My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

C LOS EllS TEN I N G 299
bases of reason against a dehumanizing fixation on the rigidly monologic
and rationalistic. The problem is being stuck in anyone modality of language-not
being able to move in, around, and about the precincts of language.
I am not anti-symbolic any more than I am pro-"semiotic". Rather I
am interpolated in their folds, knowing one through the other, and hearing
the echo of each in the next. This is what I mean to evoke by "alorality"­
sound language, language grounded in its embodiments.
Human consciousness has as much a sedimentary as a developmental
disposition; stages don't so much replace each other as infiltrate or interpenetrate-I
want to say peiform-each other. Consciousness is a compost
heap, to borrow a term from Jed Rasula. Neither the symbolic stage nor the
rise of literacy marks language's de-absorption in the world. Language itself,
speech itself, is a technology, a tool, that, from the first cultures to the first
responses to the cry of a baby, allows us to make our way on the earth by
making a world of it. The iconic sound shape of language beats the path.
Iconicity recognizes the ability of language to present its meaning rather
than to represent or designate it. The meaning is not something that
accompanies the words but is performed by them. Performance has the
potential to foreground the inexorable and "counterlogical" verbalness of
poetry-"thickening the medium" by increasing "the disparity between
itself and its referents."24 When sound ceases to follow sense, when, that
is, it makes sense of sound, then we touch on the matter of language.25 This
is the burden of poetry; this is why poetry matters.
It is precisely because sound is an arational or nonlogical feature of language
that it is so significant for poetry-for sound registers the sheer
physicality of language, a physicality that must be the grounding of reason
exactly insofar as it eludes rationality. Sound is language's flesh, its
opacity as meaning marks its material embeddedness in the world of
things. Sound brings writing back from its metaphysical and symbolic
functions to where it is at home, in performance.
Sound, like poetry "itself", can never be completely recuperated as ideas,
as content, as narrative, as extralexical meaning. The tension between
sound and logic reflects the physical resistance in the medium of poetry.
Rime's reason-the truth of sound-is that meaning is rooted in the arationality
of sound, as well as in the body's multiple capacities for signification.
Language is extra-lexical, goes beyond sense, and nothing shows this
better than verbal performance, which, like the soundless performance of
24. William K. Wimsatt, "On the Relation of Rhyme to Reason", in The Verbal Icon, Studies in
the Meaning of Poetry (LeXington, University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 217. Wimsatt is referring
to poetry as text not to the performance of poetry.
25. See Agamben, "The Idea of Prose", p. 37.