Notes on Ellipsis: Of
Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Holderlin, and Blanchot
by William S. Allen (Bloomsbury Academic, 2007)
I.
Mimesis
on the Fly
Another car is
Just a theory
Until you hit one
But it's only then
When the shapeless
Takes form
That the not knowing begins
The array of model and make
Dissolves to a black
Alterity
A singular form
Shapelessness
Embodied
Just a theory
Until you hit one
But it's only then
When the shapeless
Takes form
That the not knowing begins
The array of model and make
Dissolves to a black
Alterity
A singular form
Shapelessness
Embodied
II.
The Limits of Language
There are no words in this world
Yet I persist
In feeling it
In the only way I know
The black external mark
That calls the what is not
To the not what I am
And an essence from a sleeping realm
Shows itself
By whispering "that is wrong"
And indeed those tawny wisps of grass
Can barely without words exist
The palms so tall and foreign
Without my voice
Cannot be sensed
Without becoming so distant
The sensing itself is strange
As if the world is freed
At the point of non-being
Where it refuses to exist
Not in the words I spoke into the darkness
But somewhere else
Impossibly far
But known somehow
In all its particulars
Its silence forced me to reappear
In the sun-translucent leaves
The bee investigations
The purple buds withholding
Any future
Yet I persist
In feeling it
In the only way I know
The black external mark
That calls the what is not
To the not what I am
And an essence from a sleeping realm
Shows itself
By whispering "that is wrong"
And indeed those tawny wisps of grass
Can barely without words exist
The palms so tall and foreign
Without my voice
Cannot be sensed
Without becoming so distant
The sensing itself is strange
As if the world is freed
At the point of non-being
Where it refuses to exist
Not in the words I spoke into the darkness
But somewhere else
Impossibly far
But known somehow
In all its particulars
Its silence forced me to reappear
In the sun-translucent leaves
The bee investigations
The purple buds withholding
Any future
III.
Aphorisms of Aphoria
These flickers of ghosts
Become our history
But the world they cause
To exist
Goes back in a blink
To invisibility
As if to evade our marauding thoughts
That conjured
What they chased
There is left for us
What remains concealed
What hope that makes all things
Failed
Again and again to reveal
Some truth that lies beyond
This truth
And swirls in an equiprimordial
Hermeneutic circle
And we suffer both
Neither one a source
For pain—
Appearance is our sunshine
Speaking is our rain—
But the pull somehow of both
Against our center—
The real that never quite becomes
Desire
So simple
To make those opposites attract
So hard to make them each
Equally true
Become our history
But the world they cause
To exist
Goes back in a blink
To invisibility
As if to evade our marauding thoughts
That conjured
What they chased
There is left for us
What remains concealed
What hope that makes all things
Failed
Again and again to reveal
Some truth that lies beyond
This truth
And swirls in an equiprimordial
Hermeneutic circle
And we suffer both
Neither one a source
For pain—
Appearance is our sunshine
Speaking is our rain—
But the pull somehow of both
Against our center—
The real that never quite becomes
Desire
So simple
To make those opposites attract
So hard to make them each
Equally true
IV.
Presence-Sing
O the world is invisible
Although we see
And words mirror
Its meaning
Without seeming
To be
The glare of our own faces
Stares back
Inevitably
So truth has no proof
Or refutable
Theories
Caught in the elusive allusions
While the real sways
Free of it all
As if one must surrender
To its presence
To create one's own
Essence
In the thing that resists
What will never speak
Except in one's
Words for it
Made from something
Unimaginable
That almost smiles
To be so thoroughly
Misunderstood
In the patterns that enthrall
Where everything we are
Cedes like
A discarded draw
The radiance remains
Of what was
Never there
It was a word responding
To a dream
That has unwound
Itself already
Where the ephemera still dance
As they are captured
For perpetuity
As the trace of what we lack
How far away we are
From nothingness
Although we see
And words mirror
Its meaning
Without seeming
To be
The glare of our own faces
Stares back
Inevitably
So truth has no proof
Or refutable
Theories
Caught in the elusive allusions
While the real sways
Free of it all
As if one must surrender
To its presence
To create one's own
Essence
In the thing that resists
What will never speak
Except in one's
Words for it
Made from something
Unimaginable
That almost smiles
To be so thoroughly
Misunderstood
In the patterns that enthrall
Where everything we are
Cedes like
A discarded draw
The radiance remains
Of what was
Never there
It was a word responding
To a dream
That has unwound
Itself already
Where the ephemera still dance
As they are captured
For perpetuity
As the trace of what we lack
How far away we are
From nothingness
V.
The Mediations
No joy to the reader
To efface
What's already
Been destroyed
The scraping sound
Of the word ecrit
Untranslatable
The girl with the nectarine
Hair walks by
With her Pekinese
There are no words
But these
To describe it
And an other side
That never saw the girl
And will never know
Except in words
That reveal
It's impossible
The place is known through those
Who are lost in it
Groaning with absence
To the knowers
Who gnaw at the smoke
And the bitters
Want the book to have
Predictable music
To call forth
Lost memories of their own
For the wordless to
Grow words
From great distances they join
In a war of gestures
Complicity
As a buzzing in the air
Brittle and comforting
Strangely true
To efface
What's already
Been destroyed
The scraping sound
Of the word ecrit
Untranslatable
The girl with the nectarine
Hair walks by
With her Pekinese
There are no words
But these
To describe it
And an other side
That never saw the girl
And will never know
Except in words
That reveal
It's impossible
The place is known through those
Who are lost in it
Groaning with absence
To the knowers
Who gnaw at the smoke
And the bitters
Want the book to have
Predictable music
To call forth
Lost memories of their own
For the wordless to
Grow words
From great distances they join
In a war of gestures
Complicity
As a buzzing in the air
Brittle and comforting
Strangely true
VI.
Nature as Translation
These palms and crows
Can barely exist
Without this mist
The ink that covers
What they are
Entire
As I
Without their voice
And lazy sway
Am fully reduced
To silence
Still
We never know
Each other
Not even as theory
How can this cry
Be answered
If there is
An answer?
Words fall right
Back down to earth
The moment
They are airborne
To name some tomb
That may in fact
Be truthful
But it is not caused
By truth
The falling out of heaven
May be conveyed
In words
But it was never words
That caused
The fall
However implicated they were
Such is the nature
Of evidence
Suppositions riven from
The palimpsest
Are free as the aforementioned crows
To extemporize
The temporality
To philosophize
As if the word was something
To be cracked
Not fled from
In horror
Can barely exist
Without this mist
The ink that covers
What they are
Entire
As I
Without their voice
And lazy sway
Am fully reduced
To silence
Still
We never know
Each other
Not even as theory
How can this cry
Be answered
If there is
An answer?
Words fall right
Back down to earth
The moment
They are airborne
To name some tomb
That may in fact
Be truthful
But it is not caused
By truth
The falling out of heaven
May be conveyed
In words
But it was never words
That caused
The fall
However implicated they were
Such is the nature
Of evidence
Suppositions riven from
The palimpsest
Are free as the aforementioned crows
To extemporize
The temporality
To philosophize
As if the word was something
To be cracked
Not fled from
In horror
VII.
"The Eccentric Aphoria of Words"
Matter
We've learned from plasma physics
Is a caesura
Where the flow of all to all
Halts
From distortions in the circuits
When the poles try to cross
To their opposites
In continual yearning
And the fire is stilled
The cold of the distance
Ruptures into form
That dissolves the self
At the moment it is frozen
Presence dissembled
At the point of transport home
It's the way of the infinite
To subdivide the whole
And express its grasp of itself
As consciousness
Effacing consciousness
By way of balance
Thus subject becomes object
The infinite precise
The Greeks want the Germans
Til the Germans
Want the Greeks
As the pairs confront the what is not
In a radiance of absence
Stretched out in endless suspense
Static as fate
They resist their figuration
As the mute and deafening current
Yields a meaning at last
From an impossible distance
And the fragments that they cling to
To speak of what they've lost
Are the unredeemable
Words that they've become
For they know if they let go
They'll be gone
We've learned from plasma physics
Is a caesura
Where the flow of all to all
Halts
From distortions in the circuits
When the poles try to cross
To their opposites
In continual yearning
And the fire is stilled
The cold of the distance
Ruptures into form
That dissolves the self
At the moment it is frozen
Presence dissembled
At the point of transport home
It's the way of the infinite
To subdivide the whole
And express its grasp of itself
As consciousness
Effacing consciousness
By way of balance
Thus subject becomes object
The infinite precise
The Greeks want the Germans
Til the Germans
Want the Greeks
As the pairs confront the what is not
In a radiance of absence
Stretched out in endless suspense
Static as fate
They resist their figuration
As the mute and deafening current
Yields a meaning at last
From an impossible distance
And the fragments that they cling to
To speak of what they've lost
Are the unredeemable
Words that they've become
For they know if they let go
They'll be gone
VIII.
On Language as Darkness
"Why is literature always at the end
of words?"
The poets know
For starters
That language is a lie
Yet the poor philosopher-kings
Will chase tautologies
To their distended ends
Until the words withdraw at sunrise
Like any would-be army
Yet leave the void so near
At the edge of their campfire
They can't help but mark it down
As a tragedy of being
The first object that was named
Was the death of truth
And the rest of the string
Mere statistics
(Damn lies)
But we love to lie
To ourselves
Other people
That the world is fixed
Our souls intact
Our senses nearly accurate
Our minds are ensconced in words
Because every other thought's
From somewhere other
How familiar they become
These doppelgängers
I call thee crow and it is almost as though
I defeated you
And your wordless call
That is far above the ceiling
Of philosophy
That's something we don't want to see
But words will flatter us
Echo as if silent
As long as we don't ask them what they are
Better to think of distant kings
Than parasites
— For we love to be deceived
By etymologies
Double meanings
Oblique phrases
Ambiguous participles
The violence of grammar
It is part of who we pretend we are
Carved-out thought
Instead of nothing
What words are
When we're not around
The poets know
For starters
That language is a lie
Yet the poor philosopher-kings
Will chase tautologies
To their distended ends
Until the words withdraw at sunrise
Like any would-be army
Yet leave the void so near
At the edge of their campfire
They can't help but mark it down
As a tragedy of being
The first object that was named
Was the death of truth
And the rest of the string
Mere statistics
(Damn lies)
But we love to lie
To ourselves
Other people
That the world is fixed
Our souls intact
Our senses nearly accurate
Our minds are ensconced in words
Because every other thought's
From somewhere other
How familiar they become
These doppelgängers
I call thee crow and it is almost as though
I defeated you
And your wordless call
That is far above the ceiling
Of philosophy
That's something we don't want to see
But words will flatter us
Echo as if silent
As long as we don't ask them what they are
Better to think of distant kings
Than parasites
— For we love to be deceived
By etymologies
Double meanings
Oblique phrases
Ambiguous participles
The violence of grammar
It is part of who we pretend we are
Carved-out thought
Instead of nothing
What words are
When we're not around
IX.
An Endless Repetition of Dif-ference
I'm happy to trace
The rim of your glass
Now absence
Now presence
For the ring of openness
To something larger than black hole
As operating principle
You speak now of "ethics"
A-gnostic at best
In being conscious of writing
As "endlessly empty echoes"
How one should refuse connection
With others
For such would efface
The endless recursion
Of self
Against other
Returning to nowhere
In an endless eccentric orbit
Back and forth
From the void
It yearned for
The arrival that never came
In favor of a poetics that breaks
The illusion
Of infinite deciphering
And exposes thought
As continual erasing
In the face of the distances
That stay intact
Past all incursion
For passive writing that does not refer
Beyond itself
Un-marks difference
In an "echo of desistance"
To "expose us from the presencing of being"
Thus refusing
To be part of a whole
Or an individual voice
Or ballast for growth
Somewhere else
Unknown
We must acknowledge the futile impossibility
Of our labors
The need to write
Against itself
For it exposes our lack of relation
In words
To even ourselves
As if all our hopes
Of being understood
And loved
Must be crushed at the outset
Lest "truth" be allowed to be refused
By something larger
So the openness freezes
Like a preacher's trick
Serving emotional truth
Before the dogma
There is only darkness
Not at all like space
The rim of your glass
Now absence
Now presence
For the ring of openness
To something larger than black hole
As operating principle
You speak now of "ethics"
A-gnostic at best
In being conscious of writing
As "endlessly empty echoes"
How one should refuse connection
With others
For such would efface
The endless recursion
Of self
Against other
Returning to nowhere
In an endless eccentric orbit
Back and forth
From the void
It yearned for
The arrival that never came
In favor of a poetics that breaks
The illusion
Of infinite deciphering
And exposes thought
As continual erasing
In the face of the distances
That stay intact
Past all incursion
For passive writing that does not refer
Beyond itself
Un-marks difference
In an "echo of desistance"
To "expose us from the presencing of being"
Thus refusing
To be part of a whole
Or an individual voice
Or ballast for growth
Somewhere else
Unknown
We must acknowledge the futile impossibility
Of our labors
The need to write
Against itself
For it exposes our lack of relation
In words
To even ourselves
As if all our hopes
Of being understood
And loved
Must be crushed at the outset
Lest "truth" be allowed to be refused
By something larger
So the openness freezes
Like a preacher's trick
Serving emotional truth
Before the dogma
There is only darkness
Not at all like space
X.
Poesis as Language
The plenary does not name the planetary
So it begins
Anew
The dream of impossible speech
The voice of language
Itself
As opposed to
The voice
Of language itself
Who's to know
Which is which
When they are equally
Unreachable
Is the I that speaks
No longer me
Or the Not I that calls
Merely I
That which names has no name
Itself
Like an endless flowing
Forming from the Logos
And DNA shapes
The distant things
That afflict us
Forms into poems
To instill a relation
Where there is none
Just a mark of where
The singular
Once touched
Long lost
In a forest
Of traces
"The heart of the poetic
Lies in its unspeakability."
It speaks because of this
Over and over again
As if the first thing
That's said
Will be the final word
But there are only moments
Lost
The poetic
Goes first
Before any frisson of contact
The sound of hollow jars
Before the guide hand
The echo of what can never
Be allowed
But is anyway
In some strange vaporous land
It knows
We trust
We go
So it begins
Anew
The dream of impossible speech
The voice of language
Itself
As opposed to
The voice
Of language itself
Who's to know
Which is which
When they are equally
Unreachable
Is the I that speaks
No longer me
Or the Not I that calls
Merely I
That which names has no name
Itself
Like an endless flowing
Forming from the Logos
And DNA shapes
The distant things
That afflict us
Forms into poems
To instill a relation
Where there is none
Just a mark of where
The singular
Once touched
Long lost
In a forest
Of traces
"The heart of the poetic
Lies in its unspeakability."
It speaks because of this
Over and over again
As if the first thing
That's said
Will be the final word
But there are only moments
Lost
The poetic
Goes first
Before any frisson of contact
The sound of hollow jars
Before the guide hand
The echo of what can never
Be allowed
But is anyway
In some strange vaporous land
It knows
We trust
We go
XI.
Concluding Echo
And so the words end
As if they never did exist
Whatever was recalled
Now chatters through the leaves
Is it trauma
That we never know
Or trauma
That we hurt before
The words
Could almost console?
We ask so much of ourselves
To have a limit
For example
As if that's what is natural
To catch things in a net
But never capture
What they were
When they were alive
Our stock and trade it seems
Is a figure in black
A mysterious servant
To our inherent errancy
And our highest sobriety
Of bearing iteration
But maybe it serves
Not us at all
But what keeps us
Held inside
Captive walls
The world set free from words
How could we approach it
Without obliterating ourselves
The words of
What we are
As if they never did exist
Whatever was recalled
Now chatters through the leaves
Is it trauma
That we never know
Or trauma
That we hurt before
The words
Could almost console?
We ask so much of ourselves
To have a limit
For example
As if that's what is natural
To catch things in a net
But never capture
What they were
When they were alive
Our stock and trade it seems
Is a figure in black
A mysterious servant
To our inherent errancy
And our highest sobriety
Of bearing iteration
But maybe it serves
Not us at all
But what keeps us
Held inside
Captive walls
The world set free from words
How could we approach it
Without obliterating ourselves
The words of
What we are
