Past Futures

"Back forty years ago I wrote of The Gist of Origin: 'In such a bare age as ours, the truth, though terrible, is clean. The worlds of Chaucer, Homer and Tolstoy were conventionally realized ones-even if the men in them shifted between realizations, incorrigibly. We now are in the same ferry as these chaotic Americans: we have no fixities to shift among. The only order they bring with them-and it is not nothing-is an economy of means. Ultimately the variety-of place, of instance, of event, of impression is deceptive. Also the enormous amount to be learnt from them, deceptive-because it is all the one thing. And the one thing is terrible, because it is unclear whether it is not ourselves.' I think this era of thought/feeling is now obsolete in the culture, which is now based upon a sort of decorative wit-adapted for the computerex machinery, but on the way to being mechanically replicated by it. Incidentally, the prosody of this perhaps outdated poetry is based at its best upon simply "the taste of words, the pleasure of utterance as a physical act", in the words of Cid Corman.-Clive Faust