“My Vocabulary Did This To Me”: Chris Martin on Jack Spicer
by Johannes on Jun.12, 2012, under Uncategorized
My Vocabulary Did this to Me: An Admonition on Spicer’s Umwelt
By Chris Martin
In his 1934 ethological treatise, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Jakob von Uexküll boldly put forth his concept of the umwelt. The umwelt, a German word that most directly translates as environment, is more richly described by Uexküll as the sense-world of a living being. He uses the tick as his primary basis. The tick’s umwelt is bewilderingly small. It cannot hear. It cannot see. It cannot taste. It can, in fact, only perceive two things: heat and butyric acid, an olfactory protein released in the sweat of all mammals. Its entire umwelt consists of heat and butyric acid. Humans, by contrast, have an almost infinitely more complex umwelt. Not only do we experience at least five senses, but we experience a relatively wide range of each sense.
In the follow-up to Uexküll’s Foray, he published another treatise, A Theory of Meaning, which was prefaced with the following statement: “Commended to the kind attention of my scholarly opponents.” Boo-yah. In it, he makes his case for the human as a “carillon of living bells,” where each perception sign contributes its particular tone to a larger corporeal orchestration. It’s mystic and Leibnizian and almost unbearably poetic. At one point he locates the physiological umwelt of living beings beside the aesthetic umwelt of a painter: “One speaks of ‘his palette’ and means by this the number of colors at his disposition in the execution of his pictures” (166). If we extend this metaphor to poetic composition, we could say that a poet’s umwelt consists of the vocabulary at his disposition in the execution of her poems. Just as the mechanics of painting are left out of Uexküll’s characterization of painting, we can leave out syntax and form from our consideration of poetry, at least within the scope of this essay.
If we visualize the spectrum of vocabulary-driven umwelts English-language poetry offers, it’s difficult not to see Shakespeare on the far side of vastness and complexity. The near side is more problematic. Bear with me as I place Jack Spicer on this near shore, less for the reality of his vocabulary than for his/its ambition. In one of his letters to a long-deceased Lorca in After Lorca, Spicer writes: “The perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary” (123). In effect, Spicer is counseling the poet to circumscribe her umwelt; to winnow it down so small that it approaches the minimalist sense-world of a tick. This makes double sense as environment, given that Spicer was infamous for dramatically circumscribing his own readership, rarely moving beyond the Bay Area. Foremost remains the question: why become a tick? Well, I think there are several valid answers, but the one I’d like to posit from Spicer’s perspective is this: because it increases the likelihood of reception.
If you are a tick, possessing the frequency of but a single smell, your likelihood of identifying butyric acid when it comes walking by is near perfect. One might even argue that Uexküll’s tick is the perfect rejoinder to Heidegger’s claim that animals are “world poor” by demonstrating how they are, in a highly focused way, signal rich. Some ticks remain motionless on the edge of a leaf for 18 years before a producer of butyric acid ambles along. As Spicer writes in an earlier letter: “You are dead and the dead are very patient” (111). And indeed, Spicer’s desire for an infinitely small vocabulary represented a grotesque form of death drive, a desperate and radical reduction. He hunkered down, winnowed his world, and waited for transmission. In the end, Spicer moved closer and closer to the tick’s miniscule sense-world. The man who saw himself as the “Dancing Ape” devolved past his mammalian predecessors to emulate the most dedicated and hermetic of insects. His perception signs were alcohol (butyric acid) and language (heat). Through these two signs he was able to locate what Uexküll calls “meaning,” which in the case of a tick is blood and in the case of a Spicer is poetry.
We all know this has an unhappy ending. For Uexküll’s part, he moved from the tick to a more disturbing and appropriate example. In A Theory of Meaning, he gives an account of the moth’s umwelt. Though its sense-world is more complex than the tick’s, the former’s aural range eerily approximates the latter’s olfactory range. Whereas the tick can only smell the single smell emitted by its prey, the moth can only hear the single sound emitted by its predator: “These animals only possess two taut bands as resonators in their hearing organ. With these aids, they are able to respond to air vibrations which are at the upper audible limit of our human ear. These tones correspond to the peeping tone of the bat, which is the main enemy of the moth. Only the sounds emitted by their specific enemy are picked up by the moths. Otherwise, the world is silent to them” (167). At the near shore of the poetic spectrum, one may find himself locked into congress with the enemy. Was Spicer, at the end of his life, consigned to hearing only what might destroy him? Did the Martian frequency, the Orphic radio transmission, necessitate an umwelt so caustically small that it drove all other messages toward silence? Whether apocryphal or not, Spicer’s final words provide an answer that doubles as an admonishment. Some transformations—Becoming-Tick, Becoming-Moth—are ill-advised.
June 12th, 2012 on 6:17 am
I hope this isn’t too tangential. Your post got me thinking about Spicer; hopefully those thoughts will be in conversation with yours.
I’ve always thought Spicer’s metaphor (at least I think it’s a metaphor…) of Martian transmissions does a disservice to what he says elsewhere in his poetry. It suggests tuning in to something we wouldn’t hear otherwise—finding the right antennae. In contrast, Spicer’s focus, in many of his other poems, is not tuning IN to some other frequency, but tuning OUT all other the static. In “A Textbook of Poetry” (from My Vocabulary Did This to Me), he writes, “The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems… Yet it is not a simple process like a mirror or a radio. They try to give us circuits to see them, to hear them. Teaching an audience” (300).
To find poetry, we have to stop looking. It’s there, waiting for us. But in order to stumble across it, we have to block out all distractions, including ourselves. In “A Birthday Poem for Jim (and James) Alexander,” Spicer advises, “And so I say to you, Jim, do not become too curious about / your poetry / Let it speed into the tunnel itself” (230). It seems, at first, that Spicer is just suggesting that we trust our gut: don’t overthink it. But his advice is more standoffish than that. He continues, “Do not follow it, do not try to ride it / Let it go into the tunnel and out the other side and back / to you while you do important things like loving and / learning patience” (231).
“Patience” is a form of faith; it requires us to discard all crutches. Orpheus didn’t have faith that Eurydice was behind him, and she vanished as a result. Spicer believes the poetry that vanished into the tunnel will return to him (“Five years. The train with its utterly alien cargo moving on / the black track” (231)). Spicer’s goal is to avoid Orpheus’ nervous backward glance, but moving forward in utter faith seems its own type of paralysis: “An unvert is neither an invert or an outvert, a pervert or a convert, an introvert or a retrovert. An unvert chooses to have no place to turn.”
This brings us, at last, to your analogy of the tick (or moth) and perhaps elucidates Spicer’s metaphor about Martian transmission. Spicer went in search of a signal he knew was there all along, and locked in. But if the ghosts are “teaching an audience,” the Unvert seems to upend the cliché of the rapt, inspired and his Muse and turn the poet, instead, into a slavish stenographer.
Or not. There’s are some real questions about who’s possessing who in Spicer’s poems. In one of his Letters to James Alexander, Spicer says that poetry is “like a medium” who gets possessed by a spirit (“call her Little Eva”); Pretty soon, after a few sessions, she’ll get to know what Little Eva is going to say and start saying it for her. Then it’s no longer a séance but fakery and time to change spooks” (211).
When we picture Spicer at the end of his life, we see a man so consumed and penned in by his passions, that they destroy him (and his last words would suggest the same). He follows Orpheus into Hell and never comes back. But maybe Spicer’s poetry is what kept him going, not what killed him. Maybe he was inventing his ghosts so he could build them a graveyard: “Eurydice could be anyone. Is / I suppose / Anyone. / That makes the poem harder” (60).
June 12th, 2012 on 2:46 pm
Right on, Jordan. I’m especially taken by your focus on “teaching the audience,” which, I think, would have been good advice for Spicer to take. He began with a social fabric intact–through the magic workshops, through his intimate curatorial process, through the deep inherent sociality of his early poems–but then seems to have pared all that away toward the end. It takes a chorus to face the bat. Poetry is social and the frequencies coincide. We tune in counterpoint or become cut off in a lonely channel, contacted only by the spooks who keep their distance.
I somehow didn’t even think about the umwelt and the unvert. Someone needs to write that essay.
June 13th, 2012 on 6:35 pm
Hott post. As a lover of expanse, I’ve always had a knee-jerk reaction to Spicer’s “infinitely small vocabulary,” but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how minimalism might turn razor-sharp and ferocious. It’s all over the best hip hop right now…
June 15th, 2012 on 5:06 pm
Lucas, absolutely. I feel that way about Carter 4. Whereas Rick Ross’ minimalism feels totally warm and true to me, Wayne new chopped flow feels emotionally nubbed/numbed. It can cut both ways. Who are you thinking about?
June 15th, 2012 on 7:47 pm
But we also need to be careful about taking Spicer literally in that quote. Certainly Spicer’s writing (and life) seemed to get more hermetic over time, but the line about “infinitely small vocabulary” seems to have more with not putting too much trust in the words alone. As Spicer points, out, we want to drag the actual objects themselves into the poem, but that’s impossible; instead, we’re stuck with words that are stuck with other words–connotations and histories “clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles.” Which is dangerous, because the words change: “I yell ‘Shit’ down a cliff at an ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. It will be dead as ‘Alas.’”
It seems like Spicer is riffing on the Death of the Author (maybe), the idea that the text is alive and ever-changing: A poet is a time mechanic, not an embalmer…Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.”
But this is where I get confused… I think Spicer’s point is that the “perfect poem” has an “infinitely small vocabulary” because it would have the objects themselves in it (or something close). Which is also why he says a perfect poem could be translated by someone who doesn’t know the language–it should be evident. At least I think that’s what he’s saying… Thoughts? Other readings of that letter?
June 15th, 2012 on 7:50 pm
Side note–Chris, I hadn’t heard of umwelt before your piece, and now I’m running into it everywhere. In “Born to Run,” the book about ultra-runners:”I forget that heavy Heidegger word, but it’s the one that means I’m an expression of this place.”
I think it would be really fun to do an essay on the Umwelt/Unvert–about not turning away, but, instead, burrowing deeper.
MERTZ!
June 16th, 2012 on 4:36 pm
In case anyone might be interested, there is a fair amount of stuff here that would be speculatively relevant to the issues under review:
“Addressed to No One: Reading Jack Spicer’s After Lorca,” an epistolary essay by me and Mark DuCharme, published some years back in Montevidayoan Lucas Klein’s Cipher Journal:
http://www.cipherjournal.com/html/johnson_ducharme_i.html