with dreams
one altered word in ‘Cocaine’ by John Wieners
[…]
One can only take means to reduce misery,
confuse the sensations so that this Face,
what aches in the heart and makes each newstart less close to the source of desire,
fade from the flesh that fires the night,
with dreams and infinite longing.
lines 14–19 (the end) of ‘Cocaine’ by John Wieners. Full poem here
If you are used to that extraordinary recording of John Wieners’s poem ‘Cocaine’ made by J.H. Prynne, who died two months ago — and I am more than used to it; the text and the recording are inseparable for me — then it is jarring to witness footage of John Wieners himself reading this poem (you can find it on YouTube: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973). His delivery in and of itself is wild, let alone by comparison with Prynne’s: it’s oracular, peristaltic, hectoring, camp, somehow petrified… and the reason I’m writing this is that instead of the words “infinite longing” at the end, the copy from which Wieners is reading has “unutterable longing”.
This isn’t something I realized until suddenly presented with the option of its absence, but really the presence of “infinite” in that last line, the presence of infinity there at all, is what makes the poem meaningful to me, what makes it hurt. I’ve never read a poem coming from a place of addiction which hurts as keenly and as deeply as this one does. That pain is pretty much neutralized for me by the word “unutterable” — when the longing in this poem’s valediction is beyond merely speech — this is nowhere near enough when the longing you are used to, the longing present in the poem you knew before, is a longing which does not fit into the poem, into language, into life, maybe not even into the universe.
Apparently “longing”, the word, does just come from lengthening; as if what it means, what it records, is an emotional or affective stretching-out. That’s what happens to you, your self, your soul, in time and in space, when you long for something: you yearn to collapse the uncrossable and unbendable distance between you and whatever it is you desire, to become elastic enough that distance is made meaningless, made null.
*
Making things meaningless, making them null, is one of the things infinity can do. It’s a reckless thing to manipulate, because it isn’t a thing; it’s an absolute of ‘bigger’, of ‘smaller’, of ‘beyond’. It is a sinkhole of transgression so deep and so total that if you introduce it to other things it can rob them of their characteristics, their definitions.
Here’s one I’ve never forgotten, out of Euclidean geometry: if you travel round the edge of a circle whose centre is an infinite distance away, you’re going in a straight line. The thing by which you identify this shape is lost. Embracing infinity costs even the circle its very identity. John Clare’s instinct was to call eternity itself “this sad non-identity”, and although ‘An Invite To Eternity’ is so different from what John Wieners is doing I do feel it can join hands with ‘Cocaine’ in the dark somehow. Both poems devastate me.
Via the final line of ‘Cocaine’ (and I guess the presence in it of God, too) I sometimes think of the ‘Louange a l’Éternité de Jésus’ from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. This movement is marked “Infiniment lent, extatique”. (“Infiniment lent” even kind of sounds like “infinite longing”).
There’s a paradox in there, isn’t there. Imagine some angelic realm where the divine musicians can take that instruction literally. “Play this music infinitely slow.” Any finite audience (after a long while) realizes that the very first note lasts, is going to last, forever. What else can infinite slowness mean? It’s easy, say the angels: when one infinity has elapsed, move on to the next note!
But to the likes of us, who live less than it, infinity doesn’t elapse. Here it is again, breaking rhythm as it breaks geometry. In the reality of performance, infinity has no place: you have to move on, to play the next note, and maybe that’s where the marking “extatique” becomes relevant, ecstatic meaning “of displacement or removal from place” — actual movement in human time, not being stuck in that non-place of pure stillness generated by infinity. (What would Zeno make of that.)
*
When I used or drank till dawn, all I wanted was for that period of intake to go on forever. I’ll tell you this: it never did. But I gave it a hell of a go, and more than once it almost destroyed me (literally). Infinity curtailed by ecstatic dawn is a misery and an agony like nothing else. You are a finite creature with a finite life — which you are barely living. But what you get as a concession prize is tomorrow. Every dawn the line-break and whitespace in “each new // start”. And you can dream; and maybe, given tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, maybe you find that what you long for is not (after all) an infinity away.