Book Review: “A Quiet Unlike Any Twilight”
Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World by Joshua Poteat. The University of Georgia Press (2009).
In 1851, the same year Moby-Dick was published and the first World’s Fair was held in London, German engraver and printer J.G. Heck published his Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science. The scientific revolution that began in the mid-sixteenth century was over and science had assumed its modern form. His categories, terminology, and methods are as recognizable as our own: Heck’s illustrations cover physics, botany, zoology, mathematics, and technology. Seen side by side, they are startling in that the illustrations all attempt, in one way or another, to reduce the world to discreet categories and essences.
In this new book of poetry, Joshua Poteat uses Heck’s art as a starting point for a work that is both dreamlike and prescient. Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World: From J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science is comprised of three main sections and two appendices. The second appendix is comprised of seventeen reproductions from Heck’s Archive. These “plates” reflect a broad range of Heck’s concerns: one shows a boar being killed by dogs while another shows a globe divided into meridians, facing a small sun. Both the globe and the light hitting it are mechanically dissected: the lines and angles are precise and still, and intersections are marked with letters and numbers. Heck inscribed the German words for morning, evening, noon, and midnight at the top, bottom, right and left of the globe: the illustration appears as the scientific version of concepts of
earthly time.
Poteat states which poems link to which plates in brackets underneath their titles. In the particular case of the illustrations noted above, both are referenced in a poem entitled “Illustrating the theory of twilight.” Here, Poteat is reinstating the truth of time that lies outside mechanical understating. He unapologetically signals the poetic twilight of the sublime; the twilight that seems to invoke elements of magic, the supernatural, and the places where worlds intersect in profound ways, particularly the worlds of humanity and of nature. It is of the nature of this poetic twilight that it suggests not just endings and death, but also wonderment and visionary experience, and the fascinations and fears of childhood.
Down in the reeds, farthest from God,
where the vultures wash their feet,
is where I slept the night the dogs found
the wild boar, half-dead from a cancer,
and brought its head back to the yards.
The dogs are crazed by the kill, “as if they had seen the one true vision/of light that comes after an animal/is slaughtered in its sickness.” Extreme states of violence and madness are contrasted with the mystical mode of insight. As the light dims, the emphasis in the poem continues to turn away from mechanical reality to visionary experience: the narrator recalls vultures living “in the cupboards, in the walls” of an abandoned house, where nature (and here we must not quibble with semantics—his nature is the nature of the romantics: it stands for those things that are somehow either outside of, or lost by humans: the pure, the terrible, the uncontrolled, the still) has reclaimed the house as her own and trees are growing inside of it.
Along with the question of the poet’s relationship with nature, Poteat shares with Wallace Stevens a concern with the unanswerable question of God:
I refuse to say
I saw God in their faces, the twilight
around me told me this, and I believe it.
The refusal to say is in tension with the statement of belief, but the poet sees this tension as a condition of experience. This tension is heightened at the end of the poem. Poteat makes clear, in the chilling and final lines of the poem, yet another aspect of the poetic twilight: isolation:
what animal
is this that cannot live without a man to tell it, death is close,
stay near, do not leave me, you are all I have.
The answer is, of course, no animal. The poet suffers from a particularly human isolation, and his projection of pity onto the animal world is an expression of his distance from it and its magnetic pull. As this distance and pull are negated in Heck’s cold, motionless, exact illustrations, Poteat has employed the Blakean move of employing contraries so that the truth of the matter does not stand alone, but can be perceived through the partial insights of holistic perception.
Poteat’s epistemological search leads him to the margins. The first poem in the series is called “Illustrating the illustrators” and its subtitle indicates that it corresponds to an anatomical engraving of human hands: “When we wrote the name that we were told/was ours, the name that contained all, we would be given all that would be lost,/there was a pleasure in the small, exact/movements of our hands.” The poet at the outset introduces an aesthetic awareness outside the bounds of conventional science, and reminds us of the waning of religious monopolies on meaning as well as the importance of considering the medium of communication itself. Along with the notion of knowledge as pleasure, Poteat’s voice echoes the religious idiom: searching, meaning, suffering, and loss. The insistent recurrence of the word “all” sets a tone of near despair as absolute truth withdraws. As with other instances in his work, the Big Questions are set against humble images: the physical, actual hands of the illustrators, of those who have gone before in their attempts to somehow map out or explicate some portion of the world.
As humans lost faith in an immutable absolute, an analogue to God emerged: the myth of the underlying girders of the universe, the algorithms that explain the flight of birds if not of human desire. In “Illustrating the theory of interference” (a theory postulating that memory loss occurs when unrelated memories begin to intersect) Heck’s design is of a single, elegant spiral leading to a black, shaded sphere. It could just as well be an illustration of the geometric movement of a planet or, conversely, of a universe centered around the Earth. Poteat states that, “God’s plan cannot restore the decaying groves of fire,/and the gold birch buries sap low and pure/for the deer to salve their throats. These are facts.” The word “facts” is stated assertively, almost aggressively, as if to conclude an argument. What is at stake? The disappearing cultural memories of belief are still lingering, but they are infused with the raw hunger of animal nature. This hunger is among the last of the absolutes. He concludes, “If only I was with her now,/I could be in the world remembering this.” In the light of the poem’s themes, these final lines that might otherwise present an unexpected invocation of a past love, now echo the Psalms with their plaintive music of simple human desires transformed into a deep need for transcendent meaning and connection.
The irony of the title is that Poteat and Heck’s ways of illustrating stand in stark contrast, even if they have been spawned by the same cultural forces of industrialization and social progress. Heck’s drawings are rigid, symmetrical, clean, and clear. Even the previously mentioned plate of enraged dogs devouring a boar has a detached, mechanical, fixed quality to it. All sense of motion and change has been replaced by stillness and exactitude. Poteat’s poems usher in contraries: pleasure, curiosity, love, understanding, growth, and serenity are met with madness, death, decomposition, darkness, blindness, and suffering. The tension between loss and fulfillment operates on the level of language as well: the lines are cyclical, the images elusive, the realizations tentative. Over the course of the book, the themes and images recur, but elliptically, and under the daunting shadow of an ever increasing nothingness. Even language itself exists in decay and twilight. The nature of this nothingness remains obscure, but this attempt and consequent failure to understand is not a meaninglessness act. Always, there is the suggestion of something else, “the brightest last.” We can understand: we just can’t understand “all.”
In keeping with the poet’s concern for totality, the poems in the book stand alone as fully realized works, but also connect with each other and achieve a sort of thematic arc. Over the course of its pages, the poems transition from the lyrically surreal opening lines to those in “Appendix One,” in which blank space becomes the defining structure. The darkness of the images is contrasted with the empty whiteness overcoming the printed pages. All throughout the book, images of rot and ruin have suggested a near religious longing for completion and unity. By the time we get to the first appendix, this contrast begins to find itself figured in the structure of the poems themselves. The words are replaced, by dissolution or by the light of white space: earlier poems are rewritten, or, really, eviscerated. This appendix is made up of the remains of the earlier poems. Passages are erased, revealing entirely new images and new ways of making sense of them. We are prepared to see the growing blank space on the pages as imbued with meaning: decay, sunlight, emptiness, ghosts, and birth. Perhaps the blinding whiteness of Melville. Here is the great negation of Heck: less is shown, but the resulting picture of the world is intended to be more complete than Heck’s compendium of all the sciences.
Of course, one of the stays against a mechanistic model of the world is the imagination itself and the imagination is key because it presents another way to consider the question of religion without collapsing into a rigid or limiting dogma. Poteat suggests what is possible only through creative thought: foxes turn inside out; a slug, “fresh as cinnamon,” arises from the dying embers of a stove; pigs sing to the moon. We occasionally glimpse the looms and locomotives we might associate with nineteenth century technology but bucolic images dominate: sheep, fields, and fireflies. These are all images that highlight the “something else” side of nature: the sense of a peace outside our normal day to day affairs, a sense of meaning that exceeds our grasping. Imagination itself is one of the tools in this search for whatever feels lost or missing and dying.
Another move that stands in contrast with Heck is Poteat’s use of quotes and allusions. The allusive is slippery, reciprocal, and relational. It is inexact. James Joyce and Wallace Stevens are quoted directly, Stevens outside and inside the poems, and Poteat’s lines echo both the latter’s theories of the necessary fiction, as well as his constantly shifting sense of awareness: the fluidity of consciousness.
Perhaps Poteat is open to charges of invoking both a now unpopular Modernism as well as an unpopular Romanticism (not that thinking people would be overly concerned with this). But Illustrating the Machine is very much a book of our time, and the anxieties central to its tensions are not those of Heck’s, even if we see their origins in his engravings. Poteat is no Byronic individual, alone amid the raging storms of alienation and despair. While there is a great deal of isolation within his poetry, he emphasizes his language’s intertextuality. The notes include extensive explanations of who inspired what poems, and the inspirators range from sculptor Alice Aycock to surrealist Mary Ruefle to “the red foxes of Hampstead, North Carolina, if there are any left.” In fact, his notes resemble the liner notes section of a hip-hop album, with their mix of crediting samples and
citing influences.
Poteat recognizes that we must “forgive the pastoral,” and so we must, even if this pastoral vision is hardly one of Arcadian tranquility: it is bloody and antagonist, even as it yields moments of beauty and temporary, anxious insights. He writes, “At the edges of all fields, there is a space/for disorder.” As we continue to push to the edges of the “field,” bucolic or scientific, we enter increasingly into uncertainty. The notion of God shifts; memories seem tenuous. Vultures stir in the cupboards. The hum of a machine blends with the sound of a river.
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