Michael McClure: Mozart and the Apple

 WHEN A MAN DOES NOT ADMIT THAT HE IS AN ANIMAL, he is less than an animal. Not more but less.

I have heard that Mozart signed letters to his sister with endearing obscenities such as, "a kiss on the bottom to my darling sister." Watch young animals at play, the endearments, the mutual explorations and cleanings, the investigations. In the human realm these cub activities are forbidden or left in the secrecy of dark closets, basements, and silent bedrooms.

Mozart might be merry, tortured, brooding, serious, all at once. An animal lives in many states. The man who cannot see that he is an animal is trapped in a maze with a beginning and an end. The beginning is obviously birth and the end is apparently death.

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Cyril Connolly states that memory is a sieve and that large and important data pieces will not pass through the weave.

An animal does not specialize in a discipline. He puts the large chunks that will not pass through the sieve into an aggregate to ensure his survival. The wolf is not a wandering scholar but a wandering minstrel—with the whole prairie for an auditorium and world-field to work upon. He can visualize a universe of sound as a field on which to conceive and topologize his personal statements. Mozart might be seen as a kind of wolf at play. His merry greeting to his sister's bottom might be a wolfish act of comic grace coming from a higher state of psychic freedom, rather than from the maze a domesticated creature is trained to run in.

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Pieces of information can come together in hieroglyphs and conformations that are beyond our normal enmazed remembrances and experiences. CHILDHOOD IS AN OVERWHELMING VISION IN REMEMBERING. CERTAINLY IT IS AN OVERWHELMING EXPERIENCE. The remembrance of the absurdities, pains, joys, INTENSITIES, preposterousnesses, agonies, sensualities, freedoms, cages, punishments, and rewards staggers the comprehension! In remembrance childhood illuminates the rememberer or recasts the old nets of familiarity and rebuilds the forgotten bridges and barriers of hates, loves, and predispositions.

To remember the chairs of childhood is to reevaluate the chairs of now.

*

The artist considers himself a realist trapped in a vision. He knows that with the twenty-seven senses he is given, and without an infinite number of senses, he can make constructs of only the most fractional semblances of the total matter he swirls in (or that thrashes or dreams in him).

The pieces of his experience and remembrance and perception, writing themselves upon his sensorium, come together in strange modalities and proportions and combinations. He believes he perceives REALISTICALLY more than it is possible to have seen. (He must lose the fear of being wrong.) As a realist he trained himself for perception-as-vision, or he was bom with the capacity and chose to develop it.

Surely the most Augustan artists cherished secret acknowledgements of their Romance—perhaps Horace frightened himself as his view of structure expanded and contracted. Seneca a wolfish act of comic grace coming from a higher state of psychic freedom, rather than from the maze a domesticated creature is trained to run in.

*

Pieces of information can come together in hieroglyphs and conformations that are beyond our normal enmazed remembrances and experiences. CHILDHOOD IS AN OVERWHELMING VISION IN REMEMBERING. CERTAINLY IT IS AN OVERWHELMING EXPERIENCE. The remembrance of the absurdities, pains, joys, INTENSITIES, preposterousnesses, agonies, sensualities, freedoms, cages, punishments, and rewards staggers the comprehension! In remembrance childhood illuminates the rememberer or recasts the old nets of familiarity and rebuilds the forgotten bridges and barriers of hates, loves, and predispositions.

To remember the chairs of childhood is to reevaluate the chairs of now.

*

The artist considers himself a realist trapped in a vision. He knows that with the twenty-seven senses he is given, and without an infinite number of senses, he can make constructs of only the most fractional semblances of the total matter he swirls in (or that thrashes or dreams in him).

The pieces of his experience and remembrance and perception, writing themselves upon his sensorium, come together in strange modalities and proportions and combinations. He believes he perceives REALISTICALLY more than it is possible to have seen. (He must lose the fear of being wrong.) As a realist he trained himself for perception-as-vision, or he was born with the capacity and chose to develop it.

Surely the most Augustan artists cherished secret acknowledgements of their Romance—perhaps Horace frightened himself as his view of structure expanded and contracted. Seneca was privy to a court that made his blood-revenge dramas seem as frothy as the plays of Noel Coward.

Seneca's death was a grotesque, noble absurdity. He escaped from the mafia-esque court of Nero (after being an apologist for monsterhood), then was condemned to death by the Emperor. The sentry tapped his foot outside Seneca's door, while one suicide attempt after another failed, until finally, with bleeding wrists, weeping wife, numbed by slow-working hemlock, dictating his death hexameters, he was carried by his slaves into a vapor bath, where he kissed final good-bye to his geist amidst the steam.

*

We are the most complex formations of physical matter on this planet surface. We are born out of physical matter from a spectrum of inorganic matter that shapes itself into amino acids, bacteria, viruses, sponges, and ultimately projects the vertebrate. The vertebrate creature coexists with life forms just as perfect, merely less complex.

It is the nature of certain matter, under special conditions, to become a growing surge producing more and more physically complex and subjectively intense types. In the 19105 and 19305 it was accepted that there is no ideological outcome to this process. Sensations of hopelessness, nausea, horror, were the result. The discoveries demanded a new bourgeois ethic for the intellectual and professional man.

But the development of the Existentialist ethic was interrupted by World War Two (a manifestation of nationalistic evangelisms and the endocrine stress of overpopulation). Camus and Sartre confronted the raw prehensions of the biological frontier sciences—and the apparent meaninglessness of life. However, their solution met, head-on, the sealing-up of a planetary industrial society at war with itself.

If experience-information (memory) is stored hologramistical-ly within the brain, that is, if the memory constructs are stored throughout the brain, and not in units in certain areas, it would do much to explain imagination and creative thought. This implies that storage is not stationary. As one constellation of memories lights up, and becomes an awareness, it illuminates partially, and possibly in toto, the adjacent, interconnected, or associated nets and constellations of information. The activity is constant, or is an off/on process. Or, it might be multiple, constant, interrelating processes.

Played against the constant shows of stored experience patterns is the intake of new immediate experience through the apertures of the sensorium—the eyes, ears, nose, etc.

*

While I am stimulated by the novelty of an immediate experience it continues to register as the primary experience. I hold an apple in my hand. I am entertained by the odor, the color, the reflections of light, the irregularities of the natural shape. I experience the weight, the density, the temperature of the apple. I am not hungry, the apple is an esthetic object.

Assume that I have a three-dimensional screen within my head (perhaps it is the reticular formation). What I feel, see, think, and know is imaged on the screen. This screen IS the best image that I can make, with limited senses, of the world and universe surrounding me. It is also the neuron-sculptural screen for memory-experience activity that continuously dances. There appears to be an order of preference for what takes place on the sculpture screen.The order is apparently biological.

*

While the apple is interesting it continues to register. As I explore it, it grows less interesting. It becomes a familiar object. It recedes into the "category" apple. However, it becomes APPLE again as I study it more and sensory interest revives. At last it becomes category again. But it becomes category gradually and by default. It becomes stored information, if it stimulates me to remember or speak of it, if I make it a piece that will not pass through the sieve.

While this APPLE is the center of my attention, while it occupies the primary area of the screen, there are associations of stored information playing at the screen's edges. I compare this apple to another apple—its similarities and dissimilarities. The APPLE may become hologramistically stored as a memory and it may interrelate with other apples, or with other memories connected with apples. (((The odor of the apple may stimulate nonverbal, nonintellective, nonrational parts of my consciousness that send apple-related associations to the periphery of the screen. The touch of the apple might do the same. The noise of a truck sloshing on the street through the rain might bring childhood images to the edges of the screen that is concerned with APPLE. Childhood rain images may light up childhood apple images, or illuminate a fleeting picture of youth that contains both apple and rain—such as eating an apple on a rainy trick-or-treat jaunt.)))

APPLE is the center of my attention, of the three-dimensional screen. At its edge flicker images that are there by chance and by associations of odor, touch, or hearing.

*

It is the nature of animal life to keep moving. The cytoplasm flows and ripples in the cell. Every life is part of the total surge of Life that feeds upon itself as it expands in size and complexity. The whole surge is powered by the sun. It becomes more complex. It grows. It expands. It is a retopologizing of the surface of the planet brought about by direct energy. Animal life keeps moving. It moves to eat, or it moves to keep from being eaten. —Or both.

The human mammal body, in the billions of years of the evolution of its complexity, has concretized the necessity to keep moving. The retopologizing surge (changing inert matter into organic) does not slow down. It will not stop exchanging parts of itself as nourishment in the expansion of the energized complexity. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, combined with the sun's energy, become pandas, salmon, roses, blackberries. Creatures move!

*

The desire for movement is internalized. In my case the desire is to write a poem. As the apple recedes, the longing to write a poem begins to produce a new image—the image of a poem, the sound of a poem—the image of a bison. The desire to write a poem about bison takes over the periphery of the image screen, perhaps the poem-desire incorporates apple-related images—or rejects them.

I am sitting with an apple in my hand but no apple on the screen. On the sculptural screen is the image of a herd of bison driven by thirst, crashing into the mudflats of a summer river on the plains. They are followed by a pack of wolves laughing like Mozarts.