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13. Eye-Crossing—From Brooklyn to Manhattan

An Eye-Poem for the Ear (With Prose Introduction, Glosses, and After-Words)

1973

Libbie Burke died on the May 24, 1969. Before going to the poem, here is what Kenneth Burke wrote to Malcolm Cowley the day after she died.

Poor Shorty is gone. She left in her sleep last night. At least, she escaped the year or two of hell-on-earth that was in store for her, had the disease run its "normal" course.

A good deal of my reason for existence has gone with her. And, I fear, also a sizable portion of my reason. For her companionship worked constantly to redeem me from my nature as a born loner.

It is so good to be surrounded by one's family at such a time. It does help. There will be no funeral. This is our understanding; this is our deal; and it goes for all of us. We will deal with our grief in our own way.

In a Tangle,
K.B.

Paul Jay, Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, p. 368

This long poem is vintage Burke. It belongs with other, late long poems like "Introduction to What" and "On Floodtides of Sinkership, A Diaristic Fragment." These poems are all written in a Whitmanian kind of verse, all are meditative and deeply personal. But these poems are also anti-Whitmanian and antitechnology and are part of Burke's sustained attack on the creative genius of hypertechnology during his later years. There is hardly an essay in this collection that does not address this antitechnology /pollution theme directly or indirectly.

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― 306 ―

But this poem is a lot more than just a diatribe against technology (represented by the City—Manhattan) and global pollution. It is a highly personal, first-person poem which takes us back, again and again, to the situation out of which the poem came: Burke's wife, Libbie, is nearly at the end of her days, physically immobilized and moving inexorably toward paralysis and death—as Burke watches and waits, hopelessly. This situation is so charged that one cannot read the poem apart from Burke and his own theory of symbolic action. The poem has a huge inside content that it gets from this personal situation, whether implicitly or explicitly. (See Section X and the commentary, for example.)

The opening lines establish the course the poem will follow. Burke's verbal high jinks not withstanding, he is going to encounter one Scylla and/or Charybdis after another and will have to try to deal with them: There is Libbie's impending death, the bitter, accusing letter from the friend gone sour (II and III, XVI), the city (the towers of Manhattan) which is what they look at from their apartment, the city which is both stupendous and disastrous, a monster of waste and pollution (IV), the cold war between the USA and the USSR (V), the dog shit he encounters during his walks (VI, XI), the fractious customers in the supermarket (VII), the past, and, almost worst of all, his terrible loneliness after Libbie is gone (X). But there is more, especially when he returns again and again to the city, the chief object of their eye-crossing. All Libbie can do is eye-cross, a fact that we need to remember during Burke's goings out and returnings and musings during the poem, and the many crossings that occupy his mind in the course of the poem. Libbie may be physically immobile and Burke psychically immobile, but this poem is full of movement. Burke goes out to the esplanade, to the bar, to the supermarket, for long walks. And his mind goes out to various questions: the unnatural city built by high technology, organ transplants made possible by modern medicine which will keep a president alive (XIV), the failure of Walt Whitman's dream of unity and his dream of a glorious future for America; the similar failure of Hart Crane's dream of transcendent unity as we get it in The Bridge, the future of America (XV and XVII—see the violent negative outburst at the end of XV). At the center of this poem is the city to which Burke returns again and again in the many eye-crossings, and all that it represents as a catastrophe—that is, as a product of technological genius.

There is no conclusion or resolution to the problems and threats in the poem. It ends with a last view of the city at sunset as Burke and Libbie do a last eyecrossing. None of the problems, except maybe the local ones such as the episode in the supermarket and what Burke encounters in his walks (the jog-jog lady, dog shit—a burlesque of the massive pollution caused by the city) are ever resolved. Libbie's illness can only be resolved by her death, which then creates a new problem for Burke because he will be alone and without her guidance for the first time since he married her in 1933—maybe even earlier. At the end of the poem, the city is finally characterized as a "catastrophe" (XVII), a term Burke has loaded up by quoting the line from Remy de Gourmont that "intelligence is an accident, genius is a catastrophe." The problems of the city—all major cities, not just Manhattan—will only get worse, as they get bigger, "better," and become even greater consumers of power and producers of pollution.

Finally, back to Scyllybdis and Charybdylla, the transposed threats with

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― 307 ―

which the poem begins: Odysseus plugged up his ears and those of his crew in order to block the songs of the two sirens and make the perilous voyage through the straits. There is nothing comparable to this in the poem except Burke's way of getting through his own perilous strait. He does this by following his own advice, which was to write a poem, to deal with it by means of words, to transform his liabilities into assets by the application of his own creative genius (See XIII).

INTRODUCTION

The author spent the winter of 1968–69 on Brooklyn Heights, in a hotel apartment overlooking New York Harbor and the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan. It was a fate-laden season. His close companion of many years was still with him, but physically immobilized by an inexorably "progressing" illness. And while the couple could but watch it grow worse, in response to her condition he developed an attitude which he thought of as being "psychically" immobilized.

They were living on the same street where Hart Crane had lived when in Brooklyn. Below them was the river which Whitman had crossed by ferry. Accordingly the relation between Whitman's symbolic crossing on the river and Hart Crane's symbol of crossing on a bridge above the river suggested a third step, a mental state in which a Poetic Ibutlooked across. Hencethepoem'stitle:"Eye-Crossing—From Brooklyn to Manhattan."^[1]

Marianne Moore had already moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but she graciously agreed to let the author honor himself by dedicating the poem to her. However, when it was printed in The Nation (June 2, 1969) last-minute editorial exigencies resulted in the omission of all but her name. I take this opportunity to restore the dedication in full:

To Marianne Moore
whose exacting yet kindly verses
give us exceptionally many twists and turns
to rejoice about
even in a lean season

In one regard at least, it is especially fitting that I should contribute these particular pages to this particular book. Before the poem was published, Henry Sams had kindly distributed copies of it to a graduate class of his at Pennsylvania State University, and had sent me copies of the students' comments, which they wrote before receiving any information about the work's authorship.

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Needless to say, I personally was much engrossed with the comments, which ranged from very friendly ones to some that were quite rough. I had fully intended to send an answer insofar as the various observations and judgments (which, as is usual in cases of this sort, were often at considerable odds with one another) provided opportunities for a general discussion of related critical issues.

The ups and downs reached their extreme when one student, whose paper had been on the gruff side, parenthetically remarked: "If there ever was an oral poem, this is it"—and I cannot conceive of a comment I'd be more happy to hear, as the title of this offering bears witness. But not until now could I find the time to write thus belatedly the intended reply, which loses by the delay, though it may profit by some considerations I encountered when reading the poem to audiences in the course of my journeyings on the "Academic Circuit."

But to the poem itself, interlarded with some Glosses.

I

	Scheming to pick my way past Charybdylla
	(or do I mean Scyllybdis?)
	caught in the midst of being nearly over,
	not "midway on the roadway of our life,"
	a septuagenarian valetudinarian
	thrown into an airy osprey-eyrie
	with a view most spacious
	(and every bit of it our country's primal gateway even),
	although, dear friends, I'd love to see you later,
	after the whole thing's done,
	comparing notes, us comically telling one another
	just what we knew or thought we knew
	that others of us didn't,
	all told what fools we were, every last one of us—
	I'd love the thought, a humane after-life,
	more fun than a bbl. of monkeys,
	but what with being sick of wooing Slumber,
	I'll settle gladly for Oblivion.

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Gloss I

The opening distortion of Scylla and Charybdis is mildly an annunciation of some sort, the vague sign of a temperamental inclination. Or it is like pointing with a sweep of the arm rather than with the index finger. Count me among those for whom not the least of their delight in Chaucer is the fact that his vocabulary has somewhat the effect of modern English deliberately distorted, a kind of "proto-Joyceanism."

As regards my allusion to the opening line of The Divine Comedy: Since Dante's line is so "summational," my reference to it from the standpoint of a "septuagenarian valetudinarian" is meant to be summation by contrast.

I like to pronounce "bbl." as "b-b-l."

II

	Weep, Hypochondriasis (hell, I mean smile):
	The bell rang, I laid my text aside,
	The day begins in earnest, they have brought the mail.
	And now to age and ailments add
	a thirteen-page single-spaced typed missile-missive,
	to start the New Year right.
	On the first of two-faced January,
	"… the injuries you inflict upon me … persecution …
	such legal felonies … unremitting efforts … malice, raids,
	slander, conspiracy … your spitefulness …"
	—just when I talked of getting through the narrows,
	now I'm not so sure.
	Smile, Hypochondriasis, (her, I mean wanly weep).

III

	So let's begin again:
	Crossing by eye from Brooklyn to Manhattan
	(Walt's was a ferry-crossing,
	Hart's by bridge)—
	to those historic primi donni,
	now add me, and call me what you will.
	From Brooklyn, now deserted
― 310 ―
	by both Marianne Moore and the Dodgers—
	an eye-crossing
	with me knocked cross-eyed or cockeyed
	by a saddening vexing letter
	from a dear friend gone sour.
	I think of a Pandora's box uncorked
	while I was trying to untie
	Laocoön's hydra-headed Gordian knot,
	entangled in a maze of Daedalus,
	plus modern traffic jam cum blackout.
	Let's begin again.

Gloss III

"Primi donni." An invention remotely in the tradition of the classical satiric usage (as with Catullus) whereby, since the male sect of Galli (priests of Cybele) resorted to castration as one of their rites, they were referred to in the feminine form, Gallae. But my male plurals for the Ital ian prima donna botch things twice, by being made as though Italian feminine donna were matched by a Latin word of masculine gender, donnus. My only argument for this solecistic neologism is that there is a crying need for it with regard to artistic psychology, even where matters of sexual persuasion (as with Walt and Hart) are not involved.

IV

	The architectural piles, erections, impositions,
	monsters of high-powered real estate promotion—
	from a room high on Brooklyn Heights
	the gaze is across and UP, to those things' peaks,
	their arrogance!
	When measured by this scale of views from Brooklyn
	they are as though deserted.

	And the boats worrying the harbor
	they too are visibly deserted
	smoothly and silent
	moving in disparate directions
	each as but yielding to a trend that bears it
― 311 ―
	like sticks without volition
	carried on a congeries
	of crossing currents.

	And void of human habitation,
	the cars on Madhatter's Eastern drive-away
	formless as stars
	speeding slowly
	close by the feet of the godam mystic giants—

	a restlessness unending, back and forth
	(glimpses of a drive, or drivenness,
	from somewhere underneath the roots of reason)

	me looking West, towards Manhattan, Newark, West
	Eye-crossing I have seen the sunrise
	gleaming in the splotch and splatter
	of Western windows facing East.

V

	East? West?
	Between USSR and USA,
	their Béhemoth and our Behémoth,
	a dialogue of sorts?
	Two damned ungainly beasts,
	threats to the entire human race's race
	but for their measured dread of each the other.
	How give or get an honest answer?

	Forgive me for this boustrophedon mood
	going from left to right, then right to left,
	pulling the plow thus back and forth alternately
	a digging of furrows not in a field to plant,
	but on my own disgruntled dumb-ox forehead.

My Gawd! Begin again!

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Gloss V

Here the East-West shifting of the previous stanza, moving into the political dimension, takes advantage of the fact that the word "behemoth" can be accented on either the first or second syllable.

Not all readers are likely to know (as the author didn't know during most of his lifetime) that "boustrophedon" is an adjective or adverb for a kind of writing that proceeds alternately from right to left and left to right. Ideally the reader should consider not only the meaning of the word (here applied by analogy to political quandaries), but also its etymology should be taken into account: as the ox turns in plowing; from Greek bous, ox, and strophos, turning, plus an adverbial suffix.

VI

	Turn back. Now just on this side:.
	By keeping your wits about you,.

	you can avoid the voidings,.
	the dog-signs scattered on the streets and sidewalks.
	(you meet them face to faeces).
	and everywhere the signs of people.
	(you meet them face to face).

	The Waltman, with time and tide before him,.
	he saw things face to face, he said so.

	then there came a big blow.
	the pavements got scoured drastically.
	—exalted, I howled back.
	into the teeth of the biting wind.
	me in Klondike zeal.
	inhaling powdered dog-dung.
	(here's a new perversion).
	now but an essence on the fitful gale.

	Still turning back.
	Surmarket—mock-heroic confrontation at—.
	(An Interlude).

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Gloss VI

"Now just on this side." Although the emphasis in the poem is upon the view of Manhattan and the harbor (in the attempt to profit by the summational connotations of a panorama) there arises secondarily the need to build up some sense of the terminus a quo, in Brooklyn Heights. To this end a characteristic "civic issue" is chosen. It is at once trivial and serious. In keeping with the theme, the adverb "drastically" is to be recommended for its etymological exactitude.

As regards the substitution of "surmarket" for "supermarket" (after the analogy of "surrealism" for "super-realism"), I plead poetic license.

VII CONFRONTATION AT BOHACKS
(AN INTERLUDE)

	Near closing time, we're zeroing in.
	Ignatius Panallergicus (that's me)
	his cart but moderately filled
	(less than five dollars buys the lot)
	he picks the likeliest queue and goes line up
	then waits, while for one shopper far ahead
	the lady at the counter tick-ticks off and tallies
	items enough to gorge a regiment.

	Then, lo! a possibility not yet disclosed sets in.
	While Panallergicus stands waiting
	next into line a further cart wheels up,
	whereat Ignatius Panallergicus (myself, unknowingly
	the very soul of Troublous Helpfullness) suggests:
	"It seems to me, my friend, you'd come out best
	on that line rather than on one of these."
	And so (let's call him "Primus")
	Primus shifts.
	Development atop development:
	Up comes another, obviously "Secundus,"
	to take his stand behind Ignatius, sunk in thought.
	No sooner had Secundus joined the line
― 314 ―
	than he addressed Ignatius Panallerge approximately thus:
	"Good neighbor, of this temporary junction,
	pray, guard my rights in this arrangement
	while I race off to get one further item,"
	then promptly left, and so things stood.

	But no. Precisely now in mankind's pilgrimage
	who suddenly decides to change his mind
	but Primus who, abandoning his other post,
	returns to enroll himself again in line behind Ignatius.
	Since, to that end, he acts to shove aside
	Secundus' cart and cargo, Crisis looms.

	Uneasy, Panallergicus explains:
	"A certain …Iamsorry … but you see …
	I was entrusted … towards the preservation of …"
	but no need protest further—
	for here is Secundus back,
	and wrathful of his rights
	as ever epic hero of an epoch-making war

	Both aging champions fall into a flurry
	of fishwife fury, even to such emphatical extent
	that each begins to jettison the other's cargo.
	While the contestants rage, pale Panallerge
	grins helplessly at others looking on.
	But Primus spots him in this very act and shouts
	for all to hear, "It's all his fault … he was the one …
	he brought this all about …"
	and Panallergicus now saw himself
	as others see him, with a traitor's wiles.

	I spare the rest. (There was much more to come)
	How An Authority came swinging in,
	twisted Secundus' arm behind his back
	and rushed him bumbling from the store.
	How further consequences flowed in turn,
	I leave all that unsaid.
	And always now, when edging towards the counter,
	his cargo in his cart,
― 315 ―
	our Ignatz Panallerge Bruxisticus
	(gnashing his costly, poorly fitting dentures)
	feels all about his head
	a glowering anti-glowing counter-halo …

	Is that a millstone hung about his neck?
	No, it is but the pressing-down
	of sixty plus eleven annual milestones.

	(It was before the damning letter came.
	Had those good burghers also known of that!)

Gloss VII

As the reader might suspect, this episode is the account of an incident that did actually take place.

On the assumption that "bruxism" means an inclination to grind or gnash the teeth, as the result of his agon Panallergicus is endowed with a transfigured identify appropriately named "Bruxisticus."

About the edges of the line, "and rushed him bumbling from the store," the author (perhaps too privately) hears a reference to the "bum's rush."

The word "counter-halo" was intended to draw on two quite different meanings of "counter": (1) as with the adjective "opposite"; (2) as with the noun for the check-out desk where the encounter took place.

The inclusion of this episode may present something of a puzzle to those readers who do not share the author's apprehensive attitude toward supermarkets. Though he shops at them regularly, he never enters one without thinking of the whole breed as the flowering of a civilization in decay. There is the criminal wastage due to sheer tricks of packaging (and the corresponding amount of trash-disposal involved in such merchandizing). But first of all there is the fantastic amount of poison that is now looked upon as "normal" to the processing and marketing of foods. Toss it. On one side up comes the TV commercials for indigestion. On the other side up comes the TV dinners.

VIII

	But no! Turn back from turning back. Begin again:
	of a late fall evening
― 316 ―
	I walked on the Esplanade
	looking across at the blaze of Walt's Madhatter
	and north to Hart's graceful bridge, all lighted
	in a cold, fitful gale I walked
	on the Esplanade in Brooklyn now deserted
	by both Marianne and the Dodgers.
	Things seemed spooky—
	eight or ten lone wandering shapes,
	and all as afraid of me as I of them?
	We kept a wholesome distance from one another.
	Had you shrieked for help in that bluster
	who'd have heard you?
	Me and my alky in that cold fitful bluster
	on the Esplanade that night
	above the tiers of the mumbling unseen traffic
	It was scary
	it was ecstactic

Gloss VIII

This section toes not do justice to the Esplanade, which is built above highways, yet is like a park that is in turn like the extension of backyards. And there is the fantastic vista. The Esplanade is an architectural success, well worthy of civic pride. But the words "Me and my alky" explain why our agonist had the courage, or bravado, or sheer foolhardiness to go there thus late at night.

IX

	Some decades earlier, before my Pap
	fell on evil days (we then were perched
	atop the Palisades, looking East, and down
	upon the traffic-heavings of the Hudson)

	I still remember Gramma (there from Pittsburgh for a spell)
	watching the tiny tugs tug monsters.
	Out of her inborn sweetness and memories
	of striving, puffing all that together,
	"Those poor little tugs!" she'd say.
― 317 ―
	God only knows what all
	she might be being sorry for.

	And now, fronting on sunset,
	repeatedly we watch the tugs, "poor little tugs,"
	and hear them—
	their signals back and forth as though complaining.
	The two tugs help each other tugging, pushing
	(against the current into place)
	a sluggish ship to be aligned along a dock,
	a bungling, bumbling, bulging, over-laden freighter.

	Their task completed,
	the two tugs toot good-bye,
	go tripping on their way,
	leaning as lightly forward
	as with a hiker
	suddenly divested
	of his knapsack.
	"Good-bye," rejoicingly, "good-bye"—

	whereat I wonder:
	Might there also be a viable albeit risky way
	to toot
	"If you should drive up and ask me,
	I think you damn near botched that job"?
	"I think you stink."

	What might comprise the total range and nature
	of tugboat-tooting nomenclature?

Gloss IX

This section happens to have a summational development that is touched upon in the poem, but that would not be as pointed, or poignant, for the reader as it is for the author. Nearly half a century before, when first coming as a boy to New York, he had lived with his family on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson. Thus, as regards his later "vista vision" that is the burden of this poem, he was quite conscious of the symbolism implicit in the change from an outlook facing sunup to an outlook facing

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sundown. In the apartment on the Palisades the tugs could not be heard. But their industriousness (the sturdy little fellows' ways of maneuvering monsters) was just as apparent, and as inviting to an onlooker's "empathy."

X

	a plunk-plunk juke-box joint
	him hunched on a stool
	peering beyond his drink
	at bottles lined up, variously pregnant
	(there’s a gleaming for you)

	Among the gents
	a scattering of trick floozies.

	May be they know or not
	just where they'll end,
	come closing time.

	He'll be in a room alone
	himself and his many-mirrored other.
	It was a plunk-plunk juke-box joint
	its lights in shadow

Gloss X

This is one of the episodes that, owing to exigencies of space, were omitted from the previously published version of the poem. Among other things, it was intended to introduce a change of pace. For whereas things had been going along quite briskly, these lines should be subdued, and slow. But there's no sure way of making a reader's eyes behave—and the printing of verse lacks the orthodox resources of a musical score, which would readily allow for such instructions as adagio, pianissimo.

This episode is the closest the poem as a whole comes to representing (symbolizing) the essence of the purely personal grounds for an "immobilized" crossing-by-eye, as distinct from the various kinds of public threats dealt with in my exhibits.

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Considering this episode ab intra, I can report on first-hand authority that the agonist of the verses corresponded "in real life" to a citizen who, having dropped into that joint, alone after a long night-walk alone, would not actually have gone home alone. Rather, he'd return to a hotel apartment and a physically immobilized companion who, in earlier days, would have shared the walk with him—and they'd have stopped in together, for a drink or two, while touching upon one or another of the many interests they had in common. The lines were somewhat morbidly anticipating, as though it were already upon him, a state of loneliness not yet actual yet (he took it for granted) inexorably on the way towards his Next Phase unless some sudden illness or accident disposed of him first. The details of the episode also drew upon the memory of occasions when, off somewhere lecturing (in a one or two-night stand on the academic circuit) he had dropped into such joints, there to commune with his watchful aloneness before going to his room, with the likelihood that, before switching off the lights, he would confront, in several mirrors, passing fragments of himself.

Since this episode, whatever its deflections, does probably come closest to the generating core of the whole enterprise so far as motivations local to the author personally are concerned, my reason for bringing up this fact, from the purely technical point of view, is that it illustrates a major concern of mine as regards speculations about the nature of symbolic action in the literary realm. Within the poetic use of a public medium, I take it, there is a private strand of motives that, while not necessarily at odds with the public realm, is at least not identical. It's as though some of the poet's words had secondary meanings not defined in a dictionary. But in saying so, I am well aware that a dishonorable opponent could use my own statement against me—and honorable opponents have always been a rare species.

XI

	But turn against this turning.
	I look over the water,
	Me-I crossing.

	I was but walking home,
	sober as a hang-over with a fluttering heart
	and homing as a pigeon.
― 320 ―
	There comes a dolled-up Jog-Jog towards myself and me.
	We're just about to pass when gong! she calls—
	and her police dog (or was he a mountain lion?)
	he had been lingering somewhere, sniffing in the shadows
	comes bounding loyally forward.

	Oh, great Milton, who wrote the basic masque of Chastity
	Protected,
	praise God, once more a lady's what-you-call-it has been
	saved—
	and I am still out of prison, free to wend my way,
	though watching where I step.

	I frame a social-minded ad:
	"Apt. for rent. In ideal residential neighborhood.
	City's highest incidence of dog-signs."

XII

	Profusion of confusion. What of a tunnel-crossing?
	What if by mail, phone, telegraph, or aircraft,
	or for that matter, hearse?

	You're in a subway car, tired, hanging from a hook,
	and you would get relief?
	Here's all I have to offer:
	Sing out our national anthem, loud and clear,
	and when in deference to the tune
	the seated passengers arise,
	you quickly slip into whatever seat
	seems safest. (I figured out this scheme,
	but never tried it.)

	Problems pile up, like the buildings,
	Even as I write, the highest to the left
	soars higher day by day.
	Now but the skeleton of itself
	(these things begin as people end!)
― 321 ―
	all night its network of naked bulbs keeps flickering
	towards us here in Brooklyn …
	then dying into dawn …
	or are our … are our what?

Gloss XII

I boasted to a colleague about "or are our" on the grounds that, though the words didn't mean much, they couldn't be pronounced without growling. He observed that I could have done pretty much the same with "aurora"—and thereby he made me wonder whether, since I was on the subject of dawn, I had been feeling for that very word.

And I have often puzzled about the possible ultimate implications of our structural-steel buildings' reverse way of growth: first the skeleton, the stage that we end on.

XIII

	As with an aging literary man who, knowing
	that words see but within
	yet finding himself impelled to build a poem
	that takes for generating core a startling View,
	a novel visual Spaciousness

	(he asks himself: "Those who have not witnessed it,
	how tell them?—and why tell those who have?
	Can you do more than say ‘remember’?")

	and as he learns the ceaseless march of one-time modulatings
	unique to this, out of eternity,
	this one-time combination
	of primal nature (Earth's) and urban, technic second nature
	there gleaming, towering, spreading out and up
	there by the many-colored, changing-colored water

	(why all that burning, all throughout the night?
	some say a good percentage is because
	the cleaning women leave the lights lit.
― 322 ―
	But no—it's the computers
	all night long now
	they go on getting fed.)

as such a man may ask himself and try,

	as such a one, knowing that words see but inside,
	noting repeated through the day or night
	the flash of ambulance or parked patrol car,
	wondering, "Is it a ticket this time, or a wreck?"
	or may be setting up conditions there
	that helicopters land with greater safety,

	so puzzling I, eye-crossing …
	and find myself repeating (and hear the words
	of a now dead once Olympian leper),
	"Intelligence is an accident
	Genius is a catastrophe."

	A jumble of towering tombstones
	hollowed, not hallowed,
	and in the night incandescent
	striving ever to outstretch one another
	like stalks of weeds dried brittle in the fall.

	Or is it a mighty pack of mausoleums?
	Or powerhouses of decay and death—
	towards the poisoning of our soil, our streams, the air,
	roots of unhappy wars abroad,
	miraculous medicine, amassing beyond imagination
	the means of pestilence,
	madly wasteful journeys to the moon (why go at all,
	except to show you can get back?)

I recalled the wanly winged words of a now dead gracious leper.

	(My own words tangle like our entangled ways,
	of hoping to stave off destruction
	by piling up magic mountains of destructiveness.)

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Gloss XIII

The poem comes to a focus in one great line: "Intelligence is an accident, genius is a catastrophe." Since the whole is written in the spirit of that oracle, I feel that, however perversely or roundabout, its dubieties are qualified by a sizeable strand of appreciation. For after all, the poem is talking about the fruits of intelligence and genius, albeit that they are visibly beset by sinister "side effects." When the poem was first published, I was asked, in an anonymous phone call, who the author of the line is, and why I speak of him as an "Olympian leper." I answered, "I call him ‘Olympian’ because in his writings he seemed so lightly to transcend his misfortune. I call him a leper because he was a leper." He was a writer to whom, only in later years, I have come to understand the depths of my indebtedness: Remy de Gourmont. Regrettably, the English version limps, in comparison with the French original: L'intelligence est un accident, le génie est une catastrophe. The comparative limp seems inevitable, since we can't pronounce our foursyllable "catastrophe" like the French three-syllable "catastróhf." Jimmy Durante got the feeling in his comic twist, "catàstastróhf."

Since this section unfolds an epic simile that deliberately gets lost along the way, I must again plead poetic licentiousness.

XIV

	Do I foresee the day?
	Calling his counsellors and medicos,
	do I foresee a day, when Unus Plurium
	World Ruler Absolute, and yet the august hulk
	is wearing out—do I foresee such time?

	Calling his counsellors and medicos together,
	"That lad who won the race so valiantly,"
	he tells them, and His Word is Law,
	"I'd like that bright lad's kidneys—
	and either honor him by changing his with mine
	or find some others for him, as opportunity offers."

	No sooner said than done.
	Thus once again The State is rescued—
	and Unus over all, drags on till next time.
― 324 ―
	Do I foresee that day, while gazing across, as though that realm was alien
	Forfend forfending of my prayer
	that if and when and as such things should be
	those (from here) silent monsters (over there)
	will have by then gone crumbled into rubble,
	and nothing all abroad
	but ancient Egypt's pyramidal piles of empire-building hierarchal stylized
	dung remains.
	Oh, I have haggled nearly sixty years
	in all the seventies I've moved along.
	My country, as my aimless ending nears,
	oh, dear my country, may I be proved wrong!

Gloss XIV

The conceit on which this section is built is not offered as "prophecy." I include it on the grounds of what I would call its "entelechial" aspect. For instance, a satire would be "entelechial" insofar as it treated certain logical conclusions in terms of reduction to absurdity. Thus, when confronting problems of pollution due to unwanted residues of highly developed technology, one might logically advocate the development of methods (with corresponding attitudes) designed to reverse this process. But a satire could treat of the same situation "entelechially," by proposing a burlesqued rationale that carried such potentialities to the end of the line, rather than proposing to correct it. In the name of "progress" one might sloganize: "Let us not turn back the clock. Rather, let us find ways to accelerate the technological polluting of the natural conditions we inherited from the days of our primitive, ignorant past. Let us instead move forward towards a new way of life" (as with a realm of interplanetary travel that transcended man's earth-bound origins).

But also, at several places in my Philosophy of Literary Form, I discussed such "end of the line" thinking in other literary modes (James Joyce's later works, for example). I did not until much later decide that I had been groping towards an ironically non-Aristotelian application of the Aristotelian term "entelechy," used by him to designate a movement towards the formal fulfillment of potentialities peculiar to some particular species of being.

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Thus the conceit informing this section would be "entelechial" (though grotesquely rather than satirically so) in that it imagines the "perfecting" of certain trends already "imperfectly" present among us, though first of all would be the need for further purely scientific progress in the technique of organ transplants, whereby the healthy parts of human specimens could be obtained either legally or illegally and stored in "body banks," to be used on demand. The most "perfectly" grotesque summarizing of such conditions would prevail if: (a) the world becomes "one world"; (b) as with the step from republic to empire in ancient Rome, rule becomes headed in a central authority whose word is law; (c) the "irreplaceable" ruler needs to replace some of his worn-out parts.

The purely "formal" or "entelechial" justification forth issummational conceit is that it would be the "perfecting" of these elements already indigenous to our times: dictatorship, organized police-protected crime, the technical resourcefulness already exemplified in the Nazi doctors' experiments on Jews, and in the purely pragmatic contributions of applied science to the unconstitutional invasion and ravishment of Indochina.

XV

	"Eye-crossing" I had said? The harbor space so sets it up.
	In Walt's ferry-crossing, besides the jumble of things seen
	(they leave him "disintegrated")
	even the sheer words "see," "sight," "look," and "watch" add up
	to 33, the number of a major mythic cross-ifying.

	In the last section of the Waltman's testimony
	there is but "gaze," and through a "necessary film" yet …
	"Gaze" as though glazed? It's not unlikely.
	"Suspend," he says, "here and everywhere, eternal float of solution."
	And the talk is of "Appearances" that "envelop the soul."

	Between this culminating ritual translation
	and the sheer recordings of the senses
	there had been intermediate thoughts
	of "looking" forward to later generations "looking" back.
	Walt the visionary, prophetically seeing crowds of cronies
― 326 ―
	crossing and recrossing
	on the ferry that itself no longer crosses.

	Six is the problematic section.
	There he takes it easy, cataloguing all his vices
	as though basking on a comfortable beach.
	His tricks of ideal democratic promiscuity
	include his tricks of ideal man-love.
	In section six he does a sliding, it makes him feel good.

	Blandly blind to the promotion racket stirring already all about him,
	he "bathed in the waters" without reference to their imminent defiling
	(Now even a single one
	of the many monsters since accumulated
	could contaminate the stream for miles.)

	He sang as though it were all his—
	a continent to give away for kicks.
	And such criss-crossing made him feel pretty godam good.

	Flow on, filthy river,
	ebbing with flood-tide and with ebb-tide flooding.
	Stand up, you feelingless Erections,
	FIy on, O Flight, be it to fly or flee.

	Thrive, cancerous cities.
	Load the once lovely streams with the clogged filter of your filth.
	"Expand,"
	even to the moon and beyond yet.
	"There is perfection in you" in the sense
	that even empire-plunder can't corrupt entirely.

Gloss XV

As regards this section, built around Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," I have not dared to check my entries, which add up to thirtythree. If I have missed the count by a little, please at least let me keep the sum in principle. In any case, implicit in the qualitative difference beteween

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those terms and "gaze" there is indeed a crossing, a transcendence. Something critical, crucial, has happened en route.

XVI

And what of Hart's crossing by the bridge?

	"Inviolate curve," he says. Who brought that up?
	The tribute gets its maturing in the penultimate stanza,
	"Under thy shadow by the piers I waited."
	Hart too was looking.

	But things have moved on since the days of Walt,
	and Hart is tunnel-conscious.

	And fittingly the subway stop at Wall Street,
	first station on the other side,
	gets named in the middle quatrain of the "Proem"
	(Wall as fate-laden as Jericho, or now as mad Madison
	of magic Madhatter Island.) Ah! I ache!
	Hart lets you take your pick:
	"Prayer of pariah and the lover's cry."

	(If crossing now on Brooklyn Bridge by car,
	be sure your tires are sound—
	for if one blows out you must keep right on riding
	on the rim. That's how it sets up now
	with what Hart calls a "curveship"
	lent as a "myth to God."
	I speak in the light of subsequent developments.)

	Elsewhere, "The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas,"
	Hart's thoughts having gone beneath the river by tunnel, and
	"from tunnel into field," whereat "iron strides the dew."
	Hart saw the glory, turning to decay,
	albeit euphemized in terms of "time's rendings."
	And by his rules, sliding from Hudson to the Mississippi,
	he could end on a tongued meeting of river there and gulf,
	a "Passion" with "hosannas silently below."
― 328 ―
	Treating of our culture's tendings
	as though its present were its own primeval past,
	making of sexual oddities a "religious" gunmanship,
	striving by a "logic of metaphor"
	to span whole decades of division,

	"I started walking home across the bridge,"
	he writes—
	but he couldn't get home that way.

	Only what flows beneath the bridge
	only that was home …

	All told, though Walt was promissory,
	Hart was nostalgic, Hart was future-loving only insofar
	as driven by his need to hunt (to hunt the hart).

	And as for me, an apprehensive whosis
	(cf. Bruxistes Panallerge, Tractatus de Strabismo),
	I'm still talking of a crossing on a river
	when three men have jumped over the moon,
	a project we are told computer-wise
	involving the social labor of 300,000 specialists
	and 20,000 businesses.

	Such are the signs one necessarily sees,
	gleaming across the water,
	the lights cutting clean
	all through the crisp winter night.

	"O! Ego, the pity of it, Ego!"
	"Malice, slander, conspiracy," the letter had said;
	"your spitefulness …"

Gloss XVI

In this, Hart's section, I couldn't resist the gruff contrast between the idealistically symbolic bridge and the materialistic one with its current exigencies of traffic. …The reference to men who had jumped over the moon was written when we had but sent astronauts around the

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moon. …I hope I can be forgiven for my most ambitious pun, that puts "Ego" in place of Othello's "Iago." … Texts differ as to whether the author of the Tractatus de Strabismo is named Bruxistes or Bruxisticus.

XVII

	Crossing?
	Just as the roads get jammed that lead
	each week-day morning from Long Island to Manhattan,
	so the roads get jammed that lead that evening
	from Manhattan to Long Island.
	And many's the driver that crosses cursing.

	Meanwhile, lo! the Vista-viewing from our windows at burning nightfall:
	To the left, the scattered lights on the water,
	hazing into the shore in Jersey, on the horizon.
	To the right, the cardboard stage-set of the blazing buildings.
	Which is to say:

	To the left,
	me looking West as though looking Up,
	it is with the lights in the harbor
	as with stars in the sky,
	just lights, pure of human filth—
	or is it?

	To the right,
	the towerings of Lower Manhattan
	a-blaze at our windows

as though the town were a catastrophe

as doubtless it is …

AFTER-WORDS

In A Grammar of Motives (1945) I expended quite some effort trying to show how philosophic schools differ in the priority they assign to one or

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another of the different but overlapping motivational areas covered by the five terms: act, scene, agent, agency, purpose. There is no point to my restating any of those speculations here. However, the terms may lend themselves to some differently directed remarks with regard to the poem about which I have been prosifying (possibly at my peril, since some readers will resent such comments either because they are needed or because they are not needed).

Applying the terms differently here, first, I'd want to go along with the position in Aristotle's Poetics, which features the term act with regard to drama (in keeping even with the sheer etymology of the word). The realm of agent (or character) seems to me most at home in the novel (of Jane Austen cast).

Some overall purpose serves well to hold together epics like The Iliad (where the aim to fight the Trojan war can also readily accommodate episodes of interference, as with Achilles sulking in his tent), or The Odyssey (a nostos that piles up one deflection after another, an organizational lure that is doubtless also at the roots of a literal report of homecoming such as Xenophon's Anabasis). A group of pilgrims with a common destination (as per The Canterbury Tales) will supply over-all pretext enough—or even the inertness of a boat ride in common (Ship of Fools). Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is interesting in this regard. There was movement enough so long as the migrants were on their way to California, but the plot became a bit aimless as soon as they arrived. One is reminded of that ingenious conceit about how we settled this country by moving West until we got to the coast, then all we could do was jump up and down. Would that it had been so, rather than as with our zeal to make the Pacific mare nostrum.

The notion of deriving all narrative from a "monomyth" generically called "the myth of the quest" owes its appeal to the fact that, implicit in the idea of any act, there is the idea of a purpose (even if it be but "unconscious," or like the "built-in purpose" of a homing torpedo, designed to "contact its target"). Even an Oblomov could be fitted in, when not getting out of bed.

Scene figures high in historical novels (such as Scott's). Zola works the same field, though in quite a different fashion, and Faulkner's regionalism in another.

Though I have read little science fiction, I'd incline to say that its fantasies (in being a response to the vast clutter of new instruments with which modern technology has surrounded us) endow the realm of agency (or means) with an importance that it never had before as the locus of motives.

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But all this is preparatory to the discussion of a term that has not been mentioned, but that bears strongly upon some issues now at hand. If I were now to write my Grammar over again, I'd turn the pentad into a hexed, the sixth term being attitude. As a matter of fact, even in its present form the book does discuss the term, "attitude," and at quite some length. I refer to a chapter entitled " ‘Incipient’ and ‘Delayed’ Action." It is included in my section on Act; for an attitude is an incipient or inchoate act in the sense that an attitude of sympathy or antipathy might lead to a corresponding act of helpfulness or aggression. But I also had to consider some ambiguities implicit in the term. And to this end I discussed its uses in George Herbert Mead's Philosophy of the Act, in contrast with I. A. Richards's treatment of attitudes as "imaginal and incipient activities or tendencies to action" (in his Principles of Literary Criticism). I also introduce related observations with regard to Alfred Korzybski's concern with "consciousness of abstracting." And in my essay, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats" (reprinted in an appendix to the Grammar) Itell why I find it significant that Keats apostrophizes his Grecian Urn as a "Fair Attitude." But besides impinging upon the realm of "act," attitude also impinges upon the realm of "agent" in the sense that, while inchoately an act, it is one with an agent's (a character's) mood or feeling.

As applied specifically to literature, I'd say that "attitude" comes most to the fore in the lyric (or in a short story of pronouncedly lyrical cast). In this connection, I'd like to quote a relevant passage from Keats, as pointed up in my autobiographical divulging, "The Anaesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell" (a piece built around some highly attitudinal experiences in a sick-room):

An attitude towards a body of topics has a unifying force. In effect its unitary nature as a response "sums up" the conglomerate of particulars towards which the attitude is directed. See a letter of Keats (March 17, 1817), modifying a passage in Act II, Scene iv, of first part of Henry IV: "Banish money—Banish sofas—Banish Wine—Banish Music; but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health—Banish Health and banish all the world." Here, he is saying in effect: The feeling infuses all things with the unity of the feeling.

The lyric strikes an attitude. Though the feeling is not often so absolute as with the health-sickness pair that here exercised poor Keats in letters written while he was hurrying on his way to death, any attitude has something of that summarizing quality.

Along those lines, I once proposed (The Kenyon Review, spring 1951) this definition for the lyric:

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A short complete poem, elevated or intense in thought and sentiment expressing and evoking a unified attitude towards a momentous situation more or less explicitly implied—in diction harmonious and rhythmical, often but not necessarily rhymed—the structure lending itself readily to a musical accompaniment strongly repetitive in quality; the gratification of the whole residing in the nature of the work as an ordered summation of emotional experience otherwise fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.

In commenting on the various clauses of this definition, with regard to the words "a unified attitude," I observed:

The "lyric attitude," as vs. the "dramatic act." Attitude as gesture, as posture. … Strictly speaking, an attitude is by its very nature "unified." Even an attitude of hesitancy or internal division is "unified" in the formal sense, if the work in its entirety rounds out precisely that.

When making that last remark I had in mind Aristotle's recipe in chapter 15 of the Poetics where he says that a character who is represented as inconsistent must be consistently so.

As the attendant discussion of the definition makes clear, when referring to "thought and sentiment" I also had in mind "the contemporary stress upon the purely sensory nature of the lyric image," and noted that the whole process would involve "the ‘sentiments' implicit in the ‘sensations,’ and the ‘thoughts' implicit in the ‘sentiments.’ " As regards a situation "more or less explicitly implied," I added:

The lyric attitude implies some kind of situation. The situation may be of the vaguest sort: The poet stands alone by the seashore while the waves are rolling in, or, the poet is separated from his beloved; or, the poet is old, remembering his youth—etc. Or the situation may be given in great detail. Indeed, a lyric may be, on its face, but a list of descriptive details specifying a scene—but these images are all manifestations of a single attitude.

While holding that "the lyric ‘tends ideally’ to be of such a nature as would adapt it to rondo-like musical forms," with stanzas "built about a recurrent refrain," I proposed that a poem "need not preserve such a structure explicitly, to qualify as a lyric," though it might be studied "as a departure from this ‘Urform,’ or archetype." (Just think: There was a time in England when music could be authoritatively defined as "inarticulate poetry.")

Where then are we, with regard to the "Eye-Crossing," viewed as a lyric? You ask: "It is, then, to be viewed as striking some kind of overall attitude?" Me: "Yes, sir." You: "And would you kindly tell me just what attitude your (let's hope) lyrical lines will be taking?" Me: "Please,

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sir!" You: "Stand up! Why the groveling?" Me: "There is no name for the attitude, sir." Then in sudden hopefulness, Me adds: "Unless, that is, you will accept the title of the poem itself as a summarizing name for the summarizing attitude." You: "You mean that there is no word in the dictionary, such as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ or ‘cynical,’ to designate the poem's attitude?" Me: "If there already were such apt words in our dictionaries, I doubt whether there'd be any incentive for the symbol-using animal to write poems." You: "?" Me: "I mean there is a sense in which each poem strikes its own specific attitude"; then hastily, "not through pride, but because it can't do otherwise"; then winsomely, "So it says in effect ‘Come attitudinize with me.’ " You: "In that case, could you at least give us a first rough approximate, by selecting one word or another that at least points vaguely in the right direction (for instance, like pointing with a sweep of the arm rather than with the index finger)?" Me: "Well, there is a spot where the narrator, or agonist, having referred to Walt as promissory and Hart as nostalgic, calls himself ‘apprehensive,’ and he fits that notion into his over-all scheme. So, for a first rough approximate, I'd propose that the summarizing lyric attitude be called ‘apprehensive.’ "

Yet to say as much is to encounter a problem. A state of apprehension can be variously modified. Otherwise put, the adjective admits of many adverbs. For instance, one can be solemnly apprehensive, or sullenly apprehensive, or sportively apprehensive, or experimentally apprehensive, or arbitrarily apprehensive (as when imagining some grotesque possibility that has a kind of formal appeal because it would "carry to the end of the line" certain tendencies already observable though not likely to attain actual dire fulfillment or "perfection," if I may use the word in an ironic sense). Or one can even be deflectively or secondarily apprehensive, as when referring to a time when tendencies that are now found to have turned out badly were, in their incipient stages, viewed in promissory rather than admonitory terms. (Would the Indians, living in what was to become New England, have had the attitude that led them to help the Pilgrims survive a first critically severe winter if those Indians had foreseen how their hospitality was to be repaid?)

To what extent can an attitude seem adjectivally consistent when it is adverbially varied? French neoclassic drama, for instance, could not have found consistency enough in the grotesquely tragic aspect of Macbeth, which readily allows for the strong contrast between the Murder scene and the Porter scene (while, if you are so inclined, the knocking at the gate can suggest the knock of conscience, and the Porter's ribaldry can suggest an Aristophanic analogue of bodily incontinence due to

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fright). Thus, there are varying degrees of tolerance, when adverbial diversity tugs at the outer limits of an attitude's adjectival unity. For some readers more than others the sense of a general apprehensiveness can get lost in a sense of the diversity among the ways of being apprehensive.

Or, the poem may be judged, not as a lyric, but as a lyric sequence. Also, there is a kind of typical consistency, more easily sensed than defined, in a work's style. And insofar as le style, c’est l’homme même, there may arise a sense of the narrator, or agonist, as a character, a persona prevailing willy-nilly throughout the work's changes of mood. Such a fiction within the conditions of a poem may or may not accurately represent the character of the author, as citizen and taxpayer, outside the conditions of the poem. But inasmuch as the realm of attitude greatly overlaps upon the realm of agent the attitudinizing nature of a poem might derive assistance from the fact that the poem's style may generate the sense of a single persona with whose imputed character all the range of expressions in the poem could seem to conform. Thus the sense of a single figure as the constant attitudinizer may help extend the range of variations which strike the reader as relevant to the problematical nature of the sights which are the objects of the poetic persona’s contemplation.

But in the last analysis, the same issue arises. Some readers may feel that the whole range of stylizations contributes to the definition of the fictive narrator's character; other readers may not. In the letter he sent me along with copies of the students' comments, Henry Sams succinctly though differently touched upon this point when referring to the "man side" of the poem "as opposed to the city side." Henry knew, as his students could not know, the damnable personal situation at the roots of my being in Brooklyn that season when the poem was written. So he could more easily approach the poem in attitude-agent terms, whereas his students would be most exercised about the shifts of attitude towards the public scene. In keeping with my theories of "symbolic action," these words afterwards are but designed to present the issue.

Of course, I'd love to talk back and forth about every sentence the students said, whether it be for or against. But obviously Time Does Not Permit. Yet before closing, I'd like to mention an article, "On Doing & Saying," built around an obviously and admittedly overblunt distinction between one hominid who is planting seeds and another (the "mythman") who "completes" the task by enacting the appropriate ritual of a planting song (Salmagundi 15, winter 1971).

I was consciously concerned with a range of associations clustered about the term "cross." But I had to admit that "not until I had finished

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the poem did I realize how another dimension had crept in without my slightestawareness."I have in mind my recurrent references to the"theme of light," connected with the fact that "at all hours of the night I had watched the fantastic gleam of the lights across the river." Whereupon:

Lo! an archetype had crept up on me: the "city of light," no less! But hold. Here was an archetype with a difference. For many of the connotations surrounding my images and ideas of light were of a sinister sort, involving "formidable things" (thoughts of empire, war, and imminent decay).

However:

Since the "city of light" does not attain its "perfection" as a "magic" vision gleaming through the night until the poem has built up an attitude of apprehension, obviously a "universal" interpretation here as archetype would be but a "first rough approximate."

But at that point I had to add: "Yet, after all, there was ‘Lucifer!’ "

At this point the author interrupted his writing long enough to go into the next room and wind his eight-day clock which now has to be wound twice a week. The day was dark, with much downpour. No mail came— and though he did get one phone call, it was a wrong number.

He could go on and on—until the last time …

NOTES

"An Eye-Poem for the Ear (with Prose Introduction, Glosses, and After-Words)" appeared in complete form in Directions in Literary Criticism: Contemporary Approaches to Literature, ed. Stanley Weintraub and Phillip Young (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), 228–251. The poem appeared originally, in a shorter version, in The Nation 208 (June 2, 1969): 700–704.