Happily
Lyn Hejinian
publisher: The Post-Apollo Press, 2000
isbn: 0-942996-38-0
price: $10
This small book by Hejinian presents a linked series of pleasures, pleasures that are not corrupted by over-arching theoretical significance imposing its will on the structure, though, indeed, a "theory" seems to be at its base.
That is to say, there is an "ambient" quality to this work, an attempt to provide the "mental furniture" (in Satie's phrase) to daily living and thinking which approaches as from a distance, but a distance that is neither exterior or interior, but is to be found in language. That it appear "far" is mostly a quality of the measured incompleteness of the phrasing, which can be contrasted to the overdetermined quality of the aphorism or rhymed couplet.
The sentences have a self-containment -- they can be read individually for their contents and aporias -- but fall, when taken on a long-view, into a pragmatist's discourse of viewing thought in its moment-by-moment self-creation:
Now is a blinding instant one single explosion but somehow some part of it gets accentuated
And each time the moment falls the emphasis of the moment falls into time differently
No sooner noticed no sooner now that falls from something
Now is a noted conjunction
The happiness of knowing it appears
[27]
The reader is guided along by a rhythmic certainty that doesn't fall into a regularity suggesting "pace" or a normative meter; likewise, "conclusions" appear -- "Now is a noted conjunction" for example -- which can spiral off into an entire philosophical thesis (suggesting closure) but which, in obedience to the method of the poem, leads only to the next moment and the promise -- the best promise of poetry -- of further discoveries, of "possible futures".
"Dailiness" seems to be some aspect of this, that one should not create thought or linguistic structures that could not, in fact, survive the contingencies of day, whether these be impositions on one's reading time or the hierarchies created when values are too much analyzed, too much banished to the linearities of, say, academic discourse.
"There is no 'correct path' / No sure indication / It is hazy even to itself" she writes, echoing, in a sense, Dante, but subverting in some ways the entire mythos of the "bildungsroman" and the promise of metaphysical certainty, in which humans are banished to the second-tier, "mundane" task of the approach to essence and the ideal.
Some lines read like counter-arguments to the accusation of relativity; Hejinian opts for the approach that pragmatism relieves one not just of final vocabularies but also of any myth that contingent values fail in their relationship to the "eternal verities":
From the second moment of life, one can test experience, be eager to please, have the mouth of a scholar, hands never at rest, there is no such thing as objectivity but that doesn't mean everything is unclear and one doesn't fail to choose the next moment for a long time
[30]
The poem ends beautifully, and it sounds like a beginning, subsuming within itself both Bergsonian notions of time as a tactile, immeasurable quantity but whose recognition is revelatory, and the Marcusian argument that uncontaminated "pleasure" is a quality worth fighting for in the economic/political nexus, though difficult to deduce freed of the needs of capital:
No, happily I'm feeling the wind in its own right rather than as of particular pertinence to us as a windy moment
I hear its lines leaving in a rumor the silence of which is to catch on quickly to arrange things in preparation for what will come next
That may be the thing and logically we go then it departs
[39]
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