Pure Work: Mallarmé, Mondrian and Adamson (part 3)

Lozenge for Brennan1

A first reading of ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ traces out the lineage and reciprocity between Mallarmé, Brennan and Adamson, as Adamson draws Symbolism out into Brennan’s ‘POETRY OF THE ROSE POETRY OF THE HEAD,’ Mallarmé’s ‘WHITE ABYSS’ and Adamson’s own ‘RIVER POETRY OF / HEADLAND SYMBOLIST.’ Central to Adamson’s lozenge is Symbolism’s relation to faith, thought and death in the context laid down by the lozenge’s first line:

TIME    WORLD    LIVING    SPACE    IMAGINATION

‘Lozenge for Brennan’ places poetry in immediate relation to the world, stressing in the first line a trajectory between, and it is the nature of the poem that the trajectory flows both ways, to/from ‘TIME’ and to/from ‘IMAGINATION.’ Adamson appears on one level to suggest that the poem is itself the ‘LIVING SPACE’ through which temporality may be assuaged through the powers of the ‘IMAGINATION.’ This, though not apparent at first, may be seen under the imprimatur of Christopher Brennan’s reading of Symbolism, which assimilates both the Romantic conception of the imagination and theosophy’s theory of correspondences. Adamson underscores the explicit mysticism of Brennan’s reading of Symbolism, in the second line of the lozenge, by signing Brennan’s poetry under the Rose of Gnosticism (‘POETRY OF THE ROSE’), itself a symbol of divine mystery. ‘THE POETRY OF THE ROSE’ refers the reader back to Brennan’s suite ‘The Forest of the Night,’ and most pointedly to Poem 56: ‘pale absence of the ruin’d rose.’2 Elsewhere Brennan noted: ‘I cannot conceive of poetry otherwise than as an expression of the religious instinct.’3 This instinct and the despairing tones most approximate to Mallarmé’s own are perhaps nowhere else more perfectly rendered than in the image of the ‘shatter’d traceries’ of Brennan’s rose window. In the face of ‘the outer day’s indifferent stare,’ Brennan catches the absence of God in the symbol of the traceries, continuing:

where now its disenhallowe’d face

beholds the petal-ribs enclose

nought, in their web of shatter’d lace,

save this pale absence of the rose.

Brennan’s use of the rose as an embodiment of the absence of God is a remarkably effective metaphor for a lapsed though finally longing faith. Rather than turn towards transcendent possibilities, Brennan allows the poem to afford a sense of desolation and meaninglessness instilled with an immediate and fragile beauty. This beauty is, however, premised upon the ‘pale absence’ itself, a sense of nothingness, ‘the ruin’d rose.’ Brennan moves from the experience of the phenomenal world, the ‘gray and dusty daylight’ of the first line, to the abstracted and idealised absence of the rose, both transcendence and the absence of transcendence.

In ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ Adamson frames abstract and speculative thought in terms of ‘LIVING SPACE’ and ‘THE RIVER POETRY,’ ‘A NIGHT.’ This last conjures once again Brennan’s ‘Forest of Night’ but displaces it to Adamson’s own speculative terrain of the river. Whereas Brennan claims poetry as a movement ‘toward the source,’ Adamson follows Mallarmé’s lead uncovering poetry as the experience of a paradox whereby ‘LIVING SPACE’ and ‘DEATH SPACE,’ the ‘BLACK SPACE LIFE ROCKS’ and ‘WHITE ABYSS’ commune. Many years before, Adamson commented: ‘there’s no such thing as the virgin white page for me … it’s a white abyss.’4 It is this question of purity, of the virginal and the abyssal, the same questions Mallarmé contested time and again, that the lozenge engages.

The White Abyss: crude and essential words

Blanchot makes much of Mallarmé’s notion of the double condition of language drawn between the crude and the essential, the same notion that Brennan took to neoplatonic ends. Blanchot arrives at very different ends to Brennan, acknowledging that the ‘double condition’ ‘attributes the same substances to the two aspects of language’5 distinguished so absolutely. Blanchot acknowledges, with Mallarmé, the absence of the supreme language and, therefore, the prevalence of the ‘extreme variety of different tongues,’ drawing close to Cratylus, and neoplatonism, but palliating this with reference to Dadaist ‘automatic writing.’ Central to Blanchot’s meditation on the crude and the essential is the abyssal nature of language: ‘language whose whole force lies in its not being, whose very glory [and it is worth noting the attention Mallarmé paid glory] is to evoke, in its own absence, the absence of everything.’6 All of this, both as the crude and the essential, the word as its usage and the word erased in its usage (in or as poetry) turns toward silence. In Blanchot’s reading, the essential word ‘imposes nothing’ whereas the crude word serves: ‘We are used to it, it is usual, useful. Through it we are in the world.’ Blanchot continues, drawing out the ‘double condition’ of the word: ‘this crude word is a pure nothing, nothingness itself. But it is nothingness in action: that which acts, labors, constructs.’7

Blanchot expends a great deal of concentrated thought on the crude word, developing its relation to the language of thought and the process of signification which ‘affirms in man his decision not to be, to separate himself from being, and, by making this separation real, to build the world,’8 and drawing out the poetic, the essential, word through the erasure of the word’s utility, its reference back to the world of tasks, building and signification. This is premised on the poet’s ‘death,’ as Blanchot states: ‘From here on, it is not Mallarmé who speaks, but language which speaks itself: language as the work and the work as language.’ This turns to the poem as autonomous linguistic construct, invested with its essential power through its autonomy, and vested as ‘a powerful universe of words where relations, configurations, forces are affirmed through sound, figure, rhythmic mobility, in a unified and sovereignly autonomous space.’ Such is Mallarmé’s musicality, which Brennan miscues by too strongly and emphatically drawing out a Baudelairean theory of correspondences.9 Rather than becoming the Ideal platonic form, Blanchot places the Mallarméan experience as he calls it, that is the poem, in reference to its autonomy and the privilege of its singularity:

where nothing is reflected but the nature of words —is perhaps in this respect a reality, a particular being, having exceptional dignity and importance; but it is a being, and for this reason it is by no means close to being, to that which escapes all determination and every form of existence.10

 

That is, the poem is not the archetypal but the singular absence of the archetype, of form, as much as it is not being as ontic but particular. It is the being of the poem. This in turn registers the poem as the experience of the being of the poem, the experience of language, which turns (through negation) on the absence of being.

Adamson’s use of inversion and allusion in the lozenge delivers some part of this awareness through the play of the text. Adamson writes (or perhaps constructs):

SPACE    BETWEEN    GOD’S    WORDS    THE    STARS
AN    ALPHABET    IN    BLACK    SPACE    WORDS
WERE    GOD’S    STARS    IN    WHITE    SPACE

The doubling he effects between the alphabet and the stars is an apt analogy for the separation of the crude and the essential word in Mallarmé’s poetic. Where Adamson moves from here, having in part delivered the Mallarméan poetic from Brennan’s reading (having laid Brennan to rest within the lozenge, the tomb itself) is to draw through the dissemination of Mallarméan constructs, and constructs of Mallarmé, towards his own work ‘WRITING THE RIVER POETRY OF HEADLAND SYMBOLIST SPINS IN A NIGHT.’ Adamson makes playful use of ‘HEADLAND,’ combining the earlier ‘POETRY OF THE / HEAD’ with ‘THE BLANK SPACES’ which ‘SPEAK ACROSS SPACE’ and ‘THE RIVER POETRY’ to arrive at a frontier, the headland itself. This leads the poem, in the broader context of Waving to Hart Crane, on to the possibility of a post-Mallarméan gambit, drawing Mallarméan negativity into conversation with the immediacy of Adamson’s own imaginative experience. This conversation occurs within the landscape of the river: a landscape that is internal, related and relating inner experience. It is such poetry, begun in Waving to Hart Crane, which comes to the fore in Black Water and Mulberry Leaves. At this point, it is perhaps vital to note Blanchot’s comment on Mallarmé’s awareness of the ‘particular nature of literary creation’:

The work of art reduces itself to being. That is its task: to be, to make present ‘those very words: it is … There lies all the mystery.’ But at the same time it cannot be said that the work belongs to being, that it exists.11

The comment is ‘vital’as this doubled condition that Adamson develops in his late poetry sets several of his most recent poems apart from his early work, and these poems arguably trace a trajectory beyond the Mallarméan poetic.

Risk and Origin

To conclude, I would like to double back and address a gap both in the reading of ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ and in the reading just now offered of Blanchot. If not itself an aporia, the gap circles around the question of origin, and returns us briefly to two deaths: ‘OUR DEATH’ and ‘GOD’S DEATH.’ Blanchot states that Mallarmé’s experience proper begins ‘when he moves from consideration of the finished work which is always one particular poem or another, or a certain picture, to the concern through which the work becomes the search for its origin and wants to identify itself with its origin.’12 Much of what Adamson makes of Mallarmé in his ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ is this search for the origin, which in turn is perhaps a search Adamson conducts for his own poetic origin. Adamson traces Mallarmé’s awareness of mutability through Anatole’s death, his own sense of mortality (which becomes that of the poet: ‘OUR DEATH POET OF LIFE’) and then comes to rest, and perhaps the suggestion is that the search rests there in its origin, as it ‘LIVES IN GOD’S DEATH’ from where literature takes over, adopts and appropriates this profusion of deaths and makes of them poetry.