Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22

1 There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’. Occurrence, a part Of an infinite series, The sad marvels; Of this was told A tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness. ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ 2 So spoke of the existence of things, An unmanageable pantheon Absolute, but they say Arid. A city of the corporations Glassed In dreams And images— And the pure joy Of the mineral fact Tho it is impenetrable As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable. 3 The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York 4 For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth And to their dwelling For which the tarred roofs And the stoops and doors— A world of stoops— Are petty alibi and satirical wit Will not serve. 5 The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge ‘1875’ Frozen in the moonlight In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, Which loves itself 6 We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always.   Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen. 7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. 8 Amor fati The love of fate For which the city alone Is audience Perhaps blasphemous. Slowly over islands, destinies Moving steadily pass And change In the thin sky Over islands Among days Having only the force Of days Most simple Most difficult 9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 10 Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. 11 it is that light Seeps anywhere, a light for the times In which the buildings Stand on low ground, their pediments Just above the harbor Absolutely immobile, Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window One might wave to himself From the top of the Empire State Building— Speak If you can Speak Phyllis—not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness— So small a picture, A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us I too am in love down there with the streets And the square slabs of pavement— To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks And it is not ‘art’ 12 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’ the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world . . . They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, Families talked, They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest. They were patient With the world. This will never return, never, Unless having reached their limits They will begin over, that is, Over and over 13 unable to begin At the beginning, the fortunate Find everything already here. They are shoppers, Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal is without issue, a dead end. They develop Argument in order to speak, they become unreal, unreal, life loses solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game because baseball is not a game but an argument and difference of opinion makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger One’s soul. There is change In an air That smells stale, they will come to the end Of an era First of all peoples And one may honorably keep His distance If he can. 14 I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country, Among them many men More capable than I— Muykut and a sergeant Named Healy, That lieutenant also— How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. 15 Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me So that I will exist, find my navel So that it will exist, find my nipples So that they will exist, find every hair Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad), Find me.’ 16 ‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat, and only he who was troubled shall find rest, and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved, and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . . but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’ 17 The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why It is not easy to speak A ferocious mumbling, in public Of rootless speech 18 It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. 19 Now in the helicopters the casual will Is atrocious Insanity in high places, If it is true we must do these things We must cut our throats The fly in the bottle Insane, the insane fly Which, over the city Is the bright light of shipwreck 20 —They await War, and the news Is war As always That the juices may flow in them Tho the juices lie. Great things have happened On the earth and given it history, armies And the ragged hordes moving and the passions Of that death. But who escapes Death Among these riders Of the subway, They know But now as I know Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight, Farm animals, Draft animals, beasts for slaughter Because it would mean they have forgiven us, Or which is the same thing, That we do not altogether matter. 21 There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne. 22 Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained Clarity in the sense of silence.