James Joyce said to Jacques Mercanton of Finnegans Wake, "You are not Irish...and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this and that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease in this passage" (quoted on page ix of John Bishop's introduction to the Wake). I read Zukofsky's "'Nor did the prophet'" this morning which mentions Jannequin and birds. That made me think of Pound's Canto LXXV, which consists mostly of a violin transcription of Janequin's "Le Chant des Oyseaulx." Pound thought birdsong had inspired troubadour Arnaut Daniel's poetry and that the music of Daniel's poetry evoked the music of the birds. Pound thought that troubadour poetry inspired Janequin's piece where singers imitate birds.
The first time I read that Canto back in 1984 I didn't know all that. I probably didn't know it the second, third or fourth times I read The Cantos either. Only I when I started teaching The Cantos did I start to read a bunch of secondary sources. It strikes me that many books demand many readings for deeper understanding. Of course, each of us can only read a fraction of the books out there, and we likely only reread a fraction of the ones we read. I think of the Kabbalistic notion Phil Dick mentioned in The Divine Invasion that 144,000 different Torahs exist for each of the members of the Twelve Tribes. We each create our own versions of each work of art we deeply experience. This gets me thinking of Borges.
I've devoted a good chunk of my life to understanding Bob Wilson's books. Participating in the Illuminatus! group read over at Rawillumination.net reminds of how limited my perception of his work seems. "Remove infinity from it and infinity remains." Bob quoted that Upanishad line in Masks of the Illuminati, and it seems true of all great works of art. I remember hearing Andre Previn saying he loved conducting because he spent his life immersing himself in works greater than himself.
Wonderful post; you're addressing something I seem to have been obsessed with for at least 17 years now.
ReplyDeleteI know that when I read the Cantos and Ulysses or Finnegans Wake and about 35 other texts I keep coming back to them and finding new things; I also wonder what I "knew" or thought in prior readings that I've lost or forgotten now. But I try not to let that bother me.
Even after the welter of wildly destabilizing epistemologies of the 20th century, that still: many want to find out what these texts "really" mean. A more interesting minority want a finite but very large number of thoughtful interpretations. I'm in that camp most of the time, but increasingly I realize how much information I WANT but don't yet have or don't quite yet understand at a level I'm comfortable with. Not only that, it seems each re-reading has me focused on some small but to me dense area of the text, which sends me off to secondary and even tertiary sources. Then I have my notes, which, when worked on long enough, seem to bring on dialogues of their own. And I'm a different person - physically, at least - than the person who last read these magickal werks.
And I like this. I like that I will never come up with the "best" interpretation of these sorts of texts. I want others to think they have done it; I will enjoy reading their works, never believing that they have finally "broken through" or cracked the codes once and for all...but I can enjoy that they think they've done so!
One of my favorite ways of making five hours go by without noticing: I start to read in one of these "difficult" texts. I take notes. I look at previous notes. I re-read a passage then realize I could do with reading more about, say, 16th century banking in Italy, or various underground societies in 19th century Europe and what they wanted, or trying to find out what Einstein thought about the status of dream-material. Etc. Then I come back to the text...and it hasn't changed, but I have.
Robert Anton Wilson said he got an idea from Korzybksi a long time ago: if you read about a fact, then combine it with another fact by using your ingenuity, and it somehow makes sense, this is a form of creating knowledge. Just think how much knowledge we create while we're reading Illuminatus! or The Cantos, or, in your case, Zukofsky. Around 1998 a Danish science writer named Tors Norretranders coined a term: "exformation." He meant information that is discarded, explicitly. I often wonder about the resonant energies in our brains while we read, and how much exformation goes on, and whether we will ever find a way to quantify it, like Claude Shannon did for information that was not discarded.
Thank you for your response. It makes me think of teaching "Hamlet" and the welter of interpretations available. Last semester I asked students at the community college who had read the play in high school if my way of interpreting the play differed from the way they had learned it in high school, expecting a "yes." They said "no, it seemed pretty much the same," which I found a bit humbling because I thought I had an unusual, multiple model interpretation, but basically the play remains
ReplyDelete"Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everybody ends in mincemeat."
I notice that you take notes. I don't tend to, but I will mark texts with a star or underline something to remind me to mention it in class. Before becoming a teacher I rarely wrote in books, but now I find it essential.
This makes me think of your post on boredom. When I get enthused I can imagine reading and studying for years. When I get tired and/or bored no books interest me. (Unless I don't have them - then I imagine buying them or getting them from the library or whereever I left them if I already own them, and I think, "If only I had that book - THEN I wouldn't feel bored.")