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Arthur Sze. Quipu. Copper Canyon Press, 2005. Paper, $15

Review by Tom Pynn

My body in the visible. This does not simply mean: it is a particle of the visible, there is the visible and here (as variant of the there) is my body. No. It is surrounded by the visible. This does not take place on a plane of which it would be an inlay, it is really surrounded, circumvented. This means: it sees itself, it is a visible—but it sees itself seeing, my look which finds it there knows that it is here, at its own side----Thus the body stands before the world and the world upright before it, and between them there is a relation that is one of embrace. And between these two vertical beings, there is not a frontier, but a contact surface—

--Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, December 1960

I am amazed at how we blossom into each other.

--Arthur Sze, from "Earthshine"

Descending into the life of things, including language, the poet dwells. What is it that the poet glimpses at the contact surface? The poet responds in Quipu’s invocation: The myriad unfolds from a progression of strokes. Already before sunrise is a knotting-- Quichuan quipu knot, a device of the ancient Peruvians and others for recording events, keeping accounts, sending messages, etc., consisting of cords or threads of various colors, knotted in various ways (OED)--when all is possible and yet impossible calling as the walking out and into, along the contact surface, calls. Vocare, "to call", not an ancient mythologizing of origins, but a mythos of time. Embracing things along the contact surface: This is a time/ when—blood in my piss, ache in nose and teeth--/I sense tortoise, flute where there is no sound, / wake to human bones carved and strung into a loose apron.

Bending to earth—the first knotting. The poet takes account of the primordial event: dark makes possible light, myriad things arise and in their arising unfold. In Quipu’s first cord of knottings, "Earthshine," we are introduced to one of the volume’s principle leitmotifs: mind. The poet asks, what scrapes in the mind as it dilates to darkness? The mind gropes in its own knotted darkness toward things and is shocked into light by the sheer presencing of things:

crackle of flames in the fireplace;

lapping of waves against rocks

as a manta ray flips and feeds on plankton;

the gasp when he glanced down at the obituaries; . . .

Along the contact surface, reversibility, the chiasm of mind and thing—flesh—the mind stops here. When the mind stops in the interpenetrating depths of the unfathomable, one descends, bends to earth, finds a single stalk budding gold. Bending to earth is not memory, not look back time but full moon first light. Barking dog . . . deer . . .snake slides . . . shoulders . . . soles of her feet: mind aligns the slivers in our experiences, but does not descend but recoils from the contact surface. Darkness into light: Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling/ a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, / slap a mosquito on my arm.

What does one find descending into the contact surface? The day’s angular momentum: second knotting. There are no names for what can go wrong. The poems in the volume’s second section recall the Chinese poet T’ao Ch'ien's work. Poems beginning in misconception—a beginning/ calligrapher has no bone to a stroke . . .a bleeding anthropologist pulled from a wrecked car. . a dead sparrow on a greenhouse floor. Through the attunement of mind—The mind is a tuning fork/ that we strike—aligned with the body along the contact surface in passing through, what were misunderstood turns to deep penetration of what is and with this a kind of solace:

yet, sometimes,

in the darkest space is a white fleck,

ox-head dot; and when I pass through,

it’s a spurt of match into flame,

glowing moths loosed into air, air

rippling, roiling the surface of the world.

Darkness opening into light, reversal, only occurs when events have left their mark on us. Passing through the contact surface in ever-deepening perceptual consciousness is all.

In the poem "Syzygy" the poet is shocked to learn that doctors collected/ the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract/ gonadotropins. He then poses the question: is that what one draws, / in infinitesimal dose, out of a vile? "Quipu," the book’s third knotting, might be subtitled: "Koans for a natural scientist." Since the seventeenth century Westerners have become habituated to framing the world in terms of the natural attitude: things are mechanical objects operating in accordance with rationally discernible and immutable laws. Poets, however, notice that the organ of rationality, mind, is no passive observer or cataloguer of phenomena, but an active player in framing things:

As in a quipu where colored, knotted strings

Hang off a primary cord—or a series

Of acequias off the Pojoaque River drop water

Into fields—the mind ties knots, and I

Follow a series of short strings to a loose end—

Thematizing the limitations of rational mind is an important tension in the book. The careful attentiveness toward things, the poet’s operative intentionality, is a kind of response to the natural attitude. Instead of subjecting objects, things subject the mind. In his Genjo Koan ("Actualizing the Fundamental Point"), Dogen (1200-1253) writes, "To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening." Recall the invocation’s opening line: The myriad unfolds from a progression of strokes. While this is not a scientific but a poetic account, as the title suggests, the scientific and the poetic are, however, held in a tension filled conjunction without either losing their respective identities.

Standing within the frame of the natural attitude one might well ask, "aren’t all things more or less the same?" Herein lies an error. Sze’s response to such a question might be read in the book’s 6th section/knotting entitled "Inflorescence" a scientific term that refers us to the flowering system as well as the event of coming into flower. The opening segment is explicit: This is how you/ become absent to pancakes smoking on a griddle--/ pricked once in thought, you are pinned, / singed back to the watery splendor of the hour. When the mind, as a second order operation, takes its place as a primary order operation, we fall into error about the nature of reality, about how things are. The conceptualizing mind incises the beginning and end to all motion . . . inscribes the beginning and end to all motion. Each particular thing has its own unique motion and participates in a general inflorescence, an eventual unfolding that if we are open will plunge us into transformation:

Who cares that the Eta Carinae Nebula is about

9,000 light-years distant? A moment in the body

is beauty’s memento mori: when I rake gravel in

a courtyard, or sweep apricot leaves off a deck,

I know an inexorable inflorescence in May sunshine.

So is poetry superior to science? Direct knowing penetrating things extends beyond the reach of a rigorous science and epistemology, but poetry is not this direct knowing, but its inscribing. In "The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence," the poet fathoms the endless knotting of things and notices Once you begin, / the branching is endless. Things and their eventual unfolding do not admit of discreet beginnings and endings: Our meandering intersects with the vanished/ in ways we do not comprehend. Our names for things, ideas, concepts, these have no through-line except that all// things becoming and unbecoming become part/ of the floe. It is in free and easy wandering we take our place among the myriad things and know ourselves. While the poet catches glimpses of the divinatory nature of language, he knows that words are but signs: And as a lantern undulating on the surface// of a black pool is not the lantern itself, / so these synapsed words are not the things// themselves but, sizzling, point the way. One would have to be a drunken Chinese poet to confuse the two.