when it is snowing, the valley is black, p. 42

Plenitude, now, to start with; Schmidt using plenitude of stories in Atheists as a means of expansion, and then Frisch's Geiser using a multiplication of stories as a form of displacement. Old and forgetful, Geiser tries to get his meaning outside himself. He pins these pieces of paper to the walls and looks at them. (Could you suggest that the situation in reverse would characterise youth for Frisch: a man without accoutrements, independently explaining himself in a well-connected series of words?) Clear thoughts and memories have been replaced by physical gestures. Geiser cuts books apart and goes for walks. That's how he tries to discern himself. He keeps trying to put himself outside. These are his calculations or proofs. But the spaces between the gestures are still unarticulated. And the paragraphs the reader sees in Holocene are set apart with white space between them: the effort you make to cross those spaces and fix the book together is made visible by the gap on the page. Frisch's way of apportioning things might remind you that running paragraphs together mentally is an effort, even if it normally seems natural and effortless because you are such a good reader. We're all heading for Geiser-land, when the pause will be a real danger. You forget in pauses. Even now you say, "I walked into this room to fetch something and now I don't remember what it was." Geiser notices the varieties of rain, then the book reflects that at least it is not snowing. A gap passes and it is snowing. The white space is a passage of time with nothing in it but struggle and drowning. Geiser turns the stove on in one paragraph, the white space comes, and ping, the danger of forgetfulness tries to overwhelm him. His stroke at the end of the book attracts an abundance of words from other sources. He has chosen them but they are not his own. They're followed by that landscape description but for the first time he is not in the landscape. Even the body of text that usually contains him does not have him in it any more. He is gone in more than one way. It is an extra-final wiping-out.

a distinction be made

Reading Man in the Holocene, 1979, by Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, after Arno Schmidt's The School for Atheists, 1972, I thought about the additional pieces of text that had been made part of each book, the side-columns and footnotes crowding to and fro in Schmidt, and then the boxed horizontal inserts that came evenly and plainly between the paragraphs in Frisch.

In Schmidt the swarming appearance of the inserts makes the 'main' text a combative partner with the side text; they are two equal things muscling one another around. It is all aware that it is in a book, and it also knows that outside this book there are others.

In Holocene the inserts have been chosen by the character Geiser, who is cutting up his library with scissors. Now the main text seems closer to the kind of writing that is 'like real life' because these snippets about dinosaurs, animals, historical episodes, and topographical features are things existing in an implied world, as cuttings exit in life; they are not the same material as that world, in the way the Atheists columns are. There is a kind of strictness in Holocene: one thing is in one place and the other is separated from it, and you notice that the theme of the book is disintegration, age, and collapse, but the form goes steadily on. Geiser has probably suffered a stroke by the end. He can't tell us about it but one of the cuttings lets us know. "Apoplexy," it reads, "commonly known as a stroke, is a sudden loss of brain function …" After the apoplexy cutting there is a passage about the world continuing as usual. "The village stands unharmed. Above the mountains, high up in the blue sky, the white trails of passenger planes. The scent of lavender …" The world and the cuttings are both commenting on him obliquely in different ways.

But they don't attack him directly; I notice that, nobody attacks him. Though over in Schmidt, people are slapping and kissing their flesh. Geiser is losing his ability to make necessary changes in the world. The moment when he almost leaves the hot plate on is worth a mention. He is losing his memory. Going for a walk in the woods, he exults when he tells himself that no one knows where he is, alone like this, independently, proving that he is still a capable body controlled by a knowing mind; the words, "The ascent is laborious," are followed by the phrase, "just as he expected," as he confirms his good judgment to himself. "Geiser knows that it is four hundred meters up to the pass."

"I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and over¬whelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information," wrote Lyn Hejinian in her introduction to The Rejection of Closure, "potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening."

In the essay itself she wrote:

"The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to satisfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curiously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to boundedness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a distinction be made between inside and outside, between the relevant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out.

Schmidt responds to this impulse by constraining his encylopaedic impulse to literature and stories: his Kolderup is another Prospero. But his "response to the world" within this constraint is enormous and playful – if Kolderup is Prospero then his daughter is a Shamela rewriting of Miranda. Frisch quotes other books (which Holocene credits in a bibliography) but there is no sign that he expects you to have read them, or that he thinks you might be interested in consulting them afterwards. Holocene uses them to refer to itself and it leaves them as they were; there is no subversion in its attitude towards them – they are discrete ...

The dinosaurs in Geiser's excerpts are being regarded with a sort of judgmental efficiency by the writer of the scientific text, who in this context might as well be immortal. The human being who walks into the woods is happy when he thinks that no one knows where he is, as if there is a danger that he too might be glanced down upon by someone listing facts about him, or calling him "terrible" and his survival "amazing," as the science-writer does.

If the dinosaurs knew that they were being talked about like this then they also might try to assert themselves by escaping down a forest path so that none of their neighbours, family members, or anyone else would know where they were - thwarting the writer who wanted to make these books out of their memories.

Possibly the dinosaurs and the man would roam together through the Swiss woodland trying to navigate the bridges.

like every autobiography

I don't trust my essayist; they're too selective, they're bouncing across too many years and too few books, they had their hypothesis worked out too tightly before they began, and they're too much in love with it. They're completing an assignment, that's the trouble. The essay would have to be called Music in the Work of Lyn Hejinian to narrow it down but even then, what value does that have? I was aware of myself picking out selective quotes; I didn't care; it took nothing at all.

They continue their essay by pointing to a line the poet riffs on several times in My Life, 1987, "The obvious analogy is with music as with words." See p. 128 in the 2002 Green Integer edition I have here, for instance. Pointing to the autobiographical nature of My Life, they write, "The connection between 'music' and 'words' was a recurring theme in Hejinian's inner life, both as a child and as an adult. The 'words' being described in the lines adjacent to 'analogy to music' in Life are often uttered aloud" - and – then they back themselves up by quoting the one in which young women are taught to "murmur" clearly when they speak, but I can't find the page. The line on 128 has, "little dialogue, heard on the street. Baby! baby! baby!" just before it but that's not as good. They go on: "- though of course 'words' can also mean the written word. We may observe that she often tries to find a descriptive word to accompany the invocation of sound, 'murmur' (Life), 'percussion' (Aide), and so on." This "often" is a handwave but they hope you buy it.

"Noticing that she repeats the line in several different, dissimilar contexts, we may suggest a further twist: that Hejinian is critical of her own habits, that she believes this connection between words and music is mechanical, reflexive, and perhaps unexamined and unworthy.

'Repetition may function as a medium of sneering.

'Music for her always has a form. It is constrained or defined by some quality: loudness, suddenness, gentleness, etc. 'How long is that ball – of sound,' she asks in Life (p. 164). Looking at the explanatory statements she has made in reference to her own poetry, we see that form, in her mind, has a possibility of meaning that goes beyond arrangement. Yet arrangement, definition, is essential. To disconnect one line from another recreates the form of death. (Unfollowing.) Music 'speaks' by shape and form. Both means of utterance, music and words, are essentially communicative, pointing to vital meanings beyond their surface existences as print on a page or noises. There are times when we can see her test the ability of words to suggest meaning through their rhythmic qualities. 'Repercussion' coming four lines after 'percussion' in section 16 of Aide, for example, is a sign for the text to abandon strict dictionary meaning for something closer to scat singing: 'bit scrap of that roll broom.'"

I'm hesitating here because the essayist has actually written, "Playing with words" next to their red underline at this point in Aide although they also identify "roll broom" as an "instrument;" and "keys of nicety" in the previous line has "of music" written in the margin next to it. If the broom is an instrument then they're not drawing conclusions about scat singing, though. Go back and get rid of the Aide reference. Instead the essayist finds "and though the parrot speaks but says nothing this has the impact of an aphorism" on p. 7 of Happily, 2000. That seems useful. Then they look for the page in Life where the poet says that different countries have to find their own words for the sounds that cats make, but this is not necessarily a prelude to music-making … I don't know where that is, myself, and I'm not even completely sure that it appears in Life and not some other book, but the essayist discovers it successfully. I congratulate them.

They tell you something about the notion of form being complicated by this inclusion of animal-noises. "In these two excerpts we can see the poet grappling with the integration of animal-noise into the comprehensible lexicon of human-noise. The integration takes place when the animal sounds are recreated in human-oriented descriptions," they write, and then they look for more nonhuman creatures to back up their point.

Eventually they come across birds again on p. 52 of Happily: "words, birds, words birds blurred, birds in words […] The birds' words | might have been love laugh loss toss long – isn't | every explanation like every autobiography […] sentimental?" Now they can say that Hejinian is expressing an awareness of the effort she makes, as a human, to integrate the animal sounds into human form-understandings, etc, etc, the absence of animal-meaning in her "sentimental" human-meaning, the devouring nature of autobiography, swallowing everything into itself, etc, etc (should they write something about the falcons, eagles, goose, etc three years after Happily in The Fatalist, 2003?), but I am distracted by the list after "birds' words | might have been" because it has made me think of Miss Flite in Bleak House and her list of bird names, Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. On the Happily page above "birds' words" there is a line fragment that reads, "He personifies the literature of the West;" on p. 54 there are the words, "Christmas tree." They take on a new meaning.

for we who are alive

Looking in this library copy of Lyn Hejinian's Writing is an Aide to Memory, 1978, I see that someone has marked various lines with red pen throughout the entire book. The aim of this person appears to have been cohesion, since they picked out those words that add up to the impression of a thought taking place somewhere, about, e.g, water, or language use, or music ("in music" and "percussion" marked on different lines in section 16); or else they have discovered phrases that are something like aphorisms such as "indifference is the language of ennui" in section 13.

But there are so many other words and phrases in the book that I wonder how they made those underlinings add up to a point or an essay, unless they were working backwards from some larger overviewing perspective. "As a founding member of the Language movement, Hejinian has always been interested in the independence of aphorisms," I imagine they wrote. They have decided it already so they are looking for evidence. "This is clear even in her earlier works, such as Writing is an Aide to Memory (1978), which contains numerous aphoristic statements. She invokes "percussion," or the element of surprise. The sudden sound of a drum interrupting a double bass" – since they have underlined the word "jazz" in section 35 they are thinking of a double bass – "startles us with its detachment from the preceding sound. So, too, Hejinian uses surprising lines to jolt us out of our expectations. And yet she remains aware that her percussion is part of the same genre as the trumpet, ie, music, or, in the case of poetry, language. We see statements of disruption elsewhere in the poem. "In rhythm with that muddle | nor rock is sure in the air was once … most unities last too long," she writes in section 36.

'Please note," they write, "that her interest in music was indicated even earlier than Aide to Memory, when she spoke about "a new piece of mine, NUMBER PRESENT" during an interview with Vicki Hudspith in 1970. "And there was an analogy with music, too, in the 12 notes of the chromatic scale," she said."

Then they go on to list other parts of her oeuvre in which she explains sets of ideas behind the uncoupling of units of her text from dependence on the units immediately before and after, and they quote her 1983 talk, The Rejection of Closure (pub. 1985), and some other things; maybe her recent introduction to The Unfollowing, 2016. This will show consistency taking place over a period of decades.

The fourteen-line constraint was not the only one I imposed on the making of the poems. I also required myself to build them with non-sequiturs. Nothing was to follow – or nothing follow logically. I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive – a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the series of poems I'm calling "The Unfollowing" was to compose a set of elegies.

They connect this to a line in Happily, 2000, "Tightly the hands of the clock turn but other elements also must conduct logic", through Rejection's discussion of the potential openness of a text. They compare this to Elizabeth Jennings in Timely Issues, 2001, whose rhyming lines are structured all towards promoting the ineffable aim of being glad through modesty and Catholicism.