I. Ideology Images

II. Literary History

• ^{1986: Jack Spicer Conference – hears Robin Blaser challenge the New College Chapel audience (quoted from memory: “I wanted to ask you to write a blasphemy, but thought better of it “- i.e., who would even know how?) – hears Robert Duncan from larger stage remember Jack Spicer; he reads from a notebook entry after first meeting, quoted from memory – “how terrible, how necessary” or, “what a terrible person, how necessary”?) – memory confident that Robert said “terrible” and not “terrifying.” Read Robert’s biography for his impeccable lineage, despite being adopted, a working-class love child?): Nin, Kantorowicz, etc. (haven’t read the biography). Met with Michael Palmer at his home in Noe Valley two or three days after Robin’s talk. Spoke with mp directly after Robin’s talk; he couldn’t meet the next day since he was having lunch with Robin. Said something to the effect that everyone was stunned (did he say “suprised?”) by Robin’s talk, or the brilliant light he emanated? Robert was dying, even at a distance you could hear it in his voice. Memory at this distance cannot be verisimilitude, but then, neither are archive documents, or photographs. Confident, now, that the electrical shock at New College Chapel the strongest since hearing Brodsky’s thunderous Russian at Tulane in 1977. Brodsky knew Akhmatova; Akhmatova knew Mandelstam. Attenuated (piecemeal) lineage, more imagined than invented? Brodsky was new to the West, not yet destroyed by it. Maybe, maybe not; after reading Serge’s account of a reading by Mandelstam, confident that Mandelstam’s voice was in the air that evening; involuntary physical movement upon news of Lowell’s death, hearing it for the first time in elegy intro spoken in Russian and translated in real time, caught Brodsky’s eye: Did he think for the flash of a moment there was a poet in the audience? Everything else was just books until mp’s 1986 three-day visit to Iowa City that the young poet in Brodsky’s audience engineered, just as he engineered the dinner meeting four or five years later (the exact date is in Shades of Hades). 1990 or 1991. 1990. Hold, hold, my heart. The Quadrant is misdirection, or design metaphor. Three were born in the 1940s, two in the 1950s. Family romance. The eldest, 1943, the youngest, 1952. An untimely death that you were prevented from mourning in public since you did not know the fate of Arctic Summer, so the Quadrant is more than metaphor. These are the poets whose poems you slept with and whose voices entered your dreams. Howe’s influence in Recent Events more literary, not mythical (biblical) as with the Quadrant. There is a great difference between prophecy and field of vision. The field of vision may derive from the field in the pre-war Sioux River valley photograph, a field that you have walked and worked, baling hay and driving a tractor hauling hay wagons. The combine was not used in summer. The field of vision can see the necessity of Adorno’s negative determination – doubts about Söderbäck’s “return” from Kristeva for her concept of revolutionary time – and hard-won lesson that absence is more powerful than presence – so the Vancouver conference cannot happen a second time. There is too much Nietzsche in Kristeva, just as there is too much Heidegger in Agamben, and too much Lacan in Zizek. Counter: Do not slight the importance of public mourning. For the ancients, a festival and feast day?The first and second generations of the San Francisco Renaissance must have another future than NYRB editions of Spicer’s Lorca. Translation is activation: Italy and classical Greece and Rome activated the Elizabethans. There is a future English and future disintegration of English that has nothing to do with return or repetition, or even the United States of America. It may have something to do with redemption, if the historical achievement of the first and second generations of the San Francisco Renaissance was to preserve and complicate (ennervate?) Orphism.}

III. Imaginary Identifications

^{_{Twelve Counter/Dora Note: After 2024 crisis of the second articulation, writes three novels. The first, a comedy, splices travels and travails of a poet named Vin who is baffled by his life and art.}}

IV. Field of Vision

• ^{It is likely an expression in every language – universal – to swear on the grave of an ancestor – in English, one swears on the grave of one’s mother. Doris Margaret Miller is buried beside her mother and father on a hill overlooking her native village; Eden is the name of the ground. A tornado destroyed many cedars and pines last summer. So let it be said, by such oath, and as such, truth, that the journey to the native city of the signature on the wall of the museum was undertaken dreaming only of writing and publishing an essay that would earn from the museum private access to the complete installation, a modest objective, since he’d overheard the elderly guard say he had watched the entire film three times at his post in the entryway to the kingdom of shadows. If this objective is fulfilled, life will go on as before, neither more or less meaningful and certainly more purposeful and hopeful after the (desperate? reckless? selfless? (on the part of the one who dared begin the dialogue)) intersubjectivity of the second articulation during the late spring and summer of 2024. There was a brief and painful return the following summer which the dreamer ended. The dreamer, who is often so fulfilled by the dream that any corresponding action is after the fact, imagined a future, whether alone or not alone, of seeing and studying the great art of Eastern and Western Europe once he completed in 2026/27 his twenty years of service to the university system he had so precipitously abandoned in his youth. In August 2024, the last word he texted to his interlocutor, or savior, was Berlin. He researched Montenegro. Bulgaria was under discussion years ago before the war orphan mother-in-law was rejected by her daughter, with whom he shares two addresses. The second is a small house in a village, a gift of his mother’s estate, near the great river. He will never be homeless. All else is contingency, accident or destiny, a future that in his field of vision he can see, or believes he sees, as in the words of the character actor ghosting Buford at Gettysburg, “there’s a power behind it.” But his field of vision does not see an invading army; he sees, or dreams, of the greatness of Art; he sees, or dreams, of redemption and “indissoluble sympathy for all” (qtd. by Killian/Cole in the Recent Events authorization). But the dreamer also remembers these words from the same book of poems: “always remembering how / personal women always / are I’m ready to give / them up the minute / it will help the cause.” He may have already activated the prediction. It will not alter his commitment to the (dialectical?) relationship between the personal and the collective that is the revelation of the work of art that the dreamer will speak of next Tuesday. His understanding of his own work changed after the 2025 viewings. His website was a single page when he spoke with Lewis Freeman in Milwaukee in late November, 2024. He wrote his first social improvisation (writing with a group rather than alone in the reading room) at Woodland Pattern in answer to an installation by Shilpa Gupta he had walked through the day before in Madison. February 1 arrived like a bolt from the blue, but he was equal to his astonishment. But it is too hard to say this. It is too hard to wonder of the other side of irony – is it felicity? – if someone’s eyes were drawn to a site, drawn and intrigued and attracted, yet unbeknownst to the reader the space they had entered and the frame for the poetry they’d begun reading was the fruition of their own desire and creation?}

V. Three Unidentifiable Lines from a Notebook