Not to Be Resolved: William Fuller’s “Daybreak”

Daybreak, by William Fuller. Flood Editions, $17.95.

The quotation from Husserl’s Logical Investigations standing at the gate of William Fuller’s Daybreak has been artfully repurposed: “Acts of counting arise and pass away and cannot be meaningfully mentioned in the same breath as numbers.” Husserl here contrasts the experience of counting with the abstract fixity of numbers, but when referenced before a poetical work, breath implies both lyric and mortality, and “numbers” reminds the prepared reader of the word’s anachronistic use for verse. Where is meaning to be found if not on the breath? Does it wander loose? And are the numbers of verse evanescent or persistent? And what more will be said about the tension between mathematical or other ordering and reasonable techniques, and the phenomenology of counting? It is a little disconcerting then, a kind of disconcert familiar to readers of Fuller, to discover that the first entry in this extensive (I hesitate to say substantial for reasons that will appear) new collection is set in prose.

Fuller is a poet without a literary career as understood in MFA circles, and with little social media presence so far as I can see. He works for a financial trust in Chicago (but is not a banker, he has been concerned to stipulate in a rare interview) and therefore has for decades been engaged in rational decision-making, estimating of risk, and much more, I imagine, troubled with numbers than with acts of counting. Daybreak suggests that such activity has not been entirely fulfilling, for the book is indulgent of the phenomenology of stray thought, or more particularly the weather of thinking, while strongly averse to the attempts of actuaries, meteorologists, financial forecasters, logicians, grammarians, and other frame-makers to make the weather behave reasonably. Such resistance to confinement within frames extends to a radical anti-individualism; Fuller admits not one iota of the attachment to the body as the last redoubt of authenticity, so prevalent in contemporary artistic practice. Where Fuller’s poetry is concerned, thinking and feeling alike occur in drifts which bodies may seek to arrogate as originating within their boundaries, but which they pass through as environments or meet as flurries—thinking and feelings do not belong to individual bodies, individual bodies being superimpositions on incessantly shifting micro-currents much as “the weather” is superimposed on atmospheric events at a particular time and place.

For such a philosophy to be sustained there must be no resolution. Acts of counting must not turn into number, and feelings must not turn into a person’s fixed emotions. Formally this explains the preponderance of prose poems in Daybreak, since verse numbers would organize thought and feeling around poetic ictus, would separate them from their generic motions. That is, if thought and feelings exist at all—“Hyperbolized nothing takes well-reasoned steps,” and from the same text, “In a quiet corner of the room dust builds up self-confidence.” If you find these statements and the title above their poem, “Arsenic Decision Pending,” to be funny and wry, as I do, this is the book for you. If you’re interested in explorations of identity, be warned that this is anti-identity poetry as well as radically anti-individualistic. Never raising their voice, nor seeking to assert the authority of experience, Fuller’s poems reveal their wit slyly, so when going back to the beginning of  the book after attuning to their idiom, I reread a line like “For the sake of illustration I fall asleep” (“Jamblique”) and laugh.

But such wit doesn’t disturb the even surface of these poems, which sustain a state of suspension neatly expressed in the title poem’s remark that “There was a constant humming or swinging of doors, then everyone would linger in the hiss.” That is to say, no ingress, no egress, no point of origin, no closure. A hiss of inflation or deflation? Is even breath imparted from without? (It’s hard to avoid thinking of a ventilator.) These are the doors of a corporate building that hiss expensively, and maybe also the hiss of speakers with nothing cued up to play. Nothing plays alright here, throughout 
these poems. Such poetry of hiatus hovers on the brink of finding form but form becomes visible only within clouds and mists; the prior appearance of form must be discounted (no numbers!), the desire for form given up, if mist and cloud are to generate new form, if only evanescently—form which could, fleetingly, be the consciousness of  Fuller, of the reader, or the ghosts of earlier visitors. This is an extreme discipline. When John Constable painted clouds even he used guides to what he could see, referring to Luke Howard’s system and other meteorologists’ descriptions and taxonomies of cloud—“the grid that’s been established” in Fuller’s phrase. Similarly, memory relies on ceasing to strive to remember, must be voluntarily involuntary. And reading these poems is much like grasping after a continually escaping thought. Rhetorical figures escape their tenors and drift down the pages, near-resolving and again dissolving.

Although prose poems are the most distinctive forms of this book, it offers also a number of  long, very skinny poems, in appearance reminiscent of poems by Fuller’s friend, the late and greatly loved British-Irish poet Tom Raworth, for instance his Ace. (There is a quiet homage to Raworth and his editor Miles Champion in the poem “World of Light,” which like Raworth’s “West Wind” refers to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”) The comparison points up a fundamental difference between Raworth’s speed-of-light jump-cut lines and Fuller’s raveling and unraveling sentences musing after syntactical prompts:

the conifers and roses
lean back
over the path
to become
one another’s
messengers
quietly flowing
through the body’s
glade
lessening
tactile properties
upstream
from sensation
—From Leave-Taking

Any selection from this thirteen-page poem is like trying to catch a river in a pail, just as the scents of conifers and roses pass messages through the body, having no designs or intentions on the body, like light flickering through a glade, continually, unbroken. “Leave-Taking” might be posed against “Retention,” a prose poem that runs:

While the individual sentences are autonomous and self-contained, they are also linked by shared internal elements too small to see. The second sentence opens on to a garden with two green chairs. The third sentence darts away like a rabbit. In the fourth the golden tortoise of misconception doesn’t absorb any point being made or not being made.

There is no fifth sentence.

Another joke of course, that fifth sentence, and reminiscent of Raworth’s poem “University Days” (“this poem has been removed for further study”), but again the difference is instructive—Raworth’s poem is a flash of attention where Fuller’s is a commentary coiling about itself and finding nothing there. No question of it, Fuller’s poetry is a canny creature of the linguistic turn, “with reveries constructed from handwriting, type, print, telex, facsimile transmission, lithography, photography, and other modes of representing or reproducing words in lasting and visible form.” That passage ends “Possible Facts,” whose opening stretch describes a reverse mimesis whereby the events of the world seek accommodation to what already has been imitated, just as cloudscapes in John Constable’s eyes discover their types—for “the wind puffs up structures more like words than things, although words are things, amoeba substitutes, units of attention, tissues under pressure to pass awareness from you to you to you, or nobody to nobody, but only for a minute” (“Arsenic Decision Pending”).

Daybreak is a book filled with beauty of a peculiar sort—hums and vibrations, internal resonances, elegant phrases and involutions, while eschewing sublimity and pathos. In a stern kind of way it is Buddhist in its philosophy, the most rigorous style of Buddhist thinking, associated with Nāgārjuna and devoid of the hyper-individualism of “mindfulness.” Although Daybreak is so strongly averse to the impositions of rationality and is so in love with drift and unaccountability, it attains an extraordinary consistency of focus—on the movements of drifting language as it configures into intimations. Where then does this leave “us,” abandoned within a scarcely-discernible hiss on its border, at the scarcely-definable edge of a glade?—

inside a vibration
without birth
without death
—From Planets and Suns

Yet, this is Buddhist, but as in Buddhist philosophy, there’s a saving humor and humanity that makes it possible to keep going, and more than that, can make for enjoyment, still turning the pages. The final poem, “Windowpane,” ends in a delicate, tentative hymn to Venus:

The eye was emptied of  its own nature, and left the earth in search of a medium where colors could be seen in primal clarity, subject to pure laws, and ready to shower down life and expression on whatever called up to them, not to be resolved, or fed into some exquisite mechanism, but left in abeyance, to evoke another visibility, moving abroad beforehand, in a loose and fluid framework, whose teasing limbs would give us something to feel or be felt by, lying face to face, like painted shapes, not resisting modification, not suspending pursuit.

That looks and sounds too like the art anyone might await and be grateful for. As Samuel Beckett writes in Molloy, “Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.”