[In the following essay, McAleavy offers an explication of Oppen's This in Which.]

In that ample matrix of possibilities, The Materials (1962), Oppen sometimes hoped to explain or integrate self-consciousness by using a metaphor of birth: the self, he argues, is born into the world and grasps outward toward the present. If the self-conscious self should fully reach the present—which is the giddy hope of The Materials—union could occur. Such a transcendence is contemplated or aspired to in “Eclogue,” “Image of the Engine,” “Sara in Her Father's Arms,” “The Men of Sheepshead,” and many other poems.

In This in Which (1965) Oppen abandons the birth metaphor, but his chief desire remains that of achieving an immediate, reciprocal relation with the world. The difference is that in the later book this desire is seen to be insatiable: Oppen feels he cannot reconcile self-consciousness with his desire for reciprocity with the world.

Instead he examines the quandary he is in, the this in which, impartially, voicing his own dilemma as clearly as he can. Basically, Oppen is torn between two concerns. One is an examination of the self's attempts to confront and understand existence. The other involves a search for a causal explanation of consciousness, an historical, not an “existential” search. Both concerns are motivated by a wish for meaning, and Oppen lets them compete; both are defeated because Oppen can let neither be successful.

This is what gives his work its authority and even its healing power: passionately contesting the rift between the world and what consciousness wants to know makes that rift less painful. This is of course a simplification, even a reduction, of the surface Oppen's poems present, for they are poems characterized by a variety of oppositions and contrasts, and they do not yield their meanings always easily.

This in Which begins by modulating through an interconnected series of fairly traditional dichotomies, of will and heart, for instance, against flesh and materiality. What Oppen grapples with has to do with his idealist inclination to side with the spiritual or anti-materialist pole in any controversy: he sides with the force or will which can perform what he calls the “act of being.” That live part of the self, he decides, is larger than itself, since it includes our desire to live; as the final poem in the book (“World, World—”) asserts,

We want to be here.
The act of being, the act of being
More than oneself.(1)

On the one hand, then, Oppen invests in the self as distinct from the body. On the other, he invests in the physical world. It happens that in This in Which the gulf between any putative personal, transcendent identity (the self who performs the act of being) and the physical world is greater than in any other of Oppen's books except perhaps Of Being Numerous (1968).²

“Technologies,” the first poem in This in Which, again shows Oppen adopting an anti-materialistic position:

Tho in a sort of summer the hard buds blossom
Into feminine profusion
The ‘inch-sized
Heart,’ the little core of oneself
So inartistic,
The inelegant heart
Which cannot grasp
The world
And makes art
Is small
Like a small hawk
Lighting disheveled on a window sill.
Like hawks we are at least not
Nowhere, and I would say
Where we are
Tho I distract
Windows that look out
On the business
Of the days
In streets
Without horizon, streets
And gardens
Of the feminine technologies
Of desire
And compassion which will clothe
Everyone, arriving
Out of uncivil
Air
Evil
As a hawk
From a hawk's
Nest as they say
The nest of such a bird
Must be, and continue
Therefore to talk about
Twig technologies.

(TIW, pp. 13-4)

The summer of blossoms is only “a sort of summer,” even though Oppen does not deny the “profusion” implied in hard buds' opening. Profusion is profusion, a “sort of” summer is not unreal. But the heart is not profuse, does not bother about the “sort of” summer. That the heart “cannot grasp / The world,” means not that the heart is afraid of dying or is itself a counterforce to death, but rather that the heart's business is not mundane, not terrestrial (“My Father's business”). Acting in accord with its own rules, it is “uncivil,” in both the usual sense (impolite) and an extended sense (antisocial). It is also “inelegant” and “Evil” (if hawks are evil), and interrupts “the business / Of the days” by appearing “Like a small hawk / Lighting disheveled on a window sill.” The success of this striking image is also substantiated “in the concrete materials of the poem,” in Oppen's phrase. The liquid sounds which may be taken to imitate the hawk's flight oppose the broad, even guttural, qualities of “hawk.” The sound of “sill,” echoing that of “small,” distills sounds found in “disheveled.” Oppen's finding one sound inside another, the way the hawk suddenly appears, suddenly is there, is one measure of his finely-tooled craft. If craft such as this seems small and insignificant, part of Oppen's point is that he, as hawk-poet, continues “to talk about / Twig technologies,” the most inconsequential bits and materials. The poet uses inconsequential and serendipitous materials in minutely particular technologies which end up producing fabulous nests, homes for hearts, in art. Even in Discrete Series (1934) Oppen had identified such “masculine” formality as essential to art.

Opposed to this sequence of notions are what he calls “the feminine technologies / Of desire / And compassion,” characterized by the profusion of blossoms, and also by the horizonless windows and streets. Again, in Discrete Series Oppen had also sought to give “feminine” vitality and looseness a place in poetry. Here, he is asserting that the “feminine” does not need reasons for living, but fulfills itself by caring for what is here. Partly, Oppen is distinguishing art from politics, and rejecting his earlier (also “feminine”) political activity. It is not enough, he feels, simply to take care of what exists. (Throughout, I should add, Oppen uses the words “masculine” and “feminine” primarily to refer either to psychological modes, in a manner reminiscent of Jung, or to social roles traditionally allocated on the basis of sex, and the behavior which is associated with those roles.) A portion of his 1963 apology, devoted to a discussion of “altruism” is relevant:

Neither ambition nor solidarity nor altruism is capable of establishing values. If the puritanical virtues proved themselves in material well-being, in the escape from danger of starvation, in TVs and radios, electric toasters and perhaps air-conditioners, electric razors and strawberry corers and is now pushing the electric toothbrush, then altruism demands these things also for the other man. It cannot, of itself, get beyond that. We can do so only when, with whatever difficulty, with whatever sense of vertigo, we begin to speak for ourselves.³

The “vertigo” comes from the difficulty of identifying one's own integrity.

“Vertigo” in this sense describes the state of mind of a person suddenly realizing the difficult spot, the quandary, he is in. The word occurs again in “The Building of the Skyscraper.” That poem presents the situation of a “steel worker on the girder” who has “Learned not to look down”; Oppen compares his situation with the language-user's:

                    there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.

(TIW, p. 73)

The poet, however, in Oppen's view, must “suffer the things of the world,” trying to approach

Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is.

(TIW, p. 73)

This formulation (like many others) resembles various statements by Heidegger, and certainly the basic idea, that existence is more important than truth, is Heideggerian.⁴ Oppen is not seeking a thing beyond declaration which “is” truth, but replaces such a quest with the search for things that exist.

Oppen finds as his fundamental emblem of existence a tree “sprouting / Little green buds / Into the culture of the streets.” The etymology of “culture” emphasizes the word's double use here in social and agricultural frames. The sight of buds on the tree jars Oppen back into an experience of unsettled, primitive, natural Manhattan: “We look back / Three hundred years and see bare land / And suffer vertigo” (TIW, p. 73). The vertigo is both physical and moral, and because it is deeply felt, demands resolution or revelation; the tension is between nature and civilization.

“Eros” extends and develops Oppen's vertiginous quandary. The epigraph is from II Esdra 4:45: “Show me also whether there is more to come than is past, or the greater part has already gone by us.” This statement is part of a speech from the prophet Ezra to the angel Uriel, who has brought Ezra a vision of the last days when, as Uriel has said, “the things that you desire to see will be disclosed to you” (4:43). The juxtaposition of epigraph and title asks the teleological question, where is life going? Both Oppen and Ezra seek to know what sort of behavior is most approriate now. Consequently they ask for a description of the present.

The first lines of the text of the poem parallel the Ezra-Uriel confrontation, except rather than human asking divine, a group of young voices are imagined to ask an old man what he knows: “‘and you too, old man, so we have heard, / Once. …’” The desire to stress the continuity of experience is worthy of Homer, for it is social continuity which gives Nestor's experience value.

The next phrases record his current situation in its physical reality:

An old man's head, bulging
And worn
Almost into death.

(TIW, p. 44)

The subsequent couplet, “The head grows from within / And is eroded” is the first and for that matter the only independent syntactic unit in the entire thirty-seven lines. It is like a stone dropped into a seemingly inert pool. Physically, the head does indeed grow from within, from a seed, as “Sara in Her Father's Arms” or “The Return” (both from The Materials) would have it. Also, physical weathering does affect appearance, erodes the skin. The mind also must grow from inside, from familiarity with itself, for instance. Too, it can be dulled by the world. In any case, death is an absolute form of erosion.

Despite this fatalistic comprehension—and here the poem reveals that it runs swiftly below its seemingly still surface—even old people come to visit a memorial to a political ideal, despite the hardships:

                                                            suffering
The rain
Here above Paris—
To the plaque of the ten thousand
Last men of the Commune
Shot at that wall
In the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, and the grave
Of Largo Caballero and the monuments to the Resistance—

(TIW, p. 44)

Following the dash, the syntactic flow continues, with much that is left unexpressed, to the “devoutness” evidenced by both the plaque and the visitors to it, expecially the old:

A devoutness
Toward the future
Recorded in this city
Which taught my generation
Art
And the great paved places
Of the cities.
Maze
And wealth
Of heavy ancestry and the foreign rooms
Of structures
Closed by their roofs
And complete, a culture
Mined
From the ground …
As tho the powerful gift
Of their presence
And the great squares void
Of their dead
Were the human tongue
That will speak.

(TIW, pp. 44-5)

Part of the reason behind Dembo's insistence on using the word “nominalism” in his interviews with Oppen, Rexroth, and Zukofsky, and in both his major article on Oppen's work and his earlier review of Of Being Numerous, may be that Oppen tends to transform his sentences into noun clauses or phrases in which the verbal elements are often suppressed or “understood.” Oppen himself has acknowleged this tendency:

I still have trouble with verbs. It's not exactly trouble; I just didn't want to put it too pretentiously. I'm really concerned with the substantive, with the subject of the sentence, with what we are talking about, and not rushing over the subject-matter in order to make a comment about it. It is still a principle with me, of more than poetry, to notice, to state, to lay down the substantive for its own sake.⁵

Often enough, Oppen does not so much ignore verbs as utilize the verbal force of participles like “rushing,” which he favors for their substantive qualities. In any case, his practice in a poem like “Eros,” far from resting in passive and noun-dominated constructions, requires the reader to address the gaps between those constructions in order to imagine the connections. There may be a loss of exactness in communication by this method, but it can be in the interest of greater truth: “L'exactitude n'est pas la verité.’”⁶

(Oppen's later poetry comes increasingly to require that reading be an act of recovery, demanding the reader's alertness. This is common enough in the twentieth century, but of course Oppen's early champion, Pound, is one of the most extreme. Pound wrote in the preface to his Active Anthology of the intelligence he expected in his readers, as against Eliot's apparent expectations:

His [Eliot's] contempt for his readers has always been much greater than mine, by which I would indicate that I quite often write as if I expected my reader to use his intelligence, and count on its being fairly strong, whereas Mr. Eliot after enduring decennial fogs in Britain practically always writes as if for very very feeble and brittle mentalities, from whom he can expect neither resilience nor any faculty for seeing the main import instead of the details or surfaces.⁷

Since the alterations in the later published versions of his poems move toward popularization, for instance by clarifying syntactic structures, Oppen cannot be said to be unyielding in his relation to his reader; but he does often demand patience and insight.)

In “Eros” Oppen says that Paris, even though it is merely a city and therefore a center of companionship but not of values, even though it too is “Mined / From the ground,” manifests despite its maze a devotion to the future of man. The devotion is an expression of Eros, the will. The physical fact closing the poem is that the city is the organ of speech, the “tongue / That will speak,” perhaps to answer Ezra's teleological questions. Alternatively, the “Maze” and the closed structures describe the “cemetery of Père-Lachaise,” full of mausoleums. The chief point is that buildings are the embodiment of death. The live parts are found in memory and its memorial, in the re-activation of memory by the will to return evidenced by this presence of the visitors, and in “the great squares void / Of their dead,” which in their bareness testify to the causes of those martyr-like deaths. In these ways Eros speaks its conflict with the eroding materiality of the world. Similarly, Freud's innovative life instinct attempts to dominate the habit-preserving “death” instinct. Oppen can seem as pessimistic as Freud, too, perhaps because both move away from dialectics (implying progress towards new, improved syntheses) towards the unadorned exposition and elaboration of conflicts and contrasts.

“Eros” concludes with the subjunctive, with Oppen uncertain about the human tongue's ability to speak of liberation. “Monument” gives a different view of both heroism and memory. It compares the attitude embodied in Mt. St. Michel with that Oppen has adopted, an attitude presented by the New York harbor though also opposed to the harbor:

One comes to the Norman chapel,
The Norman wall
Of the armed man
At the root of the thing,
Roughly armed,
The great sword, the great shield
And the helmet,
The horned helmet
On the mount
In the sea threatening
Its distances.

(TIW, p. 69)

Since “public silence indeed is nothing,” one seeks for a way to do something, perhaps within “the available poses // Of greatness.” Oppen however was born to

A minor courage
And the harbor
We lived near, and the ungainliness
Of the merchants, my grandparents;
Of which I chose the harbor
And the sea
Which is a home and the homeless,
It is the sea,
Contrary of monuments
And illiberal.

(TIW, p. 69)

If we can accept that in this poem the sea is a symbol of Being, and is not to be equated with the nothing of public silence, then we see that Oppen envisages himself surpassing monuments, rising into “illiberal” totality. This does not involve a direct contradiction of “Eros” however, since the monument in “Eros” was legitimate and did not defy the greater-than-human, but was a reminder of the life-force within. That the Norman chapel is built on the rough armor of the fighting men “At the root of the thing,” however, reminds us that devotion properly follows on acts of courage.

Furthermore, Oppen uses the word “thing” in this passage to refer to more than the chapel on the mount. In “Giovanni's Rape of the Sabine Women at Wildenstein's” he talks again of the sea:

The nights
At sea, and what
We sailed in, the large
Loose sphere of it
Visible, the force in it
Moving the little boat.
Only that it changes! Perhaps one is himself
Beyond the heart, the center of the thing
And cannot praise it
As he would want to, with the light in it, feeling the long
                    helplessness
Of those who will remain in it
And the losses.

(TIW, pp. 34-5)

Loss alienates the individual from his central being, from the will, Eros, that thing which the selves that the body “dreams” protects (cf. “Alpine,” Collected Poems, 116). Loss of faith in the insulating ability of such selves results in destruction (Berryman is perhaps a case in point), or in a loss of faith in the artist's abilities to address or speak from the core, the root of particular existing entities, whether Giovanni's statue or Mt. St. Michel:

                                        If this is treason
To the artists, make the most of it; one needs such faith,
Such faith in it
In the whole thing, more than I,
Or they, have had in songs.

(TIW, p. 35)

This lack of faith is a crucial problem in Oppen's work. What he fears is the guilt which would attend—and which must attend—failure to capture feeling with all “the light in it.” He fights a constant battle against the tyranny of this anticipated guilt, however. Elsewhere in This in Which he states bluntly,

Possible
To use
Words provided one treat them
As enemies.
Not enemies—Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks.

(TIW, p. 39)

These lines come from the fourth section of the eight-part poem called “A Language of New York,” most of which is incorporated into the later and much longer “Of Being Numerous.” These particular lines do not appear there however, as Oppen backs off from their bluntness. Even in “A Language of New York” he qualifies his bluntness, urging the hygiene one might extend to a returning, brainwashed prisoner-of-war:

                                        If one captures them
One by one proceeding
Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense.

(TIW, p. 39)

The corresponding section of “Of Being Numerous” (#17) talks of the “roots of words / Dim in the subways,” and the imagery returns in something like a full circle to include “Vulcan” (from The Materials) and “Monument,” which follows, in This in Which, “The Occurrences”:

The simplest
Words say the grass blade
Hides the blaze
Of a sun
To throw a shadow
In which the bugs crawl
At the roots of the grass;
Father, father
Of fatherhood
Who haunts me, shivering
Man most naked
Of us all, O father
                              watch
At the roots
Of the grass the creating
Now that tremendous
plunge

(TIW, p. 68)

The shivering of the “father / Of fatherhood” takes us to the shelter offered by the Sabine girl as she is being lifted up by a Roman, “shelter // From the winds // The winds that lie / In the mind”; she offers the promise of shelter, of “Everything that matters,” to “the animals” who are however, like us, “‘Powerless to affect / The intensity of what is.’” Oppen cannot wholly identify with the girl's suffering, because he wants to say, “‘It has been good to us,’ / However.” This acceptance of suffering is the treason he refers to later in the poem, which I have called a lack of faith. The dilemma he is addressing is that sympathy with suffering is incompatible with praise: art, which often enough deals with suffering, is still praise, and opposes altruistic political activity. Oppen is suggesting that his own mind is so bound up with suffering, so guilty and far from praise that his poetry becomes a sort of treason to art. But the doubt is registered in art, and does not disallow the possibility that he means to say now he has faith enough to praise. Also he wants to minimize the effects of guilt, and achieve an inner liberation. “The dust,” he says,

Settles into village clarity
Among the villagers, a difficult
Song
Full of treason.
Sing?
To one's fellows?
To old men? in the villages,
The dwindling heritage
The heart will shrivel in
Sometime—But the statue!
Spiraling its drama
In the stair well
Of the gallery …

(TIW, pp. 33-4)

Oppen's poem is an attempt to sing a difficult song of “village clarity,” on a cosmic scale: “the large / Loose sphere of it // Visible,” he says, which changes. Oppen praises Giovanni for recording the same opposition of pain and praise in the spiral movement of his statue, a dynamic technical unification. The poem is Oppen's answer to the girl's gaze which passes beyond the apex of the spiral to encounter the beholder.⁸ Giovanni and Oppen both seem to say that the dichotomy, the opposition, the dilemma cannot be resolved, but only recognized or addressed.

“Guest Room” talks more about the “village clarity” Oppen was witness to in “Giovanni's Rape. …” It begins with lines that include comment on the opening of Book Five of Paterson:

There is in age
The risk that the mind
Reach
Into homelessness, ‘nowhere to return.’ In age
The maxims
Expose themselves, the happy endings
That justify a moral.

(TIW, p. 29)

These lines are more sober than Williams':

In old age
                                        the mind
                                                                                casts off
                                                  rebelliously
                                        an eagle
from its crag.(9)

If Oppen's lines are more constrained (and they are) they also investigate an issue Williams does not take up, that the mind may not return to “its crag.” Oppen lacks the older poet's insistence, his belief in belonging to a place.

The main thrust of the first part of this poem, however, is to question the validity of “the happy endings / That justify a moral.” The “moral” is the Protestant work ethic, and what Oppen questions is the reward envisaged: if its end is “The clamor of wealth—tree / So often shaken,” too much is left unsatisfied. Oppen prefers “The virtue of the mind,” which

Is that emotion
Which causes
To see. Virtue …
Virtue … ?

(TIW, p. 29)

Because he has skeptically questioned the word “moral,” he realizes he must also question “virtue.” It too has become a word he cannot trust. In a characteristic gesture, he describes his own presence in the house of wealth:

                                        The great house
With its servants,
The great utensiled
House
Of air conditioners, safe harbor
In which the heart sinks, closes
Now like a fortress
In daylight, setting its weight
Against the bare blank paper.

(TIW, pp. 29-30)

The second section of this poem criticizes the rich for acting swank without a “gleaming / Mandate” from the past. He realizes here and in the third section that the rich also have no final basis for action. He recognizes that if the only significance of will is “to exert force, // To open a window,” if the universe is merely mechanical and life itself not a source of value, then death is

                                        the horror
Which will arrive
When one is most without defenses,
The unspeakable
Defeat.

(TIW, p. 31)

If death is a defeat, however, there is a stigma attached to it, and a guilt. Oppen would like to work free of guilt, and of the fearful attempt to outrun death which can be traced to guilt. But he cannot easily escape the horror of having no defenses. Skepticism is an attempt to eradicate defenses, after all. Consequently Oppen admires the rich who can truly exert their wills in the material world, and in doing so “are an avant garde // Near the limits of life.” The analogy to the poet is not hard to see:

                                                            Like theirs
My abilities
Are ridiculous:
To go perhaps unarmed
And unarmored, to return
Now to the old questions—

(TIW, p. 32)

The dust settles, then, into a renewed appreciation of the insolubility of the questions Oppen has been asking. The irreducibility of his quandary itself must become Oppen's source of hope. Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Oppen turns to the sheer marvel of dawn,

Over Frisco
Lighting the large hills
And the very small coves
At their feet, and we
Perched in the dawn wind
Of that coast like leaves
Of the most recent weed—And yet the things
That happen! Signs,
Promises—we took it
As sign, as promise
Still for nothing wavered,
Nothing begged or was unreal, the thing
Happening, filling our eyesight
Out to the horizon—I remember the sky
And the moving sea.

(TIW, p. 32).

Oppen does not rest simply with sensing the phenomenological world. Memory (“I remember …”) is still the repository of what value there is because it transforms faith into value. Furthermore, language, especially the language of “small nouns,” responds to the responsive phenomenological world and is essential to melioristic belief. (Hence its importance in “Eros.”) Similarly, he says at the end of “Psalm,”

                                                            The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

(TIW, p. 20)

The sudden and yet simple discovery the deer make is of the “really real,” which art aims for: “It may rescue us / As only the true // Might …” (“From Virgil,” TIW, p. 26). The “really real” is an amalgam of the material world, memory, will, and language.

Earlier I suggested that Oppen's vertiginous quandary is the “this in which,” the thing about which many of these poems revolve. In the Dembo interview, Oppen answers the question “What exactly is this faith [which the nouns cry]? Is it in the world as world or is it in man's ability to know the world?” He says,

Well, that the nouns do refer to something; that it's there, that it's true, the whole implication of these nouns; that appearances represent reality, whether or not they misrepresent it: that this in which the thing takes place, this thing is here, and that these things do take place. On the other hand, one is left with the deer, staring out of the thing, at the thing, not knowing what will come next.¹⁰

The “quandary” to which I have been pointing is that which spurs Oppen to balance two remarks across the fulcrum of the phrase “on the other hand.”

This series of concerns, including the oppositions This in Which starts with (masculine/feminine, will/world, and so on) end without resolution in the self's confronting existence. However, this confrontation with existence, what we might call a desire for cognition, is, as I have already suggested, only one of the major motions in the book. Because the mind wants to know more than the fact of existence, it undertakes a search for its own source, for the hawk's nest. Many poems in This in Which pertain to this search for recognition, for the dissolving of all causes in a supreme source.

In this book the causes Oppen seeks to discover are explicitly historical. The recognitions are less far-fetched than they are in the parallel, but more generalized, mythified poems in The Materials. For instance, “Philai Te Kou Philai,” one of the more specific enquiries, relates the loss of American wilderness to the “ruined ethic” of conviction whose genealogy is traceable to Roman origins:

Rococo boulevards
Backed by the Roman
Whose fluted pillars
Blossoming antique acanthus
Stand on other coasts
Lifing their tremendous cornices

(TIW, p. 19)

“Penobscot” confronts birth (“that locked room”) and contemplates finding a core “Distant / From the classic world.” Oppen admits, however, even though he is willing to suppose that the aurora borealis “burns like a Tyger,” that “It is more primitive // Than I know / To live like this”; “I think we will not breach the world / These small worlds least / Of all.” Oppen's desire for a linear history which might yield a point of origin gains strength to the degree he doubts his ability to extract essence from the present phenomenon confronting him; yet history so understood has its own human limitation.

If a proper causal or historical explanation would involve an entire history of the cosmos, then to conceive the cause of anything is most “unpleasant.” (Oppen's epigraph to This in Which is a quote from Heinlein's The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag which addressed this very issue.) More significantly, unless the past is understood to be wholly a supposition, that is, merely noumenal—which violates common sense, at any rate—there is no way to consider events which once occurred as part of the present now-unfolding reality: which is one goal of such an enquiry. That is, the goal of causal enquiry must be to see the structure perfectly; but prior events which are not present can never again be present; therefore instantaneous knowledge (in the broadest sense) of everything is impossible.

On the other hand there is no other way of constructing an historical reality. In crude form this is the paradox Oppen works with. He resolves it only insofar as he can say that because we wish to live, we seek to locate an historical or transcendent cause. This is more far-reaching than may appear. In another context he has written that the intellect loves “what exists” and longs for “all that exists.”¹¹ Perhaps the two are not after all so much inevitably opposed as they are simply complementary.

But in “Penobscot” he argues that neither search is wholly productive by itself. The pursuit of cause across time inhibits the knowledge of time. But Oppen does accept the historicity of process and affirms the possibility of partial historical explanation. Furthermore he rejects non-linear explanations of history:

Serpent, Ouroboros
Whose tail is in his mouth: he is the root
Of evil,
This ring worm, the devil's
Doctrine the blind man
Knew. His mind
Is its own place;
He has no story. Digested
And digesting—Fool object,
Dingy medallion
In the gutter
Of Atlantic Avenue!
Let it alone! It is deadly.
What breath there is
In the rib cage we must draw
From the dimensions
Surrounding, whether or not we are lost
And choke on words.

(TIW, p. 79)

This, the seventh section of “A Narrative,” clarifies much of Oppen's meaning. To perform the “act of being more than oneself” demands that the mind must break out of its own circularity—which is merely a “Fool object”—and accept the “dimensions,” including time, which are responsible for the “ruinous winds that lie in the mind.”

To accept “dimensions” is to recognize the possibility that existence may not be intelligible:

                                                            I cannot know
Whether the weight of cause
Is in such a place as that, tho the depth of water
Pours and pours past Albany
From all its sources.

(TIW, p. 78)

We believe in causal explanation because, like the primitive Indians, we do not want existence to cease. We wish to live:

And because they also were a people in danger,
Because they feared also the thing might end,
I think of the Indian songs …
‘There was no question what the old men were singing’
The anthropologist wrote,
Aware that the old men sang
On those prairies,
Return, the return of the sun.

(TIW, p. 81)

In another poem Oppen calls this feeling “homesickness,” because it is a desire for the familiar, for recognition. “Rationality,” in which he makes that association, is a poem about a pressman, and refers to the poem “Debt” from The Materials:

To say again: the massive heart
Of the present, the presence
Of the machine tools
In the factories, and the young workman
Elated among the men
Is homesick
In that instant
Of the shock
Of the press
In which the manufactured part
New in its oil
On the steel bed is caught
In the obstinate links
Of cause, like the earth tilting
To its famous Summers—that ‘part
Of consciousness’ …

(TIW, p. 59)

The final phrase is directly quoted from the earlier poem, where it was also placed in quotes, and many other phrases also echo “Debt.” But the earlier poem was in praise of consciousness, the anti-materialist “virtue” whose plan was being put into imperfect operation by the press. “Rationality” on the other hand does not emphasize serial, physical imperfection but the moment of creation itself; the pressman is made homesick because at some hypothetical instant the fresh part is not held in the “obstinate links // Of cause”: it is new, and out of time. Oppen's poem thus resembles Wordsworth's “Intimations” ode; certainly it is no less compromising on the inability of the “massive heart” to survive in full original grandeur. Neither heart nor will survive untarnished. Birth, even the birth of a “manufactured part,” has the power to bring about a reaffirmation of mythic freshness.

Other sections of “A Narrative” than those I have already mentioned deal with the nature of the forces opposed to will and heart and rationality: with the flesh of the world. In one of the most powerful (#8) Oppen talks of our search for reality:

But at night the park
She said, is horrible. And Bronk said
Perhaps the world
Is horror.
She did not understand. He meant
The waves or pellets
Are thrown from the process
Of the suns and like radar
Bounce where they strike. The eye
It happens
Registers
But it is dark.
It is the nature
Of the world:
It is as dark as radar.

(TIW, p. 80)

Such lines reflect only spectrally theories of vision and nature like that of Emerson's, who had argued that “if eyes were made for seeing /Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.” Oppen is more hard-headed, more fundamentalist, asking what seeing is. His reference to William Bronk is probably to Bronk's poem “The Nature of the Universe,” which includes these lines:

If there is One, and all we know is One,
and there is no other, nothing, as nightly, the far
glitter of distant stars proclaims it, we
are the inner mirror of those stars, who find
only an ecstasy to outfeel
horror, and be blind to that sight that:
we are nowhere, there is no other place,
and nothing to turn to, in solitude.(12)

The ecstasy both Bronk and Oppen look for and hope to attain through poetry demands that opposed forces be understood as being irreconcilably at war. The problem is not solvable. Still, it is the recognition that all contraries struggle which characteristically brings Oppen to both an understanding of the devastation of all meaning and awe before existence itself. The ephemerality of awe points to the on-going struggle, and to the insight that horror—which may be guilt—lingers. Though he wants to get free of that horror (especially if it is guilt), still it is the devastation of meaning which sparks awe. Love, therefore, is just a step on the complicated path Oppen treads, a needed effort to reconcile the unreconcilable, as “The People, the People” says:

For love we all go
To that mountain
Of human flesh
Which exists
And is incapable
Of love and which we saw
In the image
Of a woman—We said once
She was beautiful for she was
Suffering
And beautiful. She was more ambitious
Than we knew
Of wealth
And more ruthless—speaking
Still in that image—we will never be free
Again from the knowledge
Of that hatred
And that huge contempt. Will she not rot
Without us and die
In childbed leaving
Monstrous issue—

(TIW, p. 54)

For love we go to flesh which is incapable of love and is ambitious and ruthless besides. The body (feminine) will rot without mind, the (masculine) loving power or will. But we must go to “her” in order to survive; love will no longer exist otherwise, just “monstrous issue.”

What then is beauty, and why does Oppen seek to press his understanding of the physical down to the minutest, most impenetrable object? In “The Mayan Ground” the Indians seem beautiful even though they have lost the protection of their guardians. He quotes a passage from a Mayan translation: “… and whether they are beautiful or not there will be no one to guard them in the days to come. …” The priestly source records the destruction of tradition, in a confirmation of the Plains Indians chanting “Return, the return of the sun.” Now these Indians are

Savages, there is no mystery about them,
Given the rest of it,
They who have evolved
In it, and no one to shield them
Therefore in the days to come, in the ruts
Of the road
Or the fields, or the thin
Air of the berserk mountains—. But the god!
They said,
Moving on the waters,
The breeze on the water, feathery
Serpent,
Wind on the surface,
On the shallows

(TIW, p. 62)

The reference to “ruts” also goes back to an earlier moment in the poem:

                                                            Merely rolling now
The tire leaves a mark
On the earth, a ridge in the ground
Crumbling at the edges
Which is terror, the unsightly
Silting sand of events—

(TIW, p. 61)

The reality of “events” is however only a “shell,” as in an eggshell, which prompts a reference to Levertov's poem “Matins,” where the real is seen as a

                                                  new-laid
egg whose speckled shell
the poet fondles and must break
if he will be nourished.(13)

Inside that shell is where Oppen wants to go and, in yet another self-reference, also where he hopes to find

                                        the little grain,
Electron, beating
Without cause,
Dry grain, father
Of all our fathers
Hidden in the blazing shell
Of sunlight—

(TIW, p. 61)

“The Occurrences,” we remember, uses a similar phrase: “father / Of fatherhood / … shivering / Man most naked / Of us all.” The search is still to resolve the dichotomies that This in Which does not resolve, this time by finding in the corporeal the ultimate “masculine” impenetrable will “beating / Without cause” like the unmoved mover. Lacking such a divinity, Oppen turns back to the Indians whose text claims that “they had lost account / Of the unrolling of the universe” (“the count of the calendar had become confused”), so that

                    only the people
Stir in the mornings
Coming from the houses, and the black hair
Of the women at the pump
Against the dawn
Seems beautiful.

(TIW, pp. 62-3)

Against a belief that the historical process (or “unrolling of the universe”) has brought about “unsightly” events stands the conclusion, to be content with simple vision; all efforts to “breach the world” have failed. There is still ecstasy:

River of our substance
Flowing
With the rest. River of the substance
Of the earth's curve, river of the substance
Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing
To no imaginable sea. But the mind rises
Into happiness, rising
Into what is there. I know of no other happiness
Nor have I ever witnessed it. … Islands
To the north
In polar mist
In the rather shallow sea—
Nothing more
But the sense
Of where we are
Who are most northerly. The marvel of the wave
Even here is its noise seething
In the world; I thought that even if there were nothing
The possibility of being would exist;
I thought I had encountered
Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea
For in that sea we breathe the open
Miracle
Of place, and speak
If we would rescue
Love to the ice-lit
Upper World a substantial language
Of clarity, and of respect.

(TIW, p. 82)

This, the final, eleventh section of “A Narrative,” seems to me to be as good as any of Oppen's writing, not because of especially striking imagery or especially well-measured sounds, but because it reaches a peak of celebration fully deserved: we “breathe the open / Miracle // Of place” in the poem's diction, its use of line length, ending, and space, and its sense of rhythm.

The poet's enthusiasm is consoling without, however, limiting mystery by demanding acceptance of some dogma. Oppen certainly keeps the quality of mystery alive. “The self is no mystery,” he writes in “World, World—,” “the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on.”

Notes

1. George Oppen, This in Which (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 85. All subsequent references to this volume, hereafter abbreviated TIW, will be made in the text.

2. This can easily be shown by referring to “Alpine,” a poem first published in This in Which but now available in three different, later versions. The gulf between self and world is expressed originally as follows:

   And the will cowers

   In the given.

   Eros—the will—
   Eros!

   That no thing
   Shelters

   (TIW, p. 58)

   In the final version, the parallel lines suggest a more intricate, and in that sense more moderate view:

   And the will cowers
   In the given

   .....

   The distinctions of what one does
   And what is done to him blurrs [sic]

   Bodies dream selves
   For themselves

   .....

   Yet we move
   Are moving

   Are we not

   .....

   (Collected Poems, New York: New Directions, 1975, p. 116)

3. George Oppen, “The Mind's Own Place,” Kulchur, 3, No. 10 (1963), 8.

4. Thus Heidegger's concern to demonstrate that falsehood does not have existence, denies existence: “… untruth as the opposite of truth can be left out of account when it is a matter of coming to grips with the pure essence of truth” (“On the Essence of Truth,” tr. R.F.C. Hull and Alan Crick, in Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, ed. W. Brock [Chicago: Regnery, 1949], p. 298).

5. George Oppen, interviewed by L.S. Dembo (25 April 1968), Contempororary Literature, 10 (1969), 174. Other poets have expressed analogous fears. Even Christopher Middleton, for instance, has said, “I do note that verb-forms are being marginalized in current American. … A poem can fight this deadly undertow by creating patterns of dissent, organized around verbs and present participles” (in “Supplement: On Rhythm in America,” Agenda, 11, Nos. 2-3 (1973), 55-6.

6. Henri Matisse, quoted by Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 42.

7. Ezra Pound, “Praefatio,” Active Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 9.

8. For a reproduction of the statue by Giovanni di Bologna, see Frederick Hartt, History of Renaissance Italian Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1969), p. 590.

9. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963), p. 207.

10. Oppen/Dembo interview, p. 176.

11. George Oppen, “A Note on Tom McGrath & C,” West End, 1, No. 2 (1972), 10-1.

12. William Bronk, “The Nature of the Universe,” The World, The Worldless (New York: New Directions, 1964), p.

13. Denise Levertov, The Jacob's Ladder (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 58.