Of Being Numerous: Sections 1-22

1

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part

Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.

It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.

3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city

As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality

But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows

Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

4

For the people of that flow

Are new, the old

New to age as the young

To youth

And to their dwelling

For which the tarred roofs

And the stoops and doors—

A world of stoops—

Are petty alibi and satirical wit

Will not serve.

5

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,

We will be told at once

Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts

In a paroxysm of emotion

Now as always.   Crusoe

We say was

‘Rescued’.

So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

8

Amor fati

The love of fate

For which the city alone

Is audience

Perhaps blasphemous.

Slowly over islands, destinies

Moving steadily pass

And change

In the thin sky

Over islands

Among days

Having only the force

Of days

Most simple

Most difficult

9

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

10

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it.

11

            it is that light

Seeps anywhere, a light for the times

In which the buildings

Stand on low ground, their pediments

Just above the harbor

Absolutely immobile,

Hollow, available, you could enter any building,

You could look from any window

One might wave to himself

From the top of the Empire State Building—

Speak

If you can

Speak

Phyllis—not neo-classic,

The girl’s name is Phyllis—

Coming home from her first job

On the bus in the bare civic interior

Among those people, the small doors

Opening on the night at the curb

Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness—

So small a picture,

A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us

I too am in love down there with the streets

And the square slabs of pavement—

To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks

And it is not ‘art’

12

‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’

the rain falls

that had not been falling

and it is the same world

. . .

They made small objects

Of wood and the bones of fish

And of stone. They talked,

Families talked,

They gathered in council

And spoke, carrying objects.

They were credulous,

Their things shone in the forest.

They were patient

With the world.

This will never return, never,

Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,

Over and over

13

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

14

I cannot even now

Altogether disengage myself

From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,

In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies

Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men

More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant

Named Healy,

That lieutenant also—

How forget that? How talk

Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force

Within the walls

Of cities

Wherein their cars

Echo like history

Down walled avenues

In which one cannot speak.

15

Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me

So that I will exist, find my navel

So that it will exist, find my nipples

So that they will exist, find every hair

Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad),

Find me.’

16

‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat,

and only he who was troubled shall find rest,

and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved,

and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . .

but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’

17

The roots of words

Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number

Of the living

‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say

His life is real,

No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public

Of rootless speech

18

It is the air of atrocity,

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

19

Now in the helicopters the casual will

Is atrocious

Insanity in high places,

If it is true we must do these things

We must cut our throats

The fly in the bottle

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city

Is the bright light of shipwreck

20

—They await

War, and the news

Is war

As always

That the juices may flow in them

Tho the juices lie.

Great things have happened

On the earth and given it history, armies

And the ragged hordes moving and the passions

Of that death. But who escapes

Death

Among these riders

Of the subway,

They know

But now as I know

Failure and the guilt

Of failure.

As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas

We might half-hope to find the animals

In the sheds of a nation

Kneeling at midnight,

Farm animals,

Draft animals, beasts for slaughter

Because it would mean they have forgiven us,

Or which is the same thing,

That we do not altogether matter.

21

There can be a brick

In a brick wall

The eye picks

So quiet of a Sunday

Here is the brick, it was waiting

Here when you were born

Mary-Anne.

22

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained

Clarity in the sense of silence.