ON THE “TRANSMITTED INTO”: The receptive poetics of Joan Mitchell, Jack Spicer, and H.D.
Joan Mitchell, “Dune,” 1970. Oil paint on canvas; 98 x 78 5/8 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of Dr. Charles and Linda Hamlin on the occasion of Dianne Vanderlip's 25th year with the Contemporary Collection. © Estate of Joan Mitchell
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I hadn’t thought of Joan Mitchell in years. Then, there she was, a couple weeks ago at the Denver Art Museum.
All of Mitchell’s paintings have always struck me as uncannily representative of the poet’s effort. In her “Dune” (1970), I see something semantically aspirational in those blocks. The orange block on the left settled in its place; the crowd of blue, green, and off-white blocks on the right still falling, still jumbled, still to be properly arranged. And all the white above the blocks: that undifferentiated preverbal space from which all expression falls. Something stanzaic is happening. It looks like a cross-section of inspiration or enthusiasm. Painted metaphors for what the poet is up to. Not because that was Mitchell’s plan, but because the painter, the poet—the artist—are all making a bargain with the never-been-expressed (and wishes to be).
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I think specifically of Jack Spicer, an American poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance movement, who might have shuddered with recognition if he saw Mitchell’s “Dune.” He might have wondered if his Martians were real. In Spicer’s “Vancouver Lecture Series” he draws playfully on paranormal means to explain the origin of the poem, of inspiration. And Mitchell’s blocks look like a literal representation of these paranormal origins. Spicer begins by asserting that the poem comes from “the Outside of you.” He writes, “That essentially you are something which is being transmitted into”: as if a Martian comes into a room with children’s blocks with A, B, C, D, E which are in English and he tries to convey a message. This is the way the source of energy goes. But the blocks, on the other hand, are always resisting it. (Spicer 8)
The children’s blocks are not intended for Martian application; they’re awkward in the Martian’s hand. Insufficient as they are, they’re all we have. What we feel, what makes its impression on us, must be contorted and molded to fit inside the word-blocks that will lend it expression.
In Mitchell’s blocks of paint, I see these stubborn, but necessary materials, in a different medium, in paint. I look at Mitchell’s “Dune” and feel something far out, cosmic, and airy trying to break through onto our plane of understanding, using whatever means available to convey its message. I try again and again to read the blocks. Maybe it’s enough to know that something is trying to reach us. And to feel so remote from it: maybe that’s our dune.
Spicer only invoked the Martians and blocks analogically—“as if a Martian comes…”—yet, here they are (Spicer 8). I lean into the paranormal sensation. Feelings that cannot contribute to “the future and broad daylight of truth” move around in me. It feels good, naughty, illegal, free (Blanchot 247).
Spicer’s elaboration of the poem’s source of energy gives composition to the relational identity and porous subjectivity of the poet: they are a vessel, a receiver of transmissions, a conduit that the Outside (outside of comprehension/knowledge/human possibility) hijacks and leaves tangible traces through. Traces we can see on our plane. Spicer’s poetics therefore suggests the possibility of outside faculties/agencies that sometimes take interest in us and act through us. He forgets our modern insistence on an omniscient interiority (as the origin of art) in exchange for a real and involved relationship with the rest of the world, with those ungovernable, unmeasurable, and unknowable things that don’t fit—can’t, won’t fit—into the scientific inventorying of the world. The poem is therefore the basis of human-Outside relation.
Mitchell lets us see this phenomenon as though we’ve come across its preserved dinosaur footprints. Not a paleo-historical fossil, but exo-historical. The painter does not have to deal with freeing their medium from meaning-models imposed on them. Yellow paint and blue paint do not have a determined meaning. And so the abstract expressionists return expression itself to its original autonomy. Mitchell paints what it looks like to be a poet possessed by miraculous feelings in search of a lexicological approximation.
These approximations are, to our comprehension, always somewhere between completely opaque and shy of the decipherable. Mitchell’s “Dune” seems to make patient concessions to its human viewer, like “Dune” studied our language and is trying to follow a formal etiquette, attentive to the shapes of syntax, to the horizontal assemblage of sentences. It wants to be deciphered. I can feel a companionable intelligence behind it, something tapping on the glass between us and the Outside. Yet, perhaps its opacity is the mark of its “authenticity,” its organic reality, because no cosmic creation is ever designed for our intellectual metabolism. When Life approaches us, as Maurice Blanchot says, “what approaches is the nonserious and nontrue” (247). Because, as Spicer writes in “Thing Language,” “The ocean / Does not mean to be listened to” (373):
Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. No
One listens to poetry.
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On this fall day I walk down my block. A chickadee harasses the still air, yellow leaves dance lethargically down to their final destiny, a woman rounds the corner at the same time I do, snorts, miffed perhaps by our surprise encounter, and my shoes scrape rhythmically on the dry flagstone with each step. Somewhere a roof is being replaced, the firing nail gun and crew singing along to mariachi reach me by fuzzy echo. But I am thinking about my work schedule next week: why those shifts? Are they mad at me? I was a bit slow and hungover at my last shift.
That is what is cognized. And here lies the poet’s mission, to find a way to bring what isn’t cognized immediately into consciousness. Language can bring cognition into contact with previously secret feelings. I do not know how many leaves fell on that walk because I did not count them. I’d have failed anyway, frustrated by my limits again, confronted by the fact that what is cognized is impossibly scarce, a fragment.
Because what is felt, in full, happens with or without me cognizing it. And affects me by subtler means. Did those lazy leaves cool my frustration? Or did they solidify my hunch that things are mildly and unendingly doomed?
There is a reciprocal relationship between what is cognized and what is legible—communicable, what is moldable to the rigid templates we call words. Language lends to cognition feelings that may otherwise have always remained obscure. Language can, at least in the most approximate sense, give expression to a feeling, hold a feeling inside it.
And by a reciprocal relation, cognition gives to language its vitality, the pressure that pushes it into new territory: neologisms, slang, and all forms of word-smithing. Because there are reasons for thinking through what we feel, we ask language to uncover more. I don’t know what the reasons are. Why we want to think through what we feel is on the way to asking why we exist.
Language might be characterized as: the search for more of what is felt. Drops pulled out from the deluge, frozen into forms, and added to a library.
But I would like to object to a bias that predetermines what is extracted from the deluge and made available to cognition, made intelligible. I am opposed to a narrow selectivity that only allows into cognition that which is amenable to History, to what Blanchot calls “the overall human undertaking,” the story of the human as protagonist in a world of dumb material; matter without intelligence(s) (212). A confirmation bias that prohibits the world from speaking. This bias rejects as delusion anything that does not affirm the manipulation of the earth and life toward the completion of History. Unless temporally effective, this bias says: there is no reason to lend something felt to cognition (and therefore to language) or expression (Blanchot 213). History’s dominant epistemology doesn’t have a reason to care for or recognize the work of Mitchell’s “Dune.” The expressions she lends painted matter to are abstract ones, incompatible with any modern calendar. Non-representative, they do not belong to History, or an ascendant narrative of artistic progress. Like the ocean that doesn’t mean to be listened to, “Dune” doesn’t mean to be listened to. An expression abstracted doesn’t mean to be listened to.
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This “transmitted into” identity, this self that is porous and prone to receiving messages, this artist-as-conduit/medium/instrument of “Dune”/Martian/Outside—there are two reasons why this construction of subjectivity is worth cultivating.
By its basic nature, the “transmitted into” identity is incapable of anything that would advance the objective of History “where,” as Blanchot characterizes it, “the whole will be achieved under the mastery of man and his use” (213). The artist/poet is never a master of anything, they are mastered, are subject to the goals and intentions of a Martian, they advance a “Dune”-agenda, are possessed by a force and intelligence that can only ever propel the goals of humanity by accident. Other accidents also happen. By assuming this conductive identity, the poet becomes a participant in processes that—like rain, like time, emotion, aesthetics, etc—propel life, enact life. Charles Olson writes in his essay “Human Universe,”“[A]rt is the only twin life has—its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact” (10).
For Olson, art becomes a real metaphor for life’s physics. Art acts, and lives. And because art still does, without our consent, contain meaning, it also confronts us with a radical fact: that meanings don’t need humans. Meaning exists before us. This, however, does not mean we aren’t invited to participate in its unfolding. In fact I feel the opposite; I feel like the Outside has been waiting for me to RSVP my attendance, as though “Dune” and Martians have been partying without me for years, keen to see me, but perfectly capable of having their own fun without me.
This is the second reason why the “transmitted into” identity is worth cultivating, a reason refreshingly unbothered with any political justification—unless we allow for a politics that pertains to the universe and places the earth, seasons, emotions, “Dune,” and martians in elected office.
I don’t need to stubbornly cling to the narrative that places my species in the protagonist’s seat of the cosmos—and don’t really want to when I hear stars and winds, feel the agitations of pain and love like entities asking me to help them in their works. I get to be part of something cosmic, part of the stories, ambitions, and fellowships that move the universe. I realize now that love is something like a force or spirit, always hovering above us, sometimes attaching itself to bodies when the conditions, when the emotional and aesthetic chemistries, are ideal. It’s an “over-world” energy, to put it in H.D.’s terms:
The fruit tree and the human body are both receiving stations, capable of storing up energy, over-world energy. That energy is always there but can be transmitted only to another body or another mind that is in sympathy with it, or keyed to the same pitch. (47)
When the over-world love energy finds a body and mind that are in sympathy with it, keyed to it, a region in the body is excited that becomes part of that energy’s habitat. I feel the sensation of love’s over-world energy being transmitted into my body like a migrating bird who has found a riparian sanctuary in which to roost. A bird that assumes the authority of a mental faculty over me, an intelligence, a brain:
The love-region is excited by the appearance of beauty or of the loved one, its energy not dissipated in physical relation, takes on its character of mind, becomes this womb-brain or love-brain that I have visualized as a jellyfish in the body. (H.D. 22)
For H.D., love is its own intelligence, which she distinguishes by approximations, a “love-brain” or “womb-brain,” something that animates an invisible entity inside of us, something she sees, for whatever reason, as an interior jellyfish (22). Her style of neurology might be blatantly vigilante, invalid to the scientist, but what makes H.D.’s claim far more relevant than any verified science is the way it matches my experience of love. No wonder I have no claim over the love feeling, no say over when it will find me or how I might direct it. The love feeling directs me, as a Martian directs a poem. Love moves by sympathetic pitches, is transmitted into bodies that are keyed to it. It’s precognitive because it’s pre-human. Therefore post-human? “The energy is always there,” says H.D.
I bet love survives me. I bet the more room I make for love to transmit itself into me, the more I partake in sensations that will never expire. The more I give my mortal duration the chance to reverberate on the eternal plane, the more I allow for a space that contains some of me in the afterlife. A relation to death is forming.
It’s like every time I apprehend the beauty of something, my body and soul answer a call a Martian has placed. Because, like love, the feeling that something is beautiful is pre-cognitive, an aspiration that is in search of a poem to live in. I don’t look at these mountains and deduce by rational means that they are beautiful. I’m struck by the fact. Like a Martian is making decisions for me. The Martian and my body talk: my sensibility and the world engage in a relationship. And this relationship is the connective tissue that is the habitat of the over-world energy that is love.
To be transmitted into is to enter into the possession of other powers, powers that I cannot, by my own intellectual chops, put, into expression. I need “Dune” or a Martian to help me.
If someone asked me to name one “of the inexpressible powers of our life,” I’d be very confused at first, probably think they are up to some tricks, and then say easy: love (Blanchot 129). It is under the duress of “over-world energies”—such as love—that I feel like I am brought into the central thrust of things, in from the marginal (H.D. 47).
It is from this revelation that I reject such facile and pseudoscientific reductions of love to nothing more than a biological determinism, the expression of a survival drive. I invert the formula: we do not love so that we will survive, we survive so that Love will have material into which to put its expressions. We survive to dance. Songs are the strings that connect a mortal marionette to a Martian puppeteer who is themself an agent of Love’s.
Whether this is true or not, I am totally indifferent. Possessed by this conviction that the world is alive with innumerable intelligences, all of them engaged in variously aesthetic ambitions, I see the earth’s material stuff, its bodies and citizens, not as an inventory of resources, but as neighbors, peers, as the original facilitators of Love’s life. If we, humans, exist as the mediums of an artistic and dramatic species of Martians, then let us redesign our cities, our professional structures, laws, erotics, and morals, our reasons for all things, according to the maximum proliferation of Love’s elaborations. Let our structures become teeming habitats where all of the “over-world energies,” where all the “inexpressible powers of our life” can find unlikely, surprising, and durable sustenance (H.D. 47 & Blanchot 129).
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If language is the technology that brings feeling into contact with cognition, then it is the poet who is capable of building unimagined structures to acquaint us with unestablished relations. That’s what the poetic license gives us. A chance to break grammar and contort words into illegal significations. Rogue punctuations, the vigilante’s syntax. Except it isn’t enough to just break the law (although I do endorse this). We break it, which is fun, but also necessary to the translation of ostracized feeling. We break the law in order to introduce to cognition the conviction that this world is not an empty amalgam of dumb matter, no, it speaks. Matter itself, as proven by art, acts: feeling and looking around for fruit trees, human bodies, anything it might take as a “receiving station.” Our structures and selves become the fields, plains, and meadows where “Dune,” a speaking Martian, or anything—some unknown and invisible migratory bird—can visit and sometimes leave their expressions behind for us to contemplate.
I see metropolises, careers, traffic-laws, education systems—an entire politics and ethics of immortal action. “Dune”-Love-Martian City. The city of inexpressible powers, composed of “transmitted into” citizens, those people belonging to an original and real government—the universe (Spicer 8).
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* Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translation by Ann Smock. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
* H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers: 1983.
* Mitchell, Joan. Dune. 1970. Oil paint on canvas. Denver Art Museum, Denver.
* Olson, Charles. Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Auerhahn Society, 1965; Rpt. New York: Grove, 1967.
* Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middleton CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
* ________. The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Tom Jeep Carlson teaches First Year Writing at Metropolitan State University of Denver, holds a couple graduate degrees of debatable use-value, a BA from The Evergreen State College, and a pile of debt he will pay off when he’s rich. He has been published in Edge City (Noco Books), peel lit, Metapsychosis, digital vestiges (Black Sun Lit), and The Ballet Review. His poems attempt whale syntax, afterlife physics, hosting gods, the body’s mode of thought, and the poetics of poetry’s obsolescence.