled nor hidden
b) That which receives neither an addition nor complement, what cannot be mixed with another thing
c) That which is straight and has neither folds nor deviations; that which is direct
d) That which persists in its unity, its immutability, its incorruptibility
Is it possible to find in the poem this true logos as it has been described? I don’t think so. To the bitter end, I will suggest that it isn’t sufficient, that the logos of the poem goes beyond the true logos. All the same, the rewards in seeking it out and following the line of inquiry said search supposes, in following a certain feeling and in intuiting possible correctives, is worth the risk (in any case, we are not going to try to seek out a truth nor an excess but rather follow a line of inquiry).
[2]
Blanca Varela’s poem is, at the least, intriguing for a number of reasons. First, the most apparent: it is a short poem, with barely 58 words (eight of which are the word “head” and six the possessive “my” or “mine”). It is an economical poem: it has no title, no punctuation, no capital letters. In the first edition, the first two words are in bold type, though I am ignoring whether this is an editorial choice or Varela’s (I am inclined to the former.) In general, there is little to serve as a guide – barely anything. While the three verses are grouped in brief stanzas of two, one, three, four and three verses each of which gathers, at times, periods of meaning, they arrive preceded by the formula “my head.” Four of these periods, then. The heads are deployed telescopically, one within another within another. The poem has no proper Subject; rather, there is Someone that possesses a head. And later, in the fourth verse, “another head” appears (likely a distinct one) and yet another head, which is “not mine,” in the sixth. In the place of a Subject there are successive possessive partitions: my head/another head/the not-my head. In each of these forms, there is an erasure, a hiddenness, an absence – the Subject is barely a possessor (of the head, etc.) They are its objects, its possessions, those which appear and which are talked about: heads, heads filled with fish, with water, with whispers, heads within others, dry heads, ruined heads, and finally heads that blossom. All of this is what is apparent on the surface of the poem, in the superficial tension of the poem that emerges if we simply describe the surface. But even on the surface, this short, economical, cut-up, at times confusing poem, appears intriguing, an entanglement…that one is moved to work at and inquire into.
The temptation to interpret is great: What are these heads? What do they “symbolize”? The temptation is to exchange them for precise meanings, to “Oedipalize” the examination to solve the riddle and win the prize, etc. But we are not going to do this here so as to be able to inquire into a feeling, a direction, that we want to follow.
[3]
I have read it carefully, and, if you will permit me, I will now destroy it so that we can speak of it with greater freedom.
Max Jacob does not refer with this phrase to Blanca Varela’s poem but rather to a text by Edmond Jabès, and, in effect, Jacob did destroy it - destroyed it physically, shredded it and threw it in the trash. Certainly, I am not thinking of doing the same with Varela’s poem. It would be a useless gesture. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to destroy. One can destroy a limit, or the monotony of a landscape, a persistent silence, a truce, customs; one can destroy speech, or destroy the day… All these forms of destruction have something in common: they are forms of separation or of irruption that can be attributed to an external force: a valley interrupts a desert, a shooting interrupts silence or a truce, etc. There is another form of destruction that is distinct because it is internal, a destruction that persists for its own structural reasons – as when we say that a wave crashes, that it breaks into foam; waves that break against the rocks, to the left or to the right, on the shore. No subject is an agent of this fracture; the wave changes, plainly, in what it is. The Nietzschean imperative in The Gay Science comes to mind: You must, you have to change that which you are. In any case, that is a breakage that fits the poem, that which occurs due to its internal structure, that which converts what it itself is. The inquiry into the poem (which is different from its interpretation) must understand, then, how the sufficient conditions to enable the observation of this breakage are deployed in order to observe the strange (and marvelous) spectacle of a poem that changes what it itself is.
[4]
There are other, less evident, reasons for the intrigue that Blanca Varela’s poem arouses. First, the poem contains one of the most trite phrases of the Spanish language (or its equivalent in whatever language): “the harshest winter”. This common phrase is on the level with other celebrated banalities like “the stormy sea” or the “the infinite night” – the zero degree of metaphor. One cannot say less. It is impossible to find in all synesthetic language anything as in-significant as “the harshest winter.” And here it is. Its appearance is especially intriguing in a poem by a poet as prolix and intelligent as Blanca Varela. Why does she use it then? We could say that she is deploying the Classical Greek device of repeating the epithet (“the ringing sea” – or in its original…. In Homer’s Iliad; or the “crystalline waters of Garcilaso-). But she isn’t trying to do this. Here she isn’t repeating the epithet as it appears only once. She is trying, instead, for pure banality, like a monument. What is happening there? And what type of monument is this? What does it show?
Second, Varela includes the agrammatical phrase “the not-my head”. The construction of a determinant followed by a possessive followed by a noun was possible in medieval Spanish (11th-12th centuries) but that is no longer the case. The foundational Spanish poem is titled in exactly this way: The My Cid. But we no longer say “the my book” nor “the my dog”. Other languages do this (Italian) and certain dialects (some Andean forms) of Spanish, but in the standard language (which is, in essence, that which Varela writes in) it hasn’t been the case for centuries. Varela’s construction is stranger still because it employs a negative version, which is to say: “the not-my head”. This construction is impossible now but it also existed in medieval Spanish. There, where we could say “the my Cid”, we couldn’t say “the not-my Cid.” Thus, at the least, Varela is employing an archaic and agrammatical construction. Varela is writing not only in a language that is no longer ours but in a language that has never been, but that we (likely) understand, that we can decipher and make ours. Therefore, what we have to ask is: what is that which is only able to repeatedly express the agrammatical and archaic—and recurrent—in a language that has no place for it?
These, then, are the two intriguing (and less evident) peculiarities of Blanca Varela’s poem: a trite phrase and another that is agrammatical and archaic – which is like traveling from the outer reaches of grammar to the zero degree of the commonplace in barely 58 words-. There certainly must be a reason for all of this.
[5]
The poem must resist one’s intelligence almost successfully.
In 1994, five years before the publication of the poem under consideration, Blanca Varela noted in an interview that when she started to write, she “believed…that constructing many metaphors was poetry… Afterward, I realized that I didn’t enjoy this sort of poetry…I preferred the shamelessness and nakedness that I am now cultivating.” It’s curious that Varela opposes “constructing many metaphors” to “shamelessness and nakedness.” Another name for the same thing: literality. The poem used to be constructed with images, now it is not. It has them, but the poem is not reducible to this. The nakedness of the poem involves less dressing, less wrapping. And, certainly, the poem that we are occupied with is written in the era of “shamelessness and nakedness,” and contains the most inane dressing of all: that of trite metaphor, the harshest winter. Or is it that shamelessness arrives here at rhetorical indifference?
There are writers who, after having generously demonstrated their talent and intelligence, let slip what appear to be infantile “errors.” No one is perfect, certainly, but the quality of these errors is striking. Plato is a good example. Plato puts in Socrates’ mouth one of the most absurd linguistic theories imaginable, the theory that names are “imitations of the things that they specify; a sort of general principle of onomatopoeia. Socrates argues, “the roundness of the “o” makes it so that it should be employed in words like “round” and the laborious production of the r makes it ideal for words that indicate movement like saunter. Spanish offers more examples of this last one: rio (river), rueda (wheel), correr (to run), etc. But we know that this theory is nonsensical. What was Plato thinking? Was he kidding, or being ironic? Who knows! The point is that before dumping someone who has provided undoubtedly valuable lessons we need to think twice. Such is the case of Varela and the harshest winter. Before we question her for including this banality in her poems, we need to rethink the question. Sometimes there is a reason for the inclusion of banal filler, a reason along the lines of “shamelessness and nakedness” – a reason that, sometimes, is able to explain at the same time its agrammatical and archaic exercise.
What is Varela raising objections to in her statements from 1994? I cite here the interviewer’s question and Varela’s answer in their entirety.
Coaguila: One senses, moreover, a clear tendency toward reflection in your two new books whereas earlier you were more descriptive.
Varela: My early poetry is a juvenile poetry, full of superficial elements, quite contrived, in which I am seeking at all ends. There’s something of an interpretive delirium. Everything served as a means of making poetry: the telephone, a tree, a person’s face. I thought, at that time, that to interpret much, that to employ many metaphors, was poetry. In reality, I later realized that that sort of poetry did little to please me. I could write that way, but it doesn’t interest me, because I don’t feel expressive in that manner. I prefer shamelessness and nakedness.
Varela corrects the interviewer. Before it wasn’t more descriptive. Now it is. Before she interpreted plenty, constructed many metaphors…before she was more “poetic.” It is curious to regard the apparent feeling of “interpreting” as a creation of metaphors in her response. We can understand it, as we indicated above, as a creation of largely enigmatic exchanges, of transactions to obtain hidden meanings. In any case, it is obvious that what bothers Varela is a certain distance between the words and the things, or between the words and certain internal contents or between words and other words. What bothers her is a kind of distance.
To describe certain “crossing” effects in the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, L.D. Clark brackets those that don’t change no matter how far they are traversed as a “Minoan distance”; but this indicates a distance that arises solely after the intent to traverse it, with its failure – as when we are moving toward a coast and it seems to be getting no closer. At times something similar appears in these later poems by Varela. Before she made poems “filled with elements”, or, what amounts to the same, she was “very superficial [and] concerned with artifice.” But nothing of this sort interests her now. It is the time of shamelessness and nakedness; another word for this same thing is, I repeat, literality. To make poems that are fastened to the letter, not to the image. Or fastened to the thing. To be more descriptive. But this can also be deceptive. What does it mean to make poems that are fastened to the letter or to the thing? What results from the Minoan distance, from that which does not change, when we tie ourselves to the letter? What we commonly mean when we say literality is what the analytic philosophers designate as ‘Fido’-Fido fidelity. One says Fido and Fido appears, which is nothing other than the ideal of scientific discourse where every thing has a name and every name a thing. But names are not descriptive: they don’t describe, they simply name. How is it then that Varela feels more descriptive now that she is less metaphorical? How can she be more descriptive in naming?
[6]
This disgust with metaphor or the discomfort with its distance also appears in the reflections of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor: “In my youth, I imagined that poetry was a sort of cloud shaded with more or less diffuse metaphors and allusions, which, in specific circumstances one could enjoy, but it was difficult to connect it to a cohesive vision of the world…I learned to understand that the opposite was closer to the truth than this juvenile idea.” Zumthor overlaps with Varela on two points. On one hand he recognizes that this addiction to metaphor is juvenile and on the other he signals (with metaphor) that he loses a “cohesive vision of the world” or, in Varela’s terms, “shamelessness and nakedness”. In both cases, what is lost with metaphor is an immediate relationship with things.
A double movement has thus occurred. On one hand, it requires an inquiry (distinct from interpretation) to face the poem with the truth of logos and not with the truth of knowing, and on the other, the same authors require from their works a greater immediacy with the world, as though for the creator of the truth of logos this were not sufficient.
I am going to leave this observation here, as food for the winter, that which we will return to when the weather gets worse.
[6a]
The idea that, in general, it is the authors themselves (not critics) who exhibit a certain disgust with interpretation (or with the exchangeable metaphor) can easily be substantiated. What follows are three notable examples.
1. Herman Melville in Chapter 45 of Moby Dick, “The Affidavit”, writes:
“The majority of men on earth are so ignorant about some of these most simple and palpable marvels of the world that…they can imagine Moby Dick as some fabulous monster, or, worse and more detestable, as a horrible and unsupportable allegory.”
For the man of the sea (and for the author), Moby Dick is Moby Dick; for the man of terra firma (the critic) Moby Dick will always be a part of a formula. “Moby Dick is X”, where the interpretation offers the distinct valuation in which X allows us to “understand” the whale.
2. Basho says in the following haiku:
How admirable
Is he who does not think “life is ephemeral”
When he sees lightning
Basho’s observation is especially acute for two reasons. First, he explicitly says that the association of lightning with “life is ephemeral” is too easy, that it is not “admirable”. What is admirable is to resist it. And second, Basho rightly says that what he asks should not be done: to pose an un-admirable association. True, he does it under the sign of negation (“don’t do this”) but what this shows is an opening of a re-negation: in order to negate the existence of something it is indispensable to bring it into existence in order to later retract it.
3. Wallace Stevens writes in his Adagia:
The image itself and the image as symbol is the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something distinct, the image is secondary. The word has to be the thing that represents; otherwise it is a symbol.
The derogatory character of the “symbol” is notorious. It is likewise notorious that Stevens comments repeatedly in his poems on the law of symbol/metaphor. For example, in “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight”, Stevens argues that the reality of things makes them such that every thing that we imagine (symbols, metaphors) is automatically “lesser thing[s]”. Our perceptions of these things change, but not in metaphors. Sense exceeds all metaphor, he deduces.
In these three cases a paradox is evident: that of wanting to shorten the distance with the very thing that creates it. On one hand we seek out an immediacy with the thing that mediates a more direct language than that of metaphor and symbol, but on the other hand every sort of language is an obstacle – or, as Foucault observed “language is a distance” that we want to shorten.
[7]
Blanca Varela’s poem begins by introducing its central trope, a simile. This Is the great mother-trope of the poem:
My head like a giant basket
The structure of this trope is clear: a is like b, my head is like a giant basket. Donald Davidson has asserted that all comparisons are inevitably trivial because they are always already true given that everything is like everything. (Everything is like everything, and in endless ways.) There is no question that the point of comparison is not its truth value. What every comparison shows us is an analogical argument that permits us to discover the terms of comparison. What is curious about the analogy (at least since Aristotle) is that it is a movement that does not proceed from the universal to the particular (as in a deduction), nor from the particular to the universal (as in induction), but rather from the particular to the particular. This is a case of reasoning by similarities (homoiotes) or by example (paradeigma).
The poetic attraction of the simile is evident. Verbal language is an instrument of generalization, which makes it different than, say, photography. In language, when one says “dog” one alludes to all dogs (the class that they are bracketed under). In contrast, if one takes a photograph of a dog one has retraced a dog into the particular, to that poem which appears in the image. For that reason, when we write, what is most difficult is to write about a particular object, singular and unique because it requires the de-generalization of language itself. The inverse movement occurs in photography – how do we generalize from a particular object? In a simile, language meets the possibility, as Aristotle says, of establishing a relationship between two particulars, yet both of them allude to a generality. Varela intends to do just that in the poem in question. “Head” begins to degeneralize with the possessive (“my head”) and the “basket” with “fish” (“basket of fish”) in the second verse.
There is another point in analogical reasoning that has been elucidated by Jean-Claude Milner and that is often overlooked. Milner says: “When arithmetic says that eight is to four what ten is to five, it does not annul the inequality between eight and ten or four and five. On the contrary, it maintains the inequality so that the analogy can determine the general notion of doubling”. In the same manner, “designating the lion as the king of the animals has meaning only if the lion is not a king,” etc.
To say “my head is like a big basket” is to remember first that it is not that. It is only then that the likeness of the simile is able to establish itself and the head is able to think itself like a basket. What does this point to? To that which “carries its fish” in my head-like-a-basket. Or better: my head is like a giant basket that carries fish. The idea appears simply on first glance, especially if we add it to the third verse:
It lets the water through, my head
Thus, like a big basket carries fish, holds fish in it and lets the water drain, so my head carries, holds, and disposes. What? One is free to make associations as one wishes; what is important here is the structure of the simile that gets going.
Note in that parallel that if “my head” is indeed like “a big basket” (I insist, it is not a big basket but rather like a giant basket), the third verse implores us to render exactly that equation impossible: my head = a big basket. This is so because at the same time that it is the grammatical subject of “lets the water through” it is vague: it can be “my head” like “a big basket.” In reality, this ambiguity which is propitiated by Varela’s phrasing is resolved if we concede the equation of head-basket. My head, just as much as a big basket, could let water through, the first by means of whatever metaphorical attribution with “water,” the second, we might say, “literally.” But isn’t this exactly what the simile blocks off?
More than that, I have suggested considering the literality as a hypostasis of the trope. This is what Varela does in this poem. She plants the simile that puts “my head” in relation to “a big basket” (a simile that supposes the clear differentiation between one and the other) solely in order to proceed to nullify the simile and grant (hypostasize) said relation as an equation. What Varela does, in a few words, is establish the dis-simile that makes possible the simile that appears as a non-simile. This, as we will see later, is in the service of a greater simile that Varela wagers, which compares a poem with a non-poem.
[7a]
A brief distinction. A simile seeks to reveal the similarity between a and b in order to distinguish a from b. The metaphor seeks to reveal the differences between a and b in order to affirm the identifications of a and b.
[8]
There is a poem by Sappho, of which only the following fragment has survived (37a)
κατ εμον δταλαχμον
In me drop
The fragment has only come down to us because it appears in the Etymologicum Genuinum (a compendium put together in Constantinople in the 9th century CE) as an argument from which the (long winded?) authors employ the word δταλαχμον (stalagmos, “drop”) to designate pain. This gives rein to the imagination so as to arrive at such beautiful versions as that of Mary Barnard:
Pain penetrates
Me drop
By drop
Which gives way to the following version in Spanish:
Dolor pene
Trando
Me gota
A gota
Or such laconic and compressed translations as Anne Carson’s:
In my dripping (pain)
The point that I want to make, though, has to do with the Constantinopolitan commentary in relation to the literality as hypostasis of the trope. The assimilation drip-pain permits Sappho to speak (as I would say) literally of pain-as-dripping without producing the feeling within figurative language, without producing the sense of comparison (the simile). In other words, it is not from pain-like-dripping but rather from pain-dripping directly as though it created an imaginary comparison and at the same time destroyed it in the same verse. That is the power of Carson’s version and that is the type of literality that appears everywhere in Blanca Varela’s final books (Concierto Animal and El Falso Teclado). It is about a literalness that shirks the distance (or that traverses it Minoanly) between word and thing to realize (= make real) the image.
The mechanism of Varela’s literalization is more complex. It is based not on a metaphor, really, but on a simile. If the metaphor is structured a=b (the substitution “a in the place of b”), the simile has the structure a-is-like-b. But the poetic mechanism that Varela uses makes it so that the “like” is also literalized, and it is returned as a thing without distance and is, thus, erased.
[9]
Then we have verses 4-6: “my head inside another head”. Varela sites “my head” within an “other”. How can we understand the otherness of this second head? Evidently it is not the same, but is it still my head?
Grammatically, if we say “[an]other dog” (for example, if we say “I want [an]other dog”), we may be alluding to a pair of things. On one hand, we may be trying to say “I don’t want this dog but [an]other”; on the other hand, we may want to say “I want [an]other dog in addition to this one”. In Varela’s verse, it appears clear that the second option is the correct one. “My head” is not eliminated; it is not exchanged for another, but it exists without another head. Nevertheless, we know nothing about this other head besides the fact that it is an other. Indeed, it is the other. That is, we know nothing except that it is an other. “My head” is inside another radically unknown head; more than inside another head, inside a head’s other. But what that is meant to signify is that, if we assume that Varela’s usage is equal to “one more” (the second meaning), when I say that I want another dog in addition to this one I know nothing about the other dog that I want. This is of course the case because the otherness of this other does not disappear as much as it is an addition. And for that reason, when we want/desire/order/ask for “another” (for example, when we order “another shot” when what we want to say is “one more”) we never know if it is the same or if it is, in truth, “another.”
The point is: “my head” is within “another (head)” about which we know nothing , except that it is [an]other and that (verses 5-6) “further inside yet” there is “the not-my head”. To be sure, a series of questions crops up as to how to decipher the sense of this progression. Is “my head” inside another (head) that is inside the ”not-my head”? Is that the “description of the acts?” Or is it that “the not-my head” is simply “further inside yet” independent of “my head” and of the other’s? It is plainly impossible to know this.
[10]
We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet
Verse 6 contains the agrammaticality I pointed to earlier: “the not-my head”. Is there a way to unravel Blanca Varela’s need to express herself in this form of throwing a syntactically anomalous phrase out there? If this is about a head that isn’t mine, why not just say it that way? One possibility is that this archaic form is employed to refer to the head that is “further inside yet”, the oldest, the most distant from “my head”. This would explain the use of an archaism but not the agrammatical construction. It is as if to say that Varela looked at this forced expression in a grammatically violent way in order to point out to what extent the effect would not have been achieved in any other form. Three heads, then. My head, the other head, the not-my head. But if this is the case, which head is that which, in verse 7, is “full of water”? It can’t be my head as that one was like a large basket that “let the water through” (verse 3). Is she indicating, instead, the other head? Or the not-my head?
The not-my head retreats within; it moves further and further from us. One form of seeing it is telescopically: my head inside the other head inside the not-my head. But this does not resolve the nature of the not-my head. It turns to a desperate sort of license so as to move on. There is a strong phonetic proximity between “the not-my head” (la no mia cabeza) and “the anomie head” (anomia cabeza) Could it be that Varela forced the grammatical hand to suggest this proximity? Better yet, is it possible to locate this possibility and do something with it?
The Royal Academy’s Dictionary of the Spanish Language (DLE) lists two meanings for “Anomie”:
1. The absence of law
2. A linguistic disturbance that prevents one from referring to things by their name
The happy lexical coincidence is promising in both respects. The first meaning establishes the agrammaticality, the second a failure in nomination. With the agrammaticality the law is disregarded, with anomie, the specific failure, the absence of a name.
Now there is a distinction that crops up quite clearly. We know that the relationship between my head and the other head is a relationship of otherness. In reality, that’s all we know about them. We also know that my head carries fish and lets water through it. We assume, therefore, that the other head does not do this. The other head in its perfect otherness does not carry fish and retains water. But in verse 7 something strange happens. Now “my head” is full of water and verse 8 notes, “of murmurs and ruins”). That is on one side. But in addition, there is a third head, “further inside yet”, the not-my/anomie head. Might this third head, now understood to be lawless and with a failure in its name, in its own nomination, be able to shed light on the matter?
The no-law may be enforced on two counts: anterior to the law, or out of dissatisfaction with the law. We can, thus, say the following: before the law (which law? The law that divides the grammatical from the agrammatical, the good from the bad, sense and nonsense, or, in general terms, the law that divides) there is language. It is just that it is a language that does not submit to the law through which we habitually recognize language. It is pure language. The particular distinction between making sense and not making sense does not exist before the law. For the anom(i)e head, the impasse between “my head” and the “other head” (the first of which retains or does not not retain water, the second of which of which must be radically other in respect to the first) does not exist as such. The not-my head does not retain nor does it not not retain fish, nor does it let water through nor does it not not let water through. But we should be clear: it is not that it is indifferent to these facts, it is that they are not opposites nor are they the results of a division between a and not-a.
[11]
Litotes are a peculiar rhetorical device, normally understood as an attenuation. Of what sort? The classic example goes like this: saying that something “is not bad” in place of saying that it “is good.” Why is this attenuation and not simply antonymy? The short answer is because they are not the same thing. Observe: we can say of someone that he “is not tall”, but that is not meant to say that he is short. To put it another way, the “is not tall” attenuates the attribution of “tall” but it does not extend all the way to its opposite pole. It is as if one said he is not tall-tall…but just a little less tall than that. A person that “is not tall” is between a tall person and a short one. Incidentally, the same thing happens if we say that someone “is not short”: it may be that he’s tall (if we say it ironically), though not necessarily. We are not going to examine whether “not short” and “not tall” coincide with one another here, although it is a fine question.
The finer point that I want to highlight is the use of negation to “attenuate” in place of marking an opposition. We say that something “is easy” or “is not easy” or that it “is difficult”, though we are not saying the same thing with the latter two expressions.
These delineations are indispensable in understanding the anom(i)e head.
[12]
Here I need to take what may seem to be a strange detour, but I will justify it in a moment.
According to Pliny the Elder, the painter Appeles went to Rhodes (c. 300 BC) to visit Protogenes, but, as he did not find the latter in, he painted a very fine line on a tablet that he left in his place. On returning, Protogenes saw the tablet and understood that Appeles had come. Then he painted another, even finer, line, within the line that Appeles had painted on the tablet. When Appeles later came to the workshop he took a brush and drew an even finer line in the middle of Protogenes’ line; so fine, in fact, that no line could divide it further. The tablet, with its three lines, was entered into Protogones’ collection and later into Caesar’s palace on Palatine Hill where a fire destroyed it in 4 AD.
The story that Pliny narrates is the story of 3 lines: a first one traced by Appeles (A1), a second line traced by Protogenes (P1), and a third line that Appeles drew within Protogones’(A2). It is the second segment (A2) that is known as Appeles’ Cut.
Pliny speaks of the 3 lines as visum effugientes, literally lines that flee from sight. We shouldn’t read this flight as the convergence of the three lines toward the same point of escape. Rather it would be better to see it as a commentary on the line’s extreme fineness, perhaps, in order, each line finer than that which it follows. As we will see, this point is not irrelevant.
We suppose that the first line (A1) divides the tablet in two. In reality, we don’t know this. We assume for the effects of what follows that A1 moves from one extreme /point (side) to the other on the tablet, marking a compete partition of the surface. A1 marks a limit, then, between one region of the tablet and the other. To continue, Protogenes traces a very fine line inside of A1 (in illapisa). This is to say that P1 meets with sufficient thickness in A1 to be inside of it. Finally, Appelles, who encounters in turn a sufficient thickness in P1, draws a second cut (A2) that divides Protogenes’ line in two. This second Appellesian line (A2) does not leave space to be subdivided in turn (nullum relinquen campliar subtilitas locum). The versions of this story in Spanish speak of a line that could not be more subtle. Line 2 no longer has sufficient thickness to be bisected; it is indivisible. A2 is Appeles’ Cut.
What is Appeles’ Cut? We established its two fundamental properties: 1) it divides an anterior division (bisecting it longitudinally); and (ii) it does not permit, in its turn, being dissected (it is indivisible in terms of its anterior property). If we concede that P1 fulfills (i), it does not fulfill (ii). Appeles’ cut is two cuts, then: one that divides an anterior division and another that impedes any posterior division. Up until now, we have understood the impossibility of the subsequent divisions as a purely material question. Property (ii) will be given when a line does not have sufficient thickness as to be able to draw another within it. This can occur because one line meets a minimum limit or because, if it has not met this limit, the artist does not have sufficient dexterity whereby to be able to draw a line on its interior.
There is another, more interesting, form of understanding property (ii): as a logical property rather than a material one. In this form, the “thickness” in question is not a matter of the brush but of understanding. It is true that following the infinitesimally (small) partitions of Zeno, any field can continue to be divided indefinitely. Appeles’ Cut cuts this infinite reproduction into divisions. But if Appeles’ Cut is simply the division of a field that is in turn divided it will never find a resting place. Appeles’ Cut doesn’t divide the divided and instead divides division itself. What does dividing the division mean? It must be as follows: to divide that which is divided out of that which cannot be divided.
This is where the strange work of Appeles’ Cut becomes apparent.
I won’t try to add anything to the original division. It isn’t that there is something that the original division ignored and left undivided and that is now introduced in Appeles’ Cut, because if that were the case then the new element would, in turn, be a or -a and the work of Appeles’ Cut would be for naught. Nor am I adding the indivisible sum (a+-a) to the division a/-a, because, among other reasons, (a+-a) is already a creation of the original division. What is more, the division a/-a can be seen (perhaps must be seen) as a creation of the totality where it wasn’t before.
Nor am I adding another division (within the divided) nor adding anything from outside. Another articulation must be employed in order to understand the root meaning of Appeles’ Cut.
I will try, then, to add something from within; in other words, to create a remainder. This is the strategy: subvert the pretension of totality of the division a/-a in the same form that now divides such that it is not coincident with itself because it has left a remainder that escapes division, but where that remainder does not escape because it has introduced a new element (predicate, category, etc). Rather, it leaves the divided as it is. It creates a condition that means that now something escapes the division a/-a: a remainder. How is this done? In truth, by dividing the division a/-a in two, between what is called a divided division and that which is not divided.
We will recall the two defining properties of Appeles’ cut: (i) it divides an anterior division (bisecting it longitudinally), and (ii) it does not permit itself in turn to be bisected (it is indivisible in terms of its anterior properties). Better yet, if Appeles’ cut is not in truth a division (because it in turn can be divided) how can it be that Appeles’ cut complies with property (i), the division of an anterior division?
In order to answer this question we need to look at a new reading of the episode of Appeles and Protogenes narrated by Pliny. When Protogenes sees A2, he sees a line that already cannot be divided. But exactly what did Protogenes see? According to Pliny, he sees a line visum effugiens, a line that flees from sight, that escapes it. Likewise, that Protogenes did not follow through in his intent to bisect it. Why? Did he not believe in his technical skill? Or maybe what Protogenes “saw” was an invisible line, a line that could not be seen, that he could not see with his eyes but that he could intuit with his mind. A2’s invisibility is not contingent, then, on the extreme fineness of the line. Once more, the problem is not material (it is not the thickness of the line) but, rather, logical.
I think that the logical intuition of Protogenes can show us that Appeles’ line A2 was not there. And that, as it wasn’t there, it could not be bisected. Where was it? The surprising conclusion is that A2 is likewise anterior to the same line, P1. We recall that Pliny’s story is the story of three lines, and that these are presented in the following order: A1-P1-A2. Appeles’ cut (A2) is presented as the third and final line. But, in reality, it is anterior to A1. And this was what Protogenes “saw”—the logical intuition that it made him conclude that A2 already could not be divided further. Line A2 “divides” exactly that which is divided from that which is not divided. But it is a line that appears, invisibly, only if it realizes a real division, not before it does.
When Appeles drew A1 he had already drawn A2; A2 is invisible to sight and is visible only to the intellect if A1 is drawn. A2 is the condition of the possibility of A1. This is the real theme of Appeles’ cut , a theme that replays the story of thought: that which is anterior to what follows, though it is likewise only made visible through it.
Appeles’ cut is, so to speak, two lines: A0 and A2. A0 is anterior to A1 but it is only visible when A2 is drawn. A0=A2 but they have distinct visibilities.
[12a]
In literary terms, Pliny’s narration (as I have interpreted it) can be seen as the perfect crime. X is found dead, and, after an exhaustive investigation, the reliable conclusion is arrived at that X’s murderer is Y. When they look for Y to arrest him they discover him dead. After an exhaustive investigation they arrive at the reliable conclusion that Y’s murderer in Z. When they look for Z to arrest him they discover him dead. And after an exhaustive investigation they come to the reliable conclusion that Z’s killer was…X!
[12b]
I have said that, with A2, Protogenes saw something that was not here; he saw that the third line was in reality anterior to its two predecessors (A0). What Protogones did was recognize the existence of A2 without (necessarily) understanding it. Here I am aided in an indispensable distinction that we owe to Stanley Cavell between “cognition” and ”recognition”. In spite of the obvious morphological connection, there is a substantial semantic disconnect. Cognition is merely scientific, facts about the world. Recognition includes a dimension that is more than empirical measurement.
[13]
We return to Blanca Varela’s poem. There are three heads: my head, the other head, and the not-my head. We have proposed extending the not-my head to the anomie head that we have used to open the verse to the loss of law and name. According to Diogenes Laertes, Diogenes (the Cynic) was the son of the banker Hicesius. Both abandoned Sinope due to Hicesius’ adulteration of currency. Other versions (that of Eubulides, for example) indicate that it was Diogenes himself that adulterated coins and because of that he was forced to abandon Sinope with his father, and that this was caused by Diogenes’ visit to the oracle at Delphi where he asked if he should adulterate coins or not. I continue with Michel Foucault’s commentary: “And Apollo’s advice was supposed to have been to falsify the currency, or to change its value.” The expression to “change the value of the currency” is parakharattein nomisma. Observe the phonetic pairing of nomos (law) and nomisma (coinage.) Our term “numismatic” is a Greek fossil. “[To] “change, alter the value of the currency” is the connection—indicated by the word itself—between currency and custom, rule, law.” For Foucault it is possible to read the episode in another way. To alter does not necessarily signify “that it loses value”. It is also possible (and this is the cynical sense) that “[w]e can sometimes find the important sense of “defacing (altérer)” a coin so that it loses its value, but here the verb essentially and especially signifies: starting from a certain coin which carries a certain effigy, erase that effigy and replace it with another which will enable this coin to circulate with its true value.” This cynical correction has at its endpoint that the coin does not dissemble its true value.
Is it possible to find a cynical poetic correction on Varela’s part? That is to say, is it possible that the anomie of the third head (its loss of law and name) is linked to the numismatic act of the alteration of the effigy (of the name) of the coin, the alteration which is without a doubt illegal inside of the law (nomos) so that – and this is important – the poem does not dissemble, so that the poem holds its true value? In order for this to be the case, the agrammaticality and the filler (the lack of law and naming that already does not name the commonplace that exists) are indispensable tools in this correction, in the devolution of a poem to its “true value.” Returning for a moment to the Nietzsche cited in note [3], what the cynical correction allows the poem is to “change itself into what it is”.
We need to examine the mechanisms of this correction.
[14]
According to Paul Celan, there is nothing so incomprehensible as two identical words”. Let’s try this out:
Head head
In effect, our first reaction is that this is trying for a repetition and that one of the two terms is spurious. The distance between them is null; thus, we need an articulation that distinguishes and separates them. Celan’s idea has a curious echo in something we have said earlier: “Whoever comes to the poem to sniff out metaphors will always encounter metaphors”. Celan outlines in this form the two limits that we have been working through here, on one hand that of literalness (two identical words) and that of metaphor. The latter because an imaginable articulation of repetition is certainly part of metaphoric construction, but in a strange way. If the general form of the metaphor is “a is b” (for example “youth is the springtime of life”) and the general form of the simile is “a is like b” (for example “chess is like capitalism”), then “the most obvious semantic difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are truth and the majority of metaphors are false.” Donald Davidson, who asserted the above, does not say that all metaphors are (literally) false, but rather that the majority of them are. Why? Because there are tautological metaphors. Consider examples like “the law is the law” or “business is business”. Observe that with respect to the general form of metaphor (“a is b”) our examples have problems given that they are already of the form “a is a”. Unless…
A typical situation in which the phrase “the law is the law” might come up would be the following. We run a red light, we are pulled over by the police and, after asking for our license and registration, they are on the verge of giving us a ticket when we try to excuse ourselves due to an extenuating circumstance, a medical emergency, family emergency, etc. Here, the police, in response, pronounce the phrase in question: “The law is the law.” A tautology? They could have said “This is how the law is”, but that phrase does not respond to our excuses. “The law is the law” has a literal form of a tautology, but while it is a metaphor it is not one. And the cop believes that we understand the difference. What is this difference? What the cop is saying is that there are two laws: “the law(1) is the law(2)” and that they are not the same thing. The first is the general law, the universal law that says that “no one can run a red light”. The second law is the particular, that of the application in a concrete case, ours. Where we have a medical emergency the law(1) is identical to the law(2): there are no exceptions. This coincidence of the universal and the particular is that which, by the way, explains that in all cases of the instantiation of a law there is an act of violence. The law is not only the law but, in some Steinian way, the law is the law is the law is the law…
The metaphorical articulation “saves” the repetition from its total incomprehensibility. But this same articulation establishes a tension on the one hand between the literal falsity of a phrase and the potential cognitive difference on the other.
In Varela’s poem there are three heads —my head, another head and the not-my/anomie/not-the-same/numismatic head. The first carries its fish and lets the water pass through, the second loses its fish and retains the water, and the third head is the head with neither name nor law, the head that must be considered in terms both agrammatical and commonplace. This third head is that which, with respect to the two first heads, is “as incomprehensible as two identical terms.” One easy and false solution to this articulation of the three heads is to take the third head as a simply dialectical solution to the two earlier heads. But this solution does not work because it does not explain the agrammaticality nor does it explain the rhetorical fix/fill. However, if “the not-my head” is taken as Appeles’ Cut (a cut that is the condition and consequence of the division between my head and the other head) then we can move toward an articulation that links to the cynical correction that seeks to give it a true poetic value.
[15]
The continuation of the poem (verses 7-13) needs to be considered in light of what has been examined thus far. After the presentation of the three heads, the first (my head) reappears once more. This time it is “full of water” but it is also full of “rumors and ruins.” The head that let water through before now retains it. Now my head is full of things that “almost” are, that do not plainly exist; things that in appearance are insubstantial. Already there are no fish, there is water; there are no assertions, there are rumors; there is no dwelling, there are ruins. Everything is of the order of the ecoide, of the phantom presence of something that has left and which from which remains its worthless remainders. This includes the water that it now retains but that also disappears, dried out by exposure to another semi-life, by a semi-living, barely existent sun.
What has been lost this time in the second apparition of my head is the simile, is the basket. My head that is like a basket (verse 1) is no longer like a basket (verse 7). Put better, this head that is no longer like a basket abandons the simile in order to languish in appearing in the commonplace of “harshest winter.” But what is happening during the harsh winter is, mirabile factu, blooming (verse 13). The commonplace term redeems itself by assigning itself a corresponding property. Nature does not bloom during the winter. This is another winter, or a wintered other. It is not rhetorical filler. This blooming occurs now not only in “the harshest winter” but “within another head.” It is almost, we might say, within the other head.
Above, we abandoned a “simply dialectical” solution for the third head in favor of an Appelesian solution, But something holds over from that, though with a distinct turn. Anne van Sevenant employs the term dualectic to refer to a synthesis that does not resolve the opposition thesis/antithesis by eliminating it but rather makes it so that the two terms coexist. The resolution of my head and the other head in Varela’s poem is precisely that, dualectical. My head and the other head co-exist and are not dissolved in a new head. The not-my head is not a new head of the same way in which the Appelesian cut does not bring with it an external difference. The not-my head is the division of the division between my head and the other head; a division that does not eliminate nor resolve both heads in a new one but precedes and follows them simultaneously.