We’re heading toward Patterson, William Carlos Williams’ modern epic lyric. The poem’s guiding conceit is stated early in the text:
Yet there is no return: rolling up out of chaos, a nine months’ wonder, the city, the man, an identity—it can’t be otherwise—an interpenetration, both ways.
With that identity, man=city, you can see that ontology is in play. But we are, specifically, headed toward Book V, which is an extended discourse on the Unicorn Tapestries in The Cloisters museum in New York City. They depict the hunting of a unicorn. In Medieval sacred symbology that was a vehicle for the capture and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, aka the Christ. Williams, with full knowledge, of course, treats it also as a figure for the defloration of the bride.
So there we have it, at trinity: 1) a story of an imaginary beast, 2) a story of a quasi-historical man-god, and 3) a story enacted many times by many people in many places, a common story of man and woman. As he weaves these stories through one another, Williams is conscious, always, that he is dealing with a tapestry made of threads, in animate material stuff. So we have three stories woven into one physical tapestry woven into one (meta)physical poem.
Let’s approach gently.
First, let us review, the Great Chain of Being, classically. Then remind ourselves about Latour Litanies by finding something like them in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Then through language to Williams.
The Great Chain of Being
We have objects, inanimate objects, at the bottom. They consist of form and substance. A ball bearing, for example. Form: sphere; substance: metal, shall we say, stainless steel.
Then we have plants; they’re alive, they grow, they die; but the also reproduce. Think of them as an object (form and substance), with the addition of a, shall we call it, a vegetal soul.
Above plants, animals: body (form and substance), vegetative soul, sensitive soul. Technically, I suppose, the souls are elaborations of form.
Continuing up: Humans: body (form and substance), vegetative soul, sensitive soul, rational soul. It’s that rational soul that distinguishes us, in this theory, from all other creatures.
You can find this in Plato, more systematically in Aristotle; and, of course, throughout Western thought. The notion that man consists of three souls is not unique to the West intellectual. In Primitive Man the Philosopher, Paul Radin has shown that the Oglala Sioux of North America, the Masai of East Africa, and the Batak of Sumatra also believe that man consists of three souls and a body. He goes on to suggest that such a belief may be a cultural universal. It may or it may not be, but the fact that similar theories appear on four continents (North America, Europe, Africa, Asia) suggests that the task those theories perform, an account of human nature, is highly constrained.
Some Latour Litanies in Burton
A Latour litany is a list that conjoins elements spanning different stations in the Great Chain. Latour, I’m told, uses them as a way of establishing ontological equivalence among the items in such a list, e.g. kumquat, Bikini atoll, octopus, Eiffel Tower, the Federal Communication Commission (of the US Government). Robert Burton has many lists in his Anatomy of Melancholy, some ontologically homogeneous, some ontologically heterogeneous. The latter are not quite Latour Litanies, for Burton is not, so far as I know, using them to assert ontological equivalence among their members.
First, a homogeneous list (p. 174*); Burton’s talking of astronomy and makes a comparison between models of the solar system and maps of the earth: “And they be but inventions, as most of them acknowledge—as we admit of equators, tropics, colures, circles arctic and antarctic—, for doctrine’s sake . . .” Now consider this list, which starts homogeneously and then goes just a touch wild (p. 163): “Many strange places, isthmi, euripi, chersonesi [isthmuses, straits, peninsulas], creeks, havens, promontories, straits, lakes, baths, rocks, mountains; places and fields where cities have been ruined or swallowed, battles fought; creatures, sea monsters, remora, etc., minerals, vegetals.” The basic theme is geographic places. But then he lists a most interesting category of places, places of human ruin, and that leads him to living creatures. And then, for completeness perhaps? “minerals, vegetals.” We end up with ontological hetereogeniety, but there’s certainly no assertion of equivalence of being.
Now we’re looking at a section of his text where Burton is reporting the mental symptoms of melancholy (p. 143): “One supposeth himself to be a dog, cock, bear, horse, glass, butter, etc.” We start off with four animals, an ontologically homogeneous list; but then we have an inanimate physical substance, glass, and a substance derived from living animals, butter. So we’ve got a bit of ontological diversity, but, this is a list of things that melancholy people pretend to be, as though melancholy were a disorder of ontological conception.
Here Burton’s talking about love melancholy (p. 238): “Jupiter himself was turned into a satyr, shepherd, a bull, a swan, a golden shower, and what not for love . . . “ Satyr, shepherd, swan distinctly different kinds of being, and then a golden shower. Ontological diversity, yes, but in the activity of a god, a being with supernatural powers.
One can hardly make any generalize about Burton’s usage on the basis of four examples. The obvious generalization to pursue would be that ontological diversity in lists is associated with disorder, which makes sense.
Recouping Chomsky
Ontology shows up, of course, in the texture of language (for a brief discussion, see this post). Noam Chomsky’s most famous sentence uses ontological disorder to show that syntax and semantics are independent: colors green ideas sleep furiously. Ideas are the sorts of things that can sleep or that have color. The sentence is nonsense, but is at the same time grammatical.
However, John Hollander prefixed Chomsky’s line with two others and thereby recouped it:
Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts: While breathless, in stodgy viridian, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Chomsky’s line now makes sense, if poetic sense. But that’s the point, no?
How does he do it? Crudely, given Chomsky’s line alone, we read it against ordinary usage and find it disorderly. Hollander provides it with a context in which its usages are consistent with the context created in the two initial lines. It’s that internal consistency among the three lines that does the trick of ontological revision. That is, the consistency simply leads us to posit an alternative ontology.
Patterson V: Unicorn Tapestries
Now to Williams. As I indicated at the beginning, Williams is meditating on the Unicorn tapestries. Here’s a passage. I present it twice. First, without comment. The second time I put certain words in boldface and then list them individually and the end, with a brief comment about each. I make no pretense that this is an exhaustive commentary on ontology in his passage.
If the passage seems to just hang there, well, that’s because I chose a more or less arbitrary end point. I’m not doing a reading of this passage, just describing one aspect of its semantics.
The mind is the demon
drives us . well,
would you prefer it to
turn vegetable and
wear no beard?
— shall we speak of love
seen only in a mirror
— no replica?
reflecting only her impalpable spirit?
which is she whom I see
and not touch her flesh?
The Unicorn roams the forest of all true
lover’s minds. They hunt it down. Bow wow! sing hey the
green holly!
— every married man carries in his head
the beloved and sacred image
of a virgin
whom he has whored
but the living fiction
a tapesty
silk and wool shot with silver threads
a milk-white one-horned beast
I, Paterson, the King-self
saw the lady
through the rough woods
outside the palace walls
The mind is the demon
drives us . well,
would you prefer it to
turn vegetable and
wear no beard?
— shall we speak of love
seen only in a mirror
— no replica?
reflecting only her impalpable spirit?
which is she whom I see
and not touch her flesh?
The Unicorn roams the forest of all true
lover’s minds. They hunt it down. Bow wow! sing hey the
green holly!
— every married man carries in his head
the beloved and sacred image
of a virgin
whom he has whored
but the living fiction
a tapesty
silk and wool shot with silver threads
a milk-white one-horned beast
I, Paterson, the King-self
saw the lady
through the rough woods
outside the palace walls
Some brief comments:
- mind: rational soul
- vegetable: an ontological rank down, the vegetative soul
- bread: object, but body part
- love: which soul, vegetative, rational?
- replica: ontologically, what’s this?
- her, she, I: indices of people, but implying social space, relationships
- flesh: physical object, body substance/part
- Unicorn: beast, but where in the ontology?
- minds: rational soul
- green holly: plant
- married man: social role
- in his head: wherein dwells the rational soul
- image: what’s this? same class as replica?
- virgin: yes, person, but just what is virginity about? It’s a social status, no?
- fiction: replica? image?
- tapestry: physical object, the object in which this scene of the unicorn is being depicted
- silver threads: components of the tapestry physical object
- one-horned: body part
- beast: animal (yes, Freudian one-horned beast resonance)
- I, Patterson: person
- King: social role
Williams plays the ontology up down sideways and inside out and then gathers it all into the physicality of the tapestry, and, immediately, starts back out. It’s in that movement, into through and back out of the woven threads, that everthing is put on a single ontological level.
* * * * *
* Page numbers are from an abridged edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Lawrende Rabb, Michigan State University Press, 1965. Project Gutenberg has a text, though I have no idea which edition.
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