James Richardson: Vectors

 

 

Over the past weeks I’ve returned to James Richardson’s VECTORS 4.1: A FEW THOUGHTS IN THE DARK and 4.2: ALL OF THE ABOVE, poems from his forthcoming collection, with the same obsessive frequency as when, decades ago, I first encountered Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”  To the same degree I was then, I’ve been hell bent on sussing out just what makes Richardson’s poems so intriguing.  Alas, now as then, I have not penetrated this mystery, but the process and the briefest comparison between these two poems has led me to appreciate the particularly original genius at work in Richardson’s VECTORS 4.1 & 4.2.

Unlike Shakespeare’s rose, which by any other name would smell as sweet, with any other title neither Richardson’s nor Stevens’ poem would (or could) be the same poem.   Like inscribed, weight bearing arches, both titles announce the subject, dictate the poems’ formal architecture, and provide scaffolding from which the speaker alternately tracks the mind through the lens of an objective observer, then collapses into subjectivity when the lens contracts to the I.

However, Stevens had tangible, known construction materials at the ready-a blackbird and landscape. The poem’s subject—how the context in which a “thing” is perceived changes a “thing,” and how, in turn a “thing” then changes the context—is announced by the title, and each of the thirteen “ways” is isolated in numbered stanzas, framed and arranged along a gallery wall like separate paintings in a thematic series.

Richardson, on the other hand, has, in a stunning imaginative leap, has created the materials of his poem from thin air; in the poems’ titles, Richardson employs vector(s)”—carrier from the noun form of the 19th century Latin verb vehere to carry— a term most frequently applied to components of motion in physics, math, medicine and computer software— to suggest that  thoughts of the human mind are not under its  control, but subject to immutable natural laws which, in vector waves, shift perspective alternately from objective to subjective. Richardson has performed the equivalent literary miracle of making the word flesh; against the “in the dark” landscape, thoughts are no longer the static fuzzing our attention or flickering like gnats at the periphery of waking conscious, but are transformed.

Dense with gravitas, sentient with magnitude and direction, these classical columns heave into view with priestly, omnipotent solemnity, like ghost ships or a divinely sculpted, solitary iceberg. Rather than float by like fleeting thoughts they move, however imperceptibly, with volition, intention, stately and white against a black sea, the white space of the page transmuted by the title’s “in the dark.” Other smaller, but no less potent vectors move in between the larger ones, but never in the wake of, or behind them.

Rather than the formal tone one might expect from these elegant structures, the anonymous, detached speaker—I only begins to appear toward the end of the first VECTOR 4.1—speaks softly, intimately, like the lover whose mouth speaks our thoughts even as we think them:

What’s the name for the color of leaves at night, a black you
can’t help seeing as green?

 

Wooed, we lie with this voice, in this dark where the tyranny of self-identity or measured time has no dominion; we are like the stars that don’t know what constellation they’re in, and begin to remember things as they are:

Hard to remember that night is not what the sky does, but
the shadow of the earth. The sun goes away, and a darkness
rises that was there all the time.

In the plush warm dark that was there all the time the lens of perception has expanded beyond the tight focus of the self.  Yet, Richardson, in tracking the idiosyncratic, characteristic movement of the Vector 4.1 recognizes what degree of focus and attention it takes to achieve this state of negative capability:

 

You need a thin film of dust and a surface it can slide on, say
the bare floor under the bed. Watch a long time, and here a
draft or there the soft concussions of your breath will
compress the dust along a front. Watch longer, and these
lines themselves collide, compressing further. That’s how
dustballs form or, on a larger scale, stars —

 

and suggests such required vigilance is beyond the natural propensity of human thought to sustain:

Difficult to imagine an eternal Yes vigilant enough to keep

every closet and drawer of the universe this sharply in focus.

Easier to feel someone is just forgetting to say No.

 

This admission triggers the movement of the fearful thought that lurking behind the dark velvet muzzle nuzzling us in the dark are sharp, glittering teeth, alert to the moment the self begins to lose it tenacious grip, ready to snatch us down into the void, into the infinite vastness of that which is not I. In panic and desperation the I launches its barbed particulars like a grappling hook into what it perceives to be the bedrock of the self identity, and bolts upright and sweating, fully back into the body, the my, the mine:

I can’t remember a thing about my little brother’s funeral,

except the tie I wore, still way back in my closet forty years

later. I dare not throw it away, but I won’t look at it because

it’s not black any more but transparent like the night.

 

In the pattern implicit in VECTORS 4.2: ALL OF THE ABOVE,  thoughts move to reflect and analyze all of the above  in VECTOR 4.1’s shift from objective perspective in the dark where we’re unplugged from our peripherals, back to the subjective I:

 

Take us away from our crowd and we see faces in cliffs, hear voices

on the wind, read the thoughts of animals, and feel watched by we

don’t know what. We’re unplugged from our peripherals, like the

newly blind who hallucinate because their brains are desperate to see.

 

 

Although Richardson suggests that our thoughts, in spite of our best efforts to control them via meditation, condemnation, medication etc., follow a natural and immutable trajectory, that does not comfort him or us; with the exception of a very small fraction of human existence we are unable to remain in a state of negative capability before we suffer the loneliness from being unplugged from our peripherals. Because this constitutional inability prevents us from full participation in the cosmic dance of life and—we just can’t win—we again suffer.

 

Spring, and the soil exhales like a pot whose lid has been
lifted The air itself has greened: sound is blurrier and slower,
blossoms send out waves of intoxicants. The woodchuck
knows exactly how long ago the fox passed, a leaf smells that
its neighbor is under attack by insects, from 300 feet up the
hawk spots the tenseness of a vole. No wonder we feel
suddenly less and more alone, like someone in a crowd who
doesn’t know any of the languages.

 

More than a fascinating observation of the movement of human thought as a natural phenomenon, Richardson’s poems are a poignant, profoundly moving and deeply empathetic lament.  It may very well be true, as Rilke, in the first of The Duino Elegies writes Yes the Springs had need of you…but alas, as moved as we may be by this revelation, we are constitutionally unable to sustain more than a fleeting response, or all but the briefest respite from never being able to not interpret roses and other things/that promise so much, in terms of a human future…

Nancy Mitchell
30 June, 2014

 

 

VECTORS 4.1: A FEW THOUGHTS IN THE DARK

Let there be light. Had he awakened, confused about where he was? Had he been sitting on a stone a long time, not quite realizing how dark it had gotten?

ε

The stars don’t know which constellation they’re in.

ε

Hard to remember that night is not what the sky does, but the shadow of the earth. The sun goes away, and a darkness rises that was there all the time.

ε

You need a thin film of dust and a surface it can slide on, say the bare floor under the bed. Watch a long time, and here a draft or there the soft concussions of your breath will compress the dust along a front. Watch longer, and these lines themselves collide, compressing further. That’s how dustballs form or, on a larger scale, stars — moved, who knows, by the little winds of a sleeper turning on a mattress, or the cold fusions of
his dreams.

ε

What the dust calls will is wind.

ε

Difficult to imagine an eternal Yes vigilant enough to keep every closet and drawer of the universe this sharply in focus. Easier to feel someone is just forgetting to say No.

ε

Bless the things so small there is no need to doubt them.

ε

I can’t remember a thing about my little brother’s funeral, except the tie I wore, still way back in my closet forty years later. I dare not throw it away, but I won’t look at it because it’s not black any more but transparent like the night. Deep, deep in it there are very faint stars, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I stare long enough for them to come into focus.

ε

On a winter night the stars are colder than the dark.

ε

In the smallest hour I can hear it, the faint hiss I know is the tape of my life, but is it recording or playing?

ε

What’s the name for the color of leaves at night, a black you can’t help seeing as green?

 

 

 

VECTORS 4.2: ALL OF THE ABOVE

 

When the power goes off, the silence wakes me.

ε

Take us away from our crowd and we see faces in cliffs, hear voices on the wind, read the thoughts of animals, and feel watched by we don’t know what. We’re unplugged from our peripherals, like the newly blind who hallucinate because their brains are desperate to see.

ε

Silent or silenced?

ε

Experience teaches that the world is a blaze in my head, pain hurts me most, only others die. The rest is Imagination.

ε

Phone rings. The house has sprung a leak!

ε

Spring, and the soil exhales like a pot whose lid has been lifted. The air itself has greened: sound is blurrier and slower, blossoms send out waves of intoxicants. The woodchuck knows exactly how long ago the fox passed, a leaf smells that its neighbor is under attack by insects, from 300 feet up the hawk spots the tenseness of a vole. No wonder we feel suddenly less and more alone, like someone in a crowd who doesn’t know any of the languages.

ε

His lip’s pierced with a ring, last link in some invisible chain.

ε

Faith is a kind of doubt…of everything else. And doubt….believes deeply it can do without believing.

ε

Zeal: shark that swims hard lest it drown.

ε

My resentment is a child who needs attention. I’m out of here, he says. Don’t let me go.

ε

At last I break my chains, only to find that those I was chained to are more relieved than I am.

ε

Rage, like infatuation, thrives on silly details.

ε

All that time trying to do what they wanted, when even they weren’t quite sure what it was.

ε

Even at 10000 feet, yellowjackets, and they are angry.

ε

Silly to have such a strong lock when the door itself is so weak, and the window is weaker, and my head can’t keep anything out.

ε

She thinks her frenzy is a victimless crime.

ε

We should be reasonable is a feeling. Feeling is more genuine than thinking is a thought.

ε

I’d listen to my conscience if I were sure it was really mine.

ε

Anxiety hunched over, eating its hands.

ε

They are our friends, or they slump next to us on the subway, or they are close-ups on the news: the sufferers. Next to them, we feel like innocents. Natural enough, but maybe it’s analogous to the old sentimentality about The Happy Poor: if we envy life’s victims for being realer than we are, will we also owe them, will we help them?

ε

Realism is false when it cares a little too much that you think it’s real.

ε

Empathy’s the human grid: a voltage surge, and we might shut down so as not to burn out, often least responsive to the troubles that are most like our own.

ε

Pain knows you don’t really know. Over and over and over it says No you don’t, no you don’t.

ε

On the Kelvin scale, which runs from Absolute Zero to a zillion degrees, we’re most comfortable way down at the chilly end: 293 degrees is room temperature. Only a little higher and water boils, molecules break, life becomes impossible. The universe is a cold place. Good thing!

ε

More moving than someone weeping: someone trying not to.

ε

Some are naked through their clothes, some never naked.

ε

Suffering builds character? Or the fear that every touch will be a blow?

ε

My pain has to be greater than yours, lest I owe you something.

ε

Values fluctuate wildly, prices considerably, but change is given to the penny.

ε

In heaven we will be known to the core and loved for exactly who we are. Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.

ε

Somehow it’s easier to believe people are better than I am than that they’re smarter.

ε

There’s no one less rebellious: maybe I think I’m in power?

ε

How messy and wrecked the house has gotten, I think, and start Spring Cleaning. There must have been a Winter Dirtying I didn’t notice, a blindness or lethargy that evolved to protect us from wasting energy during the hard months. But what leads to those much darker days when, maybe helped by a mirror or a sharp word, I look up and suddenly see how badly I’ve neglected everything in my life that really matters?

ε

Evolution provided physical pain to keep us from damaging ourselves, sympathetic pain to keep us from damaging others. Don’t feel too good.

ε

Self-criticism: superiority to the idiot I was a minute ago.

 ε

Sometimes I’m the only one in the loud bar not talking, a rock in the stream listening for the sound water makes hitting it and turning white.

ε

Are these new storms, or has everything all together reached the age of falling down?

ε

Not till I walk out of the sea of noise into the night do I know I’m drunk.

 

 

 

James Richardson‘s most recent books are By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2001). His work appears in The New Yorker, Slate, Paris Review, Yale Review, Great American Prose Poems, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, The Pushcart Prize and five recent volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Nancy Mitchell, a Pushcart Prize 2012 recipient, is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and Grief Hut, (Cervena Barva Press, 2009) and her poems have appeared in Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, Great River Review, and are anthologized in Last Call by Sarabande Books.