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4. K.B.

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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.

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14. Counter-Gridlock

An Interview with Kenneth Burke

1980–81

This interview is an edited-down version of a number of taped interviews that took place during 1980 and 1981 in Andover, New Jersey. Long as this interview is, we finally decided to include the whole piece because there seemed to be no way to cut it without seriously diminishing it. As the interviewers say, they covered a lot of ground; and as Burke points out, he had covered a lot of this ground elsewhere. The published interview included a lot of wonderful pictures of Burke, his family, his colleagues at the School of Letters, and of New York City, where Burke lived and worked for many years. It is with regret that we omit them here. The interview has been edited so that it reads like a continuous document; but in fact Burke went through the original a number of times, deleting and changing things, and the interviewers did a masterful job of compressing hours of interviews into a coherent document. Burke was fortunate in having such good, well-informed interviewers. Our collection of essays ends with it because it contains so many wonderful insights into Burke: the man, the writer, the thinker and tinkerer, the logologer, the comic, the self-quoter and self-analyzer, the storyteller—still vigorous and still seeking at eighty-four.

The repetition is not really a bad thing; Burke often rephrased the main points to change them slightly, and he always spontaneously added new examples, new stories, even new points when he was talking. Portions of the interview are good examples of Burke, live, as different from Burke in print. He was a fabulous talker, which is may be a good way to remember him, with his amazing eyes and incredible energy. He could drink and talk all night and even fit in a five-mile walk on the country roads around his place in Andover, talking all the way. He lived for words. He lived in words. He was his own Logos.

For a Rotinese, the pleasure of life is talk—not simply an idle chatter that passes time, but the more formal taking of sides in endless dispute, argument, and repartee or the rivaling of one another in eloquent and balanced phrases on ceremonial occasions. Speeches, sermons, and rhetorical statements are a delight. But in this class society, with hierarchies of order, there are notable constraints on speech. In gatherings, nobles speak more than commoners, men more than women, elders more than juniors; yet commoners, women, and youth, when given the opportunity as they invariably are, display the same prodigious verbal prowess. Lack of talk is

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an indication of distress. Rotinese repeatedly explain that if their "hearts" are confused or dejected, they keep silent. Contrarily, to be involved with someone requires active verbal encounter and this often leads to a form of litigation that is conducted more, it would seem, for the sake of argument than for any possible gain.^[1]

This interview is the result of several visits with Kenneth Burke during 1980–81 at his home outside Andover, New Jersey, where he has lived since 1921. Burke is now eighty-four years old and, as he emphasized in a recent letter, "hurrying like crazy to get things cleared up." Frank Gillette and I made each visit; twice we were accompanied by Monte Davis, coauthor of a book on Rene Thom's catastrophe theory,^[2] and once by Pellegrino D'Acierno, a Vico and Gramsci scholar who teaches at Columbia University.

We were introduced to Kenneth Burke by my friend Stevie Chinitz who has remained close to him since he was her teacher at Bennington. We drove out from Manhattan through a landscape Burke has described in writing on his friend William Carlos Williams: "that hateful traffic belching squandering of industrial power atop the tidal swamps." Then past Paterson and much further out along Route 80, we turned north toward Andover, through an area just beginning to show the signs of "a cancerous growth of haphazard real-estating"^[3] and drove up to Burke's farmhouse, still relatively isolated on Amity Road. There, suddenly, from around the back to greet us was Kenneth Burke: active, demonstrative, and welcoming.

Burke selected portions of a transcript I prepared, revised his answers ("you can tell them I struck all the goddams. They're such a goddam bore!") and added several notes which are indicated by brackets. We covered a lot of ground: "With several other spots it's stuff I've discussed elsewhere, and with the rest it's stuff I'm involved in elsewhere now."^[4]

The interview begins with a turn toward biography, motivated by our being together one time on the last day of 1980. It ends with Burke's written summary of a problem that had long concerned him, with the date of his solution. Otherwise dates are not indicated, and the interview reads as one sequence. Describing the nature of these occasions, by reference to the autobiographical hero of one of his stories, Burke summarizes:

This can turn out to be a fairly mellow text, in keeping with Herone Liddell's humanistic ideal of being "as mellow as an over-ripe cantaloupe." (The nearest I can come to that is when guys like youenz turn up in not too

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cold weather, and we can haggle backandforth in the room where real logs are burning in the fire place.)

In a 1967 addendum to Counter-Statement, Burke alluded to the "inchoate possibility of an avowal involving literal memories, deliberate fictions, and diaristic accidents." I asked him about his, and he said such a work would necessitate facing "the return of the repressed," and he continued to concentrate on the present. But now he was having difficulty finishing two epilogues for new editions of his other two books written in the thirties: Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. Throughout the time we visited, he read us excerpts of these essays which were going off in unanticipated directions.

By strategically coining a word to encompass this situation, Burke demonstrated for us one practical use of his method of "perspective by incongruity" ("the gauging of situations by verbal ‘atom-cracking’ ") and provided a title for the interview:

Remember the big traffic jam in New York when the subways stopped? That's when I learned the word gridlock. Gridlock means you can't go any way. The traffic is so jammed, it can't go forward, backwards, or sideways. What I had was counter-gridlock. I went every which way. When I wrote those two books, I had just barged in. But now, more than forty years later, all sorts of considerations that I had by-passed at the time started turning up. A lot was due to things of my own and to others that had developed since then. So, I'd write six or seven pages; then another tangent would seem needed, and I'd start over again, with the same baffling outcome. Instead of no way out, there was a clutter of ways out, each in its own way running into something that cancelled it. Every such turn was like "the return of the repressed," for it involved considerations that, if I had dealt with them at the time, I couldn't have done what I did do.

The title makes clear how our conversation is Burke's table talk at a time when he is near the completion of his theory, but it indicates, as well, an enduring aspect of his style and thought. He has always moved at tangents, provoking admiration and frustration. In 1935, R. P. Blackmur compared him to "Charles Santiago Sanders Pierce for the buoyancy and sheer remarkableness of his speculations," and contrasted his method to I. A. Richards's:

As Mr. Richards … uses literature as a springboard or source for a scientific method or philosophy of value, Mr. Burke uses literature, not only as a springboard but also as a resort or home, for a philosophy or psychology of moral possibility.^[5]

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Blackmur also notes how Marianne Moore's description of Edmund Burke as "a psychologist—of acute and raccoon-like curiosity" applies equally well to Kenneth Burke who worked with her at The Dial.

Another friend, Jerre Manjione, quotes an unidentified critic who appreciates Burke's ability to keep moving:

Burke's thoughts are as elusive as shadows. Getting the gist is like trying to put salt on the tail of a brilliantly plumaged bird. Once you think you have him firmly in hand, you find yourself clutching a vivid tailfeather or two while he has gone off again.^[6]

In conversation, he operates with the qualities of a master comedian, ironist, and dialectician. The interview gives a more sedate impression of our encounters, which were always spirited, often hilarious, and some times uproarious—as when Burke, discussing Emerson and Whitman, suddenly bounded up from his chair to exclaim: "I'm a giant! At five feet four inches I over-tower Balzac by a whole inch." Whereupon he went in search of this poem:

	But for those lucky accidents
	Were I not tall and suave and handsome
	were I not famed for my glamorous Byronic love-affairs
	had not each of my books sold riotously
	had not my fists made strong men cringe
	did not my several conversions
	enlist further hordes of followers
	and did not everything I turned to
	make me big money
	despite my almost glorious
	good heath of both body and mind
	how in God's name
	could I through all these years
	have held up
	and held out
	and held on?

He explained:

When I wrote that poem, all of a sudden I understood Whitman. Right there on his page, he built himself a character. Was his family riddled with disease? No problem: In his poems he could rejoice that he was born of a stock ideally healthy. The formula is simple: Anything you wish you were,

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just be it. Let your "Song of the Self" be an invention such that even you yourself need not be clear to yourself just when you are confessing, professing, wishing, attaining, and downright lying—and the outcome will be such that (like with much of Emerson) you don't care. It has a lift. If you want something, just let your lines reach out and take it. And if not, why not? And insofar as a "poetic" part of us all gropes in that direction, your plea to get admitted is already in.

Burke in person is most like his poems: impromptu, gnomic, aphoristic, able to dazzle his listeners and return them to fundamental knowledge while providing witness to the astonishing mores of daily life.

Identifying a central quality of Burke's method as "imperviousness," Benjamin DeMott writes:

The sage of Bennington argues with endless invention for the necessity of seeing around the spoken or written word, the announced intention, the "successful" enterprise in persuasion—in order to register the extent of the wordman's probable deflection from the X that is not words.^[7]

"The X that is not words" Burke defines as "the objective recalcitrance of the situation itself." When Frank Gillette asked him how he arrived upon the use of the word "recalcitrance," Burke got up and went to the dictionary, saying "I believe it comes from the word meaning ‘heel’ " and checked the etymology: "Yes, calx is heel, calcitrare is to kick somebody in the heel. Another word is ‘inculcate’ which brings it around the other way." Burke, like Richard Blackmur and Charles Olson, uses the dictionary, which he calls the good book, for daily exercise. This goes back to an incident in childhood which he also attributes to Herone Liddell:

The first thing of importance that had happened to Herone Liddell following the accident of his birth was a near-fatal tumble he had taken about the age of three. Spitting meditatively from the height of a second story, he lost his balance, and fell at an angle on his head. Subsequently, he tended to assume that he hit the ground before his own spit.^[8]

Burke couldn't attend school for years, and carried around a dictionary in preparation for the event. Thus he started to become an extraordinary auto-didact in the distinct American tradition.

We found Burke to be, true to DeMott's description, "that rarest of men, a good humored original genius." Frank Gillette offered a face-toface homage:

Your lexical freedom, your unwillingness to fix at any specific point, to use your term, "a cluster of associations" has been a constant source of liberation for me, and I mean liberation in the pious sense of the term.

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Gillette is referring here to the chapter "The Range of Piety" in Permanence and Change, where Burke first quotes Santayana's definition of piety "as loyalty to the sources of our being" and then provides a definition of his own: "Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what."

Although Burke has been preoccupied with the problems of summation, as well as several difficult northern winters to which recent poems testify, he has not been deterred from other lines of investigation, and he always had something fresh in hand. Most of his recent work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, and now he is working on a theory of narrative in response to a Chicago symposium. "Bodies That Learn Language"—a work in progress—is the final reduction of his epistemology Logology, which he distinguishes from his ontology Dramatism. Other articles he put into the record are: "Variations on ‘Providence’ "^[9] and "As One Thing Leads to Another" published in an issue of RANAM(Recherches Anglaises et Americanes) that honors his work. From the latter he read us a definition of language he attempted after George Steiner^[10] had written how difficult it would be to succeed at one:

Language is:

The arbitrary conventional medium of symbolic expression and communication that is best equipped to discuss itself and all others.

Its three offices are: to inform, please, and move those persons who are familiar with its conventions.

In its ability to inform, it has proved itself the collective mode of symbolic action that has comprehensively organized the study of its nonsymbolic ground (the realm of motion) and of situations and processes involved in our relation to the complex of symbolic and nonsymbolic factors affecting human conduct.

Burke adds this footnote:

The first clause is the only way I could find to differentiate language from other media (such as music, painting, dance, sculpture). And this reflexive function is important with regard to the connection between language and "thought," and the notion of "thought" as "inner dialogue." Every medium can comment on itself, but language seems most able in this regard. … The second clause is adopted from Cicero.^[11]

Burke is justly compared to Roland Barthes, as he (two decades before Barthes) moved literary analysis decisively and playfully in the direction of the social sciences.

Frank and I both came into significant contact with another protean thinker who moved at the boundaries of disciplines, Gregory Bateson. We were anxious to sound Burke out, since we knew the two had met

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in 1949 at a conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. (Sitting between Burke and Bateson is Marcel Duchamp, the artist who exemplified a range of paradox which Bateson and Burke approach by more explicit methods.) Burke wrote, as long ago as 1937, that "among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention." Bateson, in the last decade of his life, considered "the effects of conscious purpose versus nature." Bateson approaches Burke:

A peculiar sociological phenomenon has arisen in the last one hundred years which perhaps threatens to isolate conscious purpose from many corrective processes which might come out of less conscious parts of the mind. The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of "persons"—trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like. In biological fact, these entities are precisely not persons and are not even aggregates of whole persons. They are aggregates of parts of persons.^[12]

Burke, writing last year on his adopted state of New Jersey:

If more and more pollution is to be our state's future, all such polluters can get themselves the best berths on a sinking ship. And they can die rich in ripe old age, and even honored by their fellow citizens. For the ship that is sinking is the ship of state, and indications are, from all over the nation, that such a ship will never go under, wholly. It can just go on sinking and sinking as a place to live in, while there's always the likelihood that those with funds enough can invest in better berths not yet so polluted, elsewhere.^[13]

We found that Burke had just finished a paper on Bateson, and then had immediately added several pages after reading a review of Bateson's Mind and Nature by philosopher Stephen Toulmin.^[14] He also told us how he upstaged Governor Jerry Brown at a dinner honoring Bateson shortly before his death. Burke was the next-to-last speaker and brought down the house by singing a song he'd written about "everywhere the double bind." He put us down in his calendar as "the Bateson boys."

Most memorable is how Burke still wrestles with two of his masters: Kant and Nietzsche, as he indicates here in one remarkable series of parentheses that reviews the foundation of his critical method. But he is attentive to new work and pointed to Richard H. Brown's A Poetic for Sociology, which proposes "cognitive aesthetics" as a logic of discovery for the human sciences. Burke's response: "I just welcome him," and at another point: "The book's a great shopping list." Brown selects work

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in neighboring domains, as Burke did in Permanence and Change, in order to demonstrate parallel motives in art and science. He attempts to establish criteria of adequacy for a unified theory:

Cognitive aesthetics, we argue, has four principal advantages. First, it permits us to move beyond copy theories of truth in both art and in science. Second, it provides a framework within which the pioneering artist and the pioneering scientist are both seen as involved in essentially the same activity: making paradigms through which experience becomes intelligible. These two advantages give birth to a third and fourth; for if art and science are seen to have an essential affinity, then the possibility is opened for a fusion of the two principal ideals of sociological knowledge: the scientific or positivist one, stressing logical deductions and controlled research, and the artistic or intuitive one, stressing insights and subjective understanding. Finally, insofar as such a fusion is possible, cognitive aesthetics provides a source of metacategories for assessing sociological theory from any methodological perspective.

By doing so he makes clear how prophetic Burke's original investigation of behaviorism and positivism was:

This essay takes an aesthetic view, of rationality. Just as scientific theories require aesthetic adequacy, works of art present a kind of knowledge. For cognitive aesthetics, both science and art are rational in that they both presuppose various criteria of economy, congruence and consistency, elegance, originality, and scope. Such criteria are those by which we organize experience into formal structures of which "knowing" is constituted.^[15]

Burke's "poetic" perspective or "methodology of the pun" is the precursor of cognitive aesthetics. Like Burke, Brown presents an anatomy of metaphor as a primary means of demonstrating how knowledge is perspectival. Thus Burke:

The metaphorical extension of perspective by incongruity involves casuistic stretching, since it interprets new situations by removing words from their "constitutional" setting. It is not "demoralizing," however, since it is done by the "transcendence" of a new start. It is not negative smuggling, but positive cards-face-up-on-the-table. It is designed to "remoralize" by accurately naming a situation already demoralized by inaccuracy.^[16]

I was not surprised to find Burke reading Roy A. Rappaport's Ecology, Meaning, and Religion,^[17] which combines the ecological perspectives of Bateson with Burke's analysis of how social action determines varieties of linguistic expression. He now participates in a combined discipline of anthropology and sociolinguistics, as his one-time student Dell

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Hymes makes clear in an important review of Language as Symbolic Action. Burke's theory of language as gesture, first applied to poetry, is now a subset of "the ethnography of speaking." Hymes writes:

The revival of interest in the ethnography of symbolic forms (myth, ritual, song, chant, dance, and the like and the subtler forms of daily life) … promises development of work from which a truly comparative "rhetoric" and "poetics" may yet emerge … such linguistic ethnography will impoverish itself if it does not build on the insights accumulated in the tradition Burke extends and enriches.^[18]

The impression of ritual language on its hearers is one of some strangeness. The use of dialect variants contributes to this strangeness. Words are used in a variety of ways that make them slightly discrepant from their ordinary usage; but the concurrence of each of these words with another that signals its sense creates a kind of resonant intelligibility, an intelligibility that varies from individual to individual. This ritual code, in its entirety, is probably beyond the comprehension of any of its individual participants. To these participants, it is an ancestral language which they continue. It is a language into which individuals "grow" as their age and acquaintance increase. This process should last a lifetime and tales are told of former elders, who—as they approached extreme old age—ceased to speak ordinary language and uttered only ritual statements.^[19]

A note on the photographs: No one has a finer sense than Kenneth Burke of how technological change has revolutionized the cities and landscape of America in this century, an acceleration of scale and event he analyzed and resisted in exemplary ways. It is appropriate to note here that Burke lived without electricity and running water in Andover until the late sixties. His position of "agro-bohemian" anticipated by now familiar solutions to the current crisis, and like Scott Nearing, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman, he is an exemplary figure who lives his thought from the ground up. From the photography collection of the Museum of the City of New York, we selected material that would give some sense of the city Burke knew as a young man, as jack-of-all-trades editor at The Dial during the twenties, and as a social analyst during the decade of the thirties. We discovered that Burke had shared an apartment in the village with Berenice Abbott and other equally notable figures, including Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, and members of the original Provincetown Players. The photographs from the Edison Archive were suggested by a discussion not included here, but excerpts are used as captions. Burke's daughter, Mrs. Elspeth Hart, graciously allowed me to copy the photographs of Burke as a child and young man; others are from the collection at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; the pictures of

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Burke and Empson are from the Kenyon College Archive. I would like to thank Frank Gillette, John Johnston, Brian Thomas and, of course, Kenneth Burke for help in preparing this interview.

R. S.^[20]

FG:

We brought some champagne, kb.

KB:

Oh, Champagny-water!

FG:

Have you got the Viennese crystal? We just discovered Pely and I grew up in the same neighborhood in more or less the same time. You spent time in Weehawken?

KB:

Oh, yes.

FG:

Well, here we are. We're all from Weehawken in a sense.

KB:

Well, I'll be damned! I didn't realize … when I first came to New York, that's where my parents lived, on Boulevard East.

FG:

My home turf. Where Union City and Weehawken come together.

PD:

You know that hospital on the Hudson? My father used to run it.

KB:

One of my daughters was born in that hospital!

PD:

That's named after my grandmother. Only an Italian would do that.

KB:

Yes sir, one of my daughters was born in Weehawken. It's part of New Cuba now, isn't it? I remember we were right over where the tunnel goes through. This was during the First World War. Of course, there were army men up there guarding that place. There was the risk that the Germans would blow up the tunnel because of the war goods going through there.

We had an old German music box, a wonderful old Regina music box, beautiful old structure. My dad and I were sitting in the back room. All of a sudden we heard my mother put on Die Wacht am Rhein. We rushed in and turned it off as fast as we could.

There used to be many old German beer halls in that area, lovely old places. Some were still around when we were there. If you walked out from Boulevard East half a mile, you were in the country. Oh yes, and the old man had an electric car, and he just couldn't get up that hill.

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FG:

Between Weehawken and Hoboken.

KB:

Yes.

RS:

You were at Columbia only a short time. Why did you quit?

KB:

I was a dropout owing to a situation of this sort. All the courses I wanted to take were there. I didn't drop out because I was disgusted with school. But I only expected to take an A.B. degree and many of the courses I wanted to take were available only for postgraduate work. I'd already taken six years of Latin, and I wanted to take a little medieval Latin. No, I had to do that in postgraduate school. Now often colleges don't have Greek! But I had taken two years of Greek in high school, and I wanted to do the Greek Anthology. No, I couldn't do that until later. So I told the old man, "Pap, I'll save you some money. Let me go down to the Village, and give me just a fragment of what it costs you to send me to school there, and I'll keep up with my work." Well, I did. I went down there and did keep up with my work.

RS:

What was the Village like then?

KB:

One of the first guys I met there was Joe Gould. Remember old Joe? Oh, he was a fantastic creature. He lived on booze and cigarettes and ketchup. He was a mixture of … he was half insane and half brilliant as hell.

FG:

A rather lethal combination. What was his demise? What did he do?

KB:

He was writing a history of our times. He had whole files of these things. I don't know where they all disappeared to. He'd go to places like insane asylums, write up little bits of this and that. Ezra Pound got some of that stuff published at the time. When my Counter-Statement came out, Joe came around to see me. He came in and asked me all about the book. That was during prohibition. We made our own booze. We made a rice wine that was pretty effective stuff. I started plying Joe with the rice wine, and Joe kept on discussing the book with me. I knew of course that he was coming for a shakedown. But he was discussing the book making quite relevant comments about it. Finally after we'd talked about it for quite awhile, he said, "I hate to flatter someone who I'm going to ask for money, but that sure is strong wine."

RS:

You bought this place in the early twenties?

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KB:

I bought this place around '21.

RS:

Then you moved out?

KB:

In the summer I'd stay out here, and in the winter I'd stay in town if I had a job, like when I got tied in with The Dial. My God, the kind of life you lived then! You'd go down to the Village around late September or the beginning of October and rent one of these old railroad apartments where in the kitchen you had a sink and a big tub. There was also a tub in the can out in the hall. But my God, you couldn't bathe in that! There was no heat. You kept junk in that. There was a big vat in the kitchen which you used for everything. You did your laundry in it, your dish-washing and bathing. And there was a coal stove. And the rest of the house would be wholly without heat.

I'd pick one of these places and pay by the month. You'd go in the fall, pick up one of these places—and in spring put your little junky stuff back in storage and come out here. We did this again and again. It's a totally different kind of life now! If it took me more than two or three hours to find a place, I'd think I was put upon. Sometimes I would stay out here all winter and heat the whole place with wood that I sawed and chopped up myself. But that's only if I didn't have a job in New York. When I bought this place I paid off the mortgage the first year. So, during the damn smash-up, I always had this place to go to.

RS:

When you did that research on drugs in the thirties, who was that for?

KB:

I had a job with the Rockefeller Foundation back in the twenties. Colonel Arthur Woods was the head of the Rockefeller Foundation at that time, and he was also assessor in the League of Nations, the drug commission. Arthur Woods had been a member of a reform administration in New York. He was police commissioner. Later he financed some studies on drug addiction. He represented the U.S. committee on dangerous drugs in the League of Nations, and he needed a ghostwriter and I got that job.

I worked on it for a year and a half. The magic word "Rockefeller" opened all doors for me. I could ask any question. Endocrinologists, they'd tell me anything. Ironically enough, all my notes on that stuff have disappeared. All that work I'd done

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just vanished. The stuff I used in The Philosophy of Literary Form was part of it. I wouldn't have any of it but for the parts included there.

In those days people would just walk in and sit down. I didn't know who the hell they were. It was a crazy world then, of course, it was nutty as hell. Trouble was, as far as I was concerned, I was afraid I was going crazy anyhow.

FG:

This is the early thirties?

KB:

Just about that time. I even wrote fantasies of super-Hitlerite villains, all kinds of stuff. Some of it turns up once in a while, but most of it's vanished. May be it's in the FBI files for all I know. That was such a crazy period. You thought you were going crazy anyhow, and I damn near was. You never knew what's natural and what isn't natural. I was going to have lunch with a guy I'd known quite well. He was a leftist fellow. I'd rushed a shave and had had a drink besides. Had a little blood on my face, and he asked, "What happened to you?" He thought I'd been in some goddam messup or something. I had to tell him I had a new blade in. That was just normal. That was the way everybody was. Honest to God that's the way everybody was.

I've had three stretches of magic: working for Colonel Woods doing the ghosting job, working for The Dial, and working at Bennington. They were all wonderful. The whole three were just from a different world. Everyone was a different world. You do have those.

RS:

Could you describe your experience at Bennington?

KB:

At Bennington I found working with students. … I really understood the actual … it's a strange situation. I'd get to working with a student, and my God, we were so involved in her work! It was really a world apart. Terrifically. I once had a student—she was a beautiful girl, and she was interested in dance. She wanted to write original stuff—and I'm not so keen on kids writing. I'd rather work some other way, translating or something like that.

I said, "Tell me some writer you really like, a short story writer, and let's have you do a one act play, turning that stuff into a drama." She was in drama and dance and knew that field. She liked Katherine Mansfield, so we started to work on her stuff. I swear to God, we learned things I'd never realized! In the

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story you see it all quite clearly. You start to turn it into a drama all of a sudden there's one sentence that seems to need a whole extra scene. You get so involved in such stuff you're just living in it! The joint work becomes engrossing.

When I first got there, I inherited a fantastic story. Bill Troy had a group of students who proved their great literary ability by never producing anything. Only the vulgar produced. The lowly sociology students—they could write. But the literary elect were beyond that. I had this whole group, and I flunked every goddam one of them. But with the understanding that they could come back. They all finally did. The last one ten years after I flunked her. This was one hell of a way for a student to prove herself a great literary champion. Yet I did discover this: The real potential writers did suffer. The mutts could write any goddam thing!

I used to figure things out this way: I decided that I'd divide my "counselees" into three groups: The students you would think of as being set for marriage, the students you would think of as being set for careers, and the students you would try as much as possible to help keep out of the nut house! Those were the ones I inclined to love most.

PD:

They became the faculty!

KB:

Consider the situation. Every word that a student writes you is there to be concerned with. Then she goes out and tries to write a book—and who cares? The rules are totally different. Students really are marvels. They start out wonderfully. But the situation is so damned unique; and it can't go on. From the standpoint of betterment I began to talk about finding some way of easing things off.

RS:

I hadn't known you did all those translations.

KB:

I did all this work in German, and my translation of Death in Venice—Auden said, "This is it!" And that put it over. He was part of the family too. Then Mann came over. And since I had done all this work translating him, his essays, his lectures, his letters, and so on, they put me up there sitting next to Mann— and my God, I couldn't follow his German! [Bill Troy heard about this incident, when Mann himself didn't know English very well. And Bill told in my presence how, when I explained to Frau Mann that although I had done much translating of

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German I had trouble with it as spoken, Frau Mann said to Thomas, "Nicht sprechen, übersetzen." Bill had been drinking straight whiskey out of a jelly glass on a private occasion when I had gone to join in doing him honor. In an astoundingly few minutes he had gone from being personally charming to the kind of eloquent literary improvising that he was rightly famed for, to this anecdote when the adrenaline that alcohol releases had begun to take over, a stage followed almost immediately by his passing out totally stoned on the floor.]

FG:

Permanence and Change wasn't published until 1935. Did you write it out here?

KB:

I wrote most of that out here. It was published in 1934 or 1935. Actually, when I first wrote the book … this is why I believe in the whole matter of language as motive … that your own vocabulary hypnotizes you. I'd written all this stuff on perspectives, and when I got through, it was so much more real than the world. If I would talk to somebody, I had a feeling that there was a piece of glass between us … really terrible … it was a really unpleasant notion. In those days I was playing a lot of Ping-Pong at night. I would lie awake imagining a ball going back across the net. That seemed a way of making the two sides nearer alike than the image of being on two sides of glass. And finally things did ease up.

In rewriting, redoing, this whole thing, I've literally thrown away 170 pages as false starts. I finally decided that the middle section, "Perspective by Incongruity," is the essence of the whole business, and I began to work on cutting it down. Perspective by incongruity is a way of seeing two ways at once. It's the whole principle of an ironic approach to something. One of my favorite examples is Veblen's concept of "trained incapacity." They're opposites … he introduced the expression when referring to those who in being competent as businessmen were not competent to look at a situation otherwise. In that middle section I have all kinds of variations on that theme.

And by God, I did start seeing double. I got wild. I had to write twenty pages, but things dragged on and on. So in my impatience on having it pile up the more I tried to cut it down, I would drink a little bit.

I don't drink while I'm writing, but I would take a drink. And

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by God, you can't imagine what a sybaritic delight it was when, after getting out of this tangle, I could look down the road and see just one car coming. It was such a privilege. I was working here in the summer. When I heard a car I'd rush out looking to see if only one car was going down the road … wonderful.

FG:

How long did your period of double vision last?

KB:

Well, it lasted a couple of months. With everything I've ever written, something of that sort turns up. I believe, absolutely, you do get hooked to a vocabulary. If you really do live with your terms, they turn up tricks of their own. You can't get around them.

FG:

What dynamic is at work and responsible for such a fix?

KB:

They do run you by vocabulary. When you finally get down to where you're making your own terminology, then by God, you're making your own destiny too. You're picking the terms and they always have an angle beyond which you use them and then they use you. There's no question about it. Sometimes a person writes a book and the book sells well, and he writes another book … and it's wonderful. He's making money. Then it turns out that his way of writing gave him psychogenic cancer! That's a part of the anguish of your body when you were writing these books. Take someone like Sylvia Plath. Here's a woman who really lives with her work, means it, every damn thing she writes. She gets more and more efficient on suicidal themes. Then you're going in that groove …

FG:

You're preparing for suicide.

KB:

But the point is, you're reducing your range. For instance, I've tinkered with that suicide line all my life. But at the same time, I also work with ideas of how to contrast it, how to make it contain other schemes. She must make it more efficient: how to be more suicidal!

FG:

But there's dramatistic element in Plath's suicide as well. It was her third or fourth attempt, I believe, before she succeeded.

PD:

The housekeeper didn't come.

FG:

There was some unconscious mechanism.

KB:

You get suicide so clearly in the Japanese: hari-kiri, suppuku, two words they use on it. A lot of suicide is accusation. The technical, traditional way of doing it is to kill yourself on the

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doorstep of the guy you're after. … It was her relation to her husband; she was attacking him.

FG:

Basically accusing him of murder.

KB:

Let me read you my suicidal poem.

FG:

Suicide is appropriate for the last day of the year.

KB:

I was out here two years in a row. That's why I'm so goddam glad to get away. Two winters in a row alone out here. The first one was absolutely incredible. There was a series of rains that froze. This whole section was one big chunk of ice. Then the second year was mild. But two years of that, then came spring. The irony was that spring was at least the resolution, but here's what happened:

BELATED ENTRANCE

	Yes, can fight the other seasons,
	but I can't fight spring.
	So now, late March, consider me
	forcibly defenseless against the ravages
	of a call, that, near 83,
	I could not adequately answer
	e'en if they gave me bbls.
	of money
	to squander on the project.
	A quiet calm, infiltrating desolation settles
	in and about the problematical Subject (the Selph)
	A Spirit come to dwell within me,
	saturating same with its O'ver-All Context of Situation—
	and all would be like to commit hari-kiri
	except for lack of guts enough to cut one's guts out.

FG:

"April is the cruelest month …"

KB:

Oh, yes, that's the idea. The other seasons you can fight. You know, I was the guy who did the paste work on The Waste Land, putting The Waste Land together for The Dial. I spent the whole night on it because [Gilbert] Seldes was so particular. You had to fix it in such a way that you could know where the spaces were. I put it one way, it wouldn't fit, and he wouldn't allow it a little bit. Yeah, layout. Eliot wasn't even around. He was in London.

RS:

Did you have any contact with Pound?

---

KB:

The publisher sent Pound a copy of my Counter-Statement, and I got a very friendly letter from Pound about it, but he embarrassed the hell out of me because, in the course of saying nice things about my book, he put me in a bad light with the publisher. He talked about what a lousy publisher, so I didn't want to handle it.

RS:

How did you get to Remy de Gourmont, through Pound?

KB:

Remy de Gourmont died when I was working on him. I was so damned dumb in my early days. This article I wrote on Mann and Gide in Counter-Statement … Gide sent me one of his books, signed his own name, but I didn't even acknowledge it. That's what I mean by suicidal. How stupid I've been!

FG:

Did you ever take any drugs?

KB:

Nothing but alcohol. I think what saved me was Prohibition. All that goddam stuff. Every night I got sick so I got rid of it. I wasn't proud. If I'd have kept my liquor, I'd been gone a long time ago. Most of it was junk, you know. Every bit of it had chemicals in it. They denatured the denatured. Everyone would put some denaturing in it. Then the bootlegger would take some of the denaturing out. My body wouldn't put up with it.

FG:

It's all a seeking for transcendence. Alcohol, all drugs, whatever, is an attempt to achieve transcendence. Authority believes you can control transcendence with doxological methods, through ceremony, through ritual, through language. But if they believe that the expression of personal transcendence is pure escape external to their ritual, then it's prohibited.

KB:

I was up at Wesleyan. I was going to an alcohol party, and I went through a room where all the kids were glazed in darkness. My God, what a muddle. They weren't doing anything. But we were going to yell and drink.

RS:

It was an interesting moment: the necessity of abandoning language because language had been so reduced to control.

FG:

It was synonymous with the awesomeness of authority. In this case, transcendence is associated with nonverbal forms exclusively. Transcendence is not associated with a poetic message, but with a chemical one, direct mediation between your body chemistry and some external influence.

KB:

I think sometimes it's the attempt to be all body. The rule I'm most proud of is this one: The only cure for digging in the dirt is

---

an idea. The cure for any idea is more ideas. The cure for all ideas is digging in the dirt. That's the whole damn thing. Body back to body. That's your relation between ideas … that's the body talking for you. I think people who take drugs frustrate the completion of symbolism. The drugs cut corners! When I look back over my life, and all the hours I've spent under alcohol, I think that's my lostness.

FG:

You associate it with loss …

KB:

I'm trying to answer a call across a gulf that can't be crossed. I feel that. Every once in a while, I hit a couple of notes on the piano that just get the damn thing. They get what I wish I could do every time. But not by accident, not by alcohol, but just by doing it that way. I wish I could write a whole thing like that. If you haven't created them spontaneously, you haven't really done them. If you haven't done them with your whole full self. I believe that our animal, ideally, our animal … must really face these things right up close. Sometimes people will ask me, "Have you got this done? You're trying to stop things." I say no! I've got out of this … I don't know what you call it … the most terrifying development. We have a lot of it here already, and that is what we do from now on. We use these damn machines on us. … What is going on in me now when I'm talking to you? What is going up and down inside, and therefore what's going on in me when I say the word that makes me horny, or say a word that makes me disgusted. What's going on in my body? And I think for the first time in the world's history, our technological machine has got the resources to check on that. And what we have is a totally new kind of disassociation. I am out there, recorded on a dial. Who am I? Here I am, a person, and now that stuff! And I believe it will give us an ultimate. I can even believe—the irony of this—I suddenly get a little notion, all of a sudden, I can be pious again. I can see beyond. There is something! There is something!

FG:

The origins of a new piety!

KB:

I don't know. I get a little glimpse of it. I don't know but there it is.

FG:

That little glimpse is the intuitional glimpse of a new optimism.

KB:

You've got these signs on you, things up and down, you're just a bunch of records on meters. They are reporting on you, just as when you're reading the dials on a car or an airplane. The

---

problem of identity gets down to that. The irony of this whole business is that the future, a logological future of this sort would be—the irony of my resistance to technology—this would be a purely technological study. You'd have a machine recording you. Yes, the sort of "processing" they do now, working on their own blood pressure as indicated on a screen and learning to control it. My notion is that every bit of us could be objectified that way.

Remember when Aristotle speaks of the tragic pleasure? This means you're enjoying crying. But when you're crying for someone you really have lost, that's not fun at all! Therefore there are two kinds of crying. That sort of difference I would show on the screen. Under those conditions, a body can be studied from the outside.

I have thought about an experiment like this. Take a movie or a play. You have fifty control people and fifty people in your theater. The one fifty would all be together and the control group would be isolated individually. I think you would have a recording of different vibrations with the individuals than the kind that happened with the one audience.

FG:

Velocity of resonance, no?

KB:

They fit into another, fit together; and I think it could show not just in attitude that the fifty people manifested a different kind of vibrating responding together.

FG:

When it reaches a mob state, the resonance has melded into a coefficient of power. That explains mob psychology.

KB:

No doubt about it, and I think that's what Hitler was working on. The point is, as I see, you'd actually have for the first time in history, pictures of all these things going on inside you! When I had an examination some years back—I refer to this in the Grammar of Motives—the guy had me walk. He put various types of anodes on me. As I walked they were checking my gait. The record in itself didn't represent my gait; but if you had different kinds of people, their gaits would show up in different ways. The representations would show by comparison with one another. You'd have a complete diagnostic attitude toward yourself.

FG:

But who is reading the diagnosis?

KB:

Well, you have different views on that. Interpretation is something else again. The thing doesn't interpret itself. This

---

applies to the polygraph test. These things are not as accurate as people think. I like that story of the guy who thought he was Napoleon. His analysts argued with him, trying to convince him that he wasn't Napoleon. Finally he agreed that he was not Napoleon. The machine indicated that he was lying!

FG:

How about Coleridge and drugs?

KB:

Coleridge was so promising in so many ways, he put up with it, but he moaned, he was wretched in his last years. There had been a honeymoon stage. That's when he wrote his wonderful mystery poems. After that he was shot. And for several years he was just down, nowhere; then he came back. From then on he lived with himself as a disease, and he was under a doctor's care. But he retained his wonderful ability to verbalize. The record of the Table Talk is engrossing.

FG:

Would you say Coleridge functioned in the breast of Wordsworth, the surface of the earth, nature.

KB:

Coleridge's great poems, the mystery poems, I would class under the head of what he would call "fancy." I think it wasn't imagination. I don't think he thought that way. But I think those poems were adumbrations of the surrealists. "Kubla Khan" was their ideal: To write a poem out of a dream, and he did. Any one who snoots any of Coleridge has robbed himself. He was one of the most profound writers who ever wrote! And there was always something eating at him.

FG:

What is the difference between Wordsworth and Coleridge? Constable said all his art can be found under any hedge. That's pure Wordsworth.

KB:

There was a great ambiguity between Coleridge's and Wordsworth's relationship to the "imagination." Coleridge's mystery poems were really not the way Wordsworth saw it. Wordsworth was trying to situate the newness of language in its ability to reflect reality itself; Coleridge was seeing another realm, language that never was on land or sea. From the standpoint of Coleridge, that expression would mean something that wasn't there. What Wordsworth means is it's really there but you didn't see it.

---

PD:

Did you see that R. P. Blackmur's book on Henry Adams finally came out? Blackmur's stuff gets better and better. The essay on Ulysses, for example, which everyone always forgets.

KB:

There's no question about it. He has a real calling all his own. After a couple of ps you get into it, you feel it. We had a strange relationship that way. We were both auto-didacts and pretty much close together. He was much better at academic politics than I ever was. One summer, I was going to be at Indiana, and I stayed with him and John Crowe Ransom. We rented a place, a beautiful little house! It was a lovely time. As a matter of fact, that lovely little house is now a parking lot. I did a review on one of his books. It was a dirty trick I did which nobody realized. He gave two of my favorite proverbs, which I had already used: Fides quaerens intellectum and corruptio optimi pessima. [The first was an ideal statement of scholastic theology. One took faith on trust, but having accepted it, one proceeded to show why the position was rational. I have discussed it in my Rhetoric of Religion among other places. See there, page 12. The other, "the corruption of the best is the worst." is so far as I know a Latin proverb. I used it in my essay on Hitler's Mein Kampf. Dick got them both wrong. Whereas intellectum is in the accusative case, the object of "seeing," he made it a nominative. I wrote as though he had done this deliberately, to give some such other meaning as "faith a seeking intellect," or some such. And he made the other, corruptio optima pessima, which could have been interpreted vaguely as possibly meaning "corruption (is the) best worst." I forget exactly how I tinkered with them; but nobody knew the difference, and Blackmur never mentioned it to me. It is amusing that, at the time, I was entangled in the tangle myself.]

RS:

You taught with Empson once at Kenyon?

KB:

I found out we gave our classes at the same time, so we didn't even know what the other was doing. One night there was a party on, and by golly, I wasn't invited and I felt pretty bad. Still, they had parties all the time. I heard the noise across the fields, the talking, people having a wonderful time. I finally went to sleep and the next thing I knew someone was pounding on the door: Bang, bang, bang. "Wake up, Mr. Burke! Wake up, Mr.

---

Burke! Mr. Empson is attacking you!" I rushed over. And Empson was sitting in the kitchen under the kitchen sink. He was going in good form, and every time he'd make a point he'd toss his head and hit the pipe and make it ring. I thought he might knock himself out!

That's one way to crash a party, right? I was in to stay. It went on all night till five o'clock in the morning. I never did find out what he had said though; by the time I got there he was on another subject.

We had our classes at the same time, and we discovered that we were both going to give a talk on Coriolanus. So we made an agreement we'd toss up as to who went first—and we'd never change a word or refer to the other's talk at all. It was funny, because in one way students feel inclined to show their attitudes in these matters. One guy, another member of the class, had a stunt which was described to me.

Empson had a quite picturesque way of lecturing. He'd be talking, then suddenly swoop down and glance at his manuscript, then race about the room, or suddenly start writing things on the board. Constant changes in tempo and style. The student started acting as though he were aiming a gun all over the place. He said, "You can't get a bead on him." It would be like him.

FG:

Seven Types …

KB:

I think his other book …

RS:

Some Versions of Pastoral?

KB:

Yes, is better than that. That's beautiful.

FG:

But the effect of Seven Types of Ambiguity was torrential.

KB:

I don't know if it's true but I've heard that originally he had but six types.

FG:

Didn't like the number?

KB:

Richards was said to have suggested making it seven but I don't know exactly why.

FG:

For Pythagorean reasons alone.

PD:

Seven is more complete. Six is an impossible number. But three plus four …

FG:

You don't settle on six, six is …

---

KB:

I always think six in English is sex.

PD:

Did you know Wallace Stevens?

KB:

I knew him a little bit. He was given an honorary degree up at Bard. I went up there as a part of the outfit to honor him. My wife was with me, and at one of the meals she sat next to him. She said later, "Guess what Wallace Stevens asked me?" I said, "What's that?" " ‘Does your husband have insurance?’ " I claim that the basic idea of Stevens's work … what's the word for it? The first idea. I think what he was really trying to do was, by imagination, to recall what it was like to see something before he had a word for it. In a sense, that's how he did see things originally. What he really was doing was aiming to regress.

PD:

Trying to be innocent again.

KB:

Yes. Can't be! The only way was to do it. … In one sense, your body is always that way, of course. But you've lost it forever.

[Editor's note: Jerre Mangione in An Ethnic at Large (New York: Putnam, 1978) summarizes the events to which the discussion below refers:

At the first American Writers' Conference in 1935, Burke scandalized the orthodox Communists in the audience by proposing that all future leftwing propaganda substitute the word "people" for "masses." He argued that words like "masses," "workers," and "proletarians" tended to exclude some of the very elements in society that the Communists were trying to win over. At the end of his presentation, he acknowledged that his advice bore "the telltale stamp of my class, the petite bourgeoisie," but held that the allegiance of his class to the left-wing cause was "vitally important."

For this view he was severely reprimanded in public by such Communist bigwigs as Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, who gave elaborate Marxist reasons for rejecting the use of "people." Only two months later both men were obliged to swallow their rationales when the Comintern passed a resolution calling for a "People's Front," in which Communist parties in all countries were urged to ally themselves with as many liberals and bourgeois, petit and otherwise, as possible.

Burke's paper "Revolutionary Symbolism in America" is collected in American Writer's Conference (New York: International Publishers, 1935). Malcolm Cowley has a chapter on the conference in The Dream of the Golden Mountain: Remembering the Thirties (New York: The Viking Press, 1980). Other sources are: "Thirty Years Later: Memories of the First American Writers' Conference," The American Scholar (summer1966), a discussion with Burke, Cowley, Granville Hicks, and William Phillips, moderated by Daniel Aaron. Aaron's Writers' on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

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― 360 ―

1961) has a valuable discussion. Sidney Hook's review of Burke's Attitudes toward History appeared in the Partisan Review (December 1937), and an exchange between Burke and Hook appeared in the following issue. Hook's comments are reprinted in William Rueckert's Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924–1966 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).]

RS:

Is it Joseph Freeman you described as "a locomotive in public and a nice guy in private"?

KB:

Well it might have been Mike Gold too. They both went after me. Malcolm Cowley omitted some of the major details, so far as I was concerned. I thought it was a terrific experience. For instance I had the goddamdest fantasies after that thing, and I had been going through problems of my own besides. I really felt the ostracism. I was out. When I went out of that room after that thing was over, I walked behind two girls there and one of them said to the other. "But he seemed so honest!" I was just devastated, I felt that it was horrible. My God, the next day I walked down the hall I saw Joe coming, I shrank. And he says hello. You did those things. And the irony is when the slate came up, it was just as if nothing had happened.

RS:

You were elevated to the committee.

KB:

Yes. But in the meantime I had gone home, and it was ghastly. And I lay down. I had been out the night before; and I'd been shoved into this thing on top of that, and I lay down and I'd hear "Burke! Burke!" My own name had become a curse word. I'd wake up and finally, my God just this side of an absolute hallucination my tongue … shit dripping from my tongue. Horrible. My whole devotion to Harold Rosenberg stems from that time on. He turned up when I was lost. He thought it was funny! He took me down to a bunch of super, of sub subsplinters of a splinter group. To take me into reality.

On the basis of it, I saw so damn much about the psychology of the trials. The irony was that when they turned up, I could understand how the prisoners felt. You feel so goddam … it's a world of its own. You felt that the whole place was against you. I saw something. Boy! And the irony of it in that whole damn business was then, of course, Sidney Hook thought I was just a sellout to Stalin. I didn't believe the goddam charges against Stalin at the time. I really didn't. I thought the guy was straight.

---

FG:

Uh-huh.

KB:

So he thought I was just a sellout on that stuff.

FG:

At what point did you realize Stalin was what he was?

KB:

Later on … no, I didn't …

FG:

After thirty-five?

KB:

Very much later. It was almost the time of … from what's-hisname? The guy that spilt the beans over here.

FG:

You mean Eastman?

KB:

No, no, the Rooshian, the current … what's his name. Kousevitsky?

FG:

You don't mean Trotsky?

KB:

No, no, not Trotsky … the official who spilt the whole thing on Stalin.

FG:

You don't mean Solzhenitsyn. That's too late.

KB:

Inside, the big guy in the business itself.

FG:

What year is this, in the forties?

KB:

It's the man who came over here, who sparred with Nixon.

FG:

During the hearings in the early fifties?

KB:

Who was the fella who ran the … who became the Prime … Premier, whatever you want to call him, the whole outfit, the head of the state.

RS:

Khrushchev? In fifty-five you're talking about?

KB:

Yes.

RS:

Until then you didn't think Stalin was exposed?

KB:

Yes. I thought it was still …

FG:

The evidence was there since the mid-thirties.

KB:

I had worked on the damn stuff. I just didn't think … I never thought … I made a complete distinction between left totalitarianism and the Hitlerite stuff. I didn't think that the left … it didn't go that way. I just didn't. It didn't make sense to me.

FG:

Have you read Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag?

KB:

I've only read pieces of it. I believe what these fellas are saying. I didn't this other stuff that they were handing out then.

---

FG:

Did you think your good will was in any way used by this in your willingness to not see this distinction between Hitlerite totalitarianism, as you put it, and totalitarianism of the left?

KB:

I don't know. Hook's attacks on me were based on the assumption that I was just a sellout. I knew that.

FG:

That you were actively involved in deceit. Was that what Hook was saying?

KB:

Yes. What happened there was this. The whole attack of the Trotskyites at that time in New York … all of us on the fringes of the whole damn thing. … There was a general tendency, The New Republic with Stalin and The Nation with Trotsky; there was always a little balance between them. I just wove along without having to say a lot about it.

When I wrote my Attitudes toward History, I built the whole thing on my formula, the bureaucratization of the imaginative. Trotsky's attack on Stalin was sloganized as an attack against bureaucracy. My assumption was that if you had Trotsky, then you'd have a Trotsky bureaucracy. And that I don't doubt at all. There's no other way to run that sort of enterprise. Anything you know about Trotsky gives you reason to suppose that he would be as much of a slave driver as Stalin ever was.

FG:

He was far more sophisticated than Stalin.

KB:

Much much more, but it's the same damn thing. If the situation demands such policies, you're going to get them. In Congress, one way to kill a measure is to propose that it be extended to benefit many other groups, too. You can kill it by making it so broad that it becomes unwieldy. Hook thought that I was universalizing the principle of bureaucracy in order to steal it from Trotsky as a special slogan against Stalin … whereas actually I think the way I analyzed the term and corresponding attitudes does apply it honestly in a universal way. There's that wonderful story I quote in my edition of Attitudes published by Hermes. I used to resent that I got it from Lincoln Steffens. But to make up a story as good as that and have it swiped without credit would have been pretty rough!

Steffens, as the story goes, was entering the New York Public Library when a friend of his came stumbling out. The man was obviously in great agitation. "I've found it!" he shouted. And he

---

clamorously called for Steffens to go with him and listen while he told of his discovery.

Steffens obliged. The two bumped along Forty-Second Street and turned down Fifth Avenue while the friend somewhat incoherently explained.

Gradually, despite his excitement, his words began to make sense—and Steffens realized that his friend had found a plan for saving the world. And the more the outlines of the plan began to emerge, the better the scheme sounded.

Then Steffens became aware that someone was walking along beside them, listening to the account. And finally, turning, he saw a very distinguished-looking gentleman—then, looking again, he realized that it was the devil.

Steffens:

You seem to be interested in my friend's plan.

The Devil:

Decidedly!

Steffens:

What do you think of it?

The Devil:

I think it's an excellent plan.

Steffens:

You mean to say you think it would work?

The Devil:

Oh, yes. It would certainly work.

Steffens:

But in that case, how about you? Wouldn't it put you out of a job?

The Devil:

Not in the least. I'll organize it.

That's as great in its way as that wonderful thing I like so much from Veblen: Invention is the mother of necessity. I use that over and over. I love it as though it were the first time I heard it. It's the whole story!

FG:

Can you connect bureaucracy with a theory of taxonomy?

KB:

My formula: bureaucratization of the imaginative is that you start out with a dream, you organize it, and you're necessarily going to get something else. You're going to get all kinds of unforeseen consequences. The thing builds up a nature of its own. You see, one of my basic laws in this regard is the instrumentalist embarrassment, or paradox, or quandary. I don't know what you call it, paradox? It's the embarrassment of instrumental thinking. That is, you assume that some policy, some instrument designed for a certain purpose, has only the nature that you use it for. That's a great mistake. Everything has a nature of its own. There are all these other potentialities that

---

go along with it. There's your instrumentalist fallacy, or embarrassment, or paradox, or quandary. I still can't decide what noun to settle on.

The fundamental irony of the whole situation is this: You're anthropomorphizing, proclaiming that King Kilroy was here! But whatever you do, there's something else going on. And that's the scene of the whole show. And some of those unexpected consequences turn out quite well, but others decidedly do not. Of course the biggest ones to turn out lousy are our pollutions. We've built up a nature, but it's a counter-nature, in the sense that it has unforeseen consequences that not nature but only human ingenuity could bring about. Bucky Fuller sees it as irreversible, and he sees it as wonderful. I often see it as both irreversible and wonderful and [points thumb down].

FG:

I'd like to turn to the relationship between purpose and motive, which is of course your distinction, and your pentad in general. How does it overlap with a strict linguistic poetics as you find in Jakobson and Barthes? If you were to map your pentad of linguistic force on top of structural linguistics, what would survive? Are there direct points between these two systems?

KB:

I've never worked with Jakobson enough to make a decision on that. I don't really know. The terms themselves are really questions rather than answers and someone else might want to define the situation differently. All I say is, however you do define it, implicit in the algebra of it, are certain ways in which the agent will react, will be motivated by the scene, and so on. And then the motivation will be of a different sort depending upon the scope, or circumference of one's terms, if the scene has a god. My analysis of the pentad was a way of sharpening up what's going on in a work that's already written.

FG:

A hermeneutic tool, an interpretive tool?

KB:

Yes. It makes me understand the musculature of the work. That's what you look for in a work. It tells me what's there. The theory of my pentad (or hexad) tells me what kinds of questions to ask of a work and by inspecting the work I enable it to give me the answers, not just by precept, but by example. If I look at a work: What's the scene/act ratio in there? You want this guy to love that one; well, all right, I'll look to see how the work proceeds to make you do that. I found this a good way of

---

working with students. If they wanted to appreciate a work, I found such terms for motivation a good way to start asking about the work's style and structure, especially in the case of classical structure. For one can use classical structures as benchmarks without necessarily demanding that there be no departures from such structures.

FG:

Do you anchor down the pentad with other points of epistemological inference such that it's not, to use your expression, "a terminological screen" unto itself but a screen compatible with other systems?

KB:

Maybe I can do it. I was hearing a fellow on Cavett's show this morning, an anthropologist, McGuiness. He was talking about the Eskimo situation in Alaska. They are just about destroyed. They're drunk all the time, and they can't do a thing. He got caught in a little town where there were only two mechanics who could fix his car, and they were both stewed. The oil companies move in there, give them all money, and all they do with it is drink.

Theirs was originally a survival culture: They had to go out and get those whales. That's what they had to do. Now the whole meaning of such a livelihood is lost. There's a moral in that situation; in a survival culture you had to do things a certain way. Now people go out and run up and down the road to keep in good condition. But in primitive cultures the conditions keep the natives in good condition. They did what they had to do.

FG:

Eskimos don't jog.

KB:

Yes. You do philosophy. it's a moral act. But by God, if civilization were accurate, we'd do it as a necessary act! The fundamental question in this matter of counter-nature, it seems to be, is: How much of our culture is based on physical necessities? What happens to those necessities? The country was built on necessity. I had it as far back as Permanence and Change. It dealt with the rational and irrational, and I said the trouble with that way of lining things up is: A whole lot of things happen that don't fit either of the two categories. How about methodical? Your stomach! It has a method of digesting. A tremendous amount of culture is based on this methodical business of fitting into nature. How far does that go?

RS:

This goes back to your program in Counter-Statement. What do you do in the face of overproduction? That's never been dealt

---

with. We just go through periodic crises. There's never been an introduction of any dramatistic critique of production.

KB:

And I think it's just quite possible that it is a bigger job than we can handle. I don't know. Because it does require so much ethics. There's too much ethics needed to run a state. If I have to go out and jog and stuff like that in order to keep from falling apart …

RS:

Has there been anywhere where the introduction of ethics is a brake on production?

KB:

Apparently in the Hawaiian culture, originally, they did a lot of it by simply swimming so much and enjoying the water: Fishing!

FG:

Can we get back to the point of the exchangeability of systems where common points knit together to reproduce a reinforced episteme … a reinforced mode of knowing where one system overlaps the other to magnify it … and how your pentad fits into any system you wish to draw on, which is separate from it, even alien to it, but which fits it. If it's not structural linguistics, what is it?

For example, I see your work in [Erving] Goffman skeletally, especially in the whole issue of ritual interaction: as one-to-one sequences of behavior, the idea of scenic change among strangers, relations to intimacy and how intimacy relates to ritual interaction. This all comes from your pentad.

KB:

You see the original formula I used, the medieval formula: quis? quid? ubi? quibus auxillis? cur? quo modo? quando? is a hexameter line. Dick McKeon had not noticed that himself. If the terms are put in exactly that order, they make a line of verse in classical Latin prosody. I cheated in a way when I worked with it as a pentad, and I always think that I did it as a pentad because I had only five children. If I'd had six …

FG:

If you'd had nine!

KB:

Oh God! Eaneads, that goes back to …

FG:

Pythagoras?

KB:

No, the whole business that I worked on with that is. … My "dramatism" article in The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences is classed under "Interactionism." I notice that Gregory [Bateson] didn't get in there.

---

FG:

I don't see you as a social scientist. I see you as more than a social scientist.

KB:

It's one field I do decidedly work with. Permanence and Change has a lot of sociology in it.

FG:

But weren't you rebounding from a kind of naive Marxism in that book?

KB:

You know what I was rebounding from? This is a drastic confession. You wouldn't believe this. There's an awful lot of that book that was really secularizing what I learned as a Christian Scientist. All this psychogenic illness stuff … there's no other secular book in the world where you find so much of that published at that time. I got that from Mary Baker G. Eddy, and I secularized it!

FG:

That's a revelation. I would never have guessed that overlap.

KB:

But the point I started with: quis? quid? ubi? etcetera … "Who?" "What?" "By what means?" … the way I put them in the book originally: "what" was "act," "who" was "agent," "why" was "purpose" … I worked them all out that way. I had "by what means" for "agency," and I cheated in this way: If I say that "he did this," for example, "He built this with a hammer with alacrity, with good will," I've used "agency" in two ways, one literal, one figurative. I put "how" and "by what means" together; and what I did in making it a hexad was to make a difference between the two.

It really is an improvement. "How" is your attitude, and "by what means" is your instrument. I'll tell you the ultimate irony I found out. It was no wise crack in this five-term business. I was writing that book A Grammar of Motives. The book had been accepted and was finished. I started teaching at Bennington, then I holed up in Andover for the winter.

All I had to do was verify a few references here and there. But I started rewriting it! Even to the extent of changing the order. There's no one order required for a book of that sort. I could even have arranged them alphabetically, an order I have used on other occasions. But if you do write them up in a given order, all sorts of internal readjustments turn up. I was out here for the winter. I had a high chair and to keep in trim, I put my

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typewriter on that, and wrote standing up. The two boys were playing on the floor around me. In some places the snow was up to the roof in drifts.

Then one day I discovered that I couldn't go on with the revising. (Incidentally I realized later that all this time I'd been standing on one foot, with my other hooked on a chair.) I'd gone through three terms, I had two left: "agency" and "purpose." But for the next step a whole new kind of problem turned up. There were two ways to go. If I went one of those ways, the style of the book turned into a "Dear Diary" sort of thing. And literally if I went that way, I felt as though things would dissolve into a sizzle, like an Alka-Seltzer tablet. The feeling was intolerable. But if I went the other way it was as though my arms were bound tight to my sides, and that was equally intolerable. Both impressions were as near to hallucination as they could be without being so actually. They weren't just metaphors.

I stopped writing and started taking notes on my dreams. When writing these notes, of a sudden I remembered a letter in which I had referred to my children as my "five terms." And that was the problem. I had begun transforming those abstract terms into personalities. If I went more fully in that direction the book would turn into a sizzle. But if I kept them as abstract as the original plan of the book demanded, I'd be as bound as if in a straight-jacket.

For instance, I had originally begun with "Act." In the revised version, I shifted that to third. And my third daughter was the stage-struck one. Thus the tendency toward the personalizing of the terms had begun to make claims as far back as that. But when I got to "Agency," for my fourth section, this shift began to manifest itself intensely.

My elder son, Butchie, was the ideal person for that term. He's the great instrumentalist, exceptionally competent when dealing with machinery, where I'm at my worst. This fits Emerson's idea of "compensation." In our family, he's the great gadgeteer. We all rely on his ability as a fixer. When he was a little kid, he designed a whole plumbing system for this house before we had any such facilities. It was a marvel of economic efficiency. The water would come from the old pump out there in the yard, go through the heating system, the kitchen and the

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bathroom, and be drained off through a pipe that went back into the cistern that it had been pumped out of.

FG:

It sounds like Rube Goldberg.

KB:

That's real efficiency for you! And the instrumentalist term, "Agency," was pressing to become Butchie in a big way, with everything becoming a fizzle if it did, and a straight-jacket if it didn't. As soon as I discovered what I was up against, I knew what I had to cancel and redirect—and why. Stanley Hyman had come to town, and he was staging a two-day drunk party in New York. I went, stayed up all night drinking and talking. I would talk to anyone as long as he would stand it, then I'd talk to another. When I came home I was talked out. While leaving the terms in their "personal" order, I could now otherwise give them their proper abstractness, and the pattern is better with "how," quo modo, as attitude.

FG:

It serves the laws of symmetry?

KB:

Oh yes, but the point I started to tell you: In this article on "dramatism," I'm talking about my notion of this antithetical element, what I call "congregation by segregation." You get together by all being against the same thing: It's us against them. You find that every system has one of these twists in there somewhere. It's not necessarily that one, but there's always the temptation for that one to get in. In the Christian system, Jesus is the victim. Here the issue is technology, where everything is positive, free, and supposedly good. We find that the victim is the country itself, the nation.

FG:

The soil.

KB:

Fifty thousand dump heaps now. Victimage is coming back on us now. It's the most efficiently victimizing system that was ever built!

FG:

The role of the victim is placed in the future.

KB:

You get your freedom, though. Everyone of these guys who made millions is for freedom, while victimizing the structure. I get around to a notion like this: Abolitionism is a falsity. If my theory is correct, I can only believe in transformations. The whole issue gets down now to a distinction between implicit and explicit: an institution that is explicit over in one culture (thinking in terms of comparative cultures) is implicit in anotherd

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culture, or vice versa. In other words, you ask yourself how some previous system is transformed. In older systems you had your scapegoat actually, formally expressed, explicitly there. In this system it isn't named at all, yet you have the biggest scapegoat mechanism in history. Here is the straight, assertive, do-as-you-will system, and here is the greatest victimage principle, but it is moved over into the victimizing of the economy itself.

FG:

There were many forewarnings of this. We can't say we weren't warned.

KB:

Right. I have to start on this basis: I'm defining us as the symbolusing animal, and I'm saying the resources of symbolism have always been the same. You can get them transformed, not eliminated. Marx said, at the time of the bourgeois revolution, you weren't abolishing slavery; you were getting wage slavery. You transformed slavery, you didn't abolish it.

When a culture marked by a more primitive technology confronts a civilization marked by a high development of technology, the more primitive one (like the Eskimos in Alaska) collapses rather than undergoing transformations.

FG:

Could we discuss why they couldn't transform it? Is that linguistic?

KB:

That's a big feature of it. But as the fellow on the Cavett show said, it's a survival culture in the strictest sense. You give them some money, and money destroys them. It wasn't a money culture at all; it was a survival culture.

FG:

But why does money necessarily destroy them? Why couldn't the culture assert itself in such a way that something that wasn't it could destroy it? If they had no history with money, how was it allowed to enter? Clearly we're talking about something above the culture.

KB:

If you don't go out and hunt those whales as necessity, then you should do it like jogging. Money makes it ethical as an "ought," while before it was ethical as a "must." There are two kinds of ethics involved. The word means custom. But there are two kinds of customs. One means that you've got to do it, the other means that you ought to do it. That's a big difference. And the more strain you put on the "ought" kind of ethics, the tougher

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things are. The more of the culture that just grows out of the necessity of living, the better off you are. It just takes too much conscientiousness to make an adjustment of that sort.

FG:

The Eskimo culture never thought in terms of sheer survival. Sheer survival was always granted. It was an assumption that was central within the culture.

KB:

They didn't have to see it in terms of anything. As this fellow said, they have thirty-seven words for snow but no word for love. They got along all right without it.

FG:

Love in the snow, perhaps. On the way here we were talking a little bit about you and Charles Pierce, his trinity-like structure versus your pentad, the five and the three, or as you say now your hexad, the six and the three. How do you draw our five, or six, from Pierce's three? Are you familiar with his terms for conceiving the world as a continuity? Can you place this in reference to your scene/act ratio? The physical universe displays an undetermined variety and spontaneity for Pierce initially.

KB:

Well the fundamental notion I have … the way I cut all the corners of my whole pedantic hexadic process is this: I cut all down to these three things: You've got equations (this equals that); you've got implications (if this, then that); you've got transformations (from this, to that). Give me language and I can show you; for instance, if you say inside, it implies outside. If you say up, it implies down. If I say, "God our Father," there's my equation. If I say inside, my implication.

FG:

Equations, implications, and transformations. I got it. Pierce drags in the concept of love into his three, he does. Love is an element in the triple.

KB:

Well, love is in my scheme; love is a personalized word for communication.

FG:

Not a generalized?

KB:

There's communion in love, shared communion. That's all there is to it.

FG:

There is a shared dynamic which is the necessary ground for all meaningful activity, for all perception of continuity in the world. You need love, you need the presence of love, as an active dynamic more than the communion of shared selves.

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KB:

Desire, if you want to make it a nice word. You need some kind of principle of desire. Spinoza says, "It is of the essence of man to desire." You go after something. Actually, the irony of it is the beauty of it. That's why the world is all good. You see, the world is good because the good is that at which you aim. (That's Aristotle.) You're after something, and so is everything else in the world. Therefore, the rattlesnake has a different idea than you have of good. He thinks it's good to take a shot at you. You may think it's good to take a shot at him. But each of you is aiming at the good. Therefore, good, love, purpose, all the same thing.

[We have purposes as physiological organisms, and purposes as symbol-using animals. We feel hunger as physiological organisms. But our ways with symbol-systems are such that in order to feed, we're much more likely to seek for money wherewith to buy the food than to go directly in search of game. And the indirect route via money engages a realm of obligations and trick appetites far afield from the "natural" routes to food gathering. And our books, all of them themselves far afield from such a direct route between hunger and physiological satiety, allow for such roundabout ways as are reflected in the various philosophic nomenclatures I attempt to characterize in my Grammar of Motives. That's what I meant by talk of putting one term for motives in, turning the crank, and out comes another.]

Sure, sure, sure. Love would be your nice word for purpose. That's all you need. Chance, love, and logic. I'm after something; I rationalize; then luck is whether I hit it or not. That'll fit. That's all you need. It fits into the scheme and maybe I can work with it.

FG:

Both Fogarty and Hyman compare you to Richards? I always wondered how you felt about that comparison.

KB:

That's all right. I give Richards credit as far back as my Permanence and Change, I got good stuff from Richards, and I said so.

FG:

Theory of Literary Criticism?

KB:

Yes. That was a good book.

FG:

What do you make of The Meaning of Meaning?

KB:

I got the most out of the supplement by Malinowski. I found that much more useful for my purposes than any of the rest. I've

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been plugging it for years. For some reason they won't give Malinowski credit for that text. I don't know why people were so against him. I never followed that. I find it one of the most suggestive essays I ever read. Even the very things he left out are there in a way.

His whole way of bringing out the texture of language as mere part of a wider act: That is, not symbolism in the sense of this being the word for that, but when you're using symbols as part of a sheerly physical operation, as when you're teaching a kid how to tie his shoes.

He talked about the use of language when the illiterate tribesmen were catching fish, and how they called back and forth to one another. The anecdote seems better and better the more closely you look at it. It's more resonant than he had the slightest intention of making it. Fishers of men, fishers of fish and the initials, in Greek, for "Jesus Christ God Son Savior" spelling in Greek ichthus, the fish. Of course that's out of bounds but anyway:

Here they are, catching fish, completely cooperative, working together in a plot against their victims. Then on the way back the tribesmen have a race. They have several boats, and these collaborators turn their trip back into a competition.

Then when they get back they start telling about it. Here language turns to an out and out narrative. And that moves into the whole business of phatic communion. Whereat you can glimpse how the prowess of speech can develop as sheer art, like all great poetry taking delight in language for its own sake. The text also touches upon the commemorative aspect of language, that is, designs on mummies and such. All these anecdotes are explicitly distinguished from the kind of context involved in a book, which defines its own context. These others don't have the formal structure that a book has.

He's just about got in there the whole range of the relationships between language and nonlinguistic motion. The kind of speech used in the first anecdote involves primitive signs: Everything has got to be what you call it with regard to the names for the instruments they're using and the distinctions that are given. It's a primitively scientific aspect of language. There is the narrative sort; then a ritualistic language around corpses and urns, little magical signs. But although Malinowski says that the

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written book is formally self-contained, his own account of such symbolic action gives us ground to suppose that it's only relatively self-contained. No text can be wholly self-contained. That's where the deconstructionist guys are cutting in, on that sort of thing. I want to stop halfway there. Destroy it, yes, if you will. But first let us see it as having the form it does have with its particular kind of beginning, middle, and end.

RS:

You had already begun to think about social context and language in Counter-Statement, for example when you demonstrate in your analysis of Hamlet how form can be understood as "the psychology of the audience." I'm interested in the prefigurative movement of Counter-Statement and how that is the foundation of your work.

KB:

Some students who have worked on my stuff in general have commented on how much of it is already there in germ in Counter-Statement. I started from poetry and drama whereas most of such speculation starts from questions of truth and falsity, problems of knowledge. I started with other words for beauty. The first word I threw out was beauty; but I have my equivalents, involving strategies designed to induce cooperation. The big change in my life was when I wrote those two essays, "Psychology and Form" and "The Poetic Process" in Counter-Statement. I intended to round things out with a third, "Beauty and the Sublime," but that fell through, and I've been racing around ever since. You'll find little bits of it in The Philosophy of Literary Form, but it never got fully developed. In some respects it involved a quarrel with Kant. Consider his Critique of Judgment. There is no indication that he ever read either Aristotle's Poetics or his Rhetoric. Instead he saw in terms of an "aesthetic," strongly pictorial in its emphasis, in contrast with Aristotle's stress upon action. His whole system is a dramatistic mode of analysis. His formula for God was "pure act," which of course, Aquinas could take over. God as technical equivalent is what it all adds up to.

I claim that the line I got from Aristotle complicates my relation to the Kantian tradition, which builds around not action, but understanding. Aristotle's system was ontological, a theory of being (being as an act). Kant's was epistemological, rooted in a problem of knowledge. That's where I get my

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distinction between a "dramatistic" and a "scientistic" approach to thoughts on the human condition. And what I call the historical heresy, or fallacy, is to see us purely as products of the particular historical period in which we happen to have lived. I have to see us as transforming a universal identity.

FG:

So there is continuity of being?

KB:

Yes, if we are the symbol-using animal, then I assume that there are certain permanent relations between bodies and symbol systems. The idiom is the same.

FG:

How do you distinguish being from knowing? How is knowing, when it's argued to be prior to being, independent of being?

KB:

There are lots of subtler systems. I don't even bring up knowing. I just take it for granted.

[I botched the answer there disastrously. In the first place, on going back over my Permanence and Change to write an epilogue for the new edition that University of California Press is publishing, I came to realize how much Kant is operating there. After all, Nietzsche is an offshoot of Kant, and the middle section of the book is wholly in that groove. The knowing-and-being issue figures this way: My investment in the negative led me to distinguish between "propositional" and "hortatory" kinds. The first, the scientistic (knowledge) kind: is/is not—the second, the dramatistic kind: do/do not. The dramatistic route to knowledge is thus: (a) one acts; (b) in acting, one encounters the resistance to one's purpose; (c) one learns by suffering the punishment dealt by such resistances. There is a sheerly sensory ("aesthetic") route to knowledge, as when one happens to touch something that is hot, and one "instinctively" withdraws the hand. Kant's first Critique features the is/is not negative of science (a realm of "sensation" and "understanding"). The second Critique (his ethics) properly features the do/do not negative ("ideas of reason"), along with a stylistic strategy whereby his "categorical imperative" presents the don't-be-unjust in the accents of do-be-just. The third Critique involves a twist whereby he goes from the "Aesthetic" in the sense of the physiological sensory to the "Aesthetic" in the sense of artistic. Sensation is not purpose; it's purveying information that will help a given organism behave as to carry out its "purpose" (or "drive"). But that's a practical ("utilitarian") function. "Pure" art ("The Aesthetic" to perfection) is antithetical to the "practical." So Kant's epistemological (as vs. the Aristotelian Poetic's ontological approach to these matters) ends us with

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the formula for the artistically aesthetic: "purposiveness without purpose." And that could add up to: Artistic sensations for their own sake. And that's far from the ways of Aristotle on the poetics of imitation. And at least I don't have to tell you how Kantian epistemology culminates in " nonobjective" art. History has proved it.]

KB:

I've never read Kuhn's book on scientific paradigms. He is stressing more the particular scientific structure, not the general orientation that Permanence and Change builds around.

FG:

In fact, he used paradigm very strictly himself. He warns against less than strict use, a more symbolic interpretation of the concept of paradigm.

KB:

My concept of orientation would be a symbolic paradigm in that sense. The whole background.

FG:

Kuhn would agree. The paradigm for Kuhn is what the ideas are drawn from, not the idea itself, what grounds the logos.

PD:

Science is much different, though. You have a specific paradigm.

FG:

It's evidential. There's a body of evidence that corresponds.

PD:

Your notion of orientation is almost like Gramsci's notion of hegemony. Things by which we live, proverbs, the way you see my body, all kinds of things built into your expectations.

KB:

That's it. I just slapped this word in there. First I used orientation, then ideology. I began to ask myself what did I have in mind? Just anything: superstition, prejudices, hopes … completely unformed. You're really talking about nothing specific. It certainly is a quality X you're discussing. It's something like the topics in Aristotle's Rhetoric. He's talking about certain specific judgments. His theory of topics amounts to what, in modern sociology, you'd call values. That is, he tells you what to say if you want someone to like someone, or to form a policy, what to say if you want someone to dislike someone or be against a policy. The things he's telling you to say are the things that represent the kinds of things people think are good and bad, desirable or undesirable, the promissory and the admonitory, in that particular society. But his terms are so highly generalized that they would apply to other systems. He's not telling what the particulars are. He's using a level of

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generalization whereby you could analyze symbolism in general. For instance, Aristotle might say that "a good reputation" is one component of happiness. But that would be true of all societies. But societies would differ as to just what is a good reputation. Sociologists could get insight into "values" when reading the Rhetoric from that point of view.

PD:

I'm interested in the whole situation of dependency of the child and how language is generated from dependency, and how tied to Augustine's view of things it is.

KB:

I finally got my formula down to the basic statement of the case: Bodies that learn language. I claim this statement is everything you need to explain human motives, human relations: Bodies that learn language.

FG:

You use the verb learn as key?

KB:

Yes, you start in infancy, you see, in speechlessness. You learn speech in two maximum conditions of infancy arising out of speechlessness, infancy literally, and maximum immaturity The whole nature of word magic comes from learning it then. That gives me three loci of motives: motives as supplied by the body, motives that come in language, and motives that come in learning language. But the fourth locus comes from the development of tools that language makes possible.

MD:

Robinson Crusoe proved that he was human not when he started transforming the island, but when he started keeping his diary.

KB:

The diary is a form of communication, not just an attitude to self. The fundamental thing is that language sharpens the attention making it more likely that, when you have invented something you'll recognize what you have done. And language is the kind of medium that enables you to tell others what you have done. Everything from then on we can deduce from these four loci of motives, the fourth becoming the realm of highly developed technology, which is building the man-made realm of counter-nature, with its attendant realm of pollution.

MD:

There are two imaginations of that speechlessness: one is the moving, bumping confusion with no names for anything. And the other, Suzanne Langer did a lot with it, says that before

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speech things are too particular. Everything is concrete. Everything is so bursting with quiditas we can't think. So that words give us not particularity but generalization.

KB:

I work out two aspects of speech. One I call the objective triad (the thing, its image, and the word for it). The other I call the contextual triad (situations, processes, relationships) which fits in with the Spinozistic critique of substance as treated in his Ethics. A substance having been defined as "that which is conceived by itself," he says there is no such individual entity. You can't conceive of a single thing by itself. The only thing you can conceive of by itself is everything. I salute that passage in T. S. Eliot's doctoral thesis where he says that objects only exist when you have language. It's quoted on page 61 of my Language as Symbolic Action. I think the issue of what you want to call that, the thing Langer is talking about, is obviously the stage where the things just fit as part of the environment.

MD:

They haven't been outlined by a name?

KB:

Take representative painting. There you realize that the painting is the name. For example, a Vermeer: a little bit of white coming through a window, a table, and a chair. The whole thing is the equivalent of the image of the name. You feel that so much in Vermeer, that the whole thing is it! It's not just a picture of one thing, but the whole thing is the thing. So that painting has something of the quality of the Spinozistic, which might be the equivalent of what Langer is talking about. I touch on the matter in my articles on Bateson. His notion of the "unit of survival" has very good features in it because it does bring out the importance of the environment. But I argue that this kind of unit is the individual body. The environment is needed, but the body. …

FG:

Bateson includes the loop.

KB:

I use a distinction from a book by Charles A. Perry: Towards a Dimensional Realism. The distinction is between "a part of" and "apart from," which I think is absolutely astonishing. It's a little shift between something being a part of something and apart from something. I work with my notion of the body as the principle of individuation. At parturition, you become separate. You're a part of the situation, but apart from it in the sense that your pleasures and your pains are immediately yours and no one

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else's. Immediate sensation is unique. Each individual body has this quality: The difference between feeling your own pain, and being sorry for somebody else's pain.

FG:

That's the relationship between sense and empathy.

KB:

That's an immediate distinction. Whether it's my bellyache or your bellyache. That's an absolute distinction dividing you from me. I secularize Aquinas's principle of individuation. You see, he takes it that matter is the principle of individuation, and my equivalent of "matter" is "motion." I'm saying that the body as a body is just in the realm of motion, and the motions of that body are such, the centrality of its nervous system is such as to make such pleasures and pains one's own and nobody else's.

MD:

But it's a principle you trembled on the edge of violating or transcending. I was looking at the end of A Rhetoric of Motives where you talk about a state of "all the nerves attitudinally glowing … the state of radical passivity and incipience at which there is no inhibition." You say just before that a kind of knowledge that comes from a mystic perception is as much a kind of knowledge as the taste of a new fruit. Why do so many of those transcendences involve a sense of loss of individuation? Isn't that just the point where my bellyache and your bellyache begin to blur? All those descriptions you glean from William James's talk about a sense of loss of border. …

KB:

Well, you've got two principles all the way through. Begin, say, with "private property." On a purely physiological level, "private property" is my stake as against your stake. If I own X amount of stock, that's private property in the other sense, the symbolic sense. Because of language you learn all your identity as a social animal, family relationships and so on. You get all kinds. I remember that line when we were kids in school, swiped from Yale:

	Bala Boola Bala Boola
	Bala Boola Bala Boola
	On to Victory, On to Victory
	For God and Country
	And Pittsburgh High.

Three great identifications! I'm a very strict orthodox theologian. I agree with Saint Paul: "Faith comes from hearing."

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You can't have religious doctrine unless somebody tells it to you. Theology is a function of language. If you want to say that a worm is feeling wonderful, is in heaven already, go ahead. If you want to call that heaven, okay, but it couldn't have a doctrine. It couldn't have a word for God, it could only be with God. I think it all fits together pretty well. I met Maritain once. I was asking him about a speculation of mine based on Sherrington's notion that the body is really under a bunch of controls, so therefore, in the ultimate sense, you are really fighting yourself all the time. Then I thought it would be possible if you had this sheer attitude rather than actually moving about by controls. Then all could go on all at once on that level. That might account for this sense of unity. Often it does seem like a basic physiological feeling. I suggested that the mystic's sense of unity might operate on that bodily level. But Maritain said. " Maybe Protestant mystics!" That was a good wisecrack.

FG:

Chomsky's people would argue you're not learning language, but that the organ of language is merely growing, like all your other organs.

KB:

Well, the organ may be growing.

FG:

Clearly the organ must grow in a context that nurtures the "organ." It's not learning in Piaget's sense.

KB:

My whole distinction is … this is the way I handle consciousness and mind. I make a distinction of this sort in my haggling with the behaviorists. (I go along with them so much that I have to make a basic distinction between their notions and mine.) I have to make an absolute distinction between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. They treat the two realms simply as a difference in degree and not in kind. They want to throw out consciousness. I deal with consciousness this way: All the time, even in the world of inanimate nature, just physical nature, you have things making discriminations. Water is liquid unless the temperature changes. Below thirty-two degrees it becomes a solid, ice. At the upper end, it becomes gas, steam. Nature herself makes these discriminations. At this moment, in our bodies every little cell is discriminating after its biological fashion. But we're unconscious of all that. We're even unconscious of how we're conscious. Discriminations are going on all the time. We're more than ninety-nine percent

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unconscious. But mind is the genetically endowed ability, the physiologically endowed ability, to learn an arbitrary conventional symbol system such as a "natural" language. I call that mind. Animals don't have that, so far as we know. In that sense, Helen Keller had a "mind," even if she hadn't had a chance to crack the code by realizing that her helper's pressure on her hand under water was spelling the word "water." When she got that idea, a whole world opened up for her. She got the idea. She had a marvelous mind to begin with. But sensory privations such as she had can prevent such developments. A person so deprived can become a wolf child. And after a certain number of years one can't learn a language even if one didn't have her sensory privations.

FG:

So mind in that sense is linked with the organism? The physiology of the organism.

KB:

I give a definition that mind is the ability to learn a language, then the development …

FG:

But that ability is only emergent at a certain stage in the organism's development. At another stage it would not emerge. So it's not independent of the organism. …

KB:

You learn language when you have such limited resources. For instance, when an infant first starts to learn a language, it can do about three things: It can suck, it can cry, and it can thrash around. It only does those three things.

FG:

It's all you need.

KB:

But later on you've got lots of things to do. These animals in Skinner's boxes learn because they have so few things they can do. If a human animal is adult enough to have a lot of things it can do, it can't learn language. Language is an astoundingly ingenious medium. But the infant can begin learning it because it is still so stupid. It itself paces the job.

RS:

Do you distinguish stages in the formative ground of symbolic action, and how then do you locate them in relation to the acquisition of language? For some, the psychoanalytic model suggests how. Lacan, for example, distinguishes the prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal stage (when the child is one with the mother's body) from an intermediary stage, which he calls the mirror stage. This occurs when the child, upon seeing its reflection in a mirror for

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the first time, anticipates on an imaginary plane the mastery of its bodily image. This experience is the threshold of the child's entry into the Symbolic order which comes with the acquisition of language and which Lacan associates with "the name of the father" (nom du pere) punning on "name" and "no." Language, then, carries within itself repression: the father's prohibition of the child's desire for the mother.

KB:

From the standpoint of the thing Lacan is talking about, that distinction (the whole mother-father business), I have to put all that on the symbolic side. Our first parents are not representative cases. They didn't need a papa or mama that are born of woman. They were so good at language from the start, God gave Adam a big taxonomic job to do. So Genesis doesn't give us a representative case to build on, so far as the learning of language is concerned. But on the other hand, God said, "Let there be … "and there was! The creative word! In the Old Testament, God creates with the Word. The irony is what Augustine does when he takes over the Old Testament. He turns it into a Trinity, the Spirit was over the water, and God the Father created with the Word, which in the New Testament is Christ, the Son.

RS:

The Bible enforces the father's prohibition, although the figure of Mary in the Christian tradition argues for possible reentry of the mother as primary. Remaining within the perspectives of a psychoanalytic model, is it possible to locate, as D. W. Winnicott does, a stage in symbolic development when the child-mother boundary may determine a less repressive ground for symbolic action?

KB:

[Winnicott brings up too much from another angle. My impression of him (from the standpoint of my reading of Bowlby on the child's relation to the mother) involved a problem of this sort: (I don't have it here, but I wrote something to Murry Schwartz along this line): It seems to me that Winnicott's scheme would make the child too much a Momma's boy. There is a kind of dissociation needed when the child grows up. I cited Shakespeare's Coriolanus, whose whole prowess as a warrior is undone because of his obedience to Momma. The enemy who kills him calls him a "boy of tears." An early story of mine, "In Quest of Olympus," does happen to touch on that. It tells about a little guy who becomes a giant by felling a tree. I analyzed it, years

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after, as the ritual slaying of a maternal tree. But I'm not too sure. However, I do feel that it does deal with a problem of "growing up" which Winnicott didn't strike me as having a place for. Yet I hadn't read enough of him to be clear about that either.]

FG:

This would be in keeping with your point about the paradoxical value and necessity of the double bind, that a certain amount of logical jamming is necessary in acquiring the ability to maneuver at all in the social world.

KB:

Yes, when I look back at my own story, my first problem wasn't killing the father, it was killing the mother! There's my story of the guy cutting down a tree, killing the tree; the tree is a mother symbol. I began by interpreting it as killing of the father. But my mother kept me in curls. It was my father who rebelled for me. (Ironically, I fared fairly well with bobbed hair, because Buster Brown had bobbed hair—and some time I was called "Buster," who wasn't a sissy.)

PD:

You're talking about shattering the primary structures of narcissism which are determined by the relationship to the mother.

KB:

Oh yes. But I didn't think from what I read of Winnicott that he brought out the necessary making of a division. For instance, to me this is the great beauty of Baudelaire's poem "La Geante," that poem of crawling over a woman as a giantess, like a mountain. The genius of the poem is in its way of confusing the distinction between maternal woman and erotic woman. I don't know exactly how women handle that matter; but men have to make a dissociation there. They can not just go on with their mama. And I've never seen an indication in what I've read of Winnicott that he talks about how you've got to deal with that. When I analyze my own story, I got the tentative notion that that's what my symbolism was about. When I was writing Permanence and Change, all of a sudden the word "schema" turned up. I came home one day, in a sudden state of certainty. I was usually insecure in all kinds of things. I had a big cup that I always drank out of for milk not alky. This day I came home saying, "My life is going to be altogether different!"—whereupon I picked up my big cup, dropped it on the floor, and smashed it, obviously a "Freudian" incident. That night I was awakened by a dream in which I was saying, "Ma-ma the broken sche-ma is mine-a." I had

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noticed that I had begun using the word "schema" in my book— and I called my mother "Ma." (Later, when I was working on my Grammar of Motives, I liked to call it my Gramma of Motives.)

PD:

Joyce called a manifesto a mamafesta.

KB:

I must keep starting over again with these basic empirical distinctions: nonsymbolic motion, symbolic action, and the centrality of the body's nervous system as the principle of individuation. Originally I thought the magic entered when the infant, by its cries, produced "mama" and hence there arises the "creative" word. But I think it's a little subtler than that. Actually, to influence people with words is not magical. I mean, to use words to influence people who understand words involves a kind of realism! The magic comes in when you start using words to change natural processes that don't understand words, and thereby in effect personalize the whole universe.

FG:

In John, the Word was made flesh, releasing the whole metaphor of language as a genetic structure: which is implied in that enigmatic statement. The structural correlations between letters making words, words making sentences, sentences making sense. Chromosomes and genes making characteristics, characteristics combining to make personalities, which utter sentences. The fact that in most Western languages you have twenty-four, twentytwo, twenty-three letters to establish your basic word sense, and in genes you have essentially what amounts to twenty-three pairs, a similar combinatory system at work generating words and phrases.

KB:

There's a big difference between genes and the symbol analogy. That is, genes give you tropisms and language gives you tropes. Tropisms are conservative, and symbols change all the time. The critical difference about the human animal's kind of communication, language, is its notable influence in making possible the high development of tools, technology.

FG:

What's the difference between tools and language? Is counternature only linguistic?

KB:

Linguistic in the sense Gadamer brings out. The difference between tools and language is: You can lay a tool down, but you can't lay language down. In other words, your idea and the word for it are a little bit different, but they are all …

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FG:

The closer metaphoric approach or distortion would be program. Language is like a program not as much a tool.

KB:

Yes, you can call anything tools, but the point is you've got that one big distinction, that a hammer you can lay down, but you can't lay down the idea that that's a hammer.

FG:

Can you entertain the possibility that we could invest our language in machines so that if we disappear our language would evolve through these machines?

KB:

Remember that wonderful twist of Samuel Butler's in the book of the machines in Erewhon?

FG:

Yes, but I don't think Samuel Butler ever encountered an IBM 360.

KB:

It's amusing. People were very indignant when he showed how just as plants used bees to do their copulation for them, so machines use humans. Add that one process, reproduction, which so far machines haven't been able to supply for themselves. What do you want to call that? The symbolic introduces the necessary impregnating process. The more I look at language, the more it strikes me as being as astounding as existence itself. This whole process of the change when you go from mere animal sounds, to this particular kind of symbol system. But anyhow, here's the point: Once you start from the standpoint of changing the world, then counter-nature is seen as a new kind of living condition. It began the first time language helped in the production and spread of some positive instrument. To those who want to call us homo faber rather than homo sapiens, I would say: homo faber would never have got very far without the role that symbolism performs in the job. It takes an interaction between the two. It takes a new metaphor to suggest a new technological process. And the outcome of the innovation suggests another metaphor. My great day was: 3/9/81! That was my breakthrough.

FG:Say that again?
(whereupon the text says: GONG)

KB:

I love odd numbers: 3/9/81. The "breakthrough" occurred the ninth day of last March, during my time at the winter session, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. The breakthrough concerns an anecdote in my article, "Definition of Man" (Language as Symbolic Action). I quote:

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I witnessed the behavior of a wren that was unquestionably a genius within the terms of its species. The parents had succeeded in getting all of a brood off the nest except one particularly stubborn or backward fellow who still remained for a couple of days after the others had flown. Despite all kinds of threats and cajolery, he still lingered, demanding and getting the rations which all concerned seemed to consider his rightful lot. Then came the moment of genius. One of the parent wrens came to the nest with a morsel of food. But instead of simply giving it to the noisy youngster, the parent bird held it at a distance. The fledgling in the nest kept stretching its neck out farther and farther with its beak gaping until, of a sudden, instead of merely putting the morsel of food into the bird's mouth, the parent wren clamped its beak shut on the young one's lower mandible, and with a slight jerk caused the youngster, with his outstretched neck, to lose balance and tumble out of the nest.

I had often told this story, which I used as a way of indicating the kind of attention and communication that language makes possible, and thereby makes possible the discovery and spread of new methods, in brief that made possible the gradual accumulation of inventions we call "technology." I doubt whether that wren was aware enough of that motion as an innovation (a new method) to ever do it again. And even if it did, the secret would die with it; for it lacked the kind of communicative medium that could hand on the necessary information.

Yet I was never satisfied with the story, and I became still less so. At best it was but one incident, and I couldn't even be absolutely sure that I had seen it. Just one report of an animal making an invention (in this case, instead of leaving it for the baby wren to determine the moment of flight from the nest, resorting to a "revolutionary" change that introduced what an engineer would call a "principle of leverage," a highly "sophisticated" innovation). Yet just one such incident to build on.

Then on 3/9/81 I suddenly realized that the reports of animal experimenters, the most scientific of observers, had been testifying to thousands of cases in which nonhuman animals, when subjected to laboratory conditions that, while differing greatly from the state of nature to which they are instinctively adapted, improvise wholly different ways of gathering food. And their confinement in such laboratories makes it possible for their

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behavior to be inspected as regularly and methodically as my chance observation most decidedly was not.

We have been repeatedly told, for instance, how a chimpanzee, when subjected to an environment so different from its natural conditions of livelihood as to merit what logology my style would call "counter-nature," yet soon learns to so invent new ways of behavior that, by experimenting with the resources available there, it discovers (that is to say invents) a way of so pressing a button that it gets a piece of banana. And the behaviorist "Skinner Box" has provided ample documentation to show how, by learning to take advantage of wholly new "unnatural" connections between the goads of hunger and the attaining of food, animals can invent modes of behavior that, in their state of nature, they wouldn't even "think of" doing, even if they were crazy.

But they are not at home in the kind of medium that enables them to pass on the relevant information to one another. But for all their inventiveness, they can't analyze it, the nature of the technology that replaces their modes of livelihood in the uncontrolled state of nature.

Language is the particular medium of attention, expression, and communication that makes the inventions and accumulations of technology possible—and, as things look now, irreversibly inevitable, since even the correcting of technology's abuses can be brought about only by further technological inventions.

And that brings us to an Eschatological Conclusion. Whereas the Marxist Eschatology says that in a highly developed Technological civilization the history (dialectic) of class struggle will abolish itself by leading inevitably to the classless society, all that logology my style can conceive of is maximum development of Technologically "perfected" counter-nature, unless (as is not inconceivable) the whole thing blows itself up.

ADDENDUM: EDISON AND FRIENDS

KB:

We developed ways of protecting inventions by patent rights, and then you get around to the time of Edison: He invented inventing. He had a factory where every day he tried to invent something else!

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FG:

You know what stopped him? Rubber! Rubber stopped Edison. He tried to produce a synthetic rubber, and he spent his fortune on it and never produced any.

KB:

The irony was that Firestone found it out by accident. He threw some latex and sulfur on a fire, and by God he had it! He had his tires. Firestone had the necessary kind of attention, and he mopped up beautifully on that. By his vulcanizing process he made good tires; you didn't have sufficiently hard rubber before.

FG:

Edison was obsessed with omniscience, his own: hence the metastatus of inventing inventing. Given the mechanism of his process, he thought anything could be invented. He was stopped by rubber. There's a moral there.

KB:

But I never will forget one of the greatest moments of my life when I was a kid. My grandmother and grandfather were staying for a few weeks during the summer in a hotel at Bemis Point on Lake Chautauqua. There were lights in the trees between the hotel and the lake. Oh God, lights in the trees at night. They couldn't have been much in the way of brightness. Probably sixteen-candle power? But to me they were magic. It was another world. I'll never forget that. I was living one year in Brooklyn Heights, opposite Manhattan. Being a poor sleeper, I can remember in the middle of the night looking out: the whole thing blazing! All the way up and down, thousands and thousands of lights, and that's got to go!

FG:

It will not go. It may go elsewhere, but not in Manhattan. The jewel will shine brighter and brighter. The great towers of finance are lit more than ever.

KB:

I just thought it was the end of the world. I really had that sense. It was magic. There's no doubt about it: that much light! The whole symbolization of light: It's there, no question about it. Lucifer!

NOTES

This essay originally appeared in All Area 2 (spring 1983): 433.

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