Top Ten Metaphors for the Heart & Other Notecards: The List Poems of Andy McGuire

You’ve got to be kidding me. Really? You haven’t heard of Papirmass? Don’t worry, people, I’ll fill you in. Papirmass is sort of like a literary journal, if a literary journal were an art gallery.  They send you twelve nicely made art prints a year, of variable size and ready to frame, and in one way or another include something literary along with it—a chapbook sometimes, or poems, sometimes on the verso side of the print. It’s a grand idea, and if it were based in Brooklyn rather than Canada you’d have been hearing about it for a long time (they’re on their 69^th issue). I’ve been thinking about the current issue because it’s managed to deliver something quite rare: a list poem I actually like.

I don’t know why I’m a hard sell when it comes to list poems—maybe it’s because they’re such a staple of the creative writing classroom that I’ve seen too many that are either merely workmanlike or strive a little too hard for novelty. Certainly there are exceptions—if we’re calling Joe Brainard’s I Remember a list poem, then I’m a fan of at least one large scale list poem. But generally, when I sit down with a list poem, the thing is considered guilty until proven otherwise. I know. It’s not fair. But Andy McGuire’s set of four list poems in the latest Papirmass (printed on the back of “Reflet,” a photo by Sarah Bodri) overcame my resistance. I think I understand why.

To begin with, there’s what we see at first glance— McGuire’s lists take advantage of Papirmass’s ability to present the written word in a visually interesting manner. The lists appear on old library index cards, yellowed and ruled in blue and red, with holes punched for the old catalog box rods. There’s a nostalgia value, even for my generation—I am of that unfortunate generation that came of age with the microfiche library catalog, a brief transitional technology between the card catalog and the fully electronic index, but we still used the card catalog when all of the fiche readers were engaged, and the sense memory of how it felt to thumb through those old cards is real enough. It’s not just nostalgia that we get from the images of lists on these cards, though—there’s a kind of pathos, especially since McGuire has chosen to have the text appear handwritten.  We get something like the feel Wes Anderson works so hard to give us in his films, where a character like Dignan in Bottle Rocket will reveal large binders of handwritten, naïve life plans—there’s a sense of how hopelessly outgunned we are by the world when we attempt to impose order on it. For Wes Anderson, the maker of plans andlists seems like a lost child grown old. It’s an important part of the Wes Anderson aesthetic, and more than incidental to the feel of McGuire’s list poems. They’d lost a lot if they appeared conventionally printed in an ordinary literary journal.

But McGuire isn’t out to show us a sincere attempt to order an unruly world. Instead, his lists work more like Jorge Luis Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, a fictitious text described in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Here, Borges shows us a set of asymmetrical categories of knowledge. The Emporium seeks to list and classify all the world’s animals, but instead of a system of mutually exclusive categories (say, “land based animals,” “flying animals,” “water-dwelling animals” and “amphibians”) it gives a muddle of overlapping categories:

Those that belong to the emperor

Embalmed ones

Those that are trained

Suckling pigs

Mermaids (or Sirens)

Fabulous ones

Stray dogs

Those that are included in this classification

Those that tremble as if they were mad

Innumerable ones

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

Et cetera

Those that have just broken the flower vase

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

The idea is to show the confusion of ideas, the variety of ways knowledge can be structured, and the failure of consistency in the application of those varieties. Borges makes fun out of the very idea of categorization.

In a different way, Andy McGuire makes fun out of the idea of rankings. Rankings, after all, are meant to be rankings of things in terms of the same criteria—but he presents overtly non-comparable things in his rankings. In “Top Ten Places I Have Seen a Swan,” for example, we get locations where an artificial swan might be found (“Souvenir shop”); places where what one sees isn’t a swan but a drawing of a swan (“Book of bad drawings”) (here the “bad” is sort of egregious, which is wonderful); places where what one sees may or may not be a real swan, and may or may not be there because people want it there (“Art opening”—how avant-garde is the show?); places that are plausible but nevertheless incongruous for a goose (“Stuck in a doggy door”) and places that must be somehow surreal (“Under a tongue”). In a list poem, everything is about selection and juxtaposition, and McGuire’s juxtapositions are uncommonly clever, even charming.

We get similar a similar feel from McGuire’s “Top Ten Things Not Meant to Be Carried.” When he tells us a bird isn’t meant to be carried, it feels right—those things squirm and really don’t want to be in your hands. But when he tells us a hologram or a lawn are not meant to be carried, the rightness of the assertion that they aren’t meant to be carried is predicated on different grounds (immateriality and non-portability, respectively). Then there are other items that simply don’t perform their intended uses if carried (balaclava and parachute). What we’re really getting is a kind of demonstration of the variability within our language—how “not meant to be carried” can apply to many different states. To rank these things implies that they are comparable (same in kind, different in degree), but the variety of things chosen shows how the same language applies to things that are not comparable. If I were a grad student, and it were the early 1990s, I would go on for paragraphs here about linguistic slippage, dropping the names of as many French theorists as possible. But you get the idea.

“Top Ten Miscellaneous Metaphors for the Heart” is a little different, since it deals with figurative language, and in a sense the listed items are comparable. What’s nice, though, is the freshness of the metaphors, and the variety of ways in which each is accurate.  Yes, the heart is a windsock, being blown this way and that, and yes, it is the national debt, owing ever more and more, and yes, it is a polygraph, on which the truth of our actions is proved, and yes, it is a flea market, full of random accumulations and broken things. McGuire is so sure footed here that I’m sure there’s a way the heart is an “Alpha mule,” too, though I’d first have to find out just what one of those is to confirm it.

The final list, “Top Ten Places to Report From,” also shows the multiple senses of the seemingly simple language of the category. The place can be visually designated (“vanishing point”) or a matter of time (“seconds before”—there’s a nice implied narrative in that one) or ambiguous (“wherever the weather comes from”).  It can also be an “art opening,” the penultimate item in this, the final list—and a nice call back to the initial swan list, giving a satisfying sense of formal conclusion to an already satisfying piece of writing.

If this is your kind of thing, and you’re ready to be surprised with a new art print in your mailbox a dozen times a year, give Papirmass a try.

The Haunting of Jorge Luis Borges, or: Borges in the Kantian Tradition

Jorge Luis Borges, lauded everywhere as one of the greats of short fiction, rarely gets his due as an essayist.  But his essays can be every bit as intriguing as his stories—and, in fact, are haunted by the same suspicion that haunts his fiction: the suspicion that there is an order of some kind just beyond our reach, and an elusive significance always on the verge of manifestation.  Both of these suspicions emerge in the wake of Kantian and post-Kantian thought on the meaning of the beautiful.

Consider “The Wall and the Books,” in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti in ordering the building of the Great Wall and decreeing the burning of all books. Borges is, of course, aware of simple historical explanations for the phenomena.  “Historically,” writes Borges, “there is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.”  But that’s just too plodding and dull for a mind like that of Borges, who soon turns to questions about a larger meaning for the emperor’s actions.  Noting that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, Borges begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

That’s a pretty freestyle set of hermeneutic principles Borges is employing, isn’t it?  “Perhaps it means this, perhaps that…”  But Borges isn’t much interested in precise or authoritative interpretation, here.  Rather, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books “touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows.”  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Indeed, thinking about the wall and the books in this way leads Borges to conjecture that “we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural ‘content’” and that this emphasis on the form or pattern that hints, but only hints, at significance would be in accord with the thinking of Walter Pater, who “contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form.”  Music, after all, is like mythology, or “certain twilights,” in that all of these things “try to tell us something… or want to tell us something.”  For Borges, this is an “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” and “is, perhaps, the aesthetic act.”

The idea of a pure form that does not connect to utility—the wall as metaphor, rather than as defense—haunts Borges, and pushes into his mind despite his grasp of simpler, more material explanations for the wall.  And the haunting is specific to the Kantian and post-Kantian eras, in that it was Kant who told us that the aesthetic experience involves a sense of “purposiveness without purpose”—of form with no necessary connection to function.  Moreover, it was Kant who spoke of genius as a capacity for creating images that function exactly like the wall and the books in Borges’ essay.  Here’s the relevant passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgment:

Genius is, in short, the faculty of presenting aesthetical Ideas; an aesthetical Idea being an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us.

For Kant, the products of genius cannot be reduced to any single concept or meaning.  Rather, they give rise to a plethora of possible significances.  Both the notion of purposiveness without purpose and the notion of genius irreducible to concept lie behind Borges’ speculations about the wall and the books: Borges is fascinated by the possibility of something that can be “nothing but form,” and by the notion that a formal pattern “hints, but only hints, at significance.”  Borges mentions Benedetto Croce and Walter Pater in his essay—and neither figure would exist in recognizable form without Kant.  But another figure derived from the German Idealist tradition comes to mind in connection with Borges’ idea of the “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” as central to aesthetics: Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung, in his great essay “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry,” argues that the most significant forms of art give us not specific meanings per se, but  “a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.”  Meaningfulness without meaning, we might say, is the gist of Jung’s theory, here: and it is certainly a theory in accord with Borges’ fascinations.

Borges' concern with pure form and “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” informs his best-loved fiction every bit as much as it informs his essayistic thinking.  Consider “The Lottery of Babylon, ” in which all of the arbitrariness in the world just might be the result of a secret, carefully administered lottery—a pattern or form behind the apparent randomness of life, a purpose or meaning we can almost detect.  Or consider the famous “Library of Babel,” in which a vast library of books, each unique, combine to present all possible combinations of letters.  In this strange universe, men seek not only the revelation of meaning, but absolution through that revelation:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness…. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary)…

The imminence of these most personal of revelations, though, never really manifests: “the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, ” we read, “can be computed as zero. ”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” is perhaps the best example of Borgesian fiction haunted by Kantian aesthetics.  It is in this story that we see our protagonist escape from the anxieties of his situation—he is in a hostile country, pursued by an implacable foe—by contemplating a labyrinth created by an ancestor:

I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts’ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued.

The labyrinth, a structure purposive but without purpose, is an object of contemplation that lifts him above his self-protective anxieties, and takes him into a different state of mind.  Indeed, it takes him into something like disinterest, the condition in which we contemplate without thought of our ourselves and our needs—the very state Kant says we enter with aesthetic contemplation.

As it turns out, the labyrinth is not a physical maze, but a book—a seemingly incoherent book that, in fact, has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a text pregnant with meanings, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.

The ghost of pure form, of a purposiveness beyond purpose; and the haunting sense of a meaningfulness that refuses to resolve into definite meaning—these are the specters behind many of the lines Borges wrote, fiction and nonfiction alike.  They are, I think, the central principles of his aesthetics—and the product of a long tradition in Western philosophy.