Lines of Credit

David Weiss

The existence of the writer is truly dependent on his desk,

and if he wants to keep madness at bay, he must never go far

from his desk, he must hold onto it with his teeth.

 — Kafka, Letter to Felice

It's desperately palpable in Kafka, almost theological: only in the quick of composing and its immediate aftermath does one feel a reason for being, justified in being alive.

It's a powerful sensation that must belong to all creators when they feel they've got something right. Inspiration is what we call the phenomena, whose root, to breathe in, suggests that its force feels external to us, an explanation, perhaps, for its unexpected, more-than-we-imagined aspect.

Maybe no one feels more useless, or less substantial, than a poet who isn't writing. Overpraised and undervalued, poets more than other writers suffer a bi-polar socio-economic condition.

As writers we crave the sensation of being touched by the authentic. So it feels, anyway.

As readers, too, we seek the same. A poet's canon of important poems is probably formed initially from this criterion.

Emily Dickinson's famous symptoms in the presence of an authentic thing, that she felt as if the top of her head were coming off or that she got so cold nothing could ever warm her, are a sort of autonomic test. I know, for example, that I'm susceptible to a kind of giddiness, a heady feeling edged with hysteria when I feel I'm "getting something right in language," as Howard Nemerov described what poets do.

Without it, in our hearts of hearts, it's hard to shake the feeling that we're ersatz, supernumerary, our human attachments notwithstanding. Having stolen fire from the gods, we're looking for a sign; heavenly chorus or a punishment — being gnawed at by eagles, say.

We know that what we call genuine may be just a compelling aura, not actuality. Words are only words, after all. Yet, in their potent surrogacy, we happily mistake or take them for something greater.

Through words, something is revealed, though what that is is never clearer than the words themselves. They give us the bind we're in, the fabric and nature of experience. Which is not words but what comes to us in words.

Our belief in words, even when we know they are just words, is often shaken though rarely dislodged, because a belief may be, in fact, a disguised wish. And a wish, especially if it is one of the old ones, is immortal. One of the immortals.

The poets we love often speak out of this beguiling exile from authenticity. Irony's authenticity, it feels, is founded on authenticity's crumbled foundation.

“While famous night is coming on / like the blistered exterior of a sigh,” is one of many ways John Ashbery puts it.

Emily Dickinson’s “The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small – / Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all” — catches the exquisite irony.

Authenticity: that great shell game in which the winner taps the shell housing the gold doubloon of emptiness.

And yet writes Czeslaw Milosz: "One can say that even the powerful, full blooded, active personality is hardly a shadow compared to a few well-chosen words, even if they describe no more than the rising moon." A source of bewilderment and wonder for the poet.

More vertiginously, he says, "Neither did any of it happen, nor did you feel the feelings contained therein. The language itself unfurled its velvet yarn in order to cover what, without it, would equal nothing."

And yet: the felt-as-authentic is no less authentic for being inauthentic. Knowing this doesn't seem to change how we feel. And we can't shake the feeling (why should we?) that what strikes us as authentic carries real authority. Our situation, even our fatigue with our situation, is authentic.

And how do we feel in those moments? Touched. In touch. Knowing. Sure-footed. Vouchsafed. Ordained. On fire. Capacious. Brimming. Powerful. Compensated.

The stage on which this drama of writing's bemusement takes place feels metaphysically vast and urgent; it fills the earthly cosmos. The act of writing itself enacts the crisis of human existence — it brings into palpable being Love, Beauty, Creation, Loss, Yearning, Mutability and what Wallace Stevens called “the the” — all the while it's only words that you're working with as the computer hums, and your dog stretches and groans; yes, it's only you alert in a chair in the garden in Hampstead, night falling and the nightingale commencing its song, which you almost don't hear, so intent, so bent, are you on the words coming out.

It’s enough to make a person giddy.

Giddy: from gydyp, god, meaning: mad, possessed by a divine spirit. God, that great bestower of authenticity in the form of awe, wonder, holiness, whose Hebrew name, YHVH, is so powerful, so unlike other names, that it and what it refers to are coextensive, identical, a condition that all words aspire to. Or that we wish them to have.

The opposite condition: the weirdness we experience when a word is repeated enough times; it grows alien, without meaning, purely arbitrary, an enigma of sound.

The alpha and omega of language, then: gibberish on the one hand, sense on the other. But gibberish, more properly called nonsense, is not pure sound or the pleasure of pure sound. Nonsense is infused with potence, or potential. We feel that it can make something happen, "Boil, boil, toil and trouble." Gibberish can become sorcery.

Sense making belongs to the world of the profane, the instrumental, the practically purposeful. Words that primarily "make sense" are made for communication, work. Nonsense, because it is not useful, belongs to play. Nonsense makes children, and sometimes the rest of us, giddy. It takes away the specific meanings of sound and word, but not their force. Or their pleasure. It shaves away meaning from pleasure. It restores pleasure. And helps us tell apart meaning and meaningfulness, which are different, of course.

Language, then, may be, for us, like a drug which doesn't work but whose side effects are no less strong, for all that.

In Jewish tradition, the sacred prohibition against speaking God's name tries to explain the discrepancy between meaning and potency; the reason all words can only dream of sealing up the rift in being (YHVH derives from the verb "to be") is that the name of God has absorbed all being into itself.

The name of God may be the one absolute poem, all being gathered into it. All inside, no outside. Nothing excluded. Paradise Lost squeezed into one word. Like the universe, before it went bang. That wish.

The conditional insufficiency of language, the scarcity of being to which it refers, is what the mythical monopoly on being is trying to explain. Whatever the cause, it is felt by poets to be the particular wound to which they must minister.

They must heal or lessen the insufficiency of language by means of the insufficiency of language. Allen Grossman calls this "the bitter logic of the poetic principle." The necessity that words work in literature by means of representation, "graven images," makes it unavoidable that the poet must take the trouble with the world, which is the world, into the poem. But the trouble with the world is our trouble: being is ungraspable. Grasped, it ceases to be.

For he believed that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top, for example, was sufficient for the understanding of all things. For this reason he did not busy himself with great problems, it seemed to him uneconomical. Once the smallest detail was understood, then everything was understood, which was why he busied himself only with the spinning top . . . . as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty, but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand, he felt nauseated.

— Kafka, "The Top"

God made everything out of nothing, but nothing shows through. 

 — Paul Valery

Holiness, God's being, and its prelapsarian shimmer are predicated on monopoly practice which because demand is great and supply so scarce, and restricted to a single source, keeps the price up, sky high.

***************

Poetry, too, practices a kind of economics. Though, maybe it's truer to say that its poetics does.

But must it?

Does any writing not have an economics?

The first writing seems to have been used to record economic transactions. Pure denotation. But even that involved symbolic substitution. Substitution contains in it the notion of equivalence. A belief that something (someone) can replace something (someone) else.

Economics: the logic of equivalence — a leveling that precedes metaphor.

Metaphors, in revolt against economics, overpay, philanthropically. They subsidize by likening. They reverse the sorrows of surrogacy by exchanging for the substituted object the original one. They return, at the least, with the promise or whiff of the original.

***************

And only when I conceded that it was not for me to reach so high, have I felt that I was genuine.

— Milosz, “Decency”

What do the psychological, the linguistic and the economic have in common?

Or to put it more viscerally: What do inadequacy, insufficiency and scarcity have in common?

Insufficiency is the recognition that: I am not that (you). Nothing will ever be the same without it (you).

Inadequacy is the recognition that: I can never be that (you). I am nothing without it (you).

Scarcity the recognition that: I need that (you). I will die without it (you).

And what is the name that attaches to the object (that, it, you) of each recognition? The beloved.

What is poetry's role in all this? The mourner. The celebrant. The matchmaker.

Geoffrey Hill calls it: consolation.

***************

"Where is the human store to which such economies (a poem's severe condensations) are gathered in?" asks Anne Carson in one of her essays on Paul Celan and the ancient Greek poet Simonides.

To be economic: to conserve, to use sparingly or efficiently, to condense.

To be economical: to make a little go a long way.

Economics: what a poem practices in opposition to scarcity. To say worlds in few words. What might be called the dream of metonymy.

"To hoist mere statement to figurative height." — Rosanna Warren

For Carson, economy — words, space, time — belongs to greed, penuriousness. But her question, "Where is the human store to which such economies are gathered in?" suggests that words used are words spent, expended. Unused, a word and its value are, like a coin, retained, stored. Word, coin, corpus are analogous and then interchangeable.

Just as in one of Simonides' epigraphs, "We are all debts owed to Death," the metaphor sees us as, and therefore exchanges us for and turns us into, "debts," an economic transaction that presumes a contractual relationship.

We begin, and live, in the red; into life we are dispossessed — indebted. from debere, to owe, from de hacere, deprived of possession. To be born is to be bereft. Unspent words are words hoarded against the day that death calls in the debt, the debit, that we are and owe.

To get back an object in hock    father's watch, mother's broach    it must be redeemed. How many hoarded words will it take to redeem us?

Yet this seems to be a strange way to look at the economy of language and its most economic form, poetry. And, it seems strange, too, to consider, as Carson does, that "punning and wordplay are its usury." Usury is money breeding money    unnaturally, says Aristotle. Wordplay does likewise, says Carson, breeding meanings. From whom, in the case of words, is this usury being exacted, however?

To be economic: to make a little last. To make something out of (almost) nothing. To spin straw into gold. Water into wine. Loaves and fishes. To be economic is, in its deep purpose, then, to supercede economics. To escape from the necessities on which economics is founded.

I am writing this on the fourth day of Chanukah, a holiday which commemorates the miracle of the one small jar of ritually pure olive oil that burned in the temple for eight days. Miracle means: the greatest acts of economy are beyond the power of the human.

Whatever is economical is generative, exceeds itself.

Economy for Carson, as she considers Simonides, is marked by miserliness, a refusal to give up or give away words, coins. But the economy of poetry, which is what Carson marvels at, is its artfulness in suggesting and meaning more than the mereness of its words. Not usurious then. But generous. Why the latter? Perhaps because the excess is paid for by (stolen from) the gods. When a poet multiplies her meaning, she is pulling rabbits out of her hat. Carson is asking: whose rabbits are being appropriated. To me, it feels more like spontaneous generation.

Meaning in poetry proliferates. Prolifer: bearing offspring. A different way to pay off the debt, to make good on it.

Achilles makes good on the debt by way of monument: death in exchange for fame; to live on in stories.

Odysseus, the hero reconceived, makes good on the debt by way of prosperity: generation and increase — plunder, pigs, fruit trees, children, telling stories. Odysseus, one of the great talkers.

Holiness: fullness, plenitude, being beyond existence.

Desecration: depletion, emptiness, existence without being.

Economics: the sacrifice of holiness to ward off desecration.

Poetry: what brings the simulacrum of holiness into circulation.

Poetry: the weights and measures of the immeasurable.

                                                            ***************

When he was a small boy, my friend Mike told me, he had emptied his bowels on the summer grass in his family's backyard. Later his father had led him over to the spot and pointed. Mike got down on his hands and knees and put his weak eyes close to it. It glistened, a brown oblong streaked with yellows and black, gracefully tapering on one end to a point; he'd made it, the work of his body, his father could surely see that. How remarkable it was. "What's the matter with you?" his father said. "That's disgusting."

Why is Mike's story here? Because it’s a story of creation, a story of vocation. And a revocation.

Why does revoke mean to call back or cancel and not to call again?

Poesis and defecation. Both forms of making.

From the anus comes our first creations, first rebirths.

When it's shit, it's disgusting. Though not to a child.

When it's poetry, it's beautiful. (Though not to a child.)

Poetry's aim: to persuade others that the disgusting, the strange, the unacceptable, is beautiful. That is: of worth. A part of the whole.

The disgusting: a part of what we are or will be which has no meaning or value.

Existence without being.

By what means does poetry seek a solution?

By the power that resides in being nothing and no one.

To be nothing, no one: without rights, orphaned, disinherited, decreated, forgotten, annihilated.

To be nothing, nobody (or nobhdy as Odysseus names himself to the Cyclops): to be outside of history, outside the human story. (This too is the human story.)

Why does vocation only become evident at the moment of revocation?

Vocation is not really a choice since it is founded on a ravishment. To be called means to be chosen.

One is freed from having had to make a choice. As if authenticity can only come from the outside.

***************

Vocation like economics begins with a gift, an offering, a breast. Followed by a rejection. A revocation.

An exchange that balks at the idea of equivalence. A gift that you must always keep giving back.

Which you are ready but unprepared for. Ready for but not expecting. And because you did not expect it, because it happened out of the blue, in return you will have always to return it, not to the giver, but to the location of surprise, where it will lie undiscovered like a single black leather glove in some cardboard box marked lost and found.

***************

What got me thinking about this in the first place: the idea of credit.

The idea of what you still have when you have nothing.

Thinking about this began with Uncle Vili.

Uncle Vili: Andre Aciman's great uncle portrayed in Out of Egypt, the story of his family's life in Alexandria and their subsequent dispersal.

But Vili: a type, an original, an archetypal Jew. A man with many nationalities, careers, languages, women, lives; confident, charming, resourceful, cunning, secretive, persistent, metamorphic. Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy, as the chapter on him is titled. Turk, Italian, Alexandrian, English gentleman. Vili, an Odysseus without a home to get to.

The wandering Jew: someone destined to have no destination.

Perhaps that is a meaning of diaspora: to wander in time.

Siamo o non siamo? Uncle Vili's refrain which Aciman threads through this chapter of the book: Are we or aren't we? Often meaning, Am I or aren't I? Which Vili offers up with panache to suggest: are we or aren't we man enough, men of honor, Jews, peddlers, better than the rest, special.

Siamo o non Siamo? A rhetorical assertion which says in every context: nothing can take away our right to existence. There's always something, a source of credit, to draw on.

Zelig: Woody Allen's chameleon character whose impersonations and absence of continuous identity issue from a core disbelief in the right to exist.

Proteus, that demi-urge, another impersonator. A shapeshifter. Another way the tenuously existent and the surcharged with existence resemble one another.

Every poet is a Jew, said Marina Tsvetayeva, meaning: threatened, endangered, targeted, denied a place, exiled; meaning, she must side with the persecuted, the beset. Less a call to action or "solidarity" than an identification with suffering and hurt, with the outsider.

***************

What would the right to exist mean?

It might mean you would have no need of words. No need for them beyond communication, self expression. It might mean that many things are simply given.

The Greeks had no concept of rights. Only of justice.

What would the right to existence feel like? It might feel like what these lines of poetry make me feel:

Never again would birds' song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

—Robert Frost

​

Or these:

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.

—Edmund Waller

What is that feeling?  That there are loopholes in the law.

What is a poem?

An anodyne that doesn't take away the pain.

Then, crucially, there is Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, whose story can be described as how a boy with good manners, unhappy and daydreaming, acquires a belief in his right to exist.

A belief that can be summed up in a word: lineage.

Telemachus thinks of himself as an orphan. Doubts he is his father's son. Feels helpless. Alone. A nobody. Meaning: only himself. Without support or resources.

His grievance: that this state of affairs should be so.

To be just oneself: a figure of poverty.

Franz Kafka: also a son whose inauthenticity suggests not that it should be otherwise but, rather: this is the common condition. Those who feel otherwise may be marvels, self-made men, but deluded ones. Self-made: a point of pride, a source of insecurity. No security. Nothing really belongs to you. No one at your back.

Security: that which secures a loan.

No security: everything may be withdrawn at any time. The social definition of a Jew.

How does revocation become vocation?

How does Telemachus become a son? 

A son: someone who could become a king.

How? By acknowledging and accepting lineage. So, this is who I am.

Call it identification: with his father who he is told he resembles; with the Akhaians and their history, with whom he is joined in common suffering.

And: to have a god interested in you.

And then to have a story: in the male version, go look for your father.

A story. Which means to have enemies.

To have enemies: to have a story with a public life, others who are part of it.

These are the makings of a somebody.

This is the end of daydreaming. To daydream: to worship false gods. Only night dreams are real. Why? Perhaps because they are not our own. Because they alone know our real wishes.

Lineage: what extends through us. What comes out of the past like a freight train and passes through, annihilating, mangling, using us as track. Taking us with it.

Lineage: what comes glowing out of the tunnel, made solid by myth and fiction, encrusted by tradition and custom, and obliterates the happenstance of origins. 

Lineage: which never reaches as far back as the violence and force of its authoring, that is, its inauthenticity. But which, nevertheless, unauthored, authorizes. 

Lineage: inertia, momentum. A train whose only brakes are collision, extinction.

So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him.

— Simone Weil, "Human Personality"

Lineage, tradition: what is impersonal in us.

What is sacred in a poem, I am impelled to say against the narrow grain of earlier beliefs, is the impersonal in it.

By beliefs do I mean wishes? The wish to become one's own self?

Later, the self, through its repetitions, comes to seem like a small thing, a thing running out of time, which is in need of time, absorbable time, the time of others. To be backed up by time, and the productions of time.

The personal: whatever belongs to you.

The impersonal: whatever you belong to.

Lineage came naturally to Vili, not because he had it, nor because he mimicked it, nor even because he aspired to it . . . In his case, it was simply the conviction that he was born better.

— Aciman

Lineage and what one accrues through it: credit.

Uncle Vili knew how to convey that intangible though unmistakable feeling that he had lineage, a provenance so ancient and so distinguished that it transcended such petty distinctions as birthplace, nationality, or religion. And with the suggestion of lineage came the suggestion of wealth . . . . lineage earned him credit. And this is what mattered most to him.

— Aciman

What authorizes our credit: making our claim to credit credible?

Or in the absence of credibility: putting up collateral. Making the collateral appear creditable, of value.

Yet to have to show it or to prove it is to be discredited. What? Don't you trust me?

The problem resembles overstatement.

Overstatement is a spendthrift and says (covertly): I am less than I seem.

Overstatement speaks and is caught in a lie.

Understatement harbors and implies: There is more to me and this than I am saying.

Understatement's tribe: allusion, gesture, suggestion, synecdoche, etymology.

Lineage, then: an economics of authenticity. An economics of time.

Its renewable resource: whatever you are made of. Whatever is made through you.

Those "millions of strange shadows."

Credit: a worth beyond ourselves which we can draw on.

What, when you are falling, you can fall back on.

Uncle Vili, at the end of his long life, living in Surrey, England, pseudonymously as a Dr. H.M. Spingarn, tells his visiting great nephew that he's been thinking of his mother, “simply as mother, the way children do when they need something only mothers have”; he quotes from memory the opening of Proust, to Aciman's astonishment, and later when alone in his bedroom he is heard, through the door, to be reciting "an eerie garble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame." Hebrew prayers.

Mother and father tongues.  The memorious linguistic satchel that gathers up and contains the vouchers of credit, which is a source of credit itself.

Poetry, like all significant writing, gets to keep what it spends.

For the bankrupt, it is one of the few things to bank on.