Within The Inscribed, Michael Heller
Shearsman Books here is the link(2021)
by Patrick Pritchett
Beginning with 1985’s Conviction’s Net of Branches, a groundbreaking book-length study of the Objectivist poets and continuing through such brilliant and discerning works of critical and personal essays as Speaking The Estranged and Uncertain Poetries, poet Michael Heller has provided us with some of the sharpest criticism on modernist and contemporary avant-garde poetry we have. Heller, of course, has been one of our finest poets for decades now, as his massive collected poems from 2012, The Constellation is A Name, amply testifies. And of course, he’s still writing. Telescope: Selected Poems appeared from NYRB Books in 2019.
But his critical work has not really received the attention it’s due. It’s every bit as cogent, penetrating, and elegant as his poetry. Within The Inscribed -- a collection of occasional essays and interviews – begins with an audacious statement which for some requires no explanation but for others might serve as a provocation, namely, that logos is divine. Yet this claim is hardly novel, deriving from no less than ancient Judaic sources by which logos is understood, as it is in the Johannine Gospel, as the energizing and informing principle of the world. As the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, has it, the entire world was created from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alef-bet.
But his critical work has not really received the attention it’s due. It’s every bit as cogent, penetrating, and elegant as his poetry. Within The Inscribed -- a collection of occasional essays and interviews – begins with an audacious statement which for some requires no explanation but for others might serve as a provocation, namely, that logos is divine. Yet this claim is hardly novel, deriving from no less than ancient Judaic sources by which logos is understood, as it is in the Johannine Gospel, as the energizing and informing principle of the world. As the Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, has it, the entire world was created from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alef-bet.
|
Twenty-two letters He engraved, hewed out, weighed, changed, combined, and formed out of them all existing forms, and all forms that may in the future be called into existence.
|
In the Middle Ages this theory is elaborated on by Abraham Abulafia, who develops a complex system of language mysticism, the goal of which is the apprehension of the numinous through meditation on the letters of the alef-bet. As Moshe Idel observes, for Abulafia, “language contains a structure that conveys the true form of reality.” However, this reality is to be attained to not through the faithful adherence to a doctrine of similitudes, but rather through a midrashic hermeneutic by which letters are freely made to form potent new combinations. Logos, in other words, is a poetics.
The animating phrase that sparks Heller’s meditations is from Geoffrey Hartman: “the sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed.” Hartman elsewhere notes that despite the rise of terms like “the materiality of the signifier” language is still haunted, and in a sense, funded by a spiritual quality that cannot be eradicated.
The essays, talks, dialogues, and interviews collected here comprise a sort of late career miscellany but are lent cohesion thanks to the strengths of Heller’s concerns over the years: the sacred; Buddhism; the work of George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, H.D, and Pound; Benjamin and Scholem; and Judaism. Taken together this slim book provides a vibrant X-ray of Heller’s magnanimous range of interests and will be of interest to both long-time readers and newcomers.
Heller has long been invested in Buddhism but his account of a quasi-phenomenological poetics in “Bodhidharma and Poetry without Credentials” is notable more for what it has to say about Merleau-Ponty’s classic essay, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” than for any insights into Buddhism vis a vis poetry. Since R.H. Blyth at least Western writers have striven to read Western literature through a Buddhist lens, a practice that’s come to seem reductive since it tends to rely on such tired shibboleths as “awakened mind,” a phrase that’s become utterly reified. Heller observes that for Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne’s injunction that “conception cannot precede execution” models a kind of Buddhist via negativa. Fair enough, but why go so far afield when Keats’ example of negative capability lies so much closer to hand? And why. for so many Western poets enamored of it, must Buddhism be the final court of appeal when it comes to ontology and aesthetic practice? (Heller alludes to Keats’ concept in a later essay, which only points up the fact that this collection could have used more thorough editing). This simplistic binary makes Western metaphysics seem lacking, which it manifestly is not, as Heller’s deep attentiveness to Judaism makes abundantly clear.
Much richer and rewarding is Heller’s energizing conversation with poet and scholar Norman Finkelstein, “On The Poetics of the Jewish Godhead.” This warm lively dialogue between two old friends forms an active investigative inquiry into how a post-secular Judaic poetics might speak the Name beyond names without collapsing into idolatry. Finkelstein kicks off this intricate duet with Gershon Scholem’s commentary on tzimtzum, the Kabbalistic notion, first put forward by Isaac Luria, that God had to withdraw from Creation in order to liberate it. This leads Heller to
The animating phrase that sparks Heller’s meditations is from Geoffrey Hartman: “the sacred has so inscribed itself in language that while it must be interpreted, it cannot be removed.” Hartman elsewhere notes that despite the rise of terms like “the materiality of the signifier” language is still haunted, and in a sense, funded by a spiritual quality that cannot be eradicated.
The essays, talks, dialogues, and interviews collected here comprise a sort of late career miscellany but are lent cohesion thanks to the strengths of Heller’s concerns over the years: the sacred; Buddhism; the work of George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, H.D, and Pound; Benjamin and Scholem; and Judaism. Taken together this slim book provides a vibrant X-ray of Heller’s magnanimous range of interests and will be of interest to both long-time readers and newcomers.
Heller has long been invested in Buddhism but his account of a quasi-phenomenological poetics in “Bodhidharma and Poetry without Credentials” is notable more for what it has to say about Merleau-Ponty’s classic essay, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” than for any insights into Buddhism vis a vis poetry. Since R.H. Blyth at least Western writers have striven to read Western literature through a Buddhist lens, a practice that’s come to seem reductive since it tends to rely on such tired shibboleths as “awakened mind,” a phrase that’s become utterly reified. Heller observes that for Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne’s injunction that “conception cannot precede execution” models a kind of Buddhist via negativa. Fair enough, but why go so far afield when Keats’ example of negative capability lies so much closer to hand? And why. for so many Western poets enamored of it, must Buddhism be the final court of appeal when it comes to ontology and aesthetic practice? (Heller alludes to Keats’ concept in a later essay, which only points up the fact that this collection could have used more thorough editing). This simplistic binary makes Western metaphysics seem lacking, which it manifestly is not, as Heller’s deep attentiveness to Judaism makes abundantly clear.
Much richer and rewarding is Heller’s energizing conversation with poet and scholar Norman Finkelstein, “On The Poetics of the Jewish Godhead.” This warm lively dialogue between two old friends forms an active investigative inquiry into how a post-secular Judaic poetics might speak the Name beyond names without collapsing into idolatry. Finkelstein kicks off this intricate duet with Gershon Scholem’s commentary on tzimtzum, the Kabbalistic notion, first put forward by Isaac Luria, that God had to withdraw from Creation in order to liberate it. This leads Heller to
|
define the sacred as that which has been made intelligible and in that process has made the world intelligible. The ‘mystery’ (not the supernatural) of the sacred – the arena beyond its literalness, the possibility that this arena is invisible, is to be read via the office of language.
|
This eloquent formulation proposes that poetics is a form of world-building, that logos embodies a world, ala Heidegger. “The office of language” promises to deliver us to the real by way of words. Finkelstein amplifies this by remarking that midrash may serve as more than mere commentary; that it can “actually prove to be a means of invention and innovation.” Heller closes the exchange by suggesting that “perhaps for the Jewish poet, an image of God would be synonymous with that looming void our very words enable.” This chimes with Laura (Riding) Jackson’s astute debunking of content in poetry: “What is a poem? A poem is nothing. By persistence it can be made something; but then it is something, not a poem.”
To my mind the key essay is “Now-Time Poetics: Under The Sign of Benjamin.” Heller has visited the topic of Benjamin and his influence before, in Uncertain Poetries, and the poem “Letter and Dream of Walter Benjamin,” as well as his magnificent libretto for the opera Constellations of Waking, based on Benjamin’s life. Here he contemplates the significance of Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the shock of the urban environment on poetry in general. Heller’s inquiries into Benjamin’s use of the concept of the monad represent an original contribution to the ongoing commentary (midrash) on Benjamin. He inventively links Benjamin’s remarks on the aura to his own notion of “diasporic poetics” (see Uncertain Poetries), writing that “renaming is the essence of poetry, renaming in the sense that the poem is a name for a thing or state of affairs which did not previously exist.” That renaming should fund poesis goes to the heart of a Judaic poetics that draws its authority from midrash’s infinite recombinatory possibilities.
In many ways these thematically linked pieces read like a victory lap as Heller returns to and expands on topics and motifs he has written about before. While there’s a certain amount of recycling from his previous essays that strikes a needlessly repetitive note, in the end this is a quibble. This collection is a must-read for those who have followed Heller’s long and path-breaking career as a critic and his powerful and moving post-Objectivist lyricism. Heller remains a deeply welcome and enriching guide through the mysteries of logos, midrash, and poetics.
To my mind the key essay is “Now-Time Poetics: Under The Sign of Benjamin.” Heller has visited the topic of Benjamin and his influence before, in Uncertain Poetries, and the poem “Letter and Dream of Walter Benjamin,” as well as his magnificent libretto for the opera Constellations of Waking, based on Benjamin’s life. Here he contemplates the significance of Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire and the shock of the urban environment on poetry in general. Heller’s inquiries into Benjamin’s use of the concept of the monad represent an original contribution to the ongoing commentary (midrash) on Benjamin. He inventively links Benjamin’s remarks on the aura to his own notion of “diasporic poetics” (see Uncertain Poetries), writing that “renaming is the essence of poetry, renaming in the sense that the poem is a name for a thing or state of affairs which did not previously exist.” That renaming should fund poesis goes to the heart of a Judaic poetics that draws its authority from midrash’s infinite recombinatory possibilities.
In many ways these thematically linked pieces read like a victory lap as Heller returns to and expands on topics and motifs he has written about before. While there’s a certain amount of recycling from his previous essays that strikes a needlessly repetitive note, in the end this is a quibble. This collection is a must-read for those who have followed Heller’s long and path-breaking career as a critic and his powerful and moving post-Objectivist lyricism. Heller remains a deeply welcome and enriching guide through the mysteries of logos, midrash, and poetics.