THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

I take my title from one of the Ariel poems Sylvia Plath was writing up to the day she took her life at the age of thirty, and it is with her preoccupation with death and memory that I am myself preoccupied, most especially when I feel her poems enter into the things they refer to and take me along with them. This I call mimesis, but call it what you will; it stops us in our tracks as a mighty magic come alive as death animates things. As such these things are not symbols or star points for a multitude of poetic associations. Nor are they signs of anything much. Rather they are things, just things, criss-crossing back and forth between the animate and inanimate with the poet as the point of mediation, the question insistently posed, the question that makes us seem no less foolish than wise: How is it that the distinction between subject and object, between me and things, is so crucially dependent on life and death? Why is death the harbinger and index of the thing-world, and how can it be, then, that death awakens life in things? Over there, death, the graveyard where things erupt like gravestones, the entity-place. Here, me and life in buzzing blooming confusion, antithesis of entification. It was not always like this. It needed the Great Awakening brought by Enlightenment for death to finalize things. In other times and places the debate rages.

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See Also Sandra M. Gilbert: Widow (Summer 2001) Michael Taussig: The Beach (A Fantasy) (Winter 2000) Geoffrey Ward: Dying to Write: Maurice Blanchot and Tennyson's 'Tithonus' (Summer 1986)

There must be more to the story, yet we all agree that something has happened to death with the modern age. It seems to have disappeared from sight, and there is an awkwardness all round about what to do and say other than wallow in death-kitsch. This makes it impossible for us to deal with the unsentimental view of death in Aritama or know what to think when a dead man and woman call their little daughter to join them in death just outside Mocoa. With the famous "disenchantment of the world" the spirits retreat, no longer singing and dancing in the streets or moaning in what's left of the forest. The spirits retreat, said Freud, into the unconscious; that was his view of mental history over the long haul. Or maybe the dead simply die and NYC shrinks to the five boroughs along with the expansion of prisons for first-time drug offenders, prisons being the preeminent form of the modern death-space for the young men of the inner city in the U.S. today, each prisoner, no doubt, with his own story.

I would like to say--from the fullness of my naivete--that poetry fills this vacuum, that poetry is forced to fill this vacuum, and that poetry does this because it is the most mimetically nuanced form of verbal representation and expression there is, breaking up language no less than composing it, exquisitely self-aware while at the same time resolutely on the march with something to say. Nietzsche refers to the emptiness after the death of God as filled with a presence, the breath of empty space, and so even if the storyteller falls on hard times this space of death might offer opportunities to a poet who can pick up on the alarming notion that "the living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type." It is my argument, then, that the poetry in question will criss-cross the division between the living and the dead creating thereby a state of living-death that will bring the poet into full flood and language into its mimetic birthright. Benjamin may have lost hope for the storyteller but he was quick to seize on the magic of the commodity, the congealed pulse of the market, as epitomizing thinghood itself. By virtue of such an epitome he constructed an extraordinary poetics of death. As a critic close to him pointed out, the cast of Benjamin's thought was one of "'natural history,'" guided by the need to become a thing in "order to break the catastrophic spell of things."8

8. T. W. Adorno, "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin," Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 233.

Michael Taussig teaches anthropology at Columbia University. His books include The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1990), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), The Nervous System (1992), Mimesis and Alterity (1993), The Magic of the State (1997), and Defacement (1999).