delivering meaning in eshleman and schwerner

Both Juniper Fuse and The Tablets animate and reify the otherwise referential (that is, externally-dependent and, therefore, essentially neutral) space between (1) totality and (2) indeterminacy. Suggesting an attempt to extend across the expanse and plunge down the layers of truth (or at least meaning), both Clayton Eshleman and Armand Schwerner draw and play upon wide and varied incorporations of genre, voice, tone, and subject matter. Despite the poets’ shared desire to harness “total translations,” however, both Eshleman and Schwerner cite magical (or imagined) inspirations for their poetry and, thus, naturally adopt ludic (sometimes ironic) approaches to their poetic creations. These practitioners, therefore, present total play as literary artifacts (as opposed to presenting total literary artifacts as (based on) play). While, on the total level, Eshleman and Schwerner deny the conclusivity (ultimate authority) of their texts, on the localized level, these poets strive to incorporate as much narrative/poetic diversity as they can wedge inside a single book’s binding. In other words, the constituting selections of Juniper Fuse and The Tablets are each marked by their power to represent a piece of the total range of human vocality and vision.

Personally, I was much more affected by Juniper Fuse than I was by The Tablets. This is probably due to the fact that I’m very interested in psychoanalysis and feminism and some of the ideas that Eshleman presented and then wove through poetic designs have special significance in these domains. I’ll touch on what I felt to be the most striking example from each category.

First of all, Eshleman notes that “cave exploration in the Upper Paleolithic was stimulated by regressive fantasies concerning the insides of the mother’s body”(xvii), that “[t]hose who do not attempt to realize their symbolic fetal role risk moving from substitute womb to substitute womb their whole lives”(xxi), that “[t]he transformation of regressive penetration into the forming of self-conceived images is one of the ways this second birth is brought about”(xxi), and, finally, that “…the oral-oriented ‘scooping out’ of the mother’s body (which it is believed imbues caves with a womblike atmosphere) becomes in a later phase a genital ‘scooping out’ or masturbation (with its lateral analogues to image making”(232). The transition from wanting to return (get back into) the mother’s body to the formulation and recognition of the desire to enter substitute (symbolic) wombs, and to the displaced desire to “make fire” through masturbation is echoed in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s explanation of the emergence and re-direction of desire.

Lacan explains that desire emanates from the separation that an infant experiences during the mirror stage of his development. During this stage, the infant comes to a pre-verbal awareness that his inner world of introjected images is separate from the outside world of actual objects. The remnants of otherness that remain in the infant after this realization produce a profound anxiety. The infant’s response to this distress is to attempt to “reunite” with the outer world that he paradoxically believes was once a part of him and of which he now understands he is a part.

Not surprisingly, what is most traumatic for the infant during his identification of otherness is his understanding that he and his mother are separate entities. Thus, desire’s original (and most representative form) is the infant’s yearning to re-unite himself with his mother. As this potential unity is now tinged with the awareness of otherness, however, the desire to return or retreat inward to a state of homogeneity is quickly transformed into a desire to re-cognize (i.e., know again) this state of homogeneity via the embodiment of otherness.

Regarding the second (feminist related) point, in Barbara MacLeod’s 1972 report of her sensory isolation in the caves of Belize, the woman writes, “The most striking feature of the early phase, beginning within some four hours, was synaesthesia”(133). In the Middle Ages, a female saint (anchoress) would enclose herself from the outside world in a tiny dwelling, barely large enough for her body. Within her tiny enclosure, deprived from “outside” sensory experience, the saint would sometimes report to have “visions” during which she would claim to have used all of her physical senses to perceive external stimuli. MacLeod’s observations that, within the cave, she “felt that ‘anything’ could happen”(133-4) and, later, that she “…felt [her]self to be everywhere in [the cave] all at once”(135) serve as personal testimony to the fact that sensory deprivation of one kind can force new alignments (and degrees) of a sensory experience.

Also in Juniper Fuse, I was fascinated by Eshleman’s idea that humans used cave engraving/painting to objectify (and, thus, abstract) the animal half of themselves from which they sought to separate (recalling Schwerner’s inextricable face/ass dualism(79)). Eshleman notes that the act of drawing lines across a wall (as opposed to breaking into it) suggests a displacement from being at one with the impulsive animal to becoming an imaginative human. (In Schwerner’s case, by referring to the Tablet, the title of his book, as “The Rorschach idea,” as “completely [ ],” and “like the bird that flies up its own asshole”(127-28), it seems that the poet means to present The Tablets as a “wall” for his readership to recognize as an artifact pregnant “with value” and to help deliver this value via the birth of one’s own imaginative investment).

On a final note on Juniper Fuse, I also enjoyed learning that, in a particular cave painting, man is depicted as a fleck that has the power to puncture and fracture the whole scene with his “point”(32). I was further struck by a fact concerning a Cro-Magnon depiction of a horse painted on a cave’s ceiling. Regarding this painting, Eshleman observes that “…to view it one must scrunch backward on one’s back, head craned back in the same position as the stag’s”(xvii). Interactive visual art of the Cro-Magnon era? Who knew?