system

So having given any number of hours today to this project—reading "The System" by John Ashbery, which is the second of three poems in his book Three Poems and which are all prose—and trying to read it all in one sitting but finding that just impossible because however much I can ignore the phone I just can't ignore a bladder full of coffee forever, I find myself thinking that one can't say much about "The System" by John Ashbery because he has already said it or set the rule, the tone, the limit by which anything can be said—or at least said about it ("The System" by John Ashbery).

Here in my tortured syntax you see the effect of several hours of reading "The System" whose syntax is not tortured but generous and surprisingly lucid. The sentence ...

Thus, in a half-baked kind of way, this cosmic welter of attractions was coming to stand for the real thing, which has to be colorless and featureless if it is to be the true reflection of the primeval energy from which it issued forth, once a salient force capable of assuming the shape of any of the great impulses struggling to accomplish the universal task, but now bogged down in a single aspect of these to the detriment of the others, which begin to dwindle, jejeune, etiolated, as though not really essential, as though someone had devised them for the mere pleasure of complicating the already complicated texture of the byways and torments through which we have to stray, plagued by thorns, chased by wild beasts, as though it were not commonly known from the beginning that not one of these tendrils of the tree of humanity could be bruised without endangering the whole vast waving mass; that that gorgeous, motley organism would tumble or die out unless each particle of its well-being were conserved as preciously as the idea of the whole.

And now I'm finished with "The System" in which John Ashbery has acted something like the owner of an old and well-loved jacket who has finally pulled out the lining to see what might have been hidden in there between itself and the outer material of cloth or leather or some new synthetic oil-based fabric. And what has been hidden? Just the nature of life, thought, expression or the nature of how anyone can know and exist among some such. It must be that John Ashbery has considered it all—if not in fact finally explained it all. He's been as much our own Lucretius in this as we could ever have had. And did we know it? No, not then, but now we do.

It all? Well, poetry and the mind that makes poetry in its own time. As one site has Contemporary Literary Criticism saying of Three Poems, "The middle poem, "The System," is among Ashbery's most important linguistic experiments in which he reflects on the living, open-ended qualities of poetry and posits that in the elusive malleability of language inheres the foundation for love, understanding, and interpersonal connectivity." Gee, that's well said.

Comments

[M Sowid]

Ee gads.

Who on earth wants to read that kind of boring navel lintishness?

Gimme a break.

[brtom]

i chose a particularly quirky sentence out of many found in the forty pages ... but to answer your question, i guess there are (relatively) quite a few who want to (and some who actually do) read this kind of stuff ... can you believe it? o brave new world that has such saying in't ...

[brtom]

but ... o ... i just realized you may be speaking about my own poor writing here ... and ... well ... it's ALWAYS been about the navel lint ... so what can i say?