1This paper is essentially concerned with Oppen’s poem entitled The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living (1973).1 My intention is to show how the extrinsic unreadability of that poem is inherently eschatological in its purpose, and how it should not obscure its proper poetic function as a marker of the un-writable. The length and scope of that text are such that it has seemed preferable to use the word meditation, objectivist meditation, rather than pretend to exhaust the possibilities of that poem.

2But speaking of unreadability, why not begin with readability itself, and bear in mind that what we mean by reading is first of all silent reading—so a few words on the evolution of reading habits may prove useful for this introduction.

3In Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading,2 Paul Saenger examines how the introduction of separate space between words reduced the need for reading aloud in order to understand the text, and how this visual discontinuity was accompanied by important grammatical changes in the ordering of the words, and the growing visual apparatus of punctuation and diacritical marks. We may simply note for now that in contrast Oppen’s poems are mostly deprived of any syntax or punctuation, and that as with many poets, his texts rely heavily on the reader’s voice to make sense of the journey of one’s eyes on the page.

4Concerning our reading practices more specifically—here is what Brian Stock writes in his study on the history of meditative reading from and after Augustine, The Meditative Reader and the Text:

5In general, the period after the fourteenth century moved away from medieval reading habits in two important respects. Oral reading was supplemented, if not entirely replaced, by silent reading, which was practiced by greater numbers of readers than during the Middle Ages. Accompanying this development, the meditative or contemplative aspects of reading were reduced in favor of visual, symbolic, or interpretative procedures that placed a great weight on analytical understanding. . . . Later ancient and medieval meditation depended on a distinction between sound and silence, that is, between the sound of the oral reading and the silence that followed. With the widespread practice of silent reading, the sound of the reading was reduced to an inward murmur or disappeared altogether from aural perception, so that only one type of silence remained—the silence of reading itself. The history of silence thus began a new chapter, in which the subject had the impression that reading and thinking were a single, continuous process. For the reflective reader, the text and the self became interdependent, as they appear to be in Montaigne.3

6Unreadability and silent reading have in common that a form of unreadability rests in our being silenced by the text: we may read it only as far as we may sound it—without any automatic corollary sense being attached. And the interpretative procedures our analytical understanding would set about are thwarted and appear to be reduced in favour of meditative or contemplative aspects, which combine differently our sounding the words silently, and the silence which would nestle our renewed understanding.

7Unreadability in this sense is the product of the minor mode, or minor key poetics, the “impoverished” poetics George Oppen speaks of, expressed in a “going/down middle voice” (Oppen, 258) as he wrote, and to take up Michael Heller’s remarks on the matter.4 This may be summarized in these lines from Oppen:

. . . One man could not understand me because I was saying
simple things; it seemed to him that nothing was being
said. (Oppen, 197)

8Linking unreadability and simplicity may seem contradictory. But in his very often quoted lines: “Clarity/ In the sense of transparence, / I don’t mean that much can be explained./ Clarity in the sense of silence.” (Oppen, 175) Oppen himself equates the lucid with the unspoken, in a way which endows one’s consciousness of the world with the blinding self-evidence of the impenetrable. The question is then whether there may be a specific form of unreadability which derives from overreaching purification, from the reduction of language to its barest figurative limits—to a point where the utter readability of the words on the page achieves a level of disclosure which the mind cannot encompass. It seems as though the kind of balance or mirror effect that exists between the readability of the text for its readers—its answerability as it were, the fact that the text reads back as we may say we are answered back—and the readability of the world as that which stands for the poet’s experience, were meant to be somehow preserved—while a communicative opacity between worldly and textual disorders would be expected in the work of a poet so keen on stating and assessing the actual conditions of existence.

9The undoing of literacy itself directs us to the origins of unreadability as regards illiteracy, which is why this presentation proposes to focus on the figure of the “unread child”—unread in the sense that one has not been instructed in or by reading, that one is not well-read. There is also a hint here of Oppen’s rewriting that poets are legislators of the unacknowledged world—the unread is also what is discarded. And there is the idea of infancy in the Latin sense of not being skilled in language yet.

10There are essentially two sides to Oppen’s use of the pattern of childhood in his poetry. His uses of the word “child” or “children” combine precisely the voice of both wonder and awe before the world. One may be seen as proof of his interest in what Walter Benjamin calls Adamic language, to write of what Oppen calls “those primary elements which can only be named” (Oppen 197). In that sense, children are seen as being closer to a direct experience of worldliness and primitive wordiness. This appears in different poems, such as Birthplace: New Rochelle, in Stranger’s Child and Sunnyside Child, in West and the poem Exodus, to name but a few. The other side of the notion of childhood has to do with figures of loss. Oppen resorts to the voice or presence of children as something to measure against the aesthetic and unearned treatment of the horrors of the century (taking up Peter Nicholls’s point on the matter).5 Nicholls quotes Oppen saying that “The poem. . . is written against ‘those who confect, clothed and armoured in the words and phrases which first were made to tell one’s nakedness.’” (Nicholls, 153) Nakedness implies a reference to Blake’s poem Infant Sorrow (and Infant Joy would illustrate the view of childhood discussed just earlier), quoted in Oppen’s second poem called The Occurrences. Other examples may be found in The Disasters and the poem Semite, as well as the parallel prose text called Non-Resistance, etc. Or: Of the Guiltless, published in 1974, where he elaborates on his decision to join the army in 1942. Childhood stands in these poems as a kernel of shared identity, shared humanity, exemplifying the limits of individual experience after 1945.

11There we have the double-bind, which encapsulates the question of silence for Oppen: the necessity and impossibility to testify. This explains why silence is one of the dilemmas at the heart of George Oppen’s poetry, of his mistrust of language, and of the difficulties he encountered with the expression of experience. There is more to silence than what is often discussed in Oppen, the twenty-five years of silence between his first book, Discrete Series (1934) and The Materials (published 1962, begun in 1958). Or silence along the lines of the general view of Objectivist poetics, which amounts to restraint, to a sign of reserve. This limits the notion of silence to the command, which is half Stevens half Williams, that no ideas should obscure the clear perception of the thing. Naturally Oppen’s use of the word transparence in the previous quote has done much to confirm this reading. But silence, and a measure of unreadability, does not constitute a form of hindrance, or hindered meaning. Oppen writes: “The poem replaces the thing, the poem destroys its meaning—/ —I would like the poem to be nothing, to be transparent, to be inaudible, not to be.” (Nicholls, 56) So that in the end silence points in two directions in Oppen’s work. One is the inexpressible, brought to the dimensions of the inexperienced as a condition of objectivist sincerity (where the limits of one’s statement are the limits of one’s experience). The other is the poem as silent object, as concrete objectified linguistic materials. In the long poem “The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living,” in “Myth of the Blaze,” silence achieves yet another dimension, expressed in its dual title, which tells of many contradictions: between Infant Sorrow and Infant Joy, between silence and the possibility of an answer, between the composition of a poetic sequence and the accuracy of an original statement.

12Starting with the latter, this is according to Oppen “the more startling [of his poems] in view of the number of quotes and none of them from Job I’d made myself a list of the references, but seem to have lost it—includes Hölderlin, Jabès, Bobrowski, Luther, Montaigne. . . and other Quotes from memory, which is my disreputable habit.”6 For instance, one could think of discussing the unreadability of the name for God in connection to what Oppen had read from Edmond Jabès, but the input from Jabès was probably rather a matter of kinship in viewpoint and in some of the imagery of the wilderness. Quotation is never a means of encoding the text for Oppen, and however useful it may be to account for this or that quote, as Peter Nicholls writes: “the incorporation of ‘foreign’ materials does not point outside the poem, but functions rather to disrupt any sense of unified poetic ‘voice’”7—this is all the more true, and difficult, as Oppen’s own voice is among them, as he often quoted himself from his previous texts. Although it does not reach the level of appropriation we find in Montaigne’s use of quotation, this continued dialogue testifies to the poet’s constant search for what he called “other voices” and the awakening powers he sought in them, however disquieting. In fact, within the compass of this poem, we may well say that any dialogue between a poet and possible sources that would be devised for the purpose of consolidating that poet’s authority, be it an ironic one, would find itself on the side of Job’s comforters—aiming at an acceptance of the waste of the literary land.

13The most promising subtext that should be mentioned is Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos” (the final line from section one, “island of light,” is borrowed from it, and there are other possible references). I would draw attention to one line from Hölderlin’s poem, which reads: “For the wrath of the world is inconceivable, unnameable (or nameless).”8 Patmos being the island of the Apocalypse, there is revelation at stake, but as in Hölderlin’s poem, the question is one of understanding a parable, and achieving interpretation as it is built into the text,9 by making sense of the parataxis to perhaps conceive this wrath.

14Oppen’s view of the gist of the poem concerns what he called “the connection between divinity and a statement which is true. The point of the parable is that god answered.” The matter being not what God answered but “that god answered: this is the fact that the poet reports. . . . Which means there is a force, an inexplicable force, in a statement which is true.” The purpose of this is that “if you say something which is true, the whirlwind will answer.” (Nicholls, 166) Oppen adds: “One moment of sincerity threatens to disclose everything.” (Nicholls, 167) Along these remarks, Oppen insists on the material world as the creation of a demiurge, and on the figure of a demonic God, with obvious reference to Blake.

15The dynamics of the poem consists in what Oppen has identified, referring explicitly to Luther’s search for the actual word of God, as: “tragedy ‘seeking a statement/ of an experience of our own.’” (Oppen, 244) The search is repeated twice: in section one, justifying the dedication (“what is the form to say it there is something to name Goodman Schwerner Chaney/ who were beaten not we/ who were beaten children/ not our/ children ancestral/ children rose in the dark/ to their work there grows/ there builds there is written/ a vividness there is rawness”) and in section 2 (“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”).

16Within the turmoil of an elemental whirling of sea and air, the poem proceeds by elliptically setting up patterns that broaden the scope of the text, and at the same time narrow it to the humblest level. There are the repeated associations of workers (and then farmers in the last section) with Christ on the cross, translating, in the words of Simone Weil (whom Oppen had read closely), her philosophy of “gravity and grace” in the mechanics of “the lever the fulcrum/ the cam.” This parallel leads to another, linking the fate of workers to the cause of minorities (the word “greasers” points in both directions, and the poem is primarily concerned with three Civil Rights workers murdered in 1964). A condensed version of this aspect of the text may be found in the poem “To Find A Way,” which begins:

the turn the cadence the verse and the music,
clarity, plain glass and the slang word
speaks in the whirl wind the insulted
the challenged
blood of childhood now patriarchal
Jew most strange
to myself neither Roman
nor barbarian the words
and their strangeness saving
ray of strangeness ray
of exile.
ray of light (Oppen, 302)

17Whether it is a singular attempt or the attempt of a singled out number of people, finding a statement is inseparable from the efforts to find a “commonplace” for a “common breath”—the chiasmus in section 5 shows this crux (“lose me the wind cries find/ yourself I?/ this? The road”).

18This road or way is the path of the living from the title, and it is again the seeking of a statement. In the opening section the poet is in search of an image for the world, the image of the age, and of his own age. In the poem Confession, also in Myth of the Blaze, the imagery of the sea and ships resurfaces much in the same way, presenting the picture of a similar stormy despair:

‘neither childhood
nor future
are growing less’ guilts guilts
pour in
to memory things leak I am an old ship
and leaky oceans (Oppen, 258)

19What contravenes his search is latent in the repetition (“image the images” then “image image”), the difficulty—or impossibility to find a complete whole image, and not the image of an image. The image stands as captured “meaning/ in the instant,” or in section 2 “meaning’s/ instant,” but it seizes unstable pictures—even the “cherry/ tree blossoms” are “wild-eyed.” Besides, there has been a shift in Oppen’s prosody beginning with Seascape, as Eleanor Berry has pointed out in “Language Made Fluid,” noting that Oppen’s poems from then on have become increasingly pervaded by the “imagery of the liquid, of light”10 rather than the solid rocks that were the nominal materials of previous books. As a consequence, the loss of all deictic focus turns the image onto itself. The mention of photography becomes a way to warn against the isolation of the image shut away from the weather, which from his very first poem is Oppen’s word for history (“tho we forget/ the light: ” the light being the light of actuality): “weather of the camera’s click/ lonely as the shutter closing/ over the glass lens weathered.” The risk of closure, the loneliness of the shutter closing brings to section 3, and the “shame/ of loneliness all that has touched/ the man/ touches him again arms and dis-/ arms him.” The reference to Williams (“luxury, all/ said Bill, the fancy things”— a 1927 poem by Williams is called All the Fancy Things) seems likewise to dismiss fancy and invention in favour of a clear vision of “extreme/ minutes guilt/ at the heart/ of the unthinkable hunger fear enemy/ world,” but it is not directed against Williams, whose poem tells precisely of his mother ageing, who “must withstand rebuffs/ from that which returns/ to the beginnings.”11 Oppen’s poem is constantly returning to the beginning (even using precise personal memories with a reference to 1918) much like the book of Job ends on a return to Genesis.

20The last lines of the poem take us back to the beginning (“carve/ thereon”. . ./ “image the images”). The reference is explicitly to Blake’s engraving of the book of Job, and yet the repetition of “image the images” with the added plural distances the text from any idea of beneficial mimesis linked to the lines from Genesis (“in his own image, in the image of God created he him” 1: 27), and rather calls to mind endless duplication. At the beginning is the book and its first letter, b, upon which much of the rhythmic frame of section 1 rests (“blows bruise the bones” the first of these three words referring also to the wind, and then “beaten,” “beaten,” and later on “bones” is again repeated). This is the “belly of the land” exposed, and echoed, reflected and told by the “bell buoy” no longer warning but witnessing tragedy, leading up to the last part of the last section, beginning with the adverb “backward: ” “we ring/ in the continual bell/ the undoubtable bell found music in itself/ of itself speaks the word/ actual heart breaking/ tone row it is not ended the intervals/ blurred ring.” The bell that is being rung sings the whirling movement of the text revolving around the pursuit of a statement which itself partakes of the whirl-wind, which addresses it, rather than being opposed to it. It is blurred insomuch as the intervals are uncertain, because they are “not ended,” which sounds like a direct comment on the poet’s own divisive lineation, disconnecting the syntax. In the poet’s few public readings of his own work, his use of parataxis often causes rising line-endings and an overall incantatory rhythm.

21This poem of praise is a manner of incantation. The imbalance one feels in the “blurred ring/ like walls/ between floor/ and ceiling the taste/ of madness in the world,” the crumbling that seems to takes place may well evoke the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, as the words “carve thereon” are to be found in 1 Kings 6: 35, which tells of the building of the temple: “And he carved thereon cherubims and palm trees and open flowers: and covered them with gold fitted upon the carved work.” Although that may be, the words of Job resonate stronger here: “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!” (Job, 19: 23–24). Job himself is seeking a statement, and the exact measure of and reason for the resistance of Oppen’s text is the measure of Job’s outcry. It touches on the limits of language and the speechlessness that befalls any attempts at exceeding these boundaries, all the more so as pictorial escapes, even under Blake’s patronage, have been invalidated.

22Oppen writes from that point where the whirlwind answers, when the answer itself confirms man’s position in the extant universe. In doing so, it is remarkable how Oppen actually follows Adorno’s conclusion in the last fragment from Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life: Adorno writes that “In the face of despair, the only way philosophy can still be justified is as an attempt to consider all things as they look from the stand-point of salvation”12—which does not qualify as the theological embrace of any religion. It is an impossible position, Adorno goes on to say, “because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence.” Yet the need remains for new perspectives: “Perspectives must be established in which the world comes apart, alienates itself, and reveals its cracks and crevices, as it will be one day when it lies poor and disfigured in the Messianic light.” This is, after Blake, Oppen’s burning light of the blaze, so persistent in his late poetry. Oppen writes from this impossible standpoint, which would be removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of language. Moving beyond it would require another language. But reaching the limits of that encircling scope, that is this poet’s task—not looking for a language which escapes language, but a language of what escapes language—noting that a language which would not communicate anything but itself as the actuality of language, is one of the designations of the word of God.13

23What is required is what, after Oppen and a few of his commentators, we may call a precarious language. But bearing in mind that this word, precarious, sometimes used a little too often or too lightly about Oppen, stems from the same Latin root as the word prayer, and meant what had been obtained by praying, and hence easily taken away.14 Significant uncertainties in the text, uncertain significances in the text, the statement which is sought: these make up the hermeneutics of a precarious poetry, resting on a return to the premises, perhaps the promises, of the silence surrounding the promised speech of the unread child.

24The word “precarious” occurs several times in the Collected Poems: in “Vulcan,” from The Materials:

. . . The bare rails
And black walls contain
Labor before her birth, her twisted
Precarious birth and the men
Laborious, burly— (Oppen, 67)

25In the fifth section of Route, the prose section about the poet’s time in the war, from “Of Being Numerous:” “The front was inactive, but we were spread so thin that the situation was eerily precarious” (Oppen, 194).

26In West, from “Seascape:”

. . . precariousness
Like a new fire
Will burn out the roots (Oppen, 215)

27And later in that same poem:

In nakedness
Inseparable the children will say
Our parents waited in the woods precarious (Oppen, 216)

28And in the last stanza of the so appropriately titled “The Impossible Poem,” from Seascape again:

Sanity to redeem
Fragments and fragmentary
Histories in the towns and the temperate streets
Too shallow still to drown in or to mourn
The courageous and precarious children. (Oppen, 232)