2. La apuesta metodológica por la economía experimental
2.3 Limitaciones de la economía experimental en el estudio de los sistemas
Of course Kindness cannot and does not exclusively depend on moments that begin with something akin to empathy or an explicit “actant” such as “so much depends upon”. The resonance is at once emphatic and subtle, and the contrast of apparent meaning draws out the reader’s experience to engage a vibrant reparative reading. That is, the “behaviour” of the language in the poem will inform the “behaviour” of its reading or its reader’s understanding, which echoes Olson’s idea of “the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred”.185 For example:
X
The universality of things draws me toward the candy with melon flowers that open about the edge of refuse proclaiming without accent the quality of the farmer’s shoulders and his daughter’s accidental skin, so sweet with clover and the small yellow cinquefoil in the parched places.186
The crucial partnering of words in this poem occurs in the eighth line, as the surprising adjective “accidental” for “skin” catapults the poem into the realms of Kindness. The use of the word is so brilliantly timed that it refracts and bounces off itself and the poem around it, with “accidental” ringing with the “accent”. It implies a slip in the poem or a slip of clothing, implying the accidental quality of the nature of human beauty. The poem achieves its most synchronistic moment when the placing, rhythm and assonance of the words “farmer’s/shoulder’s and his daughter’s/accidental skin” muddle together in a heady confusion, with the shoulders seeming to belong to the daughter. The possessive apostrophe creates a web of lineage between bodies, paternal control, masculine work and feminine allure. It reinforces the fleeting insubstantiality of the physical, the slip of observing the skin of another or the slip of a garment possibly from a shoulder, which is still resonating from the farmer’s shoulder. There is a sense of guilty delight in accidental skin, a strange and slightly erotic moment of observing the unobserved, a worrying sweetness which of course is emphasised in “so sweet”, so that this pair of words thoroughly articulates a glance. The bitterness of the “s” and the small “o” sound puckering the mouth, one can taste the words. It is an instance of communication and knowing that is broadened specifically by its resistance to meaning.
The resistance to meaning may be found in the conflation of the observer and the observed, indicating the bizarre complicity that the phrase creates in a moment that is unassuming. A faultless moment, an intangible viewer with no agenda and the
skin of a shoulder with no agenda make this moment ripe with beauty and deception. This functions similarly to the quality of dispassionate observation discussed in the commentary on the “Red Wheelbarrow” poem. This is the result of the authentic smudge that Williams writes with “accidental skin”, the phrase evincing an explicit blur. This moment is significantly couched in a fascinating study of edges and contrasts but the “accidental skin” pierces the florid and cloyed, almost olfactorily present contrast between “refuse” and “melon”. Another crucial partnering is evident here with the fleeting and delicious terminal longevity of fruit representing the moment of opportunity for consumption. A poetic momento mori, a Dutch still life like the skin of the farmer’s daughter is fleeting too. This is precisely the conflicted experience that suggests Kindness in Williams’s work (The “cinquefoil” is a flower that is often referred to as “barren strawberry” it’s Latin name is Potentilla: which is an expression power-“potent”- affixed with the diminutive-“illa”. This reading represents a paranoid moment.) Notions of the flavour of taste and deliciousness strain against the inevitability of rot and decay, an example of the competing urges to preserve, devour, prevent, take and save. A puritanical tradition reliant on remembering the fleeting pleasures of this mortal coil warns against placing any stock in them while delighting in representing them visually. These contradictions lie at the heart of the simple complexity of Williams’s cruel form of Kindness. That is, while Kindness as evinced as a “grammar of reading” is necessarily present in the aesthetic and ethical oscillations of the poem itself, Williams’s poems can demonstrate a form of certainty akin to Pound’s. The distinction I make here is that Williams’s poems have a swift and incisive syntactical ethics that as I will demonstrate can be read, through a reading of Kindness that observes behaviour, as emotionally cruel while poetically Kind. The American puritanical tradition at play in Williams’s work represents a fascinating avenue for a discussion of Kindness, especially in a context that considers Pound who, by the Thirties was deeply invested in his commitment to Fascism.187 In contrast to Pound’s anti-Semitism is indeed, the work of the Jewish
187 Burton Hatlen makes a curious argument for reading Pound’s Cantos as “the record of Pound’s struggle” with the divided conflict that Hatlen argues produced Pound’s fascism. He figures Pound as an individual who through a series of conflicting modern ideals in response to Capitalism and a personal penchant for dogmatic reasoning becomes a fascist rather than deciding to be a common-all- garden fascist. Hatlen sets up the conflicting personas that comprise Pound the fascist in two columns: “On the right side of [his] chart, a frightened authoritarian steps out, terrified at the threat which a rising tide of mass democracy poses to the cultural treasures of human kind, determined to preserve (through violence if necessary …) the power and the property of a ruling elite, and no less determined to expugn [sic.] from the nation the alien, subversive influence of Jews. Yet if we read down the left
writers of Objectivism who address their Jewish heritage with varying levels of intensity and with naturally varying results. However, while this consideration will not be ignored entirely, it cannot be the primary concern of a work based on reparative readings. Nevertheless, the notion of exile that Kindness is developed upon is central to the poems being analysed here. For this reason, the cultural heritage and the position the poems occupy is, as discussed in the introduction, significant to the reparative method adopted in this argument.
Morality is often an arbitrary and compromised condition with which to judge anything and is generally considered superfluous to literary criticism because it can present all manner of warped mirrors with which to consider a text, none of which are ethical, aesthetic or reparative. However, the “cruelty” mentioned in the last paragraph requires departing briefly from exclusively reading Spring and All. “This is just to say” is the Williams poem that probably equals “A red wheel/barrow” in fame. It is a relevant digression as the poem, perhaps most explicitly of all of Williams’s poetry, enacts the duplicity that, when present in a poem, is working on the reader, drawing him or her into a very human ambiguous moment. Kenneth Koch makes a wonderful demonstration of the ubiquitous, seething and sinister gentility that pervades this poem in “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”, exposing the dramatic scale of the “narrative” by adjusting the slippery coolness or entitled cruelty the poem seems to have by virtue of it being a poem:
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
side of [his] chart, a very different political persona emerges: a “Quaker Pound,” committed to the creation of a peaceful and just community, grounded in love and the harmonies of nature.” Burton Hatlen, “Ezra Pound and Fascism” from Ezra Pound and History, ed. by Marianne Korn (Orono, Me: The National Poetry Foundation, 1985), 163.
Hatlen perceives vulnerability in Pound too, but of course, to a different end to the one that I pursue when I examine Pound’s pre-fascist poem of exile “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards where I am the doctor!188
Williams’s original is a feat of framing and addressing that combines the unsettlingly quiet domesticity of “red wheel/barrow” with the enticing “you” discussed earlier in relation to Owen. The crystalline and rich poem seems to replicate the “icebox” it refers to, as the single syllable words greatly outnumber the two or three syllable words. Consequently, the rhythm of “This is just to say” is staccato and clipped, yet it is submerged in the utterly approachable tone of the poem:
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which
you were probably saving
for breakfast Forgive me
they were delicious so sweet
and so cold189
As for “meaning”, the poem produces an odd, reflexive narrative in its action as a confession. The line “so sweet” echoes the “accidental skin” followed by “and so cold” and drags the consciousness of the poem to the plums. It seems to offer a type of false friendliness, which serves to draw out the perverse deliciousness not of plums but of the act of taking. The afterthought of description reinforces the nonchalance of
188 Koch, Kenneth, Selected Poems 1950-1982 (New York: Random House, 1985), 51.
189 William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems 1921-1931, pref. by Wallace Stevens (New York: The Objectivist Press, 1934), 50.
the two preceding verses. The “icebox” as preservation enters the poem because the plums are cold to eat and the taking is “so sweet.” This is not considerateness but is revelling in the deprivation of another in the guise of this kind and gentle warning about something that has already been done. It ultimately suggests the subtlety of communication itself, the irrefutability of the written word. The reader initially tastes the cold sweet plums but the structure of the poem invites him/her to taste the agenda of an act of joyful selfishness. Both kind and unkind, it is a scalpel of a poem that cuts into understanding and is an example of Williams’s cruel kindness, secretive and submerged.
These readings demonstrate how “behaviour” can be present in a poem, how the content of the poem is greater than the sum of its parts as the poem exposes vital tensions between people and poetry that the presence of understanding and shared knowledge develops. It explores the alienation of a poem, the potential for cruelty sanctioned by verse, the acceptability of the written word and the power of a friendly tone. The framing of the poem is central to this. While framed as an abandoned note, it is specifically written yet significantly delivered in a spoken tone that epitomises the old phrase “familiarity breeds contempt”. This is an example of the “behaviour” of a poem as distinctly not what the poem is about but rather how it is about. The presence is the poem itself as it enacts a strange chicanery upon the reader, lulling him/her with tone and sweetness yet describing a moment of selfishness that the reader as “you” totally sympathises with because the syntax reveals the most charming elements of selfishness. This invites the reader into the poem’s subjectivity yet it is its convincing and sympathetic tone that, as Koch points out, is far from the point. This is a sense of an experience delivered in a poem. While it is evidently not objective, it is engrossing, but this weakness is still highly seductive, a moment that is recognisable and yet somehow indefinable. This is its precise nature. There might be, as Koch suggests, a theatricality to this dialogue but perhaps that incisive quality of the good dramatist is what mobilises this reading of the poem. This link suggests a link to the demonstrably human nature of Kindness in poetry itself, perhaps a moment that is vibrant and singular in its recognisable qualities so the reader can engage with its “behaviour”.