My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

214 REZNIKOFF'S NEARNESS
resented in its totality (the taboo against graven images) but only as splinters
(of light), details. fl ••• but the cracked glass held in the frame."37
19. The ordinary, the everyday, the common, the neglected, the disregarded/unacknowledged
as the site of Paradise (there is no other--only
recover): Arts de Jaire, the art of doing, as in, The Practice oj Everyday Life:
As I was wondering with my unhappy thoughts,
I looked and saw
that I had come into a sunny place
familiar and yet strange.
"Where am Ii' I asked a stranger. "Paradise."
"Can this be Paradise?" I asked surprised,
for there were motor-cars and factories.
"It is," he answered. "This is the sun that shone on Adam once;
the very wind that blew upon him toO."38
Looked and saw: it is this twofold action that the poems constantly replay;
looking is never enough, for it shows only what can be seen by using light;
in contrast, the world may be beheld, beholded-held, cradled, rocked.
The very wind.
20. First-generation immigrant to America not as exile (as it was for Jabes
coming to France: Europe already "inhabited") but as founder-one who
finds/inhabits and one who makes new a language (a new world). It is
Reznikoff's mother who says, "We are a lost generation ... It is for our children
to do what they can."39 For Reznikoff, finding as founding means
finding as foundering (to fall to the ground, to come to grief).
21. The recovery of the ordinary: then was it lost?
22. NOT flatness or absence of rhetoric but ... a nearness to the world not
seen as "nature" but as social (urban). Materials of the world at hand, as
found: words as materials.
Not, that is, reports of things seen (narrow definition of the "objectivist"
as ocular or transparent imagism) but bearing witness to things not seen,
overlooked. Entering into the word as a descent, not (Idealized) ascent,
to borrow Simone Weil's terms.
37. By the Well of Living and Seeing, sec. II, #19 (excerpt), 2: 121.
38. Inscriptions, #20, 2:75. This is the sense of paradise I hear in Ron Silliman's Paradise and Lyn
Hejinian's The Guard.
39. These are the last words in Sarah Reznikoff's "Early History of a Seamstress", in Family
Chronic/e, p. 99.