Vol. 43 No. 4 1976 - page 627

BOOKS
627
One reads a poem like "Tattoos
12"
and the first response is "that felt
good!"; and only later ... "what happened?" Of course, Wright's poems
are not without' 'sense," not without conceptual-symbolic dimensions, but
it is the sense of primal consciousness, the sense of paradox and multiplicity
that binds these words and their meanings. Or, to use Lacan's terminology,
it is "the letter in the unconscious," which, though it may oppose conscious
purpose, is never arbitrary. So in the afterglow of the initial reading one can
go back and, unwinding the words from their embrace, realize, for example,
that the reason "oval oval oval oval" works so well with "push, pull" is that
an oval is a circle which has been squeezed, "pushed," or elongated, ..pulled, "
at two points, that oval is the transcendent ease of the perfect equilibrium of
the circle being subjected to pressure . The oval is also an egg, birth, the
push and pull of form coming into existence. And what do "apple, arrival,
the railroad, shoe" have to do with each other? Is this just perverse eroticism
at work again? No, there is meaning in the apparent madness. All the words
are related to movement-the "apple" to the movement toward knowl–
edge, the expulsion from grace, the fall into the limits of temporal existence
and guilt. With "apple" in the first slot and "arrival, the railroad, shoe"
functioning as substitutions thereafter, the series together carries meanings
of movement-knowledge-guilt-limit with a progressive emphasis on limita–
tion: "apple" signifying a transcendental causal function; "arrival," be–
cause it is used nonspecifIcally, signifying an abstract goal of movement;
"railroad" reducing the abstract movement
to
a finite vehicle of movement;
and "shoe" further restricting movement and the vehicle of movement .
The limit-restriction element is both a reverberation back to and an amplift–
cation of the ftrst line-that is, it ampliftes the sense of stress of' 'oval" and
"push, pull" and it extends the notion of imperfectness implied there. The
movement-knowledge-guilt-limit motif is also evident in the second, third,
and fourth lines: "windowpanes," suggesting consciousness itself which
receives the knowledge, immediately becomes contaminated with the
"smell of tar," black, sticky, clinging guilt. Further, all of these motifs get
connected with the "meaning" of words: after the first line, which simply
establishes a process, comes the first subject in the poem (' 'words' ') and all
the subsequent subjects which follow must be seen as substitutions, replace–
ments, which serve to multiply the signiftcations connected with that ftrst
subject. So, the ftrst stanza as well as the entire poem is about words, about
the way they come to carry meaning, the dynamic that exists between words
as signifters and the things they signify, the guilt of words as opposed
to
the
purity of silence.
Anyway, after making meaning sense of these things, after justifying
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