Thomas Fink
Anatomies of (Dis)Appearance:
Charles Borkhuis, Disappearing Acts.
(Chax Press, 2014. $18. ISBN: 9780989431682)
Charles Borkhuis enacts “disappearing acts” in the actual structure of his seventh book of poetry. The poetic sequence, “Dead Reckoning,” has five parts, each with a subtitle and each consisting of six sections of unrhymed, unpunctuated free-verse couplets, and each of the parts is separated by another poem. (And these poems, some of which are sequences as well, have differing stanzaic patterns and in one case, a cross between Olsonian composition-by-field and contemporary visual poetry.) The fourteen, fourteen-line, tercet-dominated “Hypnogogic Sonnets” that separate the first and third parts of “Dead Reckoning” consist of powerfully enigmatic narratives that all feature some form of undoing, and most make reference to the material traces and effects of language: “black pronoun on the frozen lake/ where the foot stops/ white between words” (27). Each time “Dead Reckoning” disappears, we find that it will reappear, and in fact, the binary of appearance/disappearance is crucial to the poem’s movement, as in the opening lines: “to each his own double/ loitering inside the ruins// body echo to go/ so easy to be displaced” (11).
A cliché about individual choice is transformed into a splitting of the self. And what keep appearing and disappearing—that is, displacing one another—are particular components of the multiple self. The “double” haunts “the ruins” of what is thought to be an “original” self, but is the “body” an “echo” of the mind that “goes” (does not remain stable?) or is the socially structured self a ruined, transient echo of the body? Fragmentary syntax waxes ambiguous and will not answer, but any seeming foundation or after-effect seems easily “displaced.” The poem’s speaker calls attention to his own problematic status as the one who is supposed to deliver a “self” to the audience: “whispers through the static…/ which of you insists on speaking for me” (12).
Even if the “you” may be read as an apostrophe for readers, it is more likely that this second-person plural refers to the many versions of self that might, at a given time, occupy the blank spot of the “me” representing the concept of a speaking subject. “The static,” then, involves this confusion of multiple images/tropes of identity, as though they vie in space and time for recognition—or perhaps even dominance. Because of this, as well as the perpetually othering process of self-contemplation, no mirror (literal or figurative) works to deliver stable self-identification for the individual “behind” the words: “you’re not a reflection// you’re a person who just can’t see/ his face in the glass anymore” (14). The question is whether s/he ever could see accurately. Indeed, versions of the self’s narrative depend on particular perspectives about reality/illusion and success/failure, and none seem to have staying power:
In one scenario he’s his father’s favorite
in another he’s dishonored and disowned
in one version he’s the author of too many books
in another he’s a beggar with too few limbs
one moment an intrepid world traveler
the next the man who never left his room
in still another only one world is real
and the others just soap bubbles that pop (15)
Whereas the “beggar” with one or no “limbs” and “the man who never left his room” suffer experiential immobility, a “dishonored’ identity defined by lack, the one who has authored “too many books” seems to have an excess of “limbs” that make recognition of an author traveling through time with a unified oeuvre impossible.
Various moments in the second and third parts of “Dead Reckoning” address how a constituted self is measured through the experience of intimate relationships. For example, as he is “lost on a train of thought,” a speaker’s mother (perhaps long gone) is remembered or imagined to intone a superego-like admonition: “I am speeding back to mother// spying me in the mirror’s eye/ ‘you’d never anything to make me// ashamed of you would you’” (36). This alarming utterance is punctuated by the continual “ringing” of an “alarm clock…// in the suitcase overhead.” Flashes of memory and temporal disjunction are alarming to both the speaker and his fellow travelers.
Borkhuis represents love as a source of tantalizing incompleteness, to be supplemented by poetic language and thus granted some degree of success: “’maybe we never truly touch/ and in love remain unknown’// a cat crossing at the green smiles back/’only in metaphor may we meet’” (39). The metaphorical sense of erotic unity is as unsettling as it is arresting: one who has “dreamt [he] was still alive/ but woke up dead” finds that he is “within” the erotic “other,” perhaps willingly trading an individual identity for the unification of the “egg” or sphere in Plato’s Symposium echoed in Yeats’s “Among School Children”: “and I returned to live inside you//… impossible to detect precisely// when my body stopped/ and yours started” (65). Even when “truth” seems to be exposed, it amounts to “no more than a dented can of bug spray”—a feeble defense against annoying environmental intrusions—“on a despoiled shore”; nevertheless, even in these degraded circumstances, “love will still wash up/ on my worn out loafers looking for a bone” (68).
Of course, the title “Dead Reckoning” can be read in various ways: as the calculation of a position in navigation (in either a literal or figurative sense), as the attempt of the living to interpret the dead and death itself, and as the “reckoning” performed by the dead. Especially in some of the later sections of the poem, tropes that posit reversals of the binaries living/death and person/ghost further develop the exploration of the appearance and disappearance of selves in ways that disrupt commonsensical ways of keeping track of past, present, and future: “you watch yourself acting in a film/ but your ghost is squeezed// by a story you didn’t write” (84). The self that one perceives in the “mirror” of a movie is already a “ghost” of one’s past, and in the present, he does not recognize himself as the author of the narrative of those past actions, but as an actor submitting to external forces. Yet the “dead” individual seems to inhabit the border between life and death, desperate to know his “true” status: “he awakens in a tunnel on a train// and asks the woman sitting next to him/ ‘please tell me … am I still alive.’”
For the ghost, the prospect of eternal life is a nightmare, not a consolation; it is entertained that one “in death remain[s] on call,” like a physician who cannot rest, and there is also “the call of other lifetimes inside this one” (88). “To pretend to live/ and make a show of it” mocks the quest for authenticity. Indeed, “real life” is shockingly termed “this afterbirth” (104). “Ghosts inside the minds of others” reinforce what Derrida characterizes as the hauntology of ontology; individual identity is ghostly in its failure to establish enduring temporal and spatial presence and ability to make itself wholly present: “I am what haunts and what is haunted/ / but is absent at its core/ without a clear beginning or end” (108).
The speaker of “Spasm,” a seven-page text in blocks of verse with bursts of wholly unpunctuated units of syntax, has a similar “ghostly” problematic. He is a patient in a mental institution who is acutely aware of how his “keepers” limit his freedom and reify him: “we were so much left luggage” (73); “someone turns me in like a bad bill” (77). Against the idea of shock therapy and other depersonalization attacks” (76), the speaker opens the poem with the imperative: “shock the therapy back to the spark” (73), yet he acknowledges that the bleak environment has disoriented him to the extent that his possibilities of resistance are severely challenged: “wake me hands shaking from this place I can’t/ keep words to things anymore so objects pass/ in fever” (74). Even if the disruption of links between signifier and signified, in other contexts, permits an expansion of imaginative capacity, here it stymies his already fraught negotiation with the keepers.
“Spasm” is fueled by the fascinating interplay of delusion, insight, and in-between states in the inmate speaker’s associative flow. Whereas, at one point, he has the paranoid delusion of “hearing” the keepers laughingly “sawing off patients’ limbs” in the institution’s “storage room” (76), he can detect “the nothing in their eyes” (74) that indicates the keepers’ disillusionment about the impact of their jobs, their burnout, yet he also understands the psychological power of creativity: “thought can ignite a bud inside the skull blossom….” Of course, as a response to his own immense self-doubt and lack of agency, a fantasy of mastery over his “captors” is a natural move: “stand motionless sun-/ captured tree so they will never know the/ circuitry secret sky code lips aflame so I may/ eat the sun…” The concluding trope in this passage, acknowledged as “a trick,” suggests a sublime influx of vibrant energy. All of this is not a manifestation of mere insanity, but an unsentimental call for the recognition that, behind the elements of his character that most would consider dysfunctional, he experiences a significant range of human emotions and desires. And the intricacy and subtlety of language, it should be emphasized, are the means by which the poet delivers approximations (not full re-presentations) of a being’s thought processes. Poetic language questions the policing of boundaries: “I disappear inside the/ keeper’s brain burrow deeper there until one/ night he hears my voice as if it were his own” (79).
The title of “Trace Elements” can be read as a command to investigate what is elementary or fundamental and/or as a gesture identifying the poem itself as a container of such elements. Does Borkhuis presume the possibility of capturing what is irreducible—like the most sub-atomic of entities—in his poem, or does he signal in a Derridean fashion that one cannot follow traces back to the telos of absolute origins? He poses the problem of totalized explanation, of comprehensive understanding, knocking against ubiquitous uncertainty; this gives a poem of varied imagery, tropes, and abstractions its primary dynamic: “that I might try in vain/ to explain the universe/ to a dying vole” (91); “explain till you have explained away/ all explanation// swept under the rug/ except for the silence/ between things” (92). Directly mentioned twice more in the poem (and perhaps indirectly, several other times), the vole seems a trope for whatever denizens of his environment strike the speaker as wholly other, as a severe test to his efforts to communicate. If the poet hopes to supplant “the silence” with an account of the salient relations “between things,” it is a massive challenge, and part of the problem is to find “words” that “know/ which self is knocking at the door/ and which is burrowing/ through the earth” (93)—the precise dilemma articulated so forcefully and variously in the sprawling “Dead Reckoning.”
The horizon of possibility for such an investigation is marked, of course, by what language can do: “status of the sentence/ where the noun prostrates itself/ before the verb/ for deeper clarification” (94). Like Pound, Olson, New York School poets, and many others, Borkhuis suggests that too much attention to “the noun” promotes an illusory sense of status and that one should honor the reality of process, the primacy of “the verb,” in the effort to be faithful to the interaction of elements and transformation of natural and conceptual entities. Such an approach necessitates “correction/ steeped upon correction” (92) rather than the attempt to represent a single fixed truth. We can also find a celebration of what Wallace Stevens terms the pressure of the imagination on reality: “when metaphors collide/ I see sparks from a distant alphabet/ come crawling/ infant on my tongue” (96). Unlike the “distance learners” of current web education, the poet is a “distant learner” (93); his “motive for metaphor” (to cite Stevens again) is to overcome the spatial and temporal remoteness of both prior experience and much natural and world history through establishing “infant” (fresh) linguistic correspondences.
Although poetic language can “coax/ a little life from this chronic ‘yes’ and ‘no” (95), the variegated flux of “Trace Elements” questions any efforts to achieve a comprehensive explanation or transcendence through linguistic means. Indeed, language affords no protection against death: “words will fail us in the end” (99). As when the speaker declares a sublime, surreal perception at the end of the first section, “there the convulsive sun/ hanging from a branch” (91), poetic imagination can be viewed as fostering vital energy and presenting intimations of sublime terror. The dominance of textuality—“the words want to claim us/ as their own” (97)—is something to be feared as much as overwhelming silence is. And “the world eating itself/ word by word// or simply language// stretched over everything/ in a sticky embrace” (98) may offer temporary transport, but words’ “imaginary/ doubling of this world” (100) occasions the same skepticism to be found in the appearances/disappearances of “Dead Reckoning,” “Spasm,” and Disappearing Acts as a whole.
Anatomies of (Dis)Appearance:
Charles Borkhuis, Disappearing Acts.
(Chax Press, 2014. $18. ISBN: 9780989431682)
Charles Borkhuis enacts “disappearing acts” in the actual structure of his seventh book of poetry. The poetic sequence, “Dead Reckoning,” has five parts, each with a subtitle and each consisting of six sections of unrhymed, unpunctuated free-verse couplets, and each of the parts is separated by another poem. (And these poems, some of which are sequences as well, have differing stanzaic patterns and in one case, a cross between Olsonian composition-by-field and contemporary visual poetry.) The fourteen, fourteen-line, tercet-dominated “Hypnogogic Sonnets” that separate the first and third parts of “Dead Reckoning” consist of powerfully enigmatic narratives that all feature some form of undoing, and most make reference to the material traces and effects of language: “black pronoun on the frozen lake/ where the foot stops/ white between words” (27). Each time “Dead Reckoning” disappears, we find that it will reappear, and in fact, the binary of appearance/disappearance is crucial to the poem’s movement, as in the opening lines: “to each his own double/ loitering inside the ruins// body echo to go/ so easy to be displaced” (11).
A cliché about individual choice is transformed into a splitting of the self. And what keep appearing and disappearing—that is, displacing one another—are particular components of the multiple self. The “double” haunts “the ruins” of what is thought to be an “original” self, but is the “body” an “echo” of the mind that “goes” (does not remain stable?) or is the socially structured self a ruined, transient echo of the body? Fragmentary syntax waxes ambiguous and will not answer, but any seeming foundation or after-effect seems easily “displaced.” The poem’s speaker calls attention to his own problematic status as the one who is supposed to deliver a “self” to the audience: “whispers through the static…/ which of you insists on speaking for me” (12).
Even if the “you” may be read as an apostrophe for readers, it is more likely that this second-person plural refers to the many versions of self that might, at a given time, occupy the blank spot of the “me” representing the concept of a speaking subject. “The static,” then, involves this confusion of multiple images/tropes of identity, as though they vie in space and time for recognition—or perhaps even dominance. Because of this, as well as the perpetually othering process of self-contemplation, no mirror (literal or figurative) works to deliver stable self-identification for the individual “behind” the words: “you’re not a reflection// you’re a person who just can’t see/ his face in the glass anymore” (14). The question is whether s/he ever could see accurately. Indeed, versions of the self’s narrative depend on particular perspectives about reality/illusion and success/failure, and none seem to have staying power:
In one scenario he’s his father’s favorite
in another he’s dishonored and disowned
in one version he’s the author of too many books
in another he’s a beggar with too few limbs
one moment an intrepid world traveler
the next the man who never left his room
in still another only one world is real
and the others just soap bubbles that pop (15)
Whereas the “beggar” with one or no “limbs” and “the man who never left his room” suffer experiential immobility, a “dishonored’ identity defined by lack, the one who has authored “too many books” seems to have an excess of “limbs” that make recognition of an author traveling through time with a unified oeuvre impossible.
Various moments in the second and third parts of “Dead Reckoning” address how a constituted self is measured through the experience of intimate relationships. For example, as he is “lost on a train of thought,” a speaker’s mother (perhaps long gone) is remembered or imagined to intone a superego-like admonition: “I am speeding back to mother// spying me in the mirror’s eye/ ‘you’d never anything to make me// ashamed of you would you’” (36). This alarming utterance is punctuated by the continual “ringing” of an “alarm clock…// in the suitcase overhead.” Flashes of memory and temporal disjunction are alarming to both the speaker and his fellow travelers.
Borkhuis represents love as a source of tantalizing incompleteness, to be supplemented by poetic language and thus granted some degree of success: “’maybe we never truly touch/ and in love remain unknown’// a cat crossing at the green smiles back/’only in metaphor may we meet’” (39). The metaphorical sense of erotic unity is as unsettling as it is arresting: one who has “dreamt [he] was still alive/ but woke up dead” finds that he is “within” the erotic “other,” perhaps willingly trading an individual identity for the unification of the “egg” or sphere in Plato’s Symposium echoed in Yeats’s “Among School Children”: “and I returned to live inside you//… impossible to detect precisely// when my body stopped/ and yours started” (65). Even when “truth” seems to be exposed, it amounts to “no more than a dented can of bug spray”—a feeble defense against annoying environmental intrusions—“on a despoiled shore”; nevertheless, even in these degraded circumstances, “love will still wash up/ on my worn out loafers looking for a bone” (68).
Of course, the title “Dead Reckoning” can be read in various ways: as the calculation of a position in navigation (in either a literal or figurative sense), as the attempt of the living to interpret the dead and death itself, and as the “reckoning” performed by the dead. Especially in some of the later sections of the poem, tropes that posit reversals of the binaries living/death and person/ghost further develop the exploration of the appearance and disappearance of selves in ways that disrupt commonsensical ways of keeping track of past, present, and future: “you watch yourself acting in a film/ but your ghost is squeezed// by a story you didn’t write” (84). The self that one perceives in the “mirror” of a movie is already a “ghost” of one’s past, and in the present, he does not recognize himself as the author of the narrative of those past actions, but as an actor submitting to external forces. Yet the “dead” individual seems to inhabit the border between life and death, desperate to know his “true” status: “he awakens in a tunnel on a train// and asks the woman sitting next to him/ ‘please tell me … am I still alive.’”
For the ghost, the prospect of eternal life is a nightmare, not a consolation; it is entertained that one “in death remain[s] on call,” like a physician who cannot rest, and there is also “the call of other lifetimes inside this one” (88). “To pretend to live/ and make a show of it” mocks the quest for authenticity. Indeed, “real life” is shockingly termed “this afterbirth” (104). “Ghosts inside the minds of others” reinforce what Derrida characterizes as the hauntology of ontology; individual identity is ghostly in its failure to establish enduring temporal and spatial presence and ability to make itself wholly present: “I am what haunts and what is haunted/ / but is absent at its core/ without a clear beginning or end” (108).
The speaker of “Spasm,” a seven-page text in blocks of verse with bursts of wholly unpunctuated units of syntax, has a similar “ghostly” problematic. He is a patient in a mental institution who is acutely aware of how his “keepers” limit his freedom and reify him: “we were so much left luggage” (73); “someone turns me in like a bad bill” (77). Against the idea of shock therapy and other depersonalization attacks” (76), the speaker opens the poem with the imperative: “shock the therapy back to the spark” (73), yet he acknowledges that the bleak environment has disoriented him to the extent that his possibilities of resistance are severely challenged: “wake me hands shaking from this place I can’t/ keep words to things anymore so objects pass/ in fever” (74). Even if the disruption of links between signifier and signified, in other contexts, permits an expansion of imaginative capacity, here it stymies his already fraught negotiation with the keepers.
“Spasm” is fueled by the fascinating interplay of delusion, insight, and in-between states in the inmate speaker’s associative flow. Whereas, at one point, he has the paranoid delusion of “hearing” the keepers laughingly “sawing off patients’ limbs” in the institution’s “storage room” (76), he can detect “the nothing in their eyes” (74) that indicates the keepers’ disillusionment about the impact of their jobs, their burnout, yet he also understands the psychological power of creativity: “thought can ignite a bud inside the skull blossom….” Of course, as a response to his own immense self-doubt and lack of agency, a fantasy of mastery over his “captors” is a natural move: “stand motionless sun-/ captured tree so they will never know the/ circuitry secret sky code lips aflame so I may/ eat the sun…” The concluding trope in this passage, acknowledged as “a trick,” suggests a sublime influx of vibrant energy. All of this is not a manifestation of mere insanity, but an unsentimental call for the recognition that, behind the elements of his character that most would consider dysfunctional, he experiences a significant range of human emotions and desires. And the intricacy and subtlety of language, it should be emphasized, are the means by which the poet delivers approximations (not full re-presentations) of a being’s thought processes. Poetic language questions the policing of boundaries: “I disappear inside the/ keeper’s brain burrow deeper there until one/ night he hears my voice as if it were his own” (79).
The title of “Trace Elements” can be read as a command to investigate what is elementary or fundamental and/or as a gesture identifying the poem itself as a container of such elements. Does Borkhuis presume the possibility of capturing what is irreducible—like the most sub-atomic of entities—in his poem, or does he signal in a Derridean fashion that one cannot follow traces back to the telos of absolute origins? He poses the problem of totalized explanation, of comprehensive understanding, knocking against ubiquitous uncertainty; this gives a poem of varied imagery, tropes, and abstractions its primary dynamic: “that I might try in vain/ to explain the universe/ to a dying vole” (91); “explain till you have explained away/ all explanation// swept under the rug/ except for the silence/ between things” (92). Directly mentioned twice more in the poem (and perhaps indirectly, several other times), the vole seems a trope for whatever denizens of his environment strike the speaker as wholly other, as a severe test to his efforts to communicate. If the poet hopes to supplant “the silence” with an account of the salient relations “between things,” it is a massive challenge, and part of the problem is to find “words” that “know/ which self is knocking at the door/ and which is burrowing/ through the earth” (93)—the precise dilemma articulated so forcefully and variously in the sprawling “Dead Reckoning.”
The horizon of possibility for such an investigation is marked, of course, by what language can do: “status of the sentence/ where the noun prostrates itself/ before the verb/ for deeper clarification” (94). Like Pound, Olson, New York School poets, and many others, Borkhuis suggests that too much attention to “the noun” promotes an illusory sense of status and that one should honor the reality of process, the primacy of “the verb,” in the effort to be faithful to the interaction of elements and transformation of natural and conceptual entities. Such an approach necessitates “correction/ steeped upon correction” (92) rather than the attempt to represent a single fixed truth. We can also find a celebration of what Wallace Stevens terms the pressure of the imagination on reality: “when metaphors collide/ I see sparks from a distant alphabet/ come crawling/ infant on my tongue” (96). Unlike the “distance learners” of current web education, the poet is a “distant learner” (93); his “motive for metaphor” (to cite Stevens again) is to overcome the spatial and temporal remoteness of both prior experience and much natural and world history through establishing “infant” (fresh) linguistic correspondences.
Although poetic language can “coax/ a little life from this chronic ‘yes’ and ‘no” (95), the variegated flux of “Trace Elements” questions any efforts to achieve a comprehensive explanation or transcendence through linguistic means. Indeed, language affords no protection against death: “words will fail us in the end” (99). As when the speaker declares a sublime, surreal perception at the end of the first section, “there the convulsive sun/ hanging from a branch” (91), poetic imagination can be viewed as fostering vital energy and presenting intimations of sublime terror. The dominance of textuality—“the words want to claim us/ as their own” (97)—is something to be feared as much as overwhelming silence is. And “the world eating itself/ word by word// or simply language// stretched over everything/ in a sticky embrace” (98) may offer temporary transport, but words’ “imaginary/ doubling of this world” (100) occasions the same skepticism to be found in the appearances/disappearances of “Dead Reckoning,” “Spasm,” and Disappearing Acts as a whole.