also she dreamed she danced with bears:

A better title for this would be: the beautiful problem of literary intractability.

Reading Speech and Phenomena, as most people are occasionally wont to do, I can’t help but consider a question that’s been breaking in from elsewhere (namely, from four years of struggling with the momentary and siren-slick break-ins of meaning that come–and come lately, or more often, don’t come at all, but tease within the promise of a faked memory of having-come, promising-to-return–from meditation and bad married like with troubled poems. Cf., Hart Crane’s The Bridge). What on earth are we doing reading difficult texts? I could attempt to answer a thousand-odd questions here, foremost (and most annoying) of which is that perennial, Bloom-esque question about canonization and difficulty, &c &c. Have you heard of Alain Bourdieu? Have you taken him out for tea? (He’s dead.) Have you heard the sociology students complain about him in the halls? (He grows more dead.) Alain, I’m going to leave you alone for now–kudos to your graphs and charts, your ability to distinguish among fine jazz, but I don’t really think what’s at stake in a — my, this — question of literary intractability is really a question of cultural power, insidious capital, or the things that Rockefeller bequeath’d unto the generations. So. I bracket you! (Now please go back to the basement.)

How do we see and get around lacunae in our reading? How, especially, since coming to see these lacunae, in a fairly (unrigorous) Hegelian sense, is the act that is itself the moment of, the process of, overcoming? Seeing our own difficulties is a monument to getting beyond them–once we know them, we’re not there. (Once)(If) we can speak them, we’re carving on a grave–Here my textual difficulties used to be,/ dead for my (surprise!) having come (now!) to see. Easy enough, right? This seems like a simple question of contextual literacy, right? Pay attention and the meaning will come home to you, right? Sleep in your bed and smell like a soldier, right? But does it really work like that? Does meaning, if it returns to you at all, really remember your name? Can you actually sleep with your difficulties, hold their stupid wooden claws at the ferris wheel deck? Or is the closest that we can come the act of burial, the choice of hymns as testament to our knowing them, to what we thought we knew?

Clearly, this is not just a simple question of literacy. (I am lying to you right now. I am lying to you with my rhetoric.) This is not just a simple question of literacy because there are no simple questions of literacy–there are, I would suppose, simple speakings of questions of literacy. There are utterances which simplify, which ‘give clarity.’ But we must remember that they do just that: add on clarity–clarity as supplement, as additive–more like a transparent veil than like a dissolving away. And isn’t what we want the dissolving away?

I’m not lying anymore–what I’m attempting to configure may be fairly familiar: we think that the text ‘knows’ something (something something–a secret substance, a secret message–something…about itself?) that we do not. We think that we are caught up in the interim, knee-deep in the swamps, standing in the vine, distracted by the neighbor’s mare, pulled back to our Uncle’s house because cherubim was a word he used to use. We think it’s us, and not the text, that’s lost in the mire of it. We think it’s us, moreover, who need to get free of it–out from our confusion, the world, the embodiment of our readership, all of those unsightly little traces of our finite specificity, in order to be with the text. It’s like a story my friend once told me, about a book I swore I’d never read (and never have): once in Arabia there was a young girl in a brothel who kept herself pure and bathed with myrhh (and probably birch beer) every night, in preparation for the arrival of her Lord. All of the other whores eventually gave in, and took lesser suitors with bright suits and…well, presence. They were around; whoever she was waiting for obviously wasn’t coming, on account of his always having been not-here-yet. But the young not-whore under the mark of the whore persisted–resisted? endured?–and, eventually, her Lord came. And presumably ravaged her. (Also, I think his name was Jesus, but this part of the story was highly unclear. Perhaps it was because we were both sixteen, and in a car.) Insofar as there is an ethics–some element of responsibility–to the project (who would even call it that? do we dare? with what consequences) of readership, it’s one of the order of the parable: to prepare ourselves, in what Heidegger would call anticipatory resoluteness, for the coming of the unknown God.

The trouble with this expectant-pietistic approach towards reading is that we’re not exactly waiting for whatever it is that’s to come. We’re expecting to better be able to explicate what’s already there. In short, we’re affecting a sort of perfectionist archaeology under the neon lie of futurity. Nobody waits on the text–not like Jeeves waits on the table or Heidegger’s shepherd-watchmen keeps vigilant over the land. If we bow before the text, it’s not to kiss or feel–it’s to scratch.

What is this scratching? What marks it as practice? Most notably, this hermeneutics of scratching manages to both be preemptive and defensive. We keep both eyes closed. As Walker Percy argues in “The Loss of the Creature,” we lose the dogfish for the lab manual. At the price of our own encounter with the text, we enter into an economy of exchange. The boon? Strategies, methods; codes of signification, a fluent recognition of chunks of form and meaning. We get: Strophe! Trochee! Allegory! Slant rhyme! And what we lose are our own eyes–eyes that have already been places, seen things like texts before (and even, I hope, things unlike texts)–eyes that, even if ‘impurely,’ could stand to be up for the task of reading. Thus armed, the text does not reveal itself to us. It sits closed up inside its openness because we dig with tools that order and arrange, that see based on a predetermination of the scope of recognition. We develop a thousand measurements for the shell of the clam–how long would it take us to forget that we could pry it, eat it, break our small feet into it, or drop it back and free?

What drives us out from the garden and into this bear market? A certain fear. But–a fear of what? Surely not of the text, and surely not of our own eyes. What seems to mediate here is instead a certain horizon of expectation–a publicness that makes demands of what is worth seeing and what is not worth seeing. (That’s how we read it, anyway. I’m going to argue that most demands that look like claims of value and worth may well just be descriptive sediments of historical occurrence–how we have read. Not that tradition’s descriptions don’t [leer/glow] with the power of the normative!) To be more explicit: we scratch at texts because we’re taught that we’ll be dumb if we’re not to. We scratch at texts by a shadow power that twins the “anxiety of influence” that Bloom argues holds sway among authorship, and accounts for the coherence (and, not quite sui genersis, but creeping close, its formations) of the literary canon: there exists an anxiety of readership that makes our primal (ontically primal–not ontologically primordial) encounter with the text an encounter with two questions: is this good? and is this how i’m supposed to be doing this? Under the pale of this anxiety, the reader encounters no text: she encounters herself, threatened, desperate for evidence but too terrified to look.

How do we see a text, then? How do we read?

(1) First, a detour: we have to be careful how we (even) ask these questions. I almost wrote–and still want to write–something like the following: How do we really see (the) text? How do we (come to) actually read?

These questions assume a whole lot of presence on the part of the text. As Derrida argues, probably through Freud or experiences with his own faeces, these questions are themselves symptomatic of the anxious disease that still grips the reader. It’s sort of like how John Keats coughed up his lungs–what we think we want is actually what’s killing us.

So we won’t ask those questions. And thus–of course, I mean, this blog has a picture of a bear in a canoe on it–this means we’ll have to dispense with all delusions of mastery or univocity. If we can’t ask about the way to read, or the real way to read, what on earth are we doing? I almost feel that…no, it couldn’t possible be that…: yes, we’re just making shit up. The methods aren’t less clear, so of course I can’t yet tell you if it’s true. Anyway, that’s not my horizon: bottoms-up, let’s just hope this thing is useful. It’s rather long, so it had better be at least as useful as your time. In fact, your time is the usefulness of this exercise. Clap your hands.

(2) Jesus was said to have said something about how “he who loses his soul will gain it.” I don’t have a citation for that, which will either tell you something about what sort of a Religious Person I am or what sort of a scholar I am not, but it’s important: it seems that, if we let go of the Ideal of the Pure Presence of the Textual Object as something Pre-Endowed with a Coherent and Self-Contained Meaning that can be Explicated By the Well-Training Scholar (er, Formalist), we’ve got to let go of something bigger (in the general sense). In order to (begin) read(ing), we must abandon the text.

We must abandon all ideas of what a text looks like and does. We must face it as we’d face death. What do we know about how we face death? What I know about that is that I’ve a whole lot of ridiculous fears and crazy assertions (and a collection of fairly vivid images), none of which connect up in any sort of particularly compelling system, and almost all of which exist in bizarre juxtapositions of contradiction and affect. I see chains and hell, I am a strange vantage from a cloud, I remember Harding’s tomb, or how I was made to dress as a clown for my grandmother, dying; I remember the chipmunk that I buried and dug up three times one spring, because my mother let me. I can’t sort through these notions in any conventionally “productive” way. That is, I can’t make decisions among them, or judge which to adhere to, which to let scare me, which to let stand hopeful in the citadel of my (postmodern) heart–at least not in any conventionally coherent way. That is, to use some Husserl-via-Derrida, there is no immediately available object of experience (my death; O ma-mort!) to fulfill my tentative judgments, to allow me to cast some to the dustheaps and some (for later use) to the broom closet. I’ve got to deal with the mad pick of faith, or with contingency (or aesthetics, maybe–more on that later).

To approach a book like death, then, means to feel the weight of all of our unfulfilled expectations. This isn’t just neutral weight, either–it’s the stammering weight of a thousand demands on us, from us, from elsewhere. When we withhold our inclination to scratch, to-read-as-to-dig, to read as teacher taught, we are the being that confronts those expectations. We gain our subjective readership back when we abstain from reading as such. There is first an ‘I’ that declines; then there is the ‘I’ who might begin to cast off; and through (and only through) this casting off of the heavy husks and holding armors of reading strategy (the most insidious code word ever for “bad gift from the public nowhere”) we might start to read. (Of course, we can’t really give any of that up. But it’s only by engaging that fantastic possibility that we can know the weight of what constrains us, that we can learn to shift it, or even–hold pause, hold pause–to begin to use it. To really use it!)

But that’s just part of it.

Parts of the text will still confound me–me, conscious-of-tradition me, me, the subject suspicious of my own historicity. But we want it that way. This is the specific difference that makes literature literature. Literature offers us a theory of the useless–a sort of post-childhood myth of the holding room for lost objects, for the lost parts of experience, for the differences that ‘bounce’ and seem not to register.

Parts of the text just won’t make sense. Most of these parts may confuse me or bore me–these I’ll weigh in the moment. Parts of the text will break in on me violently–this is how Faulkner moved me before I knew anything about the differences in narrative monologue, or how Joyce took away an entire April when I was fifteen. As Robert Hass once said, “It hardly had to do with her.” What got me in those books was the intractability of the strangeness, the irreducibility particularity and will-to-stick-together of certain persistent phrases: Quentin’s “Oh. Abestos,” his tripping over Dalton’s name (“Dalton Ames Dalton Ames Dalton Shirt Dalton Ames”–another day, we’ll re-read this passage as the breaking-in of the material, but I’m much too hungry and tired, and I’ve already typed James Agee’s name too many times and too superficially this weekend to justify any further violence. Well, of that sort, anyhow–); or Joyce’s “agenbit of inwit” (which, it turned out, meant just that). Poems, too, may mean in all sorts of ways, but the ones that I remember had quivering voices in them: my tenth-grade English teacher’s impassioned bass over the last lines of Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”–how interpollated, and willfully, I felt in that instant!–or Marilyn Brownstein’s strange treble as she closed her eyes over the cusp of morning and into the final hopes of Ashbery’s “Hop O’ My Thumb.” Affect. Their voices, breaking, broken in on, softened, modified, made strange by the occasion. My body riveted, the trace of the voice in my head longing to speak.

Rhetoric’s got a name for that (I’ll look it up for you)–an utterance, the sole purpose or effect of which is to drive its audience to speak. Boom: now you want to make a sound too. If it’s a good boom, maybe you want to make a sound just like mine. Maybe you want to read my poem–this very one I’ve just read. Maybe you’ll shout it alone in the shower. The so-called “affective theory” of readership has its numerous proponents–in fact, who could really object to what Richard Eldridge, via Houlgate and Stanley Cavell, calls the “sensuous immediacy” of the reading experience as a part of the reading experience we wouldn’t want to forget? Importantly, then, affect is the bearer of memory: I remember Ulysses having been that way, and if I really clear my hopes, and can reclaim that attic, I think that Moby Dick–different, yes, but in the order of the same, strange enough to be a neighbor–might be that way for me, too.

The question about affect, then, concerns its situation: how much does strategy hollow out, or pre-prescribe, our ability to be affected by a text? If there’s some bare wax stratum of how we read–some tabule rasa awaiting Locke’s pen, the realtor’s mark of closing, my name and my education–then won’t the cuneiform of my education and my anxieties come to compete with whatever fire might jump up from that block upon meeting John Updike or Jack Gilbert or William Gass? Are these experiences of “pure affect” every really pure? I mean, is my ability to read fucked up because I’ve read all this criticism? Can I ever get back John Donne without the chiasmus, Dickinson without the slant? Enough to discover–oh, Lord; to re-discover?–the crossings in him, the difference of her rhyme?

Yes, and no. As I’ve said (everybody’s spit in my mouth), we can’t ever get out from our worldliness–from tradition, from our mother’s cooking, from our father’s stubby eyelashes that are glued all over our goddamned pug-nosed faces. There’s going to be a fight anyway, so there may as well be a feasting. What I mean by that is this: literary criticism is important. The act of literary criticism (writing it and reading it), far from inscribing strategy, is actually the ‘dissolving agent’ which saves reading. Actually, I’ve lied again: it does both. It puts us back in the circle of readership, the inevitable hermeneutics of always already looking for and being anxious about something. (Meaning’s like my kindergarten teacher told me about her leprechaun sighting: there it is! Gone around the corner of the building.) And, by being woken up in that circle, by looking at those scores and marks on our little wax blocks of readerly substratum (“after the virgin, before a discourse,” quoth Kristeva), we prepare the ground for the arrival of new affect, for the awakening of our ability to be affected, which has been scored up, marked down, long slumbering under the brighter demands to find metaphor and is that part about the thighs going walking metonymy? Let me say it again, louder: you can’t get it back! You can go home again! But you can’t get it back. It might not be your home. In the case of my home, it is my willow tree; but it is also fifty-five ugly condominiums and streets named after the adult children of the neighbors who betrayed my family in a time of zoning-related crisis. So, I mean, like I said, you can go home again. But you’re not going to get rid of the marks. You’re going to soften them, make them transparent sometimes, as they would have made you transparent before. You’re going to pay attention, to be vigilant. You’re going to have to fight with yourself sometimes, to say, I like this part best, where Olson says “fish fish fish,” and I don’t even care why.

It’s sort of like how Jesus comes into the hearts of the sinners and knocks on the closed doors first. Because, really, where are there any opened doors? Where are we looking, save empty ideality, we when (I) utter this awful deferral: really?

So you’re a reader now. One question remains (again– for later): do you write about it? If you yourself turn the critic that you already are, do you write about it? What do you write about? Do you tell us about Olson and his fish? Do you get them into the open? Do they dry up under the weight of the apparatus? Are they augmented by it? Do you cook them on the fires of your longings, on the spurs of your application of continental hermeneutics? Are they good for that? Are they better than that? Are they fish anymore? Are they beautiful?

But now we’ve got to talk about blind spots–I’ve almost forgotten them three times now, and that’s the only way I’ll remember. (Write it down: about the forgetting.) All of this is well and good: beautiful fish, and the occasional annoyance (acrostic poetry) or bad memory (teaching Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” to seventh-graders for an entire summer, some of whom insisted that “Recuerdo” was a poet who had a whole bunch of interesting stuff to say about New York and her mother).

But most of it isn’t at all. I’d proffer that a whole lot of the average (and even above-average: yes, academia, I am talking at you) reading experience doesn’t register at all. We lose what we don’t understand–we can’t even see it, so how could we register it as loss? All our songs of mourning look towards whatever’s just passed–those scant few agenbits and angels that catch on the lip of our fleeting incomprehension. But most of it we don’t see, and don’t remember. And this, I think, is the more interesting problem with textual difficulty. Am blind, but now: to see?

The trouble with blindness–and we, I, must be careful with this metaphor, since it is only impartially ripped from the real, and both junctures are a wound–is precisely that: one can’t see, one cannot know (insofar as seeing ever constitutes knowing; consult John Berger or Martin Jay on that one) the things one’s not seeing. I mean this in two ways: literary blindness–the regular aporiae of the everyday reading experience–covers over what’s there to see, and also the fact of our own blindness or concealing-ness, which we might otherwise expect to appear relationally, through contradistinction. This becomes even more seamy when we deal with so-called “difficult texts” (Rilke in the German or Crane in the English) because we do still receive affect: not “from” the text, in any transparent or incarnadine way, but from the near side of our blindness–from our frustration. 

Now, I guess I’ve given it away with that little architectonics of différance in the phone–phone–phone–telephone wires. (Whew, got there!): I’ve sewed you up a strawman. But I’m no worse than most metaphysicians (not that that ever convinced St. Matthew.)(I am, however, marginally better than most highbrow comediennes. I’ll defend that margin.) So, really, truly: we must decide what blindness concerns. Is blindness about the things to which we are blinded, or about the us blindered from the things of our desired, blocked seeing? It seems, here, that we can’t have the one without the other: neither the sight of things or my sighted being become present to me in the moment of my blindness. There’s a boon, though. This blindness is not without knowledge: what returns to me, a battered loot, is the knowledge of my own blindness. Which is really (once more) two separate knowledges: the knowledge of what I want to know, the imagination or ideal construction of what I think I should be seeing; and the blockage. 

Now, you may be starting to see something peculiar: from this, it looks like we may well be able to read texts blind. How’s that? Well–we ignore the blockage, and make due with the strong imagination of what we think we should be seeing. I know this well: I used to suffer from a persistent dream, in which I’d be on my side, in a forest, some yards away from a riverbank. People were always doing something in the river–talking, laughing, yelling. Sometimes terrible things were happening to them. I always had my head turned away, right eye (the riverside eye) closed. I could see–the forest, my hand, perhaps, a rock– and I could hear just about everything that came from the river (the invitations; the cries for help), but I could not, for the life of me, open up that right eye to the river. The sight I had didn’t help me deal with the sound, and the sound just called me to want that blinded-out sight. But I knew the names of the characters. I could eavesdrop well. And I knew that I was in a wood. So I always spent the rest of my dream, lying still and half-blind on the dank leaves, reconstructing the story against the pain of the acknowledgment that I could not participate. (Or fully participate, rather–participate in the way I was imagining, was desiring to imagine; for all I know, I could have been the centerfold, the real heart of the scene).

I tell this story because I think it is also an unexpected antidote. We could read, as before, bracketing off the foundational substratum of our blindness, reducing the movement of the différance that is our (impossible) desire to see texts clearly, to read books purely, to become the body of the virgin hermeneutics, forgetting, willfully, that frustration that troubles us. Or we could read like I was forced to read the riverbank: frustrated, blind but with an eye to what I did see before me, entrenched in the difference between sight and sound, desiring my own intended participation while suspicious of my prostrate involvement. 

Can you hold two balls at once? Have you ever approached a house from two directions at night and failed to see it cohere? Do you remember the narrator’s initial confusion in Bruce Springsteen’s My Father’s House? I ask that you bear with me for a moment, because Heidegger is needed here to clarify an important structural component of this blindness-difficulty, but I’m going to have to split apart from myself (kisses, temporality) to try to do the trick. You’ll notice something about the structure of the blindness described above: it is doubled, split from itself within itself, at the very seat of itself. (So too, for Derrida, is différance itself the very movement of the split origin, the root that roots its identity in difference, its sameness in temporal-spatial discontiguity. Différance lives everywhere, but only in the between. If it could be anything, it would be the voices in the telephone wires–differing, distancing, deferring, delivering.) We can’t see (1) the stuff that we want to see, and we can’t see (2) the “fact” that we cannot see, our “blindness itself.”  In “The Turning,” Heidegger further elaborates the structure of the “Concealed” which is the secret, mysterious realm of Being. Man is usually so concerned with the setting-forth of the demands of the order of science (stellen)–putting the material of the world to human uses for purposes, as could be defended by reasons–that he loses himself in the order of the Unconcealed. In wanting desperately to unconceal, man suddenly encounters only himself–without the Concealed, what else remains for him to order, to explicate? But, Heidegger turns back: here, setting-forth man, technological man, does not really encounter himself everywhere. In fact, quite the contrary: man sees, finds himself nowhere. This is because technological man, in setting stuff forth for purposes, forgets himself–as Heidegger phrases it, he forgets that he, uniquely, is the claimant of being. Man has been chosen by Being to do Being’s work. How can man know what work there is to be done? How can he play the midwife to a Being that is Concealed, and that does not speak his language? Heidegger gives us only this: be vigilant. 

Later, in his essays on language, Heidegger matches this ocular admonition with the aural: he modifies the “anticipatory resoluteness” of Being and Time to “anticipatory listening.” Man shepherds Being by listening carefully, openly–for whatever comes next, for whatever is to come. (More on this, with some Benjamin and more of my lapsarian-literati nonsense, avenir!) That’s beautiful. That’s true, that’s Good, that’s Just. And that happens all the time! Not. Heidegger’s not shy to point out that man lives and breathes and dies (not consciously, of course) in the slime and muck of his own forgetting. I bring this up because it brings us to completion of the first half of the magic trick (remember that? It was the yellow handkerchief–): forgetting, for Heidegger, also has a double structure. At the end of “The Turning,” he tells us of the double falling-off of awareness of the Concealed as Concealed: 

The coming-to-pass of oblivion not only lets fall from remembrance into concealment; but that falling itself falls simultaneously from remembrance into concealment, which itself also falls away in that falling (Turning, 46).

So it all falls apart–and not just apart, but away. Heidegger’s double falling (perhaps an infinite falling?) strikes me as incomprehensibly sad. It is a warning against a slumber from which we cannot awake–a deafness which learns no other signs, a blindness that does not goes on, ripping up the earth and ravaging the page, as if it were sighted. I once dreamed a dream that fit this sadness–there was simply a single mule, standing, eyes closed. The mule rotted away to dust before my eyes–no blood, no maggots, just dust. I struggle to describe it: it was as if he simply slept into himself. Or sloughed off into himself. Or forgot himself, but heavily. Heavily, because, I think, he was still there, and just too tired, too already fallen in, to take responsibility for that last thing: his body, his rotting, his death. 

What might this–O mule of clay, O time that slows and then eats us–have to do with an ethics of reading? It articulates a fear: mine, Heidegger’s, maybe your own. This is the fear that we cannot be converted. This is the fear that our deaf hunger to listen better will prevent us from hearing. This is the fear that our blindness will make us pretend we are sighted so that we are blinded a second time to what the text might do for us. This is the fear that I’ll run from the parts of Stephen Dedalus’s monologues that I don’t understand; this means that, when my Gadamer comes in the mail, I leave it sitting by my bedside, every day waiting, wanting, everyday cowering in fear of its supposed “difficulty.”

This, you’ll note, is still a provisional approach. I’ve circled around, but cut the tractor across the middle: we’re back to boring aesthetics thesis no. 1: literary criticism is good for us. But–I keep forgetting! Before I forget for good!–I want to carry us back to the hopeful messianic ethics of reading formulation; which we will call, after the miracles of the New Testament, second sight. (I’ve just recalled–much forgetting tonight–that Ricouer looks for a “second naiveté”–I suppose I’m not so clever.) I promised two moments of Heidegger. So too did Heidegger promise some hope: he said that the moment of forgetting, when it becomes really bad (and the text is silent here, so note that I’m improvising)–when the atom bomb comes, or when my death breaks in on me because my elbow has shattered extraordinarily while I was on my most living and ordinary way–calls us by two names: the danger and the saving-power. They go together, structurally, like Heidegger’s ontic and ontologic, or the estranged-loving movements of Derrida’s différance; and they are important for ethical readers: the danger is the saving-power. Working our way out of our blindness–my sound and fury, the spittle of my insignificant, unsignifiable struggles at the site of Absalom, Absalom!–does not require the mediation from some above. Wayne Booth won’t help us; not, at least, until we help ourselves. 

So what do we have in our old-tool kit, ready-at-hand in those moments of being assailed by a text’s difficulty? What about the times when I hate Charles Olson–radically hate him, hate him for his passenger’s lists, hate him for his dumb travails around Gloucester, hate him because he gives me those moments of clarity, I sd, like mountain flowers so rarely–and have, want,  nothing to do with him? I could pretend that it was beautiful. I could try to see it differently. I could pray. I could talk about it. I could make recourse to criticism. 

Of all of these options, only the latter two are “concrete.” The first, I think, happens more often than we would like to think it does; the second, too, but often violently. These first two strategies, I think, are the medium of a whole lot of the comments that get piped up in undergraduate literary classrooms, where expectations of some mysterious but deeply felt obligation to “get it right” (seem to) howl louder than ghosts in the attic. The third, I think, happens least of all. In Biblical scholarship, yes. (It might, after all, do us some good to remember that hermeneutics comes out of Biblical hermeneutics–it was only after some folks made a fuss about and dismissed the primacy of the Bible as an absolutely locked system of signification that angsty folks like Bakhtin and Eagleton and Greenblatt moved on to other fullnesses.) 

How can reading be prayer? First, I want us to look back at all of those possible responses–which I’m sure are only some of the possible responses to these moments of absolute frustration with difficult texts. What do they have in common. As per my (now almost-forgotten; I am constantly rescuing things from the quick-falling sediments!) question, what tools do we have at hand, in the throes of the text, when the text isn’t there? Our frustration. 

I repeat: you, reader. You own your frustration.

And here’s where prayer comes in. It would seem that if you sit in that for awhile–it’s trouble, I know–and meditate on that trouble; if you ask out, with or without address, and love that frustration through the focusing struggle of a prayer or question’s asking; you will get an answer that changes the substratum of the question. You will change your expectations. Perhaps we will all become numinous with patience. We will find that our shovels have changed into our opened ears. 

What all of that means may be mightly “unclear”–and, my friends, perhaps it must be that way. I fought with Heidegger for weeks over this line of solution. He calls it meditative thinking. It is the way of thinking of prayer, of the question. God might live there is God lives still; the poets, too. He sets it apart from calculative thinking. This latter kind of thinking builds factories and drains the swamps, builds fine cities and is Jane Jacobs; the former tends and cultivates, is with the self-presencing of meaning as if the thinker weren’t there at all. Thus, techne is a form of physis in which the watchmen of being–us, Dasein, men, you, you and your hipster running shoes–effaces himself, in love, in partnership, in–necessity. He sinks, like a positive image of my tragic dream mule, into the surety of his claim. He has been chosen. The poet, thus, fades–and helps Being become. 

Now goodness, I’m all creeped out. You’ve gone and turned all objectivist on me. I’ve gone and turned all formalist on you. No, no–we’re still pals. Here’s why: just as the poet fades in and out of the poem, just as our self-conscious subjectivities (our persistent myths of the self-present now, God bless us all and our lies and our time!) are by this season lucid, by this season pale, so too is man-the-shepherd never gone for good. It’s like Rilke says (and I hate this poem; it just happens to be so damned illustrative):

The Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

So: let’s get things straight. You’re still a subject (phew!); you are helping Being do its thing; you are hopeful and skeptical, just like the movement of différance; you are trying to get open, to be awake, to hear the specificity of the text–its difference, its difficulty. You give it your face when it plagues you. It is unknowable other: what do we do with Rilke’s Apollo, with brilliance or marble or fur? And what do we do with the fact that, from that, we’ve received this directive?:

You must change your life.

I suppose that we do. We try. Letting texts change us–letting their difficulties be beautiful and frustrating, letting them break in on us–requires an open comportment. Although this open comportment–the open ear of tolerant readership, which sounds alot less like trumpets and strident than ethical reading; but I think the soft underbelly of justice is very important–demands a future-orientation, a smile for future struggle (and it will come), one can’t “get” open by struggling into it. I think Heidegger’s right here–at least for reading: getting open may well look like a “letting go,” a breath out, a letting being be. Does that mean that we must abandon all rigor when we read? No. That we must conflate our precise practices with the structure of the koan, the attitude (but not “logic”) of “beginner’s mind”? Yes. That too. Both and. 

If we could only get open. My friend Liza wrote that in a wonderful poem about a trip in a car with her father. It’s funny what we remember from poetry. That seems about right. It’s a little thing, and it’s everything. Or, Jack Gilbert on the devil: 

But saved there, too. Paying attention. To details. Learning the word that you hear that you can’t say. It took me two months in the classroom to realize that Tschüss was just that. There are other words that I have carried for years–sometimes mistaking them, sometimes making the other mistake of carrying them sleeping, of sleeping when they are so awake and full of the fragile spice of other places. Or was it me who was fragile? Who must be afraid of the fragility of difference? The reader, or the text? Poems–novels too, probably–get their form, their book, by a miracle. That difference is sedimented. It’s not going anywhere. It’s probably not talking straight, either. But this is OK–and important for an ethics of readership. Because an ethics of readership, one in which we’ve concomitantly given up and been given our shovels for ears, is more or less an ethics of preparation. As in, get out the brooms and sweep the temple porches. As in, read as much as you can, listen to as much as you can, because there are all sorts of differences. As in: pay enough attention so that you can be arrested by the idiom, so that you can repeat it in justice or keep it as its secret-need demands.

“Make every moment the straight gate through which the Messiah can enter.” A professor of mine always said that. He attributed it to Derrida, but I think it really comes from somewhere else. Someone Derrida read, or talked to. I always blanched at this mistake; but I now wonderful if it was not intentional. Even if not intentional, it seems somehow still (yet) necessary. 

So reading: how do we do it? Is it too mystical to say that the text has a strange grace? A grace that it holds tightly, that it bestows, not as a mica its shards, but like a glow that reduplicates. The thing about grace (I’ve been told) is that you can’t work for it: it comes over you. It assails you. But, not entirely askance, we can work for one other thing that helps for grace. We can do this by acknowledging that we’re working within it: patience, that responsibility that hones our waiting. 

And if the text does not come? Does not throw up its full meaning? This is beginning to sound more and more like a primer for the taming of wild animals. The thing is, they’re always running away. You are going to be approaching a fleeing object. What you will be possessing will not be the woman in the next room–maybe you will be in the room, and she outside without you. Desire is different than getting. Of course you can’t have it to keep. Look at your body. Look at what’s left of Plato. The intractability of the literary is not the closed door of the house of meaning. That strange and drawing sign–Hass’s blackberry, Ashbery’s Undine, the “plastic parts of poems” that cannot be reduced–it is not a wreath on the door. 

But you’re outside? The poem, then, has evicted you from your house of meaning? Look up. Derrida, via Benjamin, speaks of the structure of the “weak messianic”–this is to prepare the tomb for the king who has fled for the return of the unknown king, who may be the same, who may be iterated differently, who may yet come, who may defer infinitely in coming.

But this preparation is itself a way. We have forgotten the Sumerian votaries–those painted without eyelids. We may never know “who squired the glacier woman down the sky.” But in waiting for that to come we make ready our ears and eyes in the present. In waiting, hoping, listening, are we there? Are we (finally) ready to read?