The Mind's Disguise

       The mind’s disguise is permanence.
       Whether on rock, or on wrecked surfaces,
       Wrests the uncluttered wind for the
                  needed enemy,
       Watches with many turns at once,
       Confronts a century.

       Learn early, unletter
       Your alphabet decision,
       Coming down to
       Accident's corner of fence:
       Enigma, protector of mighty.

       And the winged, divisible sorrow,
       Granted, almost--like love,
       Is shunt from the high forbidder,
       Forehead of No.

This is the first poem in Rosalie Moore's The Grasshopper's Man and other poems -- after the dedication poem to her mentor, teacher and theorist of Activist poetry, Lawrence Hart. And it's a perfect introduction to why I find her work so compelling.

       The mind's disguise is permanence

and thus the poem announces its entry into the realm of epistemology and metaphysics, perhaps even anticipating by a year Olson's opening Heraclitean salvo -- "What does not change / is the will to change" -- in his poem "The Kingfishers."

       Whether on rock, or on wrecked surfaces,
       Wrests the uncluttered wind for the
                  needed enemy,
       Watches with many turns at once,
       Confronts a century.

As these lines take us sonically back and forth through approximants (w, r), velar plosives (k) and short "e"s, the poem's argument presumably takes us through some examples of permanance (rock) and change (wind) -- though what the wind might otherwise be cluttered with or who needs an enemy for what purposes remains immediately unclear. Perhaps the mind needs to deceive itself with permanence, which gets us quickly, it seems to me, into a very contemporary sense of desire's dynamics and how we need to keep our illusions in place even though we know they are illusions (Zizek's "enjoy your symptom"). Wallace Stevens' "supreme fiction" is not far behind here.

But this willfull self-deception is also coupled with a kind of omniscient vigilance and a rootedness in the historical moment -- the mind "Watches with many turns at once, / Confronts a century." The very first epithet for Odysseus in line 1 of The Odyssey is that he is "polutropon" -- a many of many turns: resourceful, clever. So perhaps the mind here is not such an unwilling dupe but wears its disguises deliberately. Certainly when confronting the past century, ethically one would have to prefer resourcefulness, vigilance and change to a permanence of the horrors it occasioned.

With the new stanza, however, the poem's argument turns to an imperative:

       Learn early, unletter
       Your alphabet decision,
       Coming down to
       Accident's corner of fence:
       Enigma, protector of mighty.

To learn early and unletter one's alphabet decision, this is to me a stunning injunction. Is it not on some level a deconstruction of logocentrism that Derrida himself ought to have wished he penned? Aristotle was surely not the first to notice that language, and specifically poetry, is how we learn ("Now I know my alpha beta gammas..."), and so to "unletter" one's self would amount not just to a reeducation of one's self but a Rimbaudian "immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens" or vast and reasoned disordering of meaning. The catch here, though, is that the poem implies that we have a choice in this, that you must "Learn early, unletter / Your alphabet decision." But we are born into language, it's not our choice or decision. What is the age of consent here? When does our complicity begin?

The poem offers no immediate answers, only describes the unlettering process as "Coming down to / Accident's corner of fence: / Enigma, protector of mighty." And here the poem too comes down to enigma: "accident's corner of fence" is one of those classic Rosalie Moore metaphors that resists easy interpretation. One can only speculate that the poem is embracing chance -- Mallarmé's "le hasard" -- along with change, that reason and language and understanding have limits, beyond the fenceposts of which lie mystery, enigma, the unknown.

       And the winged, divisible sorrow,
       Granted, almost--like love,
       Is shunt from the high forbidder,
       Forehead of No.

What? Yeah, wow! OK, the imagery this stanza opens with is a little too 19th-century, and bringing love in at this point runs the real risk that the poem will end on a note of trite sentimentality. Instead, I read this stanza as a call not to shrink before the unknown but to reject negativity and celebrate life and all its potentiality. And for this of course I run to Nietzsche: "Forehead of No" made me think that there was some "Gateway of No" in Zarathustra, but a quick check (thank god for google) corrects me: it's the Gateway labelled "Moment" from Section XLVI of Thus Spake Zarathustra (entitled, appropriately enough for this context, "The Vision and the Enigma"). It's section 5 of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music that contains a reference to the "eternal no":

For in the eyes of morality (and particularly Christian morality, that is, absolute morality) life must be seen as constantly and inevitably wicked, because life is something essentially amoral. Hence, pressed down under this weight of contempt and eternal No's, life must finally be experienced as something not worth desiring, as something worthless. And what about morality itself? Isn't morality a "desire for the denial of life," a secret instinct for destruction, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander, a beginning of the end, and thus, the greatest of all dangers?.

And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of evaluating life, was invented, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words, I baptized it, taking some liberties (for who knew the correct name for the Antichrist?), after the name of a Greek god: I called it the Dionysian.

But it's really the parable from Zarathustra about the dwarf and the Gateway called "Moment" that I find of interest here; it's one of the moments (there's an earlier one in The Gay Science) where Nietzsche lays out the doctrine of Eternal Recurrance of The Same, a rather bleak and hopeless idea that he turns around to make positive and life-affirming. "The Mind's Disguise" is not quite in such extreme terrain, but the poem's idea of embracing engima rather than cowering before it finds classic expression in this parable -- in particular, as antiqutedly and thus somewhat quaintly Englished by Thomas Common (1892) in the link above.

The poems in The Grasshopper's Man are not always this heavy, as I'll show at some point -- but they are fundamentally enigmatic in fun and interesting ways.