Regardless of your field, ruts deepen. And eventually they will cause you to get stuck. The subtlety whereby habitual actions can blind us to creative options can be surprising, and options exist at every point along our journey.
If leaving from point a, I follow my tendency and automatically head in direction b, I’m ignoring the fact that I could have gone another way. While 359 other degrees of direction are theoretically available to me, limiting my choices to the four or twelve options analogous to the directions on a compass is more realistic (too many options can cause a different type of paralysis).
Often our tendency is to assume the most direct route is the most desirable. The problem with such an assumption is that only the most desirable route is the most desirable route, regardless of length.
Recognizing the entire field of one’s endeavors is an idea Charles Olson applied to his poetics. As he explains in his essay Projective Verse:
“From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION – puts himself in the open – he can go by no track other than the one the poem under his hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined.” Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”, in Selected Writings, pg. 16
Olson’s practice of writing, which can be carried over into different fields of action, was to maintain an awareness of three distinct forces at play while he wrote: typos, topos, and tropos. Time and time again this triad emerges in his notebooks as well as in the marginalia of the books he read. And like a captain of a ship in the middle of the sea that needs to recognize the winds, the currents, and seasonal variations and patterns, Olson attended to the typology of the emerging work (note: archetype), to the topography or manner in which the emerging work related by extension to the world, and to the particular twist or turn that seemed to be cast in the manifestation at hand, for as we find upon further investigation “tropism (from Greek, tropos, to turn) is a biological phenomenon, indicating growth or turning movement of a biological organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus.”
(hmm…I didn’t expect this arc to emerge when I began…cool.)
“Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all.” in Robin Blaser, The Violets, quoting Whitehead (PR II. II.II, 68, Olson underlining)
The time I spent digging through the Charles Olson Archive was focused in two directions: expanding my field of inquiry through Olson’s reading and getting a handle on Olson’s practice. Over Olson’s shoulder, as it were, I encountered Jung, Whitehead, Corbin, Kerenyi, Peirce, James, Kirk, Sauer, and Havelock. And each encounter contained lively annotations that demonstrated for me how one could literally wrestle with a text, make “use” in the pragmatic sense of one’s finding, and follow insights into one’s own work. From what I saw in Olson, I can confidently say that the postmodern movement never quite practiced appropriation with the depth of Olson plummeted through his library.
Olson learned his practice reading into Melville’s library and tracing what he found there into Moby Dick. See, appropriation is a vehicle for transformation, not just a re-arrangement of external pieces.
In the back of the Elementary Latin Dictionary is a table of roots where you will find this curious combination gna- strung together. Gna- forms the root of our gnosis and know. And gnaw perfectly captures the process of transferring energy through the body.
I was keyed into this root by Charles Olson who often jotted it into the marginalia of the books he was reading when he’d find a puzzle piece to the knowledge he was pursuing.
In the following passages from Jung’s Religious Ideas in Alchemy, Olson gnawed heavily on the text. The marking from paragraphs 375 to 379 are heavily underlined and dated 1/16/66, 1/21/68 and 5/19/69. It’s clear that Olson was finding a key to his understanding of the importance of analogy, for the marginalia notes include “analogy is mind working on matter” and “like to like” and “likeness : analogy.”
Photocopy of Olson's markings on Jung
And these specific passages get marked up:
He must accomplish in his own self the same process that he attributes to matter, “for things are perfected by their like.” Therefore the operator must participate in the work. Carl Jung, CW v. 12: Psychology and Alchemy, Religious Ideas in Alchemy, par. 375
Through time and exact definition things are converted into intellect. Ibid., par. 376
The assumption underlying this train of thought is the causative effect of analogy. In other words just as in the psyche the multiplicity of sense perceptions produce s the unity and simplicity of an idea, so the primal water finally produces fire, i.e., the ethereal substance – not (and this is the decisive point) as a mere analogy but as the result of the mind’s working on matter. Ibid., par. 377
and finally:
By studying the philosophers man acquires the skill to attain this stone. But again, the stone is man. Thus Dorn cries: “Transform yourselves from dead stones into the living philosophical stones!” Here he is expressing in the clearest possible way the identity of something in man with something concealed in matter. Ibid., par.378
It’s a great deal to chew on, and Olson’s repeated return to the same pages as he approached his death shows that this content continues to remain vital through repeated visits. The “something” is the objective psyche we’ve been referring to here as of late…
Travel challenges the flexibility of the psyche. There’s gear to pack, loose ends to tie up, the leaving of the familiar, multiple lines at terminals, the checking and rechecking of documents. At each transition there’s always a sense the way could become blocked, that the doors will not open.
Beyond the nuisance of organization and procedure, the whole journey is under laid by the reality that moving vast distances, even in modern jets, is taxing to the whole person. Regardless, walking or riding, traversing space changes us.
Charles Olson, in his seminal writing Call Me Ishmael, proclaimed:
“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy.”
Like Ishmael, we set out through the world to make a claim. It’s not a land grab of property, but a mapping of the curvature we inhabit and the stories that arise from each sector. Like Ishmael, we make passages as an initiation into the Self.
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