1Oppen’s poems are never wholly unreadable, but they do point at all the unreadable in life or text. Indeed, the very question of intelligibility is at the heart of his thinking on language, poetry and thought itself—not only the other’s thought, or philosophers’ thoughts, but one’s own thoughts too. The unreadable is everywhere to be traced, in things as well as thoughts and words. Among Oppen’s notes, one finds this quote from the Book of Esdras: “Your own things that grow up with you, you cannot understand.” Such distances between presentation and interpretation define the very measure of the recalcitrant in his poetry.

2It should be stressed from the start that the unreadable in George Oppen’s poetry is no a priori artistic choice (if it can ever really be such). But taking into account Jacques Rancière’s definition, “an art is made up of the relations between some practices, their visibility and their unintelligibility,” one could say that no artist or writer can situate himself outside the scope of such relations. However, it is important to note that Oppen fails to believe in art as such, and “practices” is hardly a word that one would use about his poetry.

3In place of a supposedly a priori choice, we find in his poetry a form of process, a “route” through the relative unintelligibility of language and thought towards some form of readability—the joyful surprise of a word that suddenly makes sense, against a background in which obscurity still makes some other kind of sense.

4Another essential poetic character to be emphasized at the outset is that his idiosyncratic form of both readability and unreadability is one with the general character of lateness in his works. So I will consider here especially his late poetry, the last two collections: one poem from Myth of the Blaze (1972–1975), “The Speech at Soli,” and one from Primitive (1978), “The Tongues”—both poems being about language itself. The idea of lateness, however, as I shall try to demonstrate, goes beyond any circumstantial lateness, to signify what Edward Said calls a “late style,” and I would call here a modality of lateness, like a mode or a form.

5I will also refer abundantly to a selection of his papers, and in particular to what have been called his Daybooks—which most interestingly reveal this habit of Oppen to scribble on bits of paper, or to type on sheets of paper and then to also handwrite on or over them, and to cut and paste the whole set around him—readable or not, as a kind of form, and definitely a “late” form.

6But starting from that idea that there is no a priori artistic unreadable, we should address at first the type of limited readability or resistance which corresponds to the recalcitrant character of the world itself.

“The recognition of impenetrability”1

7Indeed, that is where it all starts from, perhaps, such recognition of the impenetrability of the world, which Oppen views as a prerequisite for the poem. To the poet, the world is a “mineral fact/ impenetrable.”2 Inhabiting such a world, man must be “in” it, as a form of Heideggerian “indwelling.” All the same, the poem may convey the movement of understanding, the process of thinking: “I think of literature as a process of thought” (SP, 153), says Oppen. In fact, the full sentence concerning impenetrability reads: “the recognition of impenetrability houses the hope of intelligibility.” Still, all of his productions, poems, texts, letters, manuscripts or typescripts sketch out an image of resistance to reading the world, but also to perfectly understanding thoughts and words.

8As already suggested, resistance in Oppen is of the inside, when the poet insists on missing part of his own process of thought, or even intention: “Difficult to know what one means/ —To be serious and to know what one means—.” Such verse should by no means be read as a provocative paradox, but as fully meant indeed—which is confirmed by a development of the same idea in Daybook 2:

Impossible to use a word without finally wondering what one means by it. I would find that I mean nothing, that everything remained precisely as it was without the word, or else that I am naming absolute implausibilities, which are moreover the worst of all nightmares. (SP, 66)

9Taking up the diffident relation to the word that has engaged almost all modernists from the first decade of the twentieth century, Oppen quietly radicalizes it along a threefold questioning: the word eludes the poet’s meaning; the world eludes the word; meaning eludes both word and poet (and perhaps world too). Still, against such doubts, the poet will keep endeavoring to convert them into possibilities of suggesting the unheard of, while remaining within the realm of the plausible. He certainly appears as oscillating in his choice between the “hope of intelligibility” and a “preference for confusion” (SP 108). Such wavering may also be seen in his variations about the idea of clarity—as in “Of Being Numerous:”

Clarity
In the sense of transparence,
I don’t mean that much can be explained.
Clarity in the sense of silence. (NCP, 175)

10One notes that silence comes to be ranked among the possible forms for a “hope of intelligibility.” Indeed, “clarity” eventually reveals, against itself as it would seem, the light of obscurity: in the last two lines of “The Lighthouses,” “clarity plain glass ray/ of darkness ray of light” (NCP, 256), the perplexing ambivalence of clarity is both stated and dramatized by the line cut, which distributes light and darkness over the two lines. Oppen further theorizes the negative double bind of intelligibility in a note: “Obscurity, and the indignities of obscurity. And the greater indignities of prominence.” (SP, 156) Exhibition might prove a greater ethical risk and a lesser reward than obscurity. So what can Oppen mean by a “hope of intelligibility”—the hope only, one might say in Eliotian manner—of intelligibility? His own fabric of a material collage of sentences and thoughts in various states, pasted and stuck around him when he was writing, as evoked earlier, which he called at some point his “nightmare of a bric-à-brac,” eventually offers an interesting metaphor for this hope only. Looking at some of the photographs taken of it, we may find in this medley of other writers’ quotes and of his own remarks or fragments of poems, all annotated and revised several times, a form of plastic resistance, in a palimpsest that both puzzles and gives a temperate hope of intelligibility. But it is no wonder then if, with such an uncertain condition of clarity, some oblique or surprising routes should be tried towards the intelligible.

From the Possible Dream of the Anemones to the Possible Dream of Language

11Since intelligibility seems to get eventually lost along both perception and creation processes, the poet may endeavor to reverse the relationship between himself and the world. A surprising remark Oppen makes about the sea anemones might provide some light: in a note about the “absolutely unintelligible universe,” he suggests “it is possible that sea anemones dream continually.” (SP, 66) With the dream of the anemones, the poet reinvents a reverse economy of literature, where poetry projects from the thing, and vision replaces rhetoric (“I am not. . .‘displaying’ a dialectic. I am talking of a vision. Only I am talking of any vision. of all vision” [SP, 125]). The vision the anemones may be having might well supersede the rhetoric that endeavors to seize them, but such vision remains nonetheless based on language. More aptly still, having a vision of language constitutes one of the most interesting dreams that could be. Thus in “The Whirl Wind Must,” things fail to dream, and so the poet has to produce words through dreaming himself of an immediate language of things:

. . . to face
the silence of the pebbles the whirl wind must have scattered under the sun the scattered
words that we can muster where once
were the grand stairways of sea captains language in the roads speech
in the gravel the worn
tongues of the villages.
(NCP, 309)

12Taking up the romantic idea of the disastrous loss of natural speech and immediate language, Oppen expresses its irremediable quality through the isolation of the word “language” as a fragment after a long blank, for instance, while at the same time obliquely re-enchanting language through that very dream of the “tongues of the villages.” Where pebbles and gravels fail to possibly dream, here is language dreaming of itself. The poverty of language, as often noted in Oppen, proves no obstacle, rather just the reverse (“so poor the words/ would with and take on substantial/meaning. . .,” “Song, The Winds of Downhill” [NCP, 220]).

13About such dreaming of language, I wish to take a brief detour through the analysis Giorgio Agamben makes of it in “Le rêve de la langue.”3 Studying the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an anonymous fifteenth century Latin-Italian text, he demonstrates that one state of the language dreams of a further one, that is of words almost unheard of yet; he also shows how one part of language, the syntax, creates an effect of difference with the lexicon. As to the latter remark, it can be seen as a recurrent strategy of all great poets, where clashes in registers, or tensions between poetic forms and syntax, for instance, create a combined figure of the unheard of.

14Oppen creates his own specific effects of difference and contrast, which do not operate so much through tonal or formal oppositions, as by juxtaposition of presence and absence. In the extract from “The Whirl Wind Must” cited above, for instance, side by side to the blanks in the syntax, the holes in the lines, or the frequent failure of punctuation, we find the high presence of the words, all the more present and ‘substantial’ as they are more plain and poor and simple (“speech in the gravel”). Such is the contrast which creates tensions and effects of the unheard and unheard of—as if what is said could “dream” of what cannot be read nor said nor heard nor seen. I wish to look more closely at the ways in which such an effect can come to be dramatized or effectuated.

15The first effect is the most plastic one: words border blanks, long blanks, sometimes half a line long, or blanks surrounding an isolated word. It seems as if language could possibly dream of its own blanks, of its own holes and lapses. The readable would dream of the unreadable— which the poet points at by default (just as we have seen how one’s own life and one’s own thoughts could but dream of their obscurities, or clarities). The poem dreams of its unthinkable, unreadable, or non writable part.

16The other form taken by the dream or dreaming of the language in Oppen takes us back to the Hypnerotomachia and Poliphilus’s Dream, where Agamben sees one state of language dreaming of another one—not so much one historical state of the Latin or late Latin or Italian language dreaming of the other one, but one level of language dreaming of another one, mainly the written form dreaming of the oral one. And that sounds very close to Oppen’s words imagining other possible states for themselves, usually in a speech form; or the used word dreaming of the novel one, the poet’s words dreaming of “language in the roads.” Words in Oppen’s poetry are often represented as imagining their other one, dreaming by juxtaposition and contrast, dreaming of their silent counterpart or of their resounding one (which might eventually be the other—vocal—figure of the blank). Such is the effect most strongly obtained through repetition, for instance: with the strict repetition of the same words on both sides of a long blank—as in:

“anger anger” (“Soli”),
or
“to know to know in my life to know” (NCP, 247)

17It seems as if the word were really dreaming of its double, its other one, more silent perhaps on the other side of the blank. Such blank-crossing repetition suggests a word could be imagining itself as same and different, beyond a passage through the blank, both unheard and unseen.

18Similar effects of isolation and differences in language can be achieved through infinite simplicity and infinite complexity. Agamben quotes from Mallarmé about the isolation of words through complexity, when “perceived independently from the ordinary sequence;” “being of the discourse what is not said.” The dream of language in Oppen seems to be less historical, perhaps, than political and poetical. He writes in such a way that a part of the language he uses does not look like the other part. That creates an image of otherness in language, like an intimate linguistic otherness: an effect of unlikeness, of dissimilarity. We read what we can see, and we see that we cannot read all of it, or that all that is here is not quite all there is. And the very interval created by unlikeness comes to be occupied by a language that does not look like itself. In that respect, Oppen may be said to be abstract—in a quite different sense from the feeling of abstraction that can be confused with a form of difficulty, and in no contradiction, either, to the poet rightly claiming that he does not write about abstractions. Such effects and images of unlikeness, or difference, point at the unintelligible or unreadable.

19Among his strategies striving to obtain those effects, there might be counted the recurrent representation, or even dramatization of some mistakes he himself makes—mistakes about a word, or a citation. Oppen practices an odd form of appropriation at times, de-contextualizing, shifting and even distorting the original text. In mistakes or solecisms, neither the citation nor the word look like themselves any more.

Soli and Solecisms

20As to mistakes on words, spelling mistakes, solecisms, or confusions about etymology, there are not that many, but they prove most interesting to the reader—so much so that one wonders if they really can be mere mistakes. Such is the case, for instance, with a confusion Oppen makes in his Daybooks, when he misspells the verb “to bear” in “What I cannot bare I speak of.” (SP, 150) Cope unhesitatingly corrects him for his alleged spelling mistake, being confident he meant to write “What I cannot bear” in the sense of “tolerate.” Obviously, both spellings make sense: either the poet feels the need to write about things that he finds hard to bear, or to bear the thinking of; or else, he speaks about what he cannot thoroughly understand (he “cannot bare”), hoping the meaning might eventually emerge from active obscurity, as we saw earlier. Either choice represents a combination in relative intelligibility.

21In a similar line, the poem “The Speech at Soli” deserves full attention.

“The Speech at Soli”
what do you want
to tell while the world
speaks nights or some nights
sleepless
fearful remembering
myself in these towns or by car
thru these towns unconscionable
adolescent young girls fall into wells
says a letter
bringing to birth
in the green storm
anger. anger,
and the light of the self small
blazing sun of the farms—return
the return of the sun there are actors’
faces of the highways the theatre
greets itself and reverberates the spirit
goes down goes under
stationary
valves of ditches the chartered
rivers threats in stones
enemies in sidewalks and when the stars rise reverse ourselves regions of the mind
alter
mad kings
gone raving
war in incoherent
sunlight it will not
cohere it will N O T that
other
desertion
of the total we discover
Friday’s footprint is it as the sun moves
Beyond the blunt
Towns of the coast fishermen’s
Tumbled tumbling headlands the needle silver Water, and tells the public time
(NCP, 238)

22About this poem, which is not transparently understandable at first reading, let us first see what Oppen has to say:

It’s a strange poem, a kind of confessional poem. It refers to that background of mine, and it’s not completely comprehensible. I happened to notice that the etymology of the word ‘solipsism’ was the name of a place, Soli. The Greeks, apparently, thought that town somewhere in Italy to be a very barbarous place.

23That is a delightful comment, which declares the poem to be at the same time “a kind of confessional poem” and “not completely comprehensible.” One may trace up a logical link between the two, the personal line being an excluding factor for the reader—but that does not sound entirely like Oppen. I had rather read it as meaning that both life and poetry prove most recalcitrant, and primarily so to the poet.

24As to the comment which follows, about Soli being the etymology of solipsism, it could almost be called the famous Soli mistake. To take it up briefly: Soli, which is meant as the place for speech, turns out to be also the place of the mistake at Soli and about Soli—indeed, Soli was a town in antiquity where the people, according to the Greek, spoke a barbarous and erroneous form of language, from which they derived the word solecism, and not solipsism. Let us assume this was no voluntary mistake. Even so, the confusion defines much of Oppen’s sense of unintelligibility. We do have here a wrong chain of meaning (etymology being in itself a form of language coherence, a diachronic chain of readability). Hence Soli, the place for speech, becomes a place linked first with solipsism (selfness, solus-ipse), the solipsist condition of one’s life to oneself, and that of words too. Then it is also a place linked with solecism, which, while proving the correct etymology of the word, does express the very meaning of the wrong form of a word. In the end, Soli, as place and word, comes to be linked with confusion, owing to Oppen’s wrong use of etymology. Thus in the same move, the poem becomes a gesture of radical distance—from the other one, from interpretation, from clarity.

25Incidentally, Oppen’s alleged mistake also converts solipsism—the form he would perhaps tend to question Ezra Pound about (“it will not// cohere it will NOT”)—into the ipseism of word and text, and into the irretrievable separateness of the text of life, full of unintelligible catastrophes (such as the car crash Oppen actually was in and survived, to which refer perhaps “by car/ thru these towns” or the “ditches”).

26One of the images that seem to prevail is that of catastrophic falls. From the oddly isolated line “adolescent young girls fall into wells” to the obscurely and severally related “goes down goes under” (is it “the theatre” or “the spirit” that does go under?), there recurs a general image of catastrophe, while the final “fishermen’s/ tumbled tumbling headlands” possibly suggest a form of conversion of catastrophe into the creative seascape of “the needle silver/ Water” that ultimately “tells the public time”—of history, of poetry. A similar impression is conveyed by the whole poem, with its narrow lines allowing for a feeling of fall, punctuated by several possible reversals: countering, perhaps, the missing, but evoked, “overturn” of the car, we find “return” at the end of a line, after a lengthy blank, at the exact place of the versura, of the very turn that defines poetry. More opaque still, the enigmatic “when the stars rise/ reverse ourselves regions of the mind” suggests a further reversal, a more abstract change of the catastrophic turn, through the “return” of poetry, into a mental transference. The return seems to be non decidable, but possible.

27In “The Speech at Soli,” confusions prove unsolvable. Confusions even interact. Such is the case with the mistake analyzed earlier, but also with all the obscure juxtapositions in the poem, that seldom come to be syntactically clarified, as we just saw. The several vague but traceable references or citations (from Pound, Defoe, or Rachel Blau du Plessis) contribute as much to possible interpretation as to the general impression of confusion. There are also scattered elements of reference to his own work, as with “Friday’s footprint” being a reminder of the all-important Crusoe presence in his poetical work; or the scattered fragments of the title of his previous collection, Seascape: Needle’s Eye, both visible and secret (the “needle,” of course, then the seascape that is described, while the Eye is missing but exercising). In the same way, images do no more clarify themselves than the overall idea. The most striking example might be that of the sun, every occurrence of which further obscures meaning: from “small blazing sun,” to “the return of the sun,” then “incoherent/ sunlight” and “as the sun moves/ beyond”). Not only as Pound’s sunlight (“sunlight it will not/ cohere”), but as the very image of turn and return of both light and time, the sun remains limited to an irresistible and unintelligible movement.

28It seems the undecipherable operates in Oppen’s poetry, at the time, through the modality of the perplexing answer. In spite of so much confusion, and so many interpretative oscillations, the poem plainly opens with a question, “what do you want/ to tell,” and closes on what might be read as an answer: “tells the public time.” Now, of course, the forms do not correspond, and in such an unpunctuated text, almost anything could be the subject of “tells the public time,” the latest and closest possible subjects being “the sun,” but also “Friday’s footprint” or “that/ other/ desertion/ of the total.” Besides, one notes the initial question was followed by no question mark, while the final answer proves no conclusion, being left open on the absence of a full stop. Such uncertainties, added to the dissymmetry between question and answer, do not preclude the essential meaning of “tell the public time” for Oppen—that idea of a communal telling, a collective, or perhaps communist poetry. But they also suggest that conclusions as well as endings are just impossible.

29Incompleteness, indeed, participates to the general difficulty of reading this poem. Soli is finally the place of the “desertion of the total.” Any idea of a complete, total meaning, deserts the poem, of which such desertion comes to represent the central object. If we look closer at its most forceful expression

. . . it will not
cohere it will N O T that other
desertion
of the total. . .

30we can see the multiple strategy of its representation—where “desertion” fully occupies a lonely line, and inter-strophic blanks are used to redouble the non cohering or the isolation of desertion, while the adamant resistance to coherence finds its plastic representation in the capital letters of N O T, and the spaces in between those letters. “The Speech at Soli” finally presents the “desertion of the total” as the plain condition of meaning, reading, remembering. The one instance of a co-presence of word and meaning is that of a “mistake,” both the meaning of mistake to be found in solecism (evoked by default), and that of the mistake on meaning (through etymology). Speaking at Soli means telling the beauty of misreading, the conversion of catastrophe, the achievement of confusion, incompleteness, non fulfillment.

31This is a poem about the indefinite missing of the totality of intelligibility (with the hope only of a communal telling of it).

32This is also a late poem about late form.

The Truth of Lateness

33Edward Said’s book On Late Style, and the way he characterizes late style through Adorno’s studies on Beethoven’s late works, are almost surprisingly enlightening to help read Oppen’s later collections, and perhaps his whole work.

34Said quotes from Adorno’s Essays on Music, where he expresses his vision of late style in Beethoven:

The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.4

35The words here seem to adequately describe Oppen’s style, except that, with him, the disengagement and the fragmentary communication are no late gesture, but a general mode. What Said analyzes as “lateness” actually prevails in the poet’s whole life and creation.

36There is, indeed, something in Oppen of the extreme lateness of the survivor. That importance and truth of the survivor in him, he comes to recognize gradually. It is originally a biographical truth—surviving his family’s history of suicides, surviving the car crash in which someone else was killed, surviving the war too (he returns several times to that moment “in a hole” in France during World War II, when so many of his comrades were killed); then, eventually, he comes to speak more and more of his feeling as a history survivor of the Jewish holocaust, collectively if not personally, in a late coming up, not as a consciousness but as possible poetic subject. Then, of course, Oppen was also a most strange case of poetic survival, having known two successful poetic débuts, across a blank of 25 years.

37No surprise, then, that we should find in his poems meditations on lateness, and the representation of words themselves as survivors. Such is the case in these lines from “The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living” (the poem coming next to “Speech at Soli”):

. . .
in the commonplace the last words
survivors, will be tame
will stand near our feet
what shall we say they have lived their lives
they have gone feathery
and askew
in the wind from the beginning. . . (NCP, 242)

38If the used or even worn out state of the words, as they are found, is itself a commonplace among poets, and among modernist poets in particular, the idea of the word as survivor is more unusual. It seems to inscribe words within the common fate of history at large, and of the poet personally. The inter-strophic blank that separates “the last words” from “survivors” figures the hiatus and the difficulty to survive it—as confirmed by the question “what shall we say” (again, a question without any question mark, but not rhetorical for all that).

39Though it is not literally formulated, the character of lateness scatters all over the opening lines of “Myth of the Blaze,” combining several forms of—bare—survival:

night—sky bird’s world
to know to know in my life to know what I have said to myself
the dark to escape in brilliant highways
of the night sky, finally
why had they not
killed me why did they fire that warning
wounding cannon. . .

40The first line voluntarily fails to hide the blanks of the line and of syntax behind the beauty of the pararhymes in “night-sky” and “bird’s world.” It does fail to “cohere,” and even plays on cohesion in several ways: one wrongly hears a connecting “’s” in the two clauses, while in fact it proves wrong about the first one (“night—sky”); besides, the dash as well as the two extended blanks provide unsettling variations on separation. The poem itself starts as a survivor, in fact, gathering haphazardly the remains of the world and of the lexicon. The second line furthers that impression through its repetitions and blanks, while introducing the central obsessive questioning—that is getting to know why he survived the war, why he was warned by that very thing which killed others (“that warning/ wounding cannon”). Lateness reigns everywhere—in life and words, and also thoughts. One of the most moving signs of it is the need for late reinterpretation of life-long thoughts: “to know/ what I have said to myself.” The late non readability of one’s fate and thoughts creates the feeling of a dazed, if not pained, exteriority to self.

41However, as I said at first, lateness goes a far longer way than would a simply chronological marker. Relative unintelligibility as condition, image and grammar was there at the very beginning, from the first poem selected by Oppen for his first collection, Discrete Series: “The knowledge not of sorrows.”

42Lateness can indeed be seen as a general condition of recalcitrance in Oppen, a tardiness that primarily figures out the resistances in the process of thought—while perpetrating them indeed. His first poems had it too, but later he chose increasingly to ingrain some existential modality of lateness in the poems. Such a modality as Edward Said formulates in “Timeliness and Lateness:” “the increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism, which late style expresses and, more important, uses to formally sustain itself” (Said 17). Thus in his later poems is to be found a redoubled form of lateness, which impresses us as extreme formal lateness somehow, like a growing disregard for continuity, coherence and readymade communication. Lateness develops into a reflexive and invasive process. Finally, I wish to briefly consider one poem from his last collection, Primitive (1978), of which this is the complete text:

“The Tongues”
of appearance
speak in the unchosen
journey immense
journey there is loss in denying
that force the moments the years
even of death lost
in denying
that force the words
out of that whirlwind his
and not his strange
words surround him. (NCP, 275)

43Though perfectly finished, the poem creates an impression of unfinished writing and reading (his, as well as ours). Its immense force is nurtured by the unique unpunctuated movement, activated by paranomasia and repetition. The poem achieves its sway through countering the deadly denial of time: from “there is loss in denying/ that force” to “death lost/ in denying/ that force.” It is difficult to know what “that force” exactly means—the immensity of the “unchosen journey” of life, of language, of knowledge, perhaps. What is accomplished is dispossession and otherness: “his/ and not his strange/ words.” In other words, the poem ends on the certainty of non accomplishment. All the sounds of “word” can be heard in “whirlwind,” out of which the words are said to emerge, but where they obviously rewind. Forceful, but also strange and fleeting, the words cannot be appropriated, unified, retained. The same resistance and diffidence apply to the idea of a totality of intelligibility.

44In announcing a study of “late unreadability” in George Oppen’s poetry, I placed the unreadable as a question of time, of timing almost; and I do think it is linked with the always already wrong timing of reading—which is also the right one, then, probably. In Gertrude Stein’s poetry, the invention of a kind of lateral mode of reading delays readability. In a comparable way, in Oppen, the inclusion of the time of disclosure and non disclosure in the poem creates its own form of unreadable. In both cases, actually, though differently, Stein and Oppen create the unreadable by formalizing the gaps or blanks in intelligibility, which eventually take the form of unlikeness and lateness. So that, whatever is achieved by the poem, it will not have completely cohered.

45The enigmatic mistake about “The Speech at Soli” delineates a form of ethics of both solecism and solipsism, according to which it is the task of the poem to deal in alteration and separation, so that the words, the “survivor words” can be restored. If it is “the proper purpose, or the first purpose of the poem to restore the meaning of words” (SP, 68), a certain practice of unintelligibility and a “desertion of the total” are necessary conditions for “A poetry of the meaning of words” (NCP, 309).

46For this is a poetry of the possibly restored meaning of survivor words.