Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
Return to Contents»
Essaying the Essay: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s My rice tastes like the lake / Alan Clinton
First, it must be noted that Dhompa’s poetry is beautiful. That is not what I wish to discuss partly because I feel that beauty should occur rather than be talked about, and partly because I feel ill-equipped to discuss beauty in its traditional forms. What interests me more is genre, which Dhompa’s new book of poetry brings into question to provocative ends. While modernism and postmodernism have long discussed what the poem can contain, it is relatively recently that certain critics, such as Maria Damon with her discussion of “micro-poetries,” have begun to explore the domains that poetry itself can contaminate. In that spirit, I wish to discuss how My rice contaminates the genre of the essay and what results from this contamination.
The main reason that My rice must engage the essay is that Dhompa’s stated goal is that of the essay, which is to explore, if not answer, questions of a philosophical nature. Indeed, although Dhompa, like most poets, collects images, words, and ideas from almost everywhere imaginable, she is different if not completely unique in stating to me, on several occasions, “I am currently trying to write a poem exploring the topic of X.” This is the exact opposite approach of almost all poetry since Mallarme, who told Degas that the reason he could not write good poems was because although Degas may have had a lot of good ideas, poems are made out of words, not ideas. But, it is not the only approach, and Alexander Pope comes to mind as an important precursor to Dhompa’s way, as does Marcel Proust who combined the essay and the novel into what Barthes called a “third form” that was neither one nor the other.
Like Proust, whose forays into this form were an attempt to explore his thoughts and feelings on the death of his mother, My rice also sets a difficult project for itself, even a quixotic one, as noted in the epigraph to her book from The Way of the Bodhisattva:
But if the mirage is the mind itself,
What then is perceived by what?
The Guardian of the World himself has said
That mind cannot be seen by mind.
And yet, in eight essay poems1 Dhompa enters into this very question because, when it comes down to it, there is nothing, in this world, but the mind and the World, the mind Worlding itself and the world effecting the mind. This is the beginning of what some people call philosophy, others call politics, morality, or ethics. This is why Dhompa must write that which is neither poem nor essay, but something else. Or, as Dhompa puts it, signals us with her characteristic humor in the first poem of her collection: “I have a little dog that behaves like a cat, / it is not his fault he cannot pass the discipline test” (6).
In fact, which is partly what makes Dhompa’s poetic infiltration of the essay so relevant, Theodor Adorno, in his famous piece “The Essay as Form” (which may or may not be an essay) suggests that failing “the discipline test” is the particular virtue and challenge of the essay. For Adorno, an essay worthy of the name must be hybrid in nature. It does not and cannot start from scratch, pretending that previous knowledge is without worth or that one may encounter an object without mediation, but absolutely must not limit itself to one type of knowledge or truth system. This, of course, in a world where truth always presents itself as a system, is very difficult to do. Somehow, in a world that fetishizes “the universal and enduring” (3), a poetic essay writer, even and especially one addressing such alleged “universals” as the mind and the world, must direct her task towards the particular and fleeting elements of everyday existence, whether or not those elements appear to us as “everyday.”
So, here is Adorno’s wish list of what an essay would contain or be:
1. The essay must be hybrid.
2. “Luck and play are essential to it” (4).
3. It resists ultimate definitions, “primordial givens” (12) and categories.
4. The essay is against methodology, and its form is fragmentary because it does not presuppose a totality that can be arrived at from basic parts, first principles, etc.
5. The essay does not exhaust a topic, but explores relationships between objects.
6. An essay is nonlinear, digressive.
7. The essay does not know what its object is, only its starting point.
8. The essay acknowledges temporality, and thus may go on infinitely.
9. The essay is as complex as reality itself.
Therefore10. The essay’s “innermost formal law is heresy” (23)
If one takes Adorno’s definition of the essay at its word, it should become readily apparent that it is very hard to write an essay, much less an essay poem. The reasons for this stem from a false privileging of competence, utility, and clarity at the expense of what an essay (and perhaps now a poem, poetry having traditionally privileged lyric beauty and/or Rimbaud’s “illumination”), according to the OED, should also be: “the action or process of trying or testing,” an exploration involving tasting, “an attempt,” “the trial of metals.”
In what follows I would like to explore a few of the ways in which Dhompa essays the essay in her poetry, and what effects this has on the poetry, the essay, and the questions she hopes to address.
...........................................For instance, words become the object I trust
so I eat meals elegantly alone (Dhompa 10).
Throughout, with words and phrases like “for instance,” “because,” “to be sure,” etc, Dhompa signals to the reader that she is entering the terrain of the essay, only to rupture this terrain by showing us how the essay all too often, contra Adorno, reduces itself to empty formalism. The lines above suggest a sense of cause and effect as well as the idea that they are an example of a previously asserted idea. The only problem is that there is no causal relationship between trusting words and eating alone, not to mention that this “example” comes at the beginning of a poem rather than at the end. The example comes before the “thesis” as it always can in actuality, and perhaps as it always does. We encounter the real first and attempt to piece it together retroactively. Cinema, particularly in the hybrid form known as the essay film, points to the problem of the thetical approach to thinking. Thus, it makes sense that the most interesting essays produced in the last fifty years have occurred on film, as cinema, and that the essay poem would recognize this. We think of the cinema as a story-telling machine, but it has certain qualities which lend itself to, even more than stories, the production of the sort of essay Adorno calls for.
More than anything else, it is the technology of the camera, its automatic nature, which lends itself to producing research in the form of a search, as opposed to the slow accumulation of knowledge fetishized by traditional disciplines. When we read something, we begin that reading with a wealth of opinions and biases (both personal and disciplinary), and these presuppositions determine the nature of our reading. Dhompa signals the nature of this problem by not only beginning a poem with an example, but by ending one with a dubious premise: “replication comes / with appropriate responses because we are civilized (40). When we write, we tend to think of writing as “tool” used to give permanent form to pre-existing ideas. When we look at the world we notice a very small amount of what we actually see. But the camera, because it operates beyond the interventions of human consciousness (we may choose our subject matter, but the camera does the rest, at least at first), produces images that possess a far greater wealth than our habits of perception normally take in. It was said of Atget, an early Parisian photographer, that every street he photographed resembled a crime scene. This was because the camera picked up what was actually there, and the resulting image, when contemplated, brought to one’s attention strange details that took on the status of clues, unnerving clues. It was almost as if the photo took a picture of you, producing a breakdown in the separation of subject and object so fundamental to the myth of Western theories of perception. Thus, with the camera itself, we are presented with a new relation to objects, one provocatively called by Walter Benjamin “the optical unconscious.” The camera does not present us with the unified mood of a landscape painting, but with the fragments of reality itself, experienced as fragmentary. To the extent that this new way of looking produced by the camera enters the mind of the filmmaker, the filmmaker as essayist, or the poetic essayer, we have the possibility of a more noncategorical, nonjudgmental form of thinking suggested by Dhompa’s passage from “Selvage: for country,” an essay poem that begins with a reference to the frames of photographs and that is titled not only for “selfhood,” but for the border (read frame) of a finished piece of fabric: “I remember a man in leather trousers / kneeling to photograph wispy flowers. As I watched, / I thought the words, Man in leather trousers / kneeled to photograph delicate flowers (53). The poem essay that does not trade in universals must have its moments of allowing the object to, as much as possible, be an object, and it is photography/cinema and the sensibilities granted by this technology that allow the poet to realize these possibilities in a fuller way.
It is interesting that Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant essayists, was eventually driven, through his understanding of cinema, to a new kind of essay, an unfinishable essay composed mainly of fragments of quoted material. The fragments of this unfinished 1000 page work, entitled The Arcades Project, an essay which investigates 19th-century Paris as the prototype of what we now understand as the dominant form of modern life, a form we designate as, among other things, “consumer capitalism,” these fragments resemble the textual version of photographs or film stills, and they strike the reader as simultaneously sequenced and lacking in sequence. Benjamin’s own commentary, when it is present, almost always comes after the quote, as if he is responding to an image. One of his most intriguing images of his method is that of the rag-picker:
Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse--- these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own, by making use of them. (460)
So Benjamin makes use, but whereas The Arcades Project primarily leaves behind the essay in favor of cinematic fragments to become something that was both inside and outside the essay as we know it, even as Adorno knew it, who rejected the initial drafts sent as a precis for Frankfurt School funding, Dhompa’s fragments come from essay conventions themselves including, but not limited to: the example, the premise, cause and effect arguments, definitions, quotation, analogy, analysis, qualification, the epigram, and the proposition. Sometimes these fragments are used ironically, but in the greater sense, Dhompa is recognizing that by moving her poem into the realm of the essay which results in a form that is neither one or the other, something much more important is at stake:
The ancients were wise
to save renunciation
for the end. My pain does
not affect the other,
not right now. It is
possible to alter position
with another as a mother does
but the lessons get harder
with age. It is not out of habit
we take flowers to the river:
A ritual takes us closer
to the unknown---the known,
we guess where they go.
Repetition (of rituals)
wherein the hands,
in time, cease. (88)
In writing her poem essay My rice tastes like the lake, Dhompa does not ultimately renounce the essay---far from it. Rather, in exploring the limits of the poem essay as a form she has also chosen the most effective ritualistic form for her, at the moment, to explore the unknown that is the known. Although, like Benjamin, Dhompa recognizes that her own form is unfinished and unfinishable. She deliberately does not title or even number the poems in her collection because, ultimately, the number could always be different (the book could have been much longer, there are many more poems in this exploration that did not make it into the book, Dhompa told me), the order could always be different. Rather, the individual poems in Dhompa’s collection rise off the page and, like the particles of a cloud, exchange places, sometimes float above us, sometimes move across us like fog, sometimes rain down on us, always intrigue us.
Notes
1. The "essay poem" here could just as easily be called the “poem essay” or a new word could be coined altogether, but I justify the former term for its historical connection to the better known hybrid genre designated by the term “essay film” popularized if not invented by the directors of the French New Wave.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
Dhompa, Tsering Wangmo. My rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley: Apogee Press, 2011.
Return to Top»