[In the following essay, Jackson discusses Heideggerian meaning in the poetry of Simic and Mark Strand.]

“If Cleopatra's nose changed the course of the world, it was because it entered the world's discourse, for to change it in the long or short term, it was enough, indeed it was necessary, for it to be a speaking nose.” So writes Jacques Lacan in his essay “The Freudian Thing,” incidentally suggesting, for our purposes, something of the surrealistic moods of Charles Simic and Mark Strand, and the absolute priority these two poets give to the ontological function of language. Actually, to headnote a discussion of these two poets by citing a French linguistic psychoanalyst is to follow Simic's advice in a recent essay entitled “Negative Capability and Its Children” (Antaeus, Spring 1978) in which he talks about the “multiple sources,” often conflicting (he uses Hegel and Breton, Nietzsche and Heidegger), that contemporary poets have absorbed: “Their poetics have to do with the nature of perception, with being, with psyche, with time and consciousness. Not to subject oneself to their dialectics and uncertainties is truly not to experience the age we have inherited.” And what best characterizes this various age, from the phenomenologists to the structuralists to the deconstructionists, is this relation, even sometimes a lack of it, between language and Being.

“Poetry,” says Heidegger, “is the establishing of being by means of the word” (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”). Thus Mark Strand's “author” says to his future translator in the prose work called The Monument, “Only this luminous moment has life, this instant in which we both write, this flash of voice” (# 4). So, too, the characters in his poem “Exiles” (The Late Hour) have an existence intimately related to language and “voice,” to the “story” they will find themselves in. Now this establishing of being, this passage into language, is for Lacan a passage from what he calls the Imaginary, a preverbal and visually oriented spatial grid of images lacking a phenomenological center of organization, into what he calls the Symbolic, into language as such with its temporal structurings and grammatical orders. For Simic, this is a passage from the simultaneity of experience to the linearity of language: “Form is nothing more than an extension of consciousness in Time” (“Composition,” New Literary History, 1976). But where does this extension lead? If Being is established, how is it manifested in language? In “A Day Marked With A Small White Stone,” Simic describes the dazed stupor of an animal caught in a trap:

The languorous, lazy chewing
On the caught leg
Stripped now to the bone. Pain
Joining the silence of trees
And clouds,
In a ring
Of magnanimous coyotes,
In a ring of
Compassionate, melancholy
Something or other. …

The “end” of the poem suggests a “chain of signifiers,” as Lacan and Jacques Derrida would say, that “mark,” as a gravestone might mark one's absence, a certain set of events in a life whose significance is deferred, as the infinite series implied by the three dots suggests, to further signifiers. The “luminous moment” is expanded, time is extended. In fact, it appears that language has directed us back to the timeless, nonverbal state, that there has been a reinvestment of the Symbolic Order in the Imaginary.

What we encounter here, then, is a dialectic between two orders. For Simic, the paradigmatic poem of this kind of poetic world is “Charon's Cosmology” in which the boatsman, “With only his feeble lantern / To tell him where he is,” journeys forever between shores: “I'd say by now he must be confused / As to which side is which.” What is more, says Simic—rivaling the casualness that ends “A Day Marked”—“I'd say it doesn't matter.” Strand's tone can be remarkably similar; the “author” of The Monument suggests to the translator, “find words for which you yourself have a fondness. … If ‘nothing’ conveys the wrong idea, use ‘something’” (# 14). There is a sense with both poets, then, of what Freud and Lacan describe as a “wandering” of meaning into what seemed at first to be irrelevant details, a sense of the emergence of form, the very process of suggesting possible meanings from “antithetical” words and phrases. What we arrive at, finally, is something like what Derrida terms “supplementarity,” an excess of both signifiers and signifieds; the dynamism, really, that defines the rich metaphoric quality of these poets.

Yet this excess, or imbalance, leads to what Paul Ricoeur calls the “suspicion” of language that characterizes modern thought. According to Ricoeur, “suspicion” involves the “possibility of signifying another thing than what one believes was signified” (“The Critique of Religion”). For Simic, there is always the possibility that language subverts the preverbal experience—“Suspicion is the voice because language is not mine.” Thus there is a consciousness in “Euclid Avenue” that is “doubting / the sound of its own footsteps” as they occur in a “Language / as old as rain.” But if not the speaker's language, whose? In a sense, it belongs to a collective unconscious. For Lacan, this unconscious is structured like a language and constitutes the “Other.” In fact, language itself may be said to constitute this Other; in the passage from Imaginary to Symbolic, language acts as a force which alienates us from ourselves, and in any process of reinvestment in the Imaginary, constitutes suspicion in the form of this alien Other. Thus Simic cites Heidegger to describe the way language lets Being speak: “To let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (“Negative Capability”). The experience of Otherness can be manifest in a poem like “Position Without Magnitude” in which the speaker rises in a theater, “projects his shadow / among the fabulous horsemen / on the screen,” and shudders to see his shadow / Other in an alien fiction. In “The Prisoner” the speaker imagines the inmate imagining a scene that includes him, “And all along the suspicion / That we do not exist.” On a more self-conscious level, the poet who begins by interrogating dispersed images in the Imaginary (“Among all the images / that come to mind, // where to begin?”) must eventually emerge towards the Symbolic by confronting his Other in “a corner where / a part of myself // keeps an appointment / with another part of myself” (“Description”).

Strand, too, conceives of the recognition of the Other as an elementary step for the emergence of the self: “consider how often we are given to invent ourselves; maybe once, but even so we say we are another, another entirely similar” (# 4). The Monument locates the dialectic between self and Other in the complex relationship between the “author” and his hypothetical translator. If the author recognizes the Other as he constructs the text, so too the verbal text, as it emerges from the Imaginary, is founded, in Lacan's words, upon the “discourse of the Other.” The author exclaims: “This word has allowed you to exist, yet this work exists because you are translating it.” By extension, of course, we are all “translators” of the text, and the author initiates an endless chain of relationships; moreover, he himself seems to emerge from the diverse texts, sometimes two or three of them together, that act as epigraphs to many of the fifty-two sections, often rivaling the length of the “prime” text. So, for example, a citation from Unamuno seems to prefigure the “author” of The Monument by making him an Other projected by a precursor—“the desire to be someone else without ceasing to be myself, and continue being myself at the same time I am someone else.” And so by analogy, it is the author of The Monument who makes the text of Unamuno or any other writer exist by “translating” it into his own work. The Monument thus establishes what Foucault calls the endless referentiality, the infinite contextualism of texts that transcends and subverts the priority of any particular Other, and any particular “author.”

What, then, happens to the author? Who is the author? He is, first, the speaker who dissolves into the Other's language. He is, then, the author who foresees an apocalyptic “giant of nothingness rising in sleep like the beginning of language” (# 48). But this subversion of the traditional role of the author does not subvert the fundamental structure of desire as a lack which motivates human action. Thus “Nothingness,” as Heidegger says in “What is Metaphysics,” is “Pure Other,” a signifier of openness, of possibility. So, says Strand's author:

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The Monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am. (# 9)

This passage towards “Nothing,” towards the absence of the author, must be seen as part of the structure of deferrals in the chain of signifiers. The void opened by Nothingness thus suggests a futural mode of thinking that ratifies events as history or memory once did:

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self. I—and this pronoun will have to do—have not permitted anything worthwhile or memorable to be a part of this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. (# 22)

This “absence,” which eventuates in the self's being spoken of in the third person later on, is thus not so much a self-destruction as an attempt to “grow into the language that calls from the future” (# 46). The desire for what is lacking, the Other, becomes a desire for anonymity. “My greatest hope is his continued anonymity” (# 31), says the author of himself as if he were already an Other. By the end of the book the author/Other no longer speaks in his own words, for the last section consists entirely of three cited epigraphs. It is as if the author had disappeared into the future, or even the past, leaving only these traces, these markings on a page, “the text already written, unwriting itself into the text of promise” (# 38).

For Simic this promise inherent in the absence of the author is established in a way analogous to the pronoun usage Heidegger describes in Time and Being, a usage which marks the “presence of absence,” a purely ontological perspective. That is, for Simic, “‘I’ is many. ‘I’ is an organizing principle, a necessary fiction. Actually, I'd put more emphasis on consciousness: that which witnesses has no need of a pronoun. Of course, consciousness has many degrees, and each degree has a world (or an ontology) appropriate to itself. So, perhaps, the seeming absence of the author is the description of one of its manifestations, in this case an increase of consciousness at the expense of the subject” (“Domain of the Marvelous Prey,” Poetry Miscellany, 1978). From this perspective a poem can explore the “mythical consciousness that is to be found in language” beyond the rational control of a traditional ego. The result is a poetry constructed of idiomatic expressions and sentence fragments detached from the context of a specific speaker, of indefinite pronouns that seem to refer to several possibilities, of metaphors that are literalized into surrealistic events. When the subject presents himself he seems to be continually shifting his perspective, to be a signifier whose meaning is deferred, to be, that is, a grammatical function: “I find that in my own poems I tend to abandon the original cause and follow wherever the poem leads. that's why my poems seem often to have an impersonal quality to them. It is not clear who the ‘I’ is. … I follow the logic of the algebraic equation of words on the page which is unfolding, moving in some direction” (“Domain of the Marvelous Prey”).

Where then does this logic lead us? In “Nursery Rhyme” a series of discontinuous propositions leads to the conclusion, “I see a blur, a speck, meagre, receding / Our lives trailing in its wake.” It is this recession, this fading of Being, that locates Simic's poetic world. “The poem,” he says in very Heideggerian language, “is the place where origins are allowed to think” (“Composition”). This “place” is, as he says in “Ode,” a “space between the premonition / and the event // the small lovely realm / of the possible,” a realm seen through what Heidegger calls the “forestructure” that exists before language, what Lacan calls the Imaginary. But Simic goes beyond this Heideggerian notion of Being's activity as a kind of spatial “regioning.” For him, the region, the place, is what Jacques Derrida in his own criticism of Heidegger calls a “trace,” a place that is always already “erased.” Thus we can read “Eraser” as a deconstruction of the metaphysics of pure presence:

A summons because the marvelous prey is fleeing
Something to rub out the woods
From the blackboard sound of wind and rain
A device to recover a state of pure expectancy
Only the rubbings only the endless patience
As the clearing appears the clearing which is there
Without my even having to look
The domain of the marvelous prey
This emptiness which gets larger and larger
As the eraser works and wears out
As my mother shakes her apron full of little erasers
For me to peck like breadcrumbs. …

The fading thus provides us with a summons, a summons to erase, to clear away our usual conceptions that bind us to a traditional world view, a summons to reinvest the nostalgia of origin as a new beginning, “to recover a state of pure expectancy.” Thus the prey itself will always escape, and the language of its hiding places in old “woods” (words) must be replaced by new language, new signifiers, new metaphors as the old “wear out.” The summons that the poet hears leads him back towards the origin, the mythical presence revealed by its absence in language, the absent “mother” veiled behind the apron of always more erasers. For Simic, the quest is endless, the region of absence ceaselessly growing “larger and larger,” the position of the self becoming like the proverbial fly on the wall he mythologizes—“An eternity / Around that simple event” (“The Wall”). His own time belated, searching receding traces, mired in the temporality of his language, the poet knows

A place
known as infinity
toward which that old self
advances.
The poor son of poor parents
who aspires to please
at such a late hour.

(“Euclid Avenue”)

For Strand, The Late Hour is informed by an absence and otherness which creates the sense of a world and language so large and alien that their “presence” can be enunciated only through an indefinite, intersubjective mood. Somebody seems always to be saying something somewhere that seems to be somewhat significant:

Someone mentioned
a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles
against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching.
We began to believe
the night would not end.
Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed.
Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars,
how small they were, how far away.

(“From the Long Sad Party”)

In this context, the Other before which the self becomes anonymous can be seen as a principle upon which the self can, to use Heidegger's phrase, “throw itself upon the world” and reside in its possibilities:

In the meantime I thought
of the old stars falling and the ashes of one thing and another.
I knew that I would be scattered among them,
that the dream of light would continue without me,
for it was never my dream, it was yours.

(“Seven Days”)

The poet here is located at a point in time where the events described have already begun to occur, and as the past subjunctive implies, continue into the present. This mode of vision constitutes the basis for what Heidegger calls the “retrieve,” a movement into the past to recover lost possibilities. Thus in “My Son” Strand reaches back towards a hypothetical son who seems to call “from a place / beyond, // where nothing / everything, / wants to be born.” The poet of the retrieve attempts to locate those images from the storehouse of the Imaginary that suggest possible symbolic identifications. That is precisely the motive in “For Jessica, My Daughter”—“I imagine a light / that would not let us stray far apart, / a secret moon or mirror, a sheet of paper.”

Whereas Simic's mode is finally to deconstruct presence, to recede back into the growing region of emptiness, Stand's is to expand with that region, to attempt a reconstruction of presence. The result is a transcendental vision that, because it transcends “Nothing” as well as everything, because it does, after all, grasp the problem of the absent Other, avoids the naive solipsism of earlier transcendental visions: “this is another place / what light there is / spreads like a net / over nothing” (“Another Place”). The poem “White” uses that color to link diverse places, seasons, shades, times, traces, images, events, leading to a final Heideggerian “leap” beyond language and sight:

And out of my waking
the circle of light widens,
it fills with trees, houses,
stretches of ice.
It reaches out. It rings
the eye with white.
All things are one.
All things are joined
even beyond the edge of sight.

And so the poem becomes a means to include even what lies beyond the Heideggerian “horizon of Being,” a means to treat absence as presence. In “The Garden” Strand describes a kind of sourceless light of being, “suspended in time” yet resonating with both the past of the poet's parents and the future of the friend, the Other he addresses:

And when my father bends
to whisper in her ear,
when they rise to leave
and the swallows dip and soar
and the moon and stars
have drifted off together, it shines.
Even as you lean over this page,
late and alone, it shines; even now
in the moment before it disappears.

As with the Heideggerian “it” in phrases like “it gives being,” the pronoun here suggests a kind of phenomenological naming, an openness towards presence. It attempts to close some of the gaps that a poetry like Simic's, which emphasizes more of the absence in “presence of absence,” exposes. The result is not an utter ineffability, but rather, for both poets, a knowledge that poetic language is not simply communication, that it projects, in its relation to absence, to the Other, in its deferral of meanings for its signifiers, a truth that resides in its faithfulness to the multiplicity of the world. The result is, in effect, the creation of a world through language. So, Lacan has said:

I have only to plant my tree in a locution: climb the tree, indeed to project on it the ironic lightning that a descriptive context gives to a word: let it be seen by all, in order not to let myself be imprisoned in some sort of communication of facts, however official it may be, and, if I know the truth, make it heard, in spite of all the between the lines censures by the only signifier that my acrobatics can constitute in traversing the branches.