Prose Abandoned at Some Point I Do Not Remember

 

On Nothing and the Non-Political: a Satirical Amusement in Associative Criticism 

 

I would like to say that I have nothing to say but Mr. J. Cage (Pomona Collage, DNF) in his Harvard lecture of 1964, has already done that. He went there on that occasion, on  that day in that month of that year,  to say nothing and that is precisely what he said,  that nothing. Or he went there to say the something he did say about the nothing that he wanted to say but was said anyway by its not being said. One wonders. Everything is political, even the non-political. Which is to say that being political is one of the most ideologically freighted ways of being non-political. The distinction between the political and the non-political has yet to be established, though it should be as there must surely be things which are non-political: an apple, a shoelace a shaft of sunlight with dust twirling, to suggest some few candidates. However, if they are political - that is, they are not non-political - then where should we place them on the political spectrum. And what of the spectrum itself: that too must be political and if it is where would the spectrum place itself, politically speaking, on the spectrum. (It has long been a suspicion that for the left all is political,  whereas for the right nothing is political other than the left's insisting all is political even the non-political.) 

There is a branch of contemporary philosophical thought – or should I say ‘philosophical textuality’ – that posits the impossibility of thought beyond language understood in its most basic sense. We’ll not visit that understanding here because if we did we would surely find ourselves far from the subject of this lecture. Which has, I concede, not been sketched yet in a compelling or meaningful way but has been presented as something sensed, something about which most thinking people would already have encountered in the nature of an ‘inkling’ – that is, something made by an anecdotal awareness. Thought then, and language then, and the political then, and the nothing from which the political adheres as a necessary condition of textuality that contradicts its very possibility. The possible is just that: it is that which holds hands with the impossible. We shall not come back to this point; however, we shall refer to it when need requires we do so. Philosophy begs certain silences as a means to allow the moving forwards or backwards, however it moves: one image that seems useful is that of a spinning cup in which people are set and strapped and disoriented for various purposes: one of which is a crude sensory delight. Not all find such delightful, but many do. I do not. Age does things to the inner ear. 

The political again, and the non-political. But what of the not-political: nature surely in its actions can be said at least to provide a confirmation of the famous Freudian flexibility: a cigar and nothing more than a cigar.  People are political but it is always another who sees the political there and such seeing is as if in advance of a strict judgement coming, a florid and cruel condemnation.

The non-political as distinct from the not-political: is this a worthwhile distinction to worry about. Health care is a worry, but that distinction – non or not – well, it hardly seems to matter for some. I would suggest, as a start, that the matter be viewed merely as an assumption that guides the game of language in the direction of a certain textuality. Marx and Engel’s in the Communist Manifesto – an agitated political textuality, no matter one’s own political inhibitions – has in it a lyrical yearning after an end to certain sorrows – poverty, gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth, unfairness in the possibilities presented to those who work without shoes and those who have closets full of shoes 

And bells ring from the white clapboard church

High on the bare hill shaped like a covenant stone

And voices ring from out of the fog

And thunder rolls its great cart out of the East

And wild coats soar   

And the cost of an orange made impossible

And the young man yearns to hold the hand of the young woman

And the helicopter readies its guns

And swift boats their small canon

And the cemetery awaits the political and non-political alike

And no one cares about the not-political

And one age is the invention of another

And huts beckon as we near 

 

I would say that I have nothing to say, the venerable Mr. J. Cage once said, in a lecture delivered at Harvard in 1964 – in truth, I have no idea what school Cage delivered his lecture (was it a lecture?) nor the year. I have attempted to say nothing too but have failed because in saying certain empty things I might very well have said one or two things of substance. Forgiveness, dear reader, is sought, kindness wrought. 

 

FIN

 

A NEW POEM (Work-in-Progress): Jon Cone

 

Home: an essayy

 

And that was that, lines drawn. Therein sections of land for family or families. It gives what is fruitful the land of apportions.  

And they cunningly made no writ to stand on. 

The great waters can never be assigned, nor the sky nor sun nor moon nor stars, nor the land the portion of the body of our Mother. No people shall have advantage over any other.

A rod is 16 ½ feet. A chain is 66 feet or 4 rods or 100 links. A link being 7.92 inches. A mile is 320 rods, 80 chains, or 5,280 feet. A square rod is 272 ¼ square feet. An acre contains 43,560 square feet. And an acre contains 100 square rods. And an acre is more or less 208 ¾ feet square. An acre is 8 rods wide by 20 rods long or any two numbers (of rods) whose product is 160 and so forth.

A sectional map of a township with adjoining sections. Such land, such rich soil, a veritable Eden!   

Odysseus the sea’s surveyor, cunning reader of maps he returned home from exile by labyrinthine route.  The memory of my father’s stutter is a threshold forever linked in my mind to the idea of home.  My mother asking my father to sing, “Oh sing for me Peter you’ve a lovely voice.” And rough as an old nail he sang.

And the farm called Magiscroft comprising a large white house with green trim, a smaller white cottage with rose trim, a garage, a barn, a chicken coop no longer used. The land fenced, including a gentle creek and small pond. The pond that would freeze in winter. The children would skate and chase each other with long branches and sticks.

Having no home, having been born in a village, having been taken from that village at the age of six months, having crossed the Atlantic, having entered the St. Lawrence, passing through Montreal to Toronto to Richmond Hill to Guelph to London, having felt unease a permanent condition of living – a poverty of the soul.

And Saint Thomas the Patron saint of surveyors who watched over the sectioning of the land West of the Mississippi

And the prophet Ezekiel sacred draughtsman and homeowner:   

That I too have been at home somewhere anywhere                                               along the coast looking seaward or pinned or resting inland -                                  by the creek I gazed upward at floes of cloud -                                                    this is the mind at leisure

                                                On Mill Pond in January the children gathered in skates to play a rolling game of ice hockey.  Shovels brought from home in the event of heavy snow the ice would need clearing. The mill unused for 157 year [sic].

 

In winter boys hoped to see girls out walking. How sun-lit a smile on a clear winter day …

          The same clouds that exist within the life span of droplets                         for ten minutes, familiar not familiar, moving west so trees with their familiar bend                                                   

Never before seen old faces moving homeward where families wait and one would hope love for the taking and giving and the young man could take a young wife only upon demonstrating he could build a roof

 

And waking early to see stars

And making coffee in the kitchen ship-wrecked from night before

And falling in love and then taking forty years to fall out of love

That is a cruelty of no one’s invention nonetheless a cruelty

Don't be deceived there are no victors in such case 

The only importance is to throw one’s physical self into the air from the hay loft to feel suspended in an infinity of ultimate finitude and later the sun on one’s head bent over the thrill of the creek's blazing strangeness 

The people of that land knew one day the gate would come down