No copying either over there.
I saw you.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
So what's like a panther in the glove?
Any guesses?
[INAUDIBLE]
That's good, actually.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
We'll see if you're better than Dickinson in a minute.
But yeah, that's good.
When I was in--
I just gave this talk in Austin about a week ago
and the poet Dean Young had, "a urinary tract infection."
[LAUGHTER]
How about a let of snow?
Yeah?
Wash of dark?
That's good too.
Yeah.
Wash of dark, like a light of snow.
Yeah.
That's not what Dickinson thought, but yeah.
Hanna.
Is it the soul?
Kind of.
Yeah.
How about intermittent plush?
Chariots in the vest, you might not
have had time to get to these so kind of rushing you
through the exam, right?
Well, here are Dickinson's original similes
with the missing tenors supplied.
It is simple to ache in the bone or the rind,
but gimlets are among the nerve mangled daintier, terribler,
like a panther in the glove.
A voice that alters low and on the ear
can go like let of snow.
A dog's belated feet like intermittent plush be
heard adown the empty street.
The eager look on landscapes as if they just
repressed some secret that was pushing
like chariots in the vest.
This is a totally unfair learning assessment.
I know.
My dictionary tells me that gimlet isn't even a word
anymore.
Dickinson's talking about gimlets, the carpenter's tool
for boring holes in wood and not a gin cocktail, FYI.
But once you see how nerve pain feels
like a panther in the glove, or how a low voice
sounds like a light of snow--
or the soul-- or how a dog's paws pad down
the street like intermittent plush,
or how landscapes seem to hold secrets
that surge like chariots thundering in your vest,
you see things a little differently.
Dickinson's literary comparisons make
us perceive likenesses like someone unlike us.
For a spell, we behold the world like kangaroos amid the beauty.
That's the unsung work of this venerable trope.
Every memorable simile increases the communal fund of likeness
available within a society.
Occasionally, a poetic vehicle achieves escape velocity,
leaving its tenure behind entirely.
It scatters like the birds, condenses like a flock,
like jugglers' figures situates upon a baseless arc.
Like the birds, like a flock, like jugglers' figures,
we find plenty of vehicles here.
But where on Earth is the tenor?
When Dickinson sent these cryptic verses to an editor
at the publishing house Roberts Brothers,
she supplied the answer in the poem's title, snow.
A vehicle without a tenor is a kind of riddle.
And almost philosophical, Dickinson never
reveals the answers to her riddles.
The riddle we can guess we speedily despise,
writes this literary sphinx, in order
to foreground the mystery of likeness itself.
In one of Dickinson's most famous poems,
the riddle remains unsolved to the end.
And you have this up as well.
It was not Death, for I stood up and all the Dead lie down.
It was not Night, for all the bells put out
their tongues for Noon.
It was not Frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl.
Nor Fire, for just my marble feet could keep a Chancel cool.
And yet it tasted, like them all.
The figures I have seen set orderly for burial
reminded me, of mine.
As if my life were shaven and fitted to a frame,
and could not breathe without a key.
And twas like midnight some.
When everything that ticked has stopped and space stares
all around, or grizzly frosts, first Autumn morns
repeal the beating ground.
But most, like chaos, stopless, cool.
Without a chance, or a spar, or even a report of land
to justify despair.
This "it" is the ultimate inkblot.
Dickinson might be hinting at her theological sense
of perdition, or the historical trauma of Civil War,
or some domestic contretemps, or internal difference itself.
Maybe it's all of the above.
The poet won't say what it is, but she tells us what it isn't.
The parade of negative definitions
that opens the poem--
it's not death, not night, not frost, nor fire--
dramatizes metaphor's failure to solve the riddle of feeling.
And yet, Dickinson writes, it tasted like them all.
Her poem works like a rudimentary algorithm,
trying out various metaphors for it.
Then, feeding the recycled vehicles into similes's
wavy equation.
With each iteration, we come closer
to finding an apt likeness for it,
progressing from some like in the fourth stanza to most
like in the sixth in this poem of sequential approximations.
But just when we expect to learn what it is most like,
Dickinson's riddle jumps the track.
We began with failed metaphors of death, night, frost,
and fire.
Then, death, night, and frost return as similes.
The figures I've seen set orderly for burial
reminded me of mine.
Twas like midnight sun, or grizzly frosts.
But a new vehicle usurps fire's position
in the poem's final stanza.
They were expecting fire to show up.
Oddly, we learn that it is most like chaos.
Stopless.
Cool.
What happened to fire?
Fire isn't cool and it isn't stopless either.
It's hot and it burns out by its very nature.
Entering a new kind of variable into a figurative algorithm,
Dickinson herself enters a lineage of poets from Hesiod
to John Cage who've tried to introduce chaos
into literary form since time immemorial.
Ovid even places it at the outset of his epic cosmology.
Before the sea and the Earth and the all covering sky,
nature appeared the same throughout all the world,
which men called chaos.
Once upon a time, everything was one thing.
"Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe."
Chaos reigns in a world before differences,
but we've seen how any likeness depends
on the internal difference between vehicle and tenor.
Dickinson's it, then, is most like something--
chaos-- that's literally beyond comparison.
Chaos is absolutely self identical, utterly
unlike anything else.
To shore up this metaphysical contradiction,
Dickinson immediately slips a hidden comparison
into her lines.
At bottom, Dickinson's version of chaos
looks a lot like the sea.
Without a chance, or spar, or even a report of land
to justify despair.
Maybe despair is the answer to Dickinson's riddle.
It's not death, night, frost, or fire,
but it tastes like them all.
Two: The Unlike.
Historically speaking, efforts to give form to chaos end
badly.
The largely forgotten Maestro Bartolome's early modern venn
diagram of chaos seems orderly to a fault
when you look at it today.
You might recognize this image.
It's in the art museum here in Tucson.
I tried to see it with John Melillo,
but the gallery was closed.
That's probably why it's largely forgotten, its orderliness.
Half a millennium later, the Japanese artist Takashi
Murakami's super flat chaos looks
like a kindergarten cupcake party gone horribly awry.
[LAUGHTER]
You could title this picture childhood, or Hiroshima,
or internal difference, for that matter,
and I'd buy the resemblance.
Leafing through art archives for chaos' true likeness
is enough to justify despair.
Believe me.
[LAUGHTER]
But sometimes, I think modernism came pretty close.
Like Dickinson's version of chaos,
Pablo Picasso's painting is stopless.
Try tracing the snarled labyrinth
of lines in the picture's lower left quadrant.
And cool, with its mellow palette of Earth pigments.
Beige, ecru, khaki, olive, tobacco.
I just Wikipediaed a lot of brown colors.
[LAUGHTER]
Unlike the Murakami or the Bartolome,
this image doesn't look like anything
in particular at first.
Picasso once described a painting
as a sum of destructions.
Forget what you learned in cubism 101
and this canvas resembles nothing so
much as a crumpled sheet of old parchment
retrieved from the dustbin of art history smoothed
out and put on display.
Does Picasso's cubist inkblot look like anything to you?
Have any bold audience members who want to guess what this is,
or say what this looks like to them?
Yeah.
It's like a mountain scene.
Great.
I was hoping you would say that.
[LAUGHTER]
What did she say?
It looks like a mountain scene.
Well, in an essay with the memorable title,
The Art Of The Day After Tomorrow
from a collection with the even more memorable title I Know
Everything, the French journalist Jacques de Garcon
describes his first encounter with this image.
The well-intentioned layman is a bit like a turkey,
like the turkey in the fable.
He definitely sees something, but he's not sure what it is.
The young and sympathetic dealer comes to my aid.
Oh, I know that the reading of Picasso's and Brock's most
recent works is quite difficult.
Of course, it's easier for me.
I was there when the paintings were done.
I know all about what the artist wanted to put in them.
For instance, Monsieur, this one represents the poet.
Ah!
Good manners demand that I limit the expression
of my total astonishment to this exclamation.
I thought I was looking at a landscape
and it turned out to be a poet.
The know it all de Garcon can be forgiven
for mistaking this puzzling portrait for a landscape,
or a mountain.
The turkeys in La Fontaine's fable are not so lucky.
They fall prey to a fox because they
fail to recognize what they're looking at.
Personally, I can't help seeing a Turner esque
detail over here.
In the fish scale wavelets of brushwork,
the outline of a ship's prow and sail--
I can't quite-- right over here.
And the scribbled atmospheric dusk of the picture's
left margin.
But once you focus your attention
on the rounded crown and sloping profile
at the top of the canvas, do you see it up there?
Yeah.
A peculiar likeness begins to take shape
around the poet's head.
See those overlapping corners that indicate
the backrest of his armchair?
A little clay pipe projects from his mouth at a jaunty angle.
You can make out his hands too, grasping a rolled up manuscript
at bottom center.
There's that.
And there's a man--
there's the manuscript.
Now that we know what we're supposed to see in this 131.2
by 89.5 centimeter region of unlikeness,
let's have a closer look at the poet's head.
Or maybe, I should say heads.
In this portrait, Picasso offers us two countenances
for the price of one.
To left facing profile--
I'm not sure if it's left for you guys.
That profile resembles an African sculpture,
maybe one from Picasso's private collection
which underscores the poet's otherness.
The domed brow, intent gaze, and pursed lips
lend this racialized hemisphere of his identity
an air of fierce command, like the ruler
of some sub-Saharan kingdom.
On the other hand, his right facing Siamese twin
looks melancholy to me.
The invisible eyes downcast, the mouth vaguely
indicated by that chalky pipe.
There is something of a sad congruent
to this aspect of the poet.
He seems to be perpetually mourning his own self
difference.
A head, Picasso once said, was a matter
of eyes, nose, mouth which could be
distributed any way you like.
In this pictorial economy however, certain commodities
appear to be in short supply.
The poet's discordant profiles must
make do with a single mustache.
I can't actually reach it there.
Like conjoined Mr. Potato heads from a toddler's nightmare.
[LAUGHTER]
No wonder our two faced subject isn't
feeling like himself forever.
Is it visible to you?
Yeah.
OK.
Of course, nobody, unless they're chaos personified,
is ever wholly self identical when you think about it.
We all feel like fierce African kings and sad pipe smoking
kangaroos from time to time.
So why does Picasso call this painting The Poet and not
every man, or self-portrait, or Herman Rorschach?
Poets look just like anyone else on the outside, after all.
It's some kind of internal difference
that distinguishes them from others, as Dickinson knew maybe
all too well.
To really depict his subject, Picasso
has to show us what's inside a poet's head.
Is that big enough?
You can see it?
What do we see there?
Amid the chaos of drifting glyphs, a listing crucifix,
the remains of a reversed swastika,
one pictorial motif emerges intact.
Whenever I look at this painting,
I can't help seeing a steep pyramid.
Its translucent apex piercing an ocher banner,
like a parody of the Great Seal on the back of the US dollar
bill embedded in the poet's cranium.
Yeah, I think that might come across.
[LAUGHTER]
There's even a little patch of sky in the offing.
It could be a background detail plucked out
of Hieronymus Bosch, or an eruption of proto surrealism
in the inkblot.
Have any, like myself, seen this tomb in the poet's head?
I can't find any reference to it in the literature
on Picasso's painting.
Maybe it's just me.
I'm a delusional thanatophile with pharaonic inclinations.
[LAUGHTER]
But I hope you see it too.
Gazing on this archeological will o' the wisp,
I know how Dickinson felt when she glimpsed
that imagined community and possibly
a steeple unseen by others.
Anyone who majored in English in the 90s
knows that it's always already never
a good time to review basic concepts from post
structuralism 101.
But Jacques Derrida, the last century's great rhapsode
of differences, might help us to unlock this miniature pyramid
buried in the poet's skull.
In a 1968 address to The French Philosophical Society,
Derrida spells out his thoughts on what he calls différance.
The Clown Prince of gramatology coined this theoretical
neologism by replacing the penultimate E in the French
word for difference, différence, with an A.
It's a devious sleight of hand, really,
because you can't hear any difference
between the original E and Derrida's interpolated A
in spoken French.
You can only see it.
It is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard.
It cannot be apprehended in speech,
and we will see why it also bypasses the order
of apprehension in general.
It is offered by a mute mark, by a tacit monument.
I would even say by a pyramid, thinking
not only of the form of the letter A
when it is printed as a capital, but also
of the text in Hegel's encyclopedia
in which the body of the sign is compared
to the Egyptian pyramid.
The A of différance, thus, is not heard.
It remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb.
Like Derrida's undercover A, the stealth pyramid
inside the poet's head is silent, secret and discreet
as a tomb.
But I, for one, can't help seeing it, nonetheless.
Once glimpsed, it's as inescapable as the tomb too.
Traditionally, artist's picture a poet's difference from others
by crowning the head with a laurel wreath.
This is like my favorite cranky poet.
[LAUGHTER]
That's Dante.
[LAUGHTER]
Relocating his cubist sign of unlikeness
inside the poet's head, Picasso marks it
as an internal difference.
Poets look just like everybody else on the outside.
Yes.
But they make a different kind of sound.
That pyramid in the skull pictures that different sound.
Picasso's portrait isn't a poet's likeness exactly.
It's an unlikeness.
Three: The Not Unlike.
Maybe I'll go back to the portrait here.
Sometimes when I despair of making any sense in this
lecture, I imagine sitting in the audience for Derrida's talk
about différance.
It makes me feel better.
[LAUGHTER]
Throughout the published version of his speech,
the theorist ties himself into knots to make clear whether
he's discussing différance or différence,
which sound exactly the same in French,
but mean totally different things.
To be perfectly honest, I've never understood the difference
between difference and différance myself.
But that sneaky little A makes all the difference.
In this respect, Derrida's A is not
unlike the A that opens Gertrude Stein's literary portrait
of Bernard Fay.
A is an article.
A is an article, grammatically speaking, most of the time.
A portrait, a poem, a sad kangaroo.
But it's also a noun.
The alphabetical character, A. Pronounce it as a short vowel
and you have an article, where a long gives
a voice to a noun, the letter A. The two A's look identical
on paper, but they sound different.
Stein's A, then, is the hermeneutic mirror image
of Derrida's A. One is seen but not heard,
while the other is heard but not seen.
Unlike Picasso, Stein doesn't try to picture différance.
She sounds it out.
Fashioning likenesses from sound makes perfect sense
if you're mistrustful of appearances after all.
Bernard Fay himself was obsessed with discerning
the invisible differences between people.
Under the Vichy regime, Fay was responsible for sending
hundreds of suspected Jews and Freemasons
to German concentration camps.
Conspiracy theorists in the audience
won't miss the connection between Picasso's hidden
pyramid and the Masonic symbol for Fay's historical victims.
A Jew or a Freemason looks just like anybody else
on the outside.
So does a poet, or a homosexual, or a sacred music aficionado
for that matter.
Stein's sound portraits echo locate individuals
within the imagined communities of our time,
just as Dickinson's musical vehicle cathedral
tunes situates listeners in her congregationalist social order.
Over the course of nearly half a century,
Stein composed some of the most peculiar likenesses
in the history of Western portraiture.
We can't hear the poet reading Bernard Fay aloud today,
but I do have a clip of her performing
another verbal portrait.
It takes a little over 4 minutes to play this audio inkblot
from beginning to end, but it's worth
listening to the poem all the way through
to see if it brings to mind anyone in particular.
Let's think of this as our final exam.
[LAUGHTER]