Of ideogrammar

Just the other day a professor and mentor of mine gave me a copy of Volume III of the late Larry Eigner’s recently-released Collected Poems. What demarcates this collection most immediately from others is its prodigious size: it most closely resembles a hardcover phonebook. The spatial poems, instead of cowering inside mass-market paperback dimensions, inhabit the same eight by eleven-inch sheets on which they were first composed; even the quirks of fonts and spacing, as they appeared on Eigner’s 1940 Royal typewriter were preserved. Eigner, one of the foremost Black Mountain School writers and critically palsied at birth, composed his work with his thumb and right index finger. It makes sense, then, that in curating the work of a poet for whom the physical struggle of writing was so significant, the materiality of those texts would also be honored. Reading Volume III, its pages sprawled open on my desk, it’s difficult to imagine the poems separate from their presentation, and even harder not to recall Charles Olson’s seminal 1950 essay/manifesto, “Projective Verse”: “From the moment [the poet] ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.” Eigner’s poems in these volumes, by virtue of their visual presentation, are kept true to the tracks they have declared.

Eigner might be a more obvious exception to the assumption that, with any text, it’s the text that matters and not its material embodiment, its visual aspect—but any line that separates clear cases like Eigner’s (where it’s decided that the visual aspects of poems as composed as important) from the ambiguous ones (where the opposite is decided) crumbles under scrutiny. The terminological distinctions between visual art and writing are deceivingly clear: bookstores and museums accommodate them, as do experts and theses, universities and colloquia. For the sake of parsing up the amorphous world of artistic expression into easier-to-digest boxes, calling one thing “visual art” and another thing “writing” seems, at least superficially, to be practical. Each discipline, though it can be broken up into a near-infinite number of constituent parts, has its own pantheon of greats and its own rituals in their honor. There’s no permanent Faulkner installation (though there’s a Steinbeck museum), per se, and it seems ungrammatical—in a way I’ll look at more further on—to say that one went to a museum and read a bunch of Chagalls.

But would it be incorrect? This latter case is perhaps the only one in which conversational language preserves the ruse of separateness between them—because everywhere else it gives it away. In any contemporary book review publication one’s apt to find a number of purported text-objects that, in addition to implicitly being texts, are also cast as having indispensible visual attributes: a short story is a riveting “sketch” of a time period; a novel functions also as a “portrait” that “frames” its characters in a certain way; the author “draws” or “paints” or “colors” or “sculpts” key elements of whatever it is that the written work takes as its fodder. A “scene” “illustrates” some feature of a “landscape” on a “canvas” just as a painter of the Hudson River School might. Setting aside the more clichéd idioms—“to paint with a broad brush”—physical texture makes its way into our descriptions of books as well; characters or de-pict-ions are “blurry,” “jagged,” and any number of other qualifiers. Not to mention, they might “foreshadow” a future event, a word whose visual connotations can’t be dismissed; a portmanteau of “fore” and “shadow,” Douglas Harper writes in the Online Etymology Dictionary that this c. 1570s term referenced the darkness cast by an “advancing material object.”

This doesn’t jar us as much as it maybe should, even though most of the time (most of the time!) the material natures of texts hardly vary: at least, I think, we’d be hard-pressed to say that a copy of Milton and the latest John Grisham differ to the same degree, physically speaking, as what’s resting on the walls of the Sistine Chapel and the Richard Serra work looming outside Liverpool Street Station in London do. So why the stark categorical divide in lieu of a linguistic one? While it’s true that there is a lexicon devoted exclusively to naming the idiosyncrasies of visual expression, there’s also one, of course, for writing. But the interchangeability of even more technical literary expressions like “caesura” and “parataxis” should call this into doubt: the third definition of “caesura” in the Oxford American Dictionary is, after all, “any interruption or break,” and it seems plausible that an art reviewer wishing to describe a work with recurring, iterated elements would deem it paratactic.

More than anything, the rise of the phrase “graphic novel” to describe what would otherwise be known as a “comic book” indicates just to what extent these two technical vocabularies have interbred. At first, “graphic” and “comic” might seem as switchable as “novel” and “book,” but “graphic” does away with the irreverence or even silliness implied by the latter term (not to mention its connotations as having not quite reached the level of art), just as “novel” specifies and grounds the piece as a complete creative work, not merely a generalized book by the fact of its material existence. The numerous accomplishments in this mode testify, in my mind, to its legitimacy, such as when Art Spiegelman’s Maus took home the 1992 Pulitzer Prize—via, of course, the Special Citation for works not easily typified. Eight years prior, in 1984, Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, earned that same award. In these artworks (calling them “texts” would only be halfway accurate) visual information and language are processed together, even though sources claim research has demonstrated the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text.

Where might the word and the image meet? The notion of the ideogram, or ideograph, entails an imagistic representation of an idea without, ideally, any direct indications of how the word for that idea sounds when spoken. Chinese characters, particularly in ancient Chinese, are probably (to Westerners) the most outstanding examples, along with Egyptian hieroglyphs and the logographs and petroglyphs (more terms for images that function in a similar manner) of the Native American Ojibwa and Sioux tribes. As far as contemporary American poetry is concerned, the induction of the ideogram into poetic consciousness began when Ezra Pound encountered Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which he edited and published in Instigations in 1920. Later, in 1951, he published Confucius the Great Digest & Unwobbling Pivot, an interpretational encyclopedia of sorts for ideograms. The debate as to how much Pound understood—or even perverted—the essence of the Chinese conception of the ideogram is still debated, as it was during his life: J. Marshall Unger, in Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning, argues that it’s a fallacy to imagine ideograms as transcendental systems that “represent meaning directly, without reference to language,” and Laszlo K. Géfin points out in Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method that Pound ignored or was unaware of the fact that ideograms composed only about ten percent of the system of Chinese characters he was working with. The rest were phonetic compounds—in Géfin’s mind, an necessary evolution, as the language would have needed to devise distinguishable ideograms for thousands upon thousands of additional semantic values.

But there is still much we can salvage from Pound’s ideogram, even if, from a historical standpoint, it’s incomplete or incorrect. The notion of the ideogram gets at, most fundamentally, the idea that there can be more direct systems of representation than the apparatus of language: like “meaning by contrast,” the imagistic ideogram creates a syntax out of underlying natural processes the way any act of visual observation might. (And it is intriguing that researchers recently claimed to have discovered that the part of the brain responsible for reading treats words as whole “objects.”) As the philosopher of language Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “What any picture of whatever form must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it… is logical form, i.e. the form of reality.” The ideogram isn’t so much a mimesis of reality—a copying of it—as it is an attempt to, as Géfin says, “enact natural processes,” whether they be things as they seem to exist or the process of observation, i.e. what we see first, second, and third when we look at a mural. It’s no accident, then, that in Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” we find the same haiku-ish intensity of image—of sudden, telescopic juxtaposition that shifts from one lens and focus to another:

The apparition    of these faces    in the crowd;

Petals    on a wet, black    bough.

“The apparition” comes first, a stand-in for the gestalt of the entire impression. But what appears? Faces; and where? In, of course, the crowd. With this movement Pound mimics the sort of sensual experience that one has (or, at least, that I have) when looking at a painting. There’s the first sum-total impact and its dissection—What exactly? And where, exactly?—and then, subsequently, the extrapolation of literal meaning arrives: “Petals     on a wet, black     bough.” The spacing of each line causes optical leaps back and forth between them, swapping the idea of bookish, left-to-right linear reading for free association. Although “In the Station of the Metro” details a visual experience with a very particular hierarchy, with the non-figurative placed before the figurative, both are chained together by a semicolon: neither one is separate from the other. Or, perhaps: one, by virtue of its being appended to another, is an extension of that other. Pound’s sequencing becomes a sort of grammar—a grammar of image, a syntax of vision, an form of articulation that finds equal for visual perception as it does text. It becomes a grammar that is not solely linguistic or imagistic; it becomes ideogrammar.

William Carlos Williams first said “No ideas but in things,” and it’s no surprise that between Williams and Charles Olson—himself another pillar of the Black Mountain School, along with Eigner—was a mutual admiration for the imagistic projects of both. Around 1950, Olson spent eight months in Yucatan, where he did field work excavating Mayan ruins; it was here that he first encountered hieroglyphs, the ideogrammic qualities unlike anything his own language possessed. He was so struck by this non-alphabetic system of representation that he wrote a letter to Robert Creeley claiming that the approach “on its very face, is verse, the signs so clearly and densely chosen that, cut in stone, they retain the power of the objects of which they are the images.” Williams’s quote gets to the heart of the ideogram: something pre-linguistic that captures what language tries to express but which it ends up muddling. Ginsberg makes reference to the Poundian ideogram when he writes “ChineseWritten Character for truth / defined as man standing by his word / Word picture: …” in his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra.” In this sense, then, the poetic ideogram is a hail to return to the most atomic unit of all artworks: the perceptions of “truth” that precede their creation. Whether or not one “reads” or “looks at” a Chagall, as I mentioned earlier, makes no difference.

To speak of ideograms in the work of present-day writers is to open a Pandora’s box which certainly can’t be closed in a blog post, nonetheless a dissertation. Theresa Cha’s Dictée comes to mind, as does work by Fanny Howe, Tom Phillips, and Exene Cervenka. But to me, these works sound more “experimental” in the abstract than they actually are in the concrete; I want to say, instead, that the terminological distinction is what causes us to halt when somebody is unable to say whether something’s a poem or a painting. Take, for instance, the fact that a 1925 painting by Spanish surrealist Joan (say zhoe-ahn) Miró just earned $26.6 million at a London auction house. Painting Poem (le corps de ma brune) is part of a larger series of Painting Poems that Olivier Camu, the Deputy Chairman in the Impressionist Art Department at Christie’s, maintains later influenced Pablo Picasso. The piece itself consists of muted gold atmosphere with elements that hint at shapes or even faces; its text, which reads “le corps de ma brune puisque je l’aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c’est pareil” on the canvas, amounts to “the body of my brown because I love him like my cat dressed green salad like hail they stay the same” in Google Translate.

Perhaps Pound’s critics are right: maybe his concept of the ideogram—and, subsequently, of a sort of ideogrammar and ideosyntax—are linguistic rip-offs founded on (maybe purposeful) misunderstandings. In a 1916 letter to Iris Barry, Pound’s fierce pragmatic approach to theory comes out strongly: “Really one DON’T need to know a language,” he wrote. “One NEEDS, damn well needs, to know the few hundred words in the few really good poems that any language has in it.” One might also say that it’s necessary to examine, as closely as possible, all the components of a language, as there’s no reason why letters can’t stand alone as visual objects themselves even if they have no inherent values as ideograms—as is the case with the art of calligraphy. Not even the English alphabet escaped the lens of Robert Hooke’s microscope in his 1665 treatise Micrographia. Besides being the father of “cell” biology, formulating the law of elasticity, and proposing that the Royal Society use telescopes to read coded texts across the Thames, Hooke took as his first subject the period of the printed sentence. What he found when he peered into the eyehole weren’t merely “smutty daubings” of ink, but the way in which his own scientific process would later become—by virtue of its publication—text itself. Ask Hooke asks: “And who knows, but the Creator may, in those characters, have written and engraven many of his most mysterious designs…” Here, Pound and Hooke might agree: the ideogram isn’t a form of text, but the text in all things—portraits, sculptures, and Collected Poems alike.

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Notes on the images, in order of appearance:

1) A page from Volume III of Larry Eigner’s Collected Poems which went missing in the original production run. The editors state: “In Volume 3 of this edition, page 1074 was inadvertently replaced with a duplicate of page 1174.”

2) A Chinese ideogram and petroglyph as cited by University of Notre Dame’s OpenCourseWare, with permissions from MIT Press.

3) A 1982 ink-on-paper artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha entitled Dictee, viewable online at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives website.

4) An illustration from John Dee’s esoteric 1564 text, Monas Hieroglyphica. The preceding and succeeding sentences read as follows: “I know perfectly well that there have been certain men who, by the art of the scarab, have dissolved the eagle’s egg and its shell with pure albumen and have formed thereby a mixture of all; afterwards they have reduced this mixture to a yellow liquid, by a notable process, viz. by a ceaseless circulation just as the scarabs roll their balls of earth. …By this means the great metamorphosis of the egg was accomplished; the albumen was absorbed during a great many revolutions round the heliocentric orbits, and was enveloped in this same yellow liquid. The hieroglyphic figure shown here, of this art, will not displease those who are familiar with Nature.”

5) A photographic reproduction of Joan Miró’s aforementioned Painting Poem.

6) The Chinese ideogram Allen Ginsberg mentions in his poem, which Pound found attractive. A note next to the image reads: “Durable Speech (xìn, 信): man (rén, 人) standing by word (yán, 言).”

7) The Hooke illustration and quotes can be found in Chapter 4 of Elizabeth Miller’s Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge.