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I
The word “happiness” appears eleven times in George Oppen’s published writing: once in “A Theological Definition,” “Route,” “Return,” and “Leviathan”; twice in “A Narrative”; and four times in “Of Being Numerous.”
Truth also is the pursuit of it:
Like happiness, and it will not stand.
The word “air” appears thirty-three times.
I should have written, not the rain
Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes
In the air, the dust
Here still.
II
The first person to interrogate the “motes in the air” was named John Tyndall. He had been investigating ‘heat as motion’ when he noticed his lamp behaving “exactly as sun-beams are seen to do in the dusty air of London.” “Observe this apparently solid luminous cylinder, issuing from our electric lamp,” he wrote, “marking its track thus vividly upon the dust of our darkened room.” In that dark, dank air, the beam hardened, turning into some divine light, into a mark on the air, a brush stroke, and in its revelation offered something new to sight. “For fifteen years it had been my habit to make use of floating dust to reveal the paths of luminous beams through the air,” Tyndall wrote, “but until 1868 I did not intentionally reverse the process, and employ a luminous beam to reveal and examine the dust.”
In order to reverse the process, Tyndall conceived a device he called the “blue sky apparatus.” The first what, was a tube with openings on either end in which what discovered is what gives the sky its color, “and it can be made to display a color rivaling that of the purest Italian sky.”
The “purest Italian sky,” of course, was not a scientific measurement but an aesthetic experience. In his free-time, Tyndall was an ardent naturalist. Among his publications number several mountaineering memoirs which recount his time in the Alps: his experience with the “unstained blue of heaven” and “the darkling blue of the zenith”; with “sky-gleams of the deepest blue” and what. It was there, he writes, that he discovered happiness: “The physical is the substratum of the spiritual, and this fact ought to give the food we eat and the air we breathe a transcendental significance.” (Hours, 303-4).
When Tyndall died in 1893, a memorial stone was erected in the Alps across from his prized glacier, Aletsch, beneath the “unstained blue of heaven.” He had been overdosed with Chloral hydrate by his wife, Louisa. “I measured a tablespoonful of magnesia, as I thought,” she told the coroner, “and added water... All he said was: ‘there is a curious sweet taste.’” The two spent the afternoon administering a mustard emetic and attempting water and coffee until John passed that evening. “I said John: ‘I have given you Chloral,”’ she reported, “and he said: ‘Yes, my poor darling, you have killed your John.’”
III
In the summer, I am in love. Chicago brings tidings: corn sweat, cicada-song, drifts of cottonwood. We walk down the street holding hands, heads down, like ducklings, as the world collects in our lungs and groceries, pockets and hair. When we reach home, shutting the windows and rinsing the groceries, we learn it was not happiness in the air but the worst dust storm since 1934.
IV
Sometimes it would be a week before we would see the sun. It was just dark out.
Sometimes the cloud would look black; sometimes it looked red.
We just choked and smothered.
V
In his published writing, George Oppen uses the word x-many times.
George met Mary Oppen at Oregon State University in 1926. They were, in love. They are suspended (George) and expelled (Mary) for staying out overnight. The two hitchhike around the Southwest and Texas, marrying on October 7, 1927, in Dallas. Oppen used the name “David Verdi,” pursuing them with a private detective. In communal housing, whatever, whatever, his what.
In 1950, he and Mary Oppen fled California what, the House Un-Americans Committee, to Mexico, where he stopped writing for 25 years. He worked as a carpenter and raised his daughter. “I stopped writing, yes.”
“Bertolt Brecht once wrote that there are times when it can be almost a crime to write of trees. I happen to think that the statement is valid as he meant it.”
V
“There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art,” Oppen wrote.
It happens, though, that Brecht’s statement cannot be taken literally. There is no crisis in which political poets and orators may not speak of trees, though it is more common for them, in this symbolic usage, to speak of “flowers.” “We want bread and roses”: “Let a thousand flowers bloom” on the left: on the right, the photograph once famous in Germany of Handsome Adolph sniffing the rose. Flowers stand for simple and undefined human happiness
What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
X
Three years earlier, Brecht had written the same poem to Walter Benjamin in a letter: “I doubt if we’ll be able to play chess under the apple trees for many more summers,” it read.
XI
“The actually forbidden word, Brecht, of course, could not write”: it was not “trees,” Oppen wrote, but “something like aesthetic.”
In the Third Critique, Kant the sublime: aesthetic existence is not a crime but an what.
Where there is no safety, there can be no aesthetic experience.
XI
After college, at a poetry conference in Spain, I took the short train from Madrid to the small coastal town where Walter Benjamin took his own life. It is a beach town. It was the off-season. I napped on the sun-warmed stones and paced the quiet beige streets, watching the pale gauze curtains blow in and out of the apartment windows. In the evenings, ice-cream ran down my arm in front of Benjamin’s headstone, high on the hillside, where I sat watching the sun set over the white sailboats in the cove. In the morning, I set out into the mountains. I was aware of the perversity but I did not mind. I became lost and covered in bug bites; I forgot my water beneath an olive tree; I walked with three farm dogs almost the entire trail. In the afternoon, I experienced historical process, walking his escape trail in reverse, ending where Benjamin had begun, in Baynuls-sur-Mer, exhausted and covered in cuts, where I took a warm shower, ate a meal, and went back to the beach.
XI
Benjamin about dust.
X
Every day I watch my high-school students measure the value of their lives in furtive glances and lunch-hours as against all political meaning. It is wondrous to see people so alive and full of themselves. We read Notes from Underground, and they hate it; we read The Haunting of Hill House, and they hate it. I ask, sometimes, questions of them which I know have no answer: how is it to be alive, now, as yourself? I am not surprised at the confused reponses I receive: I enjoy hearing them more than I can explain. On my last day, in December, they bring parting gifts—a felt bird, a cow-bell, a large chocolate cake—and one student hands me a separate note. “You have what, to be myself, how it is.” I do not write him back.
In October, we buy student-tickets to hear Dvorak’s what. I am writing poems about someone who loves the fourth movement. As we sit in the silent auditorium and watch the musicians firing like calm, well-oiled pistons, I cannot help but feel it is somehow tragic. All this artifice which does not what: a church to keep out nature. where it creeps back in. In reponse to the terror of nature, the symphony: the ghost-image of the factory.
This is the sincerity I feel lost walk across the graduation stage. I cannot stop crying. I have to step out. John wants to become a doctor; Laurie wants to become an architect; no one will become anything. The sphere will overdetermine and destory them, exiting into the world wherein the desires of force are not their own.
XI
For the rest of her life Louisa Tyndall was haunted by having killed her husband. She tried to absolve her conscience with a monumental Life and Letters honoring his work, but years and years in progress, it did not come. She denied his letters be removed from the house and rejected collaborators who would not live with her. She sat alone with the material, breathing it in—their past, her John—until she died, in 1940.
VIII
It purports to consecrate an autonomous zone over and above the empirical world like the lauded artistic “aesthetic circle”: we reenact what we remember in childhood—where to have a crush means, in some literal sense, the entire world. It is the “world again.” Material conditions are distant; all that matters is the school hallways and stolen glances and touching hands at recess. One must suspend disbelief in an absurd and naïve metaphysical power against material conditions. It involves a suspension of disbelief; one must pretend with all seriousness that it is a “real” autonomous thing with the power to eclipse the empirical world. Its outsize important against the material things which really matter: death and war and money and capitalism and suffering and pain. It breaks off from the empirical world by way of its silliness, its clownishness, its what. When you are inside this circle things become “more.” Bianca says people are ugly. But when inside this autonomous zone some “more” inheres in a simple visage—a face.
VIII
What I mean to say is that times are bad. The air is very dark.
VIII
“Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air that we have breathed,” Walter Benjamin wrote, among the people who have lived with us...”
George Oppen, something else.
Art and love share the courage of dumb faith in the power of beauty to triumph over the real world.
In November, a woman on the top floor has us over for dinner. “Excuse the dust,” she says. She is a cleaner. All she does is dust: “Dust, dust. Dust. Dust. Dust.”
All she does, dust. Dust, dust. Dust.