The Book of Landings. Mark McMorris
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from nation to exile, but decline to offer the privileges of a stable society. For in the hiatus between previous origin and future destination there is a meeting of discrepant horizons. Gathered together briefly at the entrepôt is a heterogeneity of national costumes, which mingle and exert a reciprocal influence on one another, and which then emerge from the exit as hybrid or fragmentary forms. As a “no-place,” entrepôt is related to paradise or utopia. But utopia, a vision of perfected polis, is the negative face of the system of transit, the inverse of entrepôt. Utopia is the destination longed for, but never attained, the form never concluded, in the passage.
In Fragments from a Time before This, the rectangles share a lexicon of entrepôt—that is to say, words dealing with exploration, conquest, warfare, migration, nomadism, transitional spaces like markets, sacred passages like thresholds and crossroads, voyages in time and space, together with words drawn from enterprises devoted to describing or facilitating movement, as, for example, the study of geography, cartography, navigation, even mathematics and cosmology. Because of this lexicon, the rectangles become vehicles for various specific metaphors: the grid of 12 rectangles serves to trap or arrest objects (words) in their flight; the grid reduces the chaos of forced migration, propelled by violent episodes such as wars, to the orderliness of a formal system, an abstract design; the grids clean up the situation, and impose stability on identities that are transient; the grids are formalized abstractions of various kinds of terrain, over which migrations take place. Hence, the borders of the grid are open to the border-spaces of the page, and open to the texts on other pages of the book. As the alphabet of the trilogy, words from the lexicon can “migrate” to other poems in both Volume II and III, evincing meanings from their usage in those contexts and suggesting another metaphor—another function—for the grids: origins, places to begin from, to go astray from.
Beginnings are repeated, then. The open structure of space in “Fragments from a Time before This” became clearer to me at this point. In the first volume, entrepôt is a mediating term in a binary system of source and destination. The vector of passage looks like this: here
This perpetual yielding is made palpable by the fragmentary texts scattered on the pages of the book. This is especially conspicuous in the graphic layout of the sections entitled “12 Rectangles” and “Line Drawings.” There one encounters inconclusive or distorted texts, together with brief meditations on the desert, on abstract painting, on nomadism; one encounters the parts of geometry, horizontal lines, vertical lines, spaces partitioned, words next to invisible borders. The scattering of pieces, even pieces of geometry, appeared to me as the product of a violent machine. And the ruined form of the pages brought to mind, not the detritus of the West, but that of scattered exiles in dissolution from what Empire had wrought, when the binary still held.
The explanation of the fragments was devised after the fact of the pages, upon the terrain of another metaphor. Overtly incomplete, the fragment of any object exhibits a dislocation in time from an original moment of assembly: what was once a whole has, over time, become disiecta membra (the “scattered limbs” of a body). As a synecdoche pointing to a greater whole, the fragment of an otherwise lost work is a broken piece, an intimation of more—a neverending incitement to nostalgia. It is a memorial of violence done to, and suffered by, a body of work in its tradition from the writer’s hand to the copyist or printer to the library, and down through time. Arrested in the present after a long and deleterious passage, the fragment, and the collage of fragments, both serve to mark the modernity of forms: all that we can today possess of the past are fragments from a whole that existed at some previous date.
In a serial poem, the fragment intensifies thought: “only by means of the sharpest focus on a single point can the individual idea gain a kind of wholeness,” says Schlegel in the Lyceum Fragments. In my reading of “Fragments from a Time before This,” the inscription of diaspora takes the form of the relocated fragment, the fragment of speech that has been displaced, sent out of its place and put out of its time, repeatedly. With the shift in the structure of space (here and there are identical), so that beyond entrepôt lies only another entrepôt, came a sense of limits—a boundary of which the first volume had no awareness. So long as I concentrated upon the basic structure of origin to destination, mediated by passage through an entrepôt, the future could still hold promise, which I had called Utopia in the first volume. But, now, with entrepôt generalized and equivalent to space, so that beyond entrepôt lies only another entrepôt, the promise of a destination was dissolved. The future retreated to the vanishing point of all perspectival trajectories. Entrepôt was shown to me in a new light, as the artifact of an epoch—the Age of Empire—prior to our own future, a future in which the structure of space had changed, in which transit led only to further transit.
For lots of reasons, this situation alarmed me. For one thing, it seemed as if in looking for an antidote to the fragility of writing I had instead found the opposite. What else is writing if not the future imagined? If metamorphosis is perpetual, what is the ground of poetry? Poetry needs the anchor of nations and the national language if it is to be read and kept in play, but a future in which the horizon is perpetually transcended will not have nations. This is a complicated thought, full of conflict, for me, since one of my impulses has always been to write against the grain of national culture.
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