TUNE ME GOLD:
NOTES ON THE TOTAL TECHNIQUE OF MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN
Maggie O’Sullivan: In the House of the Shaman,
Reality Street.
Joseph Beuys was interested in the transformative aspects of shamanism,
and, like Maggie O’Sullivan, brought this practice, as metaphor, into the heart
of a transformative twentieth century art.
‘The nature of my sculpture is … change.’ Beuys provides O’Sullivan with one of the
epigraphs for this work. Sign posts.
Marks on the page; tracks across the snow that the
shaman follows. Linguistic proliferation
is the nearest you’ll get to the processes of nature.
First, precision:
‘Great brilliancy and projection: the eye seemed to fall perpendicular from
level to level along our trees, the nearer and further Park; all things hitting
the sense with double but direct instress.’
(Hopkins, Journal, 1870) Then, exuberance: ‘Down roughcast, down
dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches, / Shivelights and shadowtackle in
long lashes lace, lance, and part.’
(Hopkins)
But why exuberance as sound? Certainly ‘The whole landscape flushes on a
sudden at a stir.’ But this would be to
admit that sound is simply a matter of imitation. The only way to make language shift like a
lump of lard in different temperatures is to sculpt with instability inside the
linguistic sign.
‘Naming’ is a poem with an apparent riddle
structure. It ends:
this is called /
fish
Mixed Pulses etched
Finningly, brilliant corners decapitate
The creation of adverbial neologisms is a favoured
technique. ‘Finningly’ emphasises the
function of the very small, independent fins in the larger movement, ‘pulses’
that are therefore ‘mixed’. But etching
and decapitation suggest both a cutting movement of fish through water and the
violence of the river itself: a martial violence.
Beast’s
coat Loading
battlegivens:
echoes Anglo-Saxon (and possibly Bill Griffiths)
with its compounds:
wound
Livery
laid into rivers
has the alliterative weight of Bunting. Fish as wounded soldier. Maggie O’Sullivan names by naming anew. Such ‘description’ is a displacement of its
object. What remains is a transformed
language.
This work must be performed, a consequence of its
exuberance. ‘She reads unhurriedly
letting the measured syllables relate to establish their rhythms in an
appropriate time’ (Adrian Clarke). There
needs to be a published tape. What
happens during this performance? I
believe we may experience language in a state of becoming; it always is
becoming - both in individuals and society - but never in the concentrated way
O’Sullivan handles it. A becoming in
which movement and scent, for example, are ‘Uppies! Downies! Jumpies! /
Fire-Sinuses!’. An ideolect becoming
dialect as an audience listens.
Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry, then, is the very
creation of meaning. Derek Attridge,
writing of lexical onomatopoeia in Peculiar
Language, deals with this single form of linguistic exuberance in a way I
believe is relevant to all the devices and techniques in O’Sullivan’s
work. Onomatopoeia is one example of
neologism.
All speech
involves muscular movements …; and the particular aspects of this complex physical
process which function in a given example of onomatopoeia depend less on the
specific configurations of the phonetic sequence in question than on the
meaning of the passage. The result is a
diversion of attention away from the referent in itself to the activity of referring carried out by
language … . And it is that focus of attention on the
materiality of language as it does its
work of bringing meaning into being that has so often been interpreted as
mimetic or iconic representation, because the experience is unquestionably one
of increased vividness or intensity of signification. (pp 153-4)
The epigraph from Pound for the poem ‘Of Mutability’
announces an alchemical ‘seeking a word to make change’. This astonishing text goes beyond neologism,
beyond precision, description. The
creative exuberance produces its own linguistic transformations. You can hear ‘groundsel’ in ‘ground all’,
‘bird in the hand’ in ‘bids in the fist’ (perhaps ‘buds’ too, appropriately
bucolic to this collection, if you submit to this language’s processes). ‘Flecks / flux / flues’ snapshots the
processes like a Muybridge; flux indeed.
But the lines
flew trees / few truths /
fish-
in-
frog
equate the kinds of linguistic slippage in the first
line here, with natural metamorphoses hinted at in the three single words. The result is that, for O’Sullivan, in the
final words of this poem, ‘GOLD / Is Recovered’. This is not the twittering of Yeats’ gold
bird of artifice and fixed eternity. The
gold, that which is produced by transformation, is the artifice. (For O’Sullivan this is also in nature.)
A doubleness.
Reference and autonomy, for want of better words. A tension between precision and transformation. William Carlos Williams wrote in Spring and All of this doubleness:
The word is
not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which
destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by
its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus
freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time.
Perhaps Williams had Gertrude Stein in mind. Stein is present also in In the House of the Shaman in an epigraph which declares that
writers, far from expressing themselves, ‘express what the world is doing’
(which is transforming, which is what the language is doing, etc.…)
The effects (I’ve outlined only a few) are thick in
the material texture of O’Sullivan’s language.
The technique is total because it is so exhaustive and to describe small
effects is to create a lexicon of devices which would bear as much resemblance
(on the page and, particularly, as sound) as a sex manual to the experience of
orgasm. It demands an engagement with
language that is unusual in activating possible responses on so many levels at
once. It has to be experienced at length
before description is possible.
‘Yonderly’, a repeated coinage. To speak of ‘yonderly’ things you must speak
from ‘here’ and know the difference between the two, as a shaman does. The real shamanism of this extraordinary
language is that it is double; it belongs to the world and yet passes beyond it.
