The Field
In the 1830's British scientist Michael Faraday began a series of experiments that would lead to 20th century field theory. Faraday first realized the importance of a field as a physical object, during his investigations into magnetism. He realized that electric and magnetic fields are not only fields of force which dictate the motion of particles, but also have independent physical reality because they carry energy. In physics, a field is an assignment of a quantity to every point in space. Other work in field theory has Rupert Sheldrake proposing morphogenetic (or morphic) field theory, a hypothetical biological (and potentially social) equivalent to an electromagnetic field that operates to shape the exact form of a living thing, and may also shape its behavior and coordination with other beings. Sheldrake takes his notions from his background in biology and points out this refers to "the coming into being of form (from the Greek morphe = form + genesis = coming into being").1 In fact Sheldrake suggests "Matter is no longer the fundamental reality, as it was for old-style materialism. Fields and energy are now more fundamental than matter. The ultimate particles of matter have become vibrations of energy within fields".2 David Hawkins has also contributed some interesting theories regarding fields of dominance. Hawkins calls them "attractor fields"3 and gives us more validation for the power of composition by field. He says "Genius … seems to proceed from sudden revelation rather than conceptualization, but there is an unseen process involved. Although the genius's mind may appear stalled, frustrated with the problem, what it is really doing is preparing the field." (My emphasis). "There is a struggle with reason which leads, like a Zen Koan, to a rational impasse from which the only way forward is by a leap from a lower to a higher attractor energy pattern".4 This may be described as a deepening of consciousness. Developing the courage to trust what looks non-linear puts the practitioner at the level of integrity, in Hawkins' Map of Consciousness.5 In the introduction to The Wedge, published in 1944, Williams put it this way "Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.".6
Williams sensed on some level that his act of writing, in opposition to the war, and the impulse toward it, was larger than the idle rambling of a left-wing poet. He was working in a different sector of the same field. His work was creating its own field(s) of resonance. One fine example of that is the poem:
In Chains
When blackguards and murderers
undercover of those offices
accuse the world of those villainies
which they themselves invent to
torture us – we have no choice
but to bend to their designs,
buck them or be trampled while
our thoughts gnaw, snap and bite
within us helplessly – unless
we learn from that to avoid
being as they are, how love
will rise out of its ashes if
we water it, tie up the slender
stem and keep the image of its
lively flower chiseled upon our minds.
Is it the linear notion of cause and effect Williams was hoping for? By this time in his career, I doubt it. He was quite frustrated by the impulse of the academies, so I am sure he did not feel a poem was going to change the mind of "scholars of war" as his protégé Allen Ginsberg called them in the poem "Howl." I am suggesting he had an understanding that his work had resonance beyond the immediate, and he was prescient if you value Hawkins view, that fields "dominate human existence and therefore define content, meaning and value, and serve as organizing energies for widespread pattern of human behavior".7 Certainly the Whitheadian notion of events being influenced by past events and influencing future events reinforces this notion of the power of the poem as field, suggesting the process-orientation of this kind of composition taps into powerful energy (in one sense) outside of the poet. How appropriate is the poem In Chains considering the acts of the Bush Administration and the systematic torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo and at secret military bases around the world?
In addition to his lifelong, perhaps mythic quest for this new measure, Williams also had an obsessive contempt for the work of T.S. Eliot, especially his influential poem "The Wasteland." Among other things, Williams felt the release of the poem "…wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it," and that "Eliot had turned his back on reviving my world," away from a new art form "rooted in the locality which should give it fruit".8
In discussing poetry with Tibetan Dur Bon Master Physician and Lha Khu Christopher Hansard, of Eliot he said: "Eliot wrote out of unconstrained fear. He always sought an outcome. And Walt Whitman discovered that words, although seemingly the adventure, were in fact the instruments by which he discovered himself."9 It was Eliot's energetic field exuding fear to which Williams and later Olson were reacting. In fact, Olson's "The Kingfishers" was a deliberate effort to repugn the hopelessness of "The Wasteland."
Yet "The Wasteland" was, and in many circles continues to be, an important poem. James Breslin in his critical essay on Williams and the Whitman tradition says:
According to Williams, "mental activity in most people is conducted primarily at the level of ordinary consciousness or the ego. The distinctive feature of such life is its tendency toward a rigid conservatism, a fear of new experience, and a desire to operate safely and fixedly within established categories. Locked within a system, cut off from fresh experience by the desire for security, the ordinary man will be emotionally and sensually starved; in a real sense, he will not even exist…Ironically then, the person who seeks security uproots himself from the present moment, the only thing that IS, and so he becomes a perpetual drifter. Because he is impoverished, his activity will be incessant; but because he is dissociated from the sources of life, his restless activity will be futile…his fear of the new, thwarting the creative process of renewal, is self-destructive".10
If that does not peg the state of the modern, TV-fed, terrorized American consumer, I am not sure what can. After all, North America is a continent made up of people escaping something. The spin we have been given is that of religious freedom and opportunity, and there is a kernel of truth in that. The truth is, in America, diversions from introspection have been perfected. Drugs (licit and il-,) gambling, sex, materialism, the list is endless. Yet Williams' spontaneous composing process, practiced in snatches of time between patients, and perfected in his later works such as "The Desert Music," and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," was one of constant renewal. Breslin suggests that was the theme of Williams work after 1913, as Williams began to internalize the work of Whitman and extend it. Add to that the notion honed in the Imagism movement - that it was the sensual, not the abstract that mattered, a process poetics grounded in the phenomenological moment and you have the main reasons Williams best work is timeless. This is what happens when you have "a poetics that are alive and conscious",11 in Michael McClure's words, combined with a content of renewal and appreciation of the here and now. The field which it radiates is one of a deep consciousness and invention, a quest to make things new "not by transcendence by immersion".12
Later in life Williams was able to get vindication for his stance toward art from the Action Painting of the Abstract Expressionists, from Charles Olson, and from Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, and increasingly, the academy, but the best vindication comes from creating a field of work that will continue to grow in radiance and inspire future generations of poets and readers. And if he is in hell, his poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" suggests it has its scenery:
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Notes:
1 Sheldrake, Rupert. The Sense of Being Stared At. New York: Crown, 2003, p.275
2 Ibid., p.4
3 Hawkins, David Power Vs. Force. Sedona: Veritas, 6th Ed., 2004, p.9
4 Ibid., p.164
5 Ibid., p.52
6 Willams, William Carlos. Collected Later Poems Revised Ed. New York: New Directions, 1963, p.4
7 Hawkins, David Power Vs. Force. Sedona: Veritas, 6th Ed., 2004, p.9
8 Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967, p.174
9 From a 2003 interview conducted by the author. (See also The Tibetan View of Sound... essay.)
10 Breslin, James. William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition. Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding selected papers from the English Institute, Damon, Philip, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967, p.158
11 McClure, Michael. Three Poems. New York: Penguin, 1995
12 Breslin, James. William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition. Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding selected papers from the English Institute, Damon, Philip, ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967, p.620
Paul Everett Nelson, co-founder of the Northwest SPokenword LAB, is author of an epic poem re-enacting history of Auburn, Washington, entitled A Time Before Slaughter. He's broadcast interviews of Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Wanda Coleman, Diane di Prima, Jerome Rothenberg, Eileen Myles and Victor Hernandez Cruz, facilitated over 200 poetry workshops w/ & w/o the SPLAB!-on-the-Road workshop troupe, is doing his graduate work through Lesley University in Cambridge, MA on Open Form in North American Poetry: A Path to Liberation, and writes at least one American Sentence every day.