When I first sent the original (“final”) version of this piece (Dérives on Letters) to my editor at the time, D., he took issue with this passage, specifically:
When one relies too heavily on the first person in, say, poetry, something unexpected happens and the subject, in this case, the poet, dissolves (I also have to be the I). Poetry as Objective, in the [German] Idealistic sense—so that the reader can feel her own subjectivity.
Here is what he had to say:
I very much disagree. Disagreement itself is not sufficient grounds for removal, but I really do wish you’d make this more nuanced.
We would often go back and forth about a piece, and I knew that he was right. There was something wrong here; the idea had a kind of feeling behind it but was undeveloped. I ran through the original again, eventually sending him the following revised section (with new text in bold):
When one relies too heavily on the first person in, say, poetry, something unexpected happens and the subject, in this case, the poet, dissolves (I also have to be the I). Poetry as Objective, in the Idealistic sense—so that the reader can feel her own subjectivity. But, if the subject or reader is preserved in this way, kept dry and unsubmerged in poetry’s dissolving I, it is so that, when she does dive, resubmerging herself in the first person, the operative metaphor may shift from merely chemical to fully demonic: not only will she dissolve; she will become the moving force and the body moved in a strange case of possession.
I wondered what he would say, and was surprised, even a little touched, by D.’s next email.
Dear Zane,
Looking good. You even managed to convince me about that question mark, and it was really a bone in my throat, somehow though, I’ve gone [over] this draft yet again, and the bone’s gone. Not sure where it went.
I feel pretty good about this. I… (no pun intended), I have a whole thesis in my head on the poetic “I” (I think that it would be not the next essay that I’d publish, but the one after that), so I’ll say, I feel like you’ve done it service, maybe it’s just me with this in my head trying to pick a dialectical scrimmage where there isn’t one, and anyway, it’s not the primary discussion in the text, and complements it well, so the prosecution rests.
Dialectical scrimmage (with a ghost) where there isn’t one
A ghost is not the personality—the subjectivity, the I—of someone who has died. In American Spiritualism, at least, this is referred to as a spirit. A ghost is a non-living recording of life, a repetition (giving a sometimes auditory or sonic dimension to ghostliness, as Fisher says somewhere in Ghosts of My Life). It follows that there may even be ghosts related to people who are still (possibly) alive.
For example: a sticky note, a voicemail, a door left ajar, or even an email from someone who has disappeared. For us, they are neither dead nor alive, but their presence has been converted to a conspicuous absence, a void out of which we feel we may still be watched. But for now, it is unknowable. Maybe no one is there.
What I mean to say is that my old editor has become for me one of these indeterminate ghosts, maybe still with us, maybe not—but in any case, a remaining presence.
D. had said that the bone in his throat over this poetological remark had disappeared and that he wasn’t sure where it went. That is because it went into my throat, but I declined to say anything. It was enough for me that it was “not the primary discussion in the text[.]”
I have just noticed that in the subtitle above, there is a very elastic ambiguity at play. Is it that there really is no such “dialectical scrimmage,” but a ghost? Or that there is indeed a scrimmage, but with a ghost that is not there?
A ghost is always already “a ghost where there isn’t one.” A dialectical scrimmage is especially justified and persistent in its presence when one suspects that it is only a phantom of oneself.
How true is it that the status of the poetic “I” was not at issue in this piece?
Why did my revision relieve D.’s overt disagreement and create new covert ones in me?
One possible answer could be that, in a prose-poetic defensive maneuver, I used precisely language that would have been complete had I written it using the very “I” at issue. Here is what it seems as if I was trying not to say, broken up into its constituent parts—and which D. could see immediately:
When I rely too heavily on the first person in, say, poetry, something unexpected happens and the I of the text, in this case, myself, dissolves.
([But] I also have to be the I.) (But what does this really mean?)
Poetry is Objective, in the Idealistic sense. In poetic—objective writing—I become aware of my own subjectivity in the presence of the poetic object/the poem.
But, if I am preserved in this way, kept dry and unsubmerged in poetry’s dissolving I (by using “one” and “you” instead of giving way to myself), it is so that, when I do dive, resubmerging myself in the first person, the operative metaphor may shift from merely chemical to fully demonic:
not only will I dissolve; I will become the moving force and the body moved in a strange case of possession.
This is fear of dissolving in signification: isn’t this the fear of the schizo-analysand? —the subject who reads and interprets everything, leaving nothing in the field of perception silent, hearing voices and reading meaning into everything, turning every mark into a sign? This is the I that does not want to fully identify with its own voice.
Here is the last line of the draft in question:
The third-person double of a writer who has not yet made the magical leap into the first-person acts as an anchor point for him so that he will not drift too far from himself but will also not always have to hear himself speaking.