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A Test of Images: George Oppen's ‘Vulcan’

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SOURCE: “A Test of Images: George Oppen's ‘Vulcan,’” in George Oppen, Man and Poet, edited by Burton Hatlan, The National Poetry Foundation, Inc., 1981, pp. 257-64.

[In the following essay, Kail explores Oppen's poem “Vulcan” in an attempt to determine if the validity of Oppen's thought can be established through a study of his imagery.]

I would like to put a poem of George Oppen's to the test, an examination using his own criterion that “a test of images can be a test of whether one's thought is valid, whether one can establish in a series of images, of experiences … whether or not one will consider the concept of humanity to be valid, something that is, or else have to regard it as being simply a word.”1 If I understand this correctly, the test of truth (or at least of “sincerity”) in a poem is its ability to establish for the poet and for the reader a tangible awareness of shared experiences among men and women that defines each of us as members of a human community. This community, Oppen insists, must actually assert itself in our consciousnesses, thereby demonstrating that we are not single, isolated things like rocks, but are instead a class of beings with a history and with a future, so that when we talk about “common humanity” or “humankind” we are not simply engaging in a process of semantic wishful thinking, but are showing that we truly cannot exist without this concept of each other.

Somehow, the poem must be “proved,” perhaps in a sense that a mathematical theorem is proved, if it is to contain “valid thought.” In a mathematical proof, we discover that our theorem is true if we end up with a statement that contains all of the previous statements within it, and at the same time is something else again, a new true statement. To do this one applies a set of rules (of logic, in mathematics) to a series of statements (themselves based on axioms, which are unprovable assumptions, or on previously “proven” statements) in order to arrive at a final statement that must also be considered true. The manner in which one manipulates these statements depends on the mathematical system being used. In short, there must be internal consistency.

In a “poetic proof,” we substitute for mathematical statements (say dx/dt = a1x1 + a2x2) what Oppen calls imagist statements. These statements are, in turn, based on “moments of conviction,” the axioms of Oppen's verse.2 The rules by which he will manipulate these statements are, of course, the rules of syntax (up to a point) and what for lack of a better phrase I am going to call the logic of emotion. In effect, what I would like to do in this paper is to examine the calculus of George Oppen's poetry.

To look at simply one poem, and a fairly short one at that, as I propose to do, is certainly a narrow basis for examination of a poet's method of thought. But Oppen's work is in many important ways one long poem, and placing a bit of it under a microscope should be somewhat like studying a sample of DNA; everything in the organism is therein contained. “Vulcan,” the poem I have chosen to examine, carries, I think, a particularly high concentration of Oppen's way of thinking, yet it is brief enough to discuss in the necessary detail. Besides, the poem still puzzles me. For those readers who are not familiar with or who have not read it recently, here it is:

“VULCAN”

The householder issuing to the street
Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff
Exterior. ‘Peninsula
Low lying in the bay
And wooded—’ Native now
Are the welder and the welder's arc
In the subway's iron circuits:
We have not escaped each other,
Not in the forest, not here. The crippled girl hobbles
Painfully in the new depths
Of the subway, and painfully
We shift our eyes. The bare rails
and black walls contain
Labor before her birth, her twisted
Precarious birth and the men
Laborious, burly—She sits
Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly,
Deliberately she sees
an anchor's blunt fluke sink
Thru coins and coin machines,
The ancient iron and the voltage
In the iron beneath us in the child's deep
Harbors into harbor sand.(3)

Reading this poem is somewhat like walking slowly along a huge mural separated into distinct panels. (I am reminded of the WPA art projects that decorated the walls of the post offices of my youth.) As we move through the poem, the images, at first apparently unconnected, begin to fit into a pattern. The poem takes us via these images through a series of “events” separated both in time and in space, and it is not until we have been through the entire poem (more than once) that the relationships among the parts become clearer, and the poem takes on a shape of its own. Like the “mineral world” that Oppen talks about so much in his work, the poem too is finally impenetrable, but not completely so. The act of examination and “proof” is, I believe, vital to reading Oppen, and a genuine part of the process of validating a concept of humanity.

The first part of this examination, then, will be simply to see what is here, to walk through the poem.

It begins by evoking man's mythic history, calling up the ancient story of Vulcan (Haephestus, in the Greek legend), the crippled craftsman thrown off Mt. Olympus by his mother, Hera, who was displeased by her own child's ugliness. Indeed, Vulcan is the only God born on Olympus unbeautiful. Yet, in spite of his deformity, or perhaps because of it, he becomes the smith to the immortals, fashioning out of fire and metal their weapons and their furnishings in his subterranean workshop. In one version of his story, he makes for his lame legs golden braces; in another he smelts golden handmaidens to help him at his forge. In either case, he is a craftsman who makes things of beauty in order to “support” himself.

Juxtaposed against the smoky, forge-bound image of Vulcan, we meet the first figure of the poem proper, a very common soul, an everyman, an anyman, coming onto a street, any street, not quite sure where he is going: “The householder issuing to the street / Is adrift a moment in that ice stiff / Exterior.” Who is this person? “Householder” is the name of a class of people, not an individual, and Oppen gives us no individualizing visual cues—the line is, in fact, stubbornly non-visual. All that we might sense about the figure at this point is a faint air of domesticity: he/she is a householder. The participle describing the action seems more promising of elucidation. The householder doesn't simply emerge into the street, but “issues,” a word that describes not only a physical action but has connotations of birth as well. And from where does the householder issue? A house? An apartment building? A subway entrance? Wherever, the moment he emerges into the street he is “adrift,” a curious nautical term that keeps the householder poised for a second on the top of a wave of indecision: shall he go up the street or down the street, east or west, left or right? In that moment of deciding, or not deciding, the householder enters the “ice stiff / Exterior.”

Exterior is an important word in Oppen's lexicon (they are all important, of course), one of those small nouns that carry such a potent meaning-making power. On the one hand, the exterior is a kind of place; it is the outside of something—a building, an automobile—the opposite place from “interior.” As we see often in Oppen's work, two words really define each other; there is an exterior of things and an interior of things. Also, the movement from the implied interior into the “ice stiff / Exterior” suggests a coming to the surface, a brief moment of being, in a sense, outside the interior of the self, an unselfconscious awareness of the world—that place where, for instance, weather happens, in this case perhaps very frigid weather, ice stiff. The householder issues into this exterior because there is an exterior there for him to emerge into. His is a particular awareness of being alive in the world in that moment during which one chooses in which direction one is going to set sail, this way or that. It is, if nothing else, a cold awakening.

The slight nautical flavor of the opening statement serves (in retrospect) as one possible link to the next image: “‘Peninsula / Low lying in the bay / And wooded—’” The single quotation marks indicate that the speaker or writer of the lines is someone other than the speaker of the poem, while the dash at the end of the statement might indicate that the entire quotation is not given, that this section has been lifted from a longer descriptive passage. Who is the speaker of this line and to what does he refer? Certainly, this is not the householder speaking; the street and the view of the peninsula seem disconnected both in time and in space. Their neighboring positions on the same line—“Exterior. ‘Peninsula”—does, however, hold them in some relationship to each other, one panel of the mural butted up against the next. Throughout the poem, in fact, Oppen never begins a new sentence on a new line; the thoughts are connected by their mutual presence if in no other immediately discernible fashion. The view we get of the land seems, itself, to be waterborn, as if we are viewing a peninsula, or what appears to be a peninsula, from the vantage point of a boat out in the bay. The matter-of-factness of the line calls to mind a ship's log written in a curious, antique style. At this point in the poem, we can surmise little else, and move on.

It is not until we read the third sentence that the second becomes more definitely located: “Native now / Are the welder and the welder's arc / In the subway's iron circuits: / We have not escaped each other, / Not in the forest, not here.” The first half of this sentence establishes a relationship between “now” and, presumably, “then.” “Then” may have been when the peninsula was wooded, inhabited by a different set of natives using a different kind of tool native to them, not the technologically sophisticated welder arcing electricity into the subway's iron circuits, joining them together into one continuous loop. “Native,” like “exterior,” is a particularly high energy word in Oppen's poems, calling up the image of the aboriginal (the Indian in America prior to European exploration?) and also the sense of people who are wholly a part of the time in which they live, “native in native time” as Oppen puts it in another poem.4 Finally, a figure from another time is also suggested in these lines—Vulcan, the metal worker, melting and reforming iron in his grotto workshop.

All of this leads to the colon and the summary remark “We have not escaped each other, / Not in the forest, not here.” “Here” is, perhaps, the present, the “now,” the subway, the modern subterranean; the forest is “then,” the wooded pristine peninsula, or possibly even the mythological time and place of Vulcan. But who is this “we”? Why does the poet speak to us now in the third person? Does he dare presume to speak for us, for humanity? The tone of the statement is flat and matter-of-fact; there is nothing speculative about it. It is as if the voice of the poem is saying, “All this is history. This is empirical fact. We have failed in our attempts as human beings to escape from each other, to lose each other in the forests, say, of a younger America. We seem to insist, instead, on living among each other, together even in the spaciousness of the forests and certainly ‘here’ in the subway's iron circuits.”

It is in the subway that we meet the major figure of the poem—a daughter of Vulcan, surely—a “crippled girl” who “hobbles / Painfully in the new depths / Of the subway.” Like Vulcan, the girl is lame, misformed. And like Vulcan's mother, we react with aversion: “and painfully / We shift our eyes.” All of the events of the poem up to this point—the householder set adrift, the sighting of the peninsula, the welder's arc, our own shared inability to escape each other—seem to lead to this image of a crippled girl. We see her against the backdrop of the subway which, even though it is “new,” is older, far older than she is. The subway's “bare rails / And black walls contain / Labor before her birth, her twisted/Precarious birth and the men / Laborious, burly—” The work that has gone into the making of the subway, an electric-like energy, is seen as only the latest in a series of workmanlike efforts in the metal-crafting tradition of Vulcan. And the energy seems still to be there, “contained” in the black walls. The circuit that the welder melts together runs not only to the next station down the line, but through history as well, connecting us with our common past. It is all still there.

If only we could “see” it. The girls's function in the poem seems to be to help us to see. From the point that she enters the poem, what happens happens in the “deep harbors” of her mind:

                                                                      She sits
Quiet, her eyes still. Slowly,
Deliberately she sees
An anchor's blunt fluke sink
Thru coins and coin machines,
The ancient iron and the voltage
In the iron beheath us in the child's deep
Harbors into harbor sands.

The crippled girl sees—not with the eyes but with the mind—the fluke of an ancient anchor (perhaps the anchor of the boat from which hundreds of years ago an explorer might have written of the vista before him, “Peninsula low lying in the bay and wooded”); and she sees this anchor, itself the product of metal working, sink through a layer of coins and coin machines, the subway itself, the modern, into the sand at the bottom of the harbor: all of it, even the voltage in the iron rails, settling together into history.

II

So, we have been through the poem. No doubt we have missed much, but we have seen as well. Now, how do the things we have seen in the poem fit together? What are the rules, what is the calculus, that holds them together and proves them to be true imagist statements? What is the emotional logic among and between

a. a man frozen in a characteristic human moment, stepping into a street,


b. a peninsula seen perhaps for the first time by alien eyes,


c. a welder kneeling over the arc of his work, and


d. the continual allusions to Vulcan?

These images or statements are one half of the equation. They lead up to the colon, the equals sign, if you will, at the end of the seventh line of the poem. On the other side of the equation, a statement: We have not escaped each other, then or now, not in the forest and not here in the subway. How can Oppen “prove” that the equation—this human equation, as it were—is true, that it balances?

Only through the emotion of vision, Oppen seems to be saying. One can prove this theorem that humanity does, in fact, exist, only through an act of “seeing” in the same sense that we “see” a tree or any other object, by filling our eyes and our minds with it. History is a thing that is in reality just as palpable (to use one of Whitman's words) as any other object or thing, an elbow, a rock, a Bach cantata. We can “see” this concept of humanity everywhere, even in the subway, where history is buried alive in the walls.

This act of vision is the function (both “mathematical” and poetical) of the girl in the poem; she is a see-er. Where Vulcan forges metals, the crippled girl in the poem is a kind of craftsman of the mind. She molds purposefully a mental image of events buried in the human consciousness in the same way that the labor of the workmen who built the subway (who gave “birth” to it) is “contained” in its walls. She sees with a kind of intent singleness of purpose this vision of an ancient anchor, product of Vulcan's craft, sinking through archeological layers, even through the archaeology of the present moment, sinking into the rich muck of history.5

Our relationship with the girl is ambiguous. She is part of “us,” down in the subway, but we refuse to look at her, even though it causes us pain to look away! She is crippled (by her vision?) and we don't want to see that, so we look away, or perhaps we are afraid to stare. And so the see-er, the craftsman of the mind, is both part of this concept of humanity and outside it. A terrible position, a painful one, paradoxical but perhaps unavoidable. If one is to prove that humanity, its history and its future, is not simply a word but an actual thing, perhaps it is necessary to be at least in some way separate from and outside that concept. This seems to be the fate of the poet in George Oppen, “suffering the things of the world and speaking them out of himself.”

Well. Has Oppen flunked or passed? Is his method of thought valid? He attempts to prove that human history is real, that there is a valid concept of humanity by seeing it as something that actually occurs. For Oppen, ideas are real, concepts take place. Yet, the concept of humanity is one that Oppen has struggled with all of his life. In “Pro Nobis,” a poem written after “Vulcan,” Oppen says,

Tho I had hoped to arrive
At an actuality
In the mere number of us
And record now
That I did not.
Therefore pray for us
In the hour of our death indeed.(6)

In mathematical proofs as well as in poetical proofs, when there is doubt one comes back to the axioms. There is, Oppen says, “a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct meaning from these moments of conviction.”7 These moments of conviction—are they replaced or superceded by other moments that invalidate their predecessors? Do things change through time, or is it merely our perception of them that changes? All that one can do, according to Oppen, is to report on what it is one actually believes to be true at the moment he believes it, native thought in native time. When he no longer believes it, it won't be true for him anymore. He'll believe something else.

The theorem that Oppen wishes to prove—i.e., that the concept of humanity is valid—may be similar to one of those propositions in mathematics that Gödel tells us are undecidable. George Oppen went on from “Pro Nobis” to write his long metaphysical poem on the same subject as “Vulcan,” “Of Being Numerous,” a poem which ends on the word “curious.” Oppen is ever curious to test his images, his language, against the “fatal rock of the world.” That is his great victory, for in doing so, even when he fails, George Oppen passes.

Notes

  1. Quoted from an interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen Interview, “The Objectivist Poet: Four Interviews,” Contemporary Literature, 2 (Spring 1969), p. 161.

  2. Dembo, Oppen Interview, Contemporary Literature, p. 161.

  3. Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1975), p. 46.

  4. “Route,” Collected Poems, p. 186.

  5. This complex image reminds me of a story about an ancient ship from out of New York's Dutch ancestry that had, miraculously, been discovered by workmen digging out one of the subway tunnels in the lower end of Manhattan. It seems that over the years the New York harbor facilities had slowly been extended into the bay by successive landfills, and this boat, sunk in what must have once been the harbor, had slowly “moved” inland until it was discovered hundreds of years later by workmen hacking out the I.R.T. It was decided (at who knows what level of the bureaucracy) too expensive or inexpedient to remove the old ship from its grave, so it was simply walled back in. And to this day, so the story goes, subway trains careen within inches of this ancient, landlocked ship. I don't know if the story is true, but it serves to illustrate a context out of which Oppen frequently constructs his thought, a sense of place in which history keeps intruding into the present and the present population, in its turn, tries to wall the past back in.

  6. Collected Poems, p. 141.

  7. Dembo, Oppen Interview, Contemporary Literature, p. 161.

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