From Vestiges_04: Aphasia
“In effect, every individual or national degradation is immediately heralded by a rigorously proportional degradation in language.”
—Joseph de Maistre
“The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain.”
—Adorno
In his esssay on aphasia, Jakobson discusses two aspects of language: the metaphoric pole and the metonymic pole.
For formalists… poetry functions along the former: the vertical axis of selection or substitution… prose, on the other hand, functions along the latter: the horizontal axis of contiguity or association.
On the one hand, poetry for the psychoanalyst is unconscious displacement… and, on the other… prose is condensation…
A Dada ad leaves an analysand uncooperative, speechless; a situationist détournement… propels words beyond the pleasure principle…
Because there is so much toil and injustice in the use of language… two images begin to take shape.
One of the rich mystic unscrolling their parchment; and… one of the police officer turning the pages of a newspaper…
Jakobson writes: “In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic)—selecting, combining, and ranking them—an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences.”
Elsewhere… he writes that literature is “organized violence committed on ordinary speech.”
The cop wraps his pistol in rosary beads; points it heavenward… the priest, on his knees, tills the soil with a crucifix…
Or; another image: De Quincey’s tourist from London “in search of the picturesque” but… looking for… as well… the shortest road to Keswick…
He writes, in the “Introductory Notice” to Suspiria de Profundis, of the caduceus: the wand of Hermes “wreathed about with meandering ornaments, or the shaft of a tree’s stem hung round and surmounted with some vagrant parasitical plant.”
De Quincey was a poor journalist but… a poet at heart. Prose, “the ugly pole, the murderous spear,” was for him an economic necessity…
From romantic nature… to the atrocities of… cities.
To the illiterate, “polis” and “poles” differ only by a letter…
Fetters: Derrida’s “law of the law of genre,” which he calls “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy,” is Le Spleen de Paris… the germination of a flower in a landfill… one writer’s attempt to eek out a dandified living from writing “poetry…”
Baudelaire told his publisher, Arsène Houssaye, that the prose poem for him arises from the “exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations.”
Robert Greer Cohn sees the prose poem as “a tetrapolar Becoming: a ‘founding’ poetry-prose unity [that] passes through a poetry and prose polarity to a poetry-prose (poetic prose or prose poem) ‘final’ unity.”
In other words, the form of a formless cross… or; the typography of an efficient capital… of which each citizen is equal in mire…
Final image: Baudelaire’s thyrsus twined by vines and flowers… “the sacerdotal emblem” of Bacchanalian frenzy; Liszt’s conductor’s wand… and “just a simple stick.”
“Words have the same destiny as empires,” writes Emil Cioran, “the writer wants his own style, to individualize himself by expression; he succeeds only by destroying his language, violating its rules, undermining its structure, its magnificent monotony…”
All roads lead to Rome.
—Jared Daniel Fagen
February 2019
Brooklyn/Arkville, New York