The Dead Baby William Carlos Williams, Scholarly Resource
ABSTRACT
This article argues that the "Walking" section of William Carlos Williams's Paterson Book Ii is usefully juxtaposed against comments Williams makes nearly his development of the variable foot ten years subsequently.
Every bit he often acknowledged, William Carlos Williams's medical practice plays a fundamental function in his literary work. In addition to the shape and rhythm of his language, at that place is his close attention to the minute details of his encounters with the fabric globe, whether it is the patients of his daily rounds or flowers springing up in the Meadowlands. His grooming led him to observe carefully his patients' symptoms and physical well-beingness, what Marie Borroff calls his "diagnostic eye" (56–65). Many of his poems are a symptomatology of the world he encounters—the "and so much depends" in his famous red wheel-barrow poem is simply that precise registering of item. Along with his medical preparation, the practical circumstances of his medical practice likewise strongly influenced both the form and content of his work. Readers before long realize they are being offered glimpses of a world seen by someone passing through, frequently at some speed. ane Williams had hospital privileges at Passaic General, but much of his practice involved business firm calls, spending his days driving all over the urban center visiting patients, a bespeak made axiomatic in his early on poem "The Immature Housewife" where the narrator in his auto catches glimpses of a immature woman's daily routine. At that place is an odd voyeuristic quality to this poem. His circling the block, comparing her "to a fallen leaf" with the "noiseless wheels of my car/rush with a crackling sound over/dried leaves equally I bow and pass smiling," is agonizing at all-time (CP1 57). Nevertheless, one thing that is clear is his poetics of the glimpse—fleeting but sharply registered details—is straight continued to motion. Williams was besides concerned with his patients' ain concrete mobility. He was called to evangelize babies but too to restore health, to get his patients "dorsum on their feet," so he had a professional business concern with health, including simple posture and walking. This article is a foray into how the concrete act of walking figures in part of his verse form Paterson equally an element of medical and social concern, but also as a formal challenge.
During World War II and the years immediately following, Williams fix himself the task of writing the great American long poem, one that could capture the historical sweep of a relatively new country formed by waves of immigration. The poem is sometimes narrated past a Dr. Paterson but oft is a collage of found texts: letters, newspaper articles, engineering reports, and devious snippets of conversations. Williams's answer to the sweep of American history is past no ways a coherent narrative, but instead is a series of seemingly unrelated chunks, much like the experience of encountering a urban center in glimpses while moving through it. By the early 1940s Williams had developed a general outline and accumulated well-nigh of what would become the content of the poem, merely he struggled with what would be its concluding form. In an excerpt from a 1943 letter to James Laughlin, his publisher and friend, included in the author's preface to the verse form, Williams complains,
That God damned and I mean God damned poem Paterson has me down. I am burned up to do it but don't quite know how. I write and destroy, write and destroy. Information technology's all shaped up in outline and intent, the torso of the thinking is finished merely the technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date. I flounder and flunk. (P xi)
Reading the various books of this long poem is to see many experiments in class. The found texts accept their own structure, only words in between—the poetry—accept on many different patterns equally Williams works toward what he would come up to call "the variable foot."
Given his close contact with the many movements in modern fine art, specially his connection to Dada, 2 Williams would have been enlightened of the many efforts to transform walking into a form of art (see Carari 68–74, O'Rourke one–26, Solnit 205–9). In Book Two, he turns a walk into poetry. Dr. Paterson sets out on a journey through a city park—Garrett Mountain—sometimes post-obit the path, sometimes hit out across a field or up a slope, detailing what he encounters and the thoughts prompted. He meditates on the doubleness of the experience of walking, existing as both a thinking mind and a moving torso—what Roger Gilbert calls the "fluid oscillation between external objects and in ideas and images" (11). Walking oft brings the promise of solitude, but, as most shortly recognize, unbidden thoughts intrude and isolation can quickly go an internal dialog every bit well equally an embodied experience. Nietzsche's Zarathustra encounters his shadow as both self and other, and exclaims "Where has my confinement fled?" (283). In "Walking," Thoreau laments that sometimes he will have walked for hours and not been able to "milkshake off the village." 3 Information technology is not simply intrusive memories of quotidian cares that can disrupt solitude. As Fredric Gros in A Philosophy of Walking notes, the phenomenological world is full, and the non-human provides company: "It's impossible to be alone when walking, with and then many things nether our gaze which are given to us through the inalienable grasp of contemplation" (54).
Book Two, chosen "Sunday in the Park," is a walk in the park. The opening stanzas proceed in a fashion familiar to readers of Williams—a voice begins speaking, the lines break in unusual places, descriptions veer from the psychological to the geographical. Those opening lines are the first appearance in Paterson of his triadic line, the form most oftentimes associated with the "variable foot." Peradventure simply as pregnant (at least for this section of the poem) is his raising the primal phenomenological experience of walking:
Exterior
exterior myself
at that place is a world,
he rumbled, subject field to my incursions (P 43)
Dr. Paterson moves through a world—he is an incursion in the park—and the world (the "exterior") is an incursion into his thoughts. Equally walkers know well, the 3rd term here, the one between mind and nature, is the body. 4 In these opening stanzas Williams sets Dr. Paterson upward as an observer moving through physical space discerning (and judging) subjects and objects, but at the same fourth dimension he is a physical part of that very globe. Book Two attempts to articulate the act of walking in a specific identify and time, pressing the problem of how to represent the concrete and mental incursions such an joint entails.
An ongoing formal strategy in Book Ii is to mark a transition in both thought and location with the word "Walking" followed past a dash. The reader shortly learns that the break might exist prompted by the path itself, by something the poet sees or hears, or information technology might just as hands marking a random transition in his stream of thought. For example, early he stirs up grasshoppers and the memory of a carved basalt grasshopper in Mexico "tumbles from the cadre of his listen" (47). The showtime of many "found-prose" insertions into the text appears just afterward 1 of these markers:
Walking —
The torso is tilted slightly forward from the basic standing
position and the weight thrown on the brawl of the foot,
while the other thigh is lifted and the leg and opposite
arm are swung forward (fig. 6B). Diverse muscles, aided. (45)
As Mike Weaver tells u.s., this is an extract from a 1946 article entitled "Dynamic Posture" by Dr. Beckett Howorth published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Weaver 206). Every bit a licensed physician, Williams would have been a fellow member of the American Medical Association and would therefore accept received its journal. Every bit a pediatrician, he would accept been interested in the commodity because Howorth begins his study with the dynamic posture of infants, describing not just static posture but likewise proper movements and gestures for babies.
"Dynamic Posture" is an early on publication in what became a long and distinguished career. Built-in in Mississippi and trained in Saint Louis, Howorth graduated from the Washington University Medical School in 1925. He interned and began his do in New York, moving on to Connecticut in 1949. He was an active outdoorsman, hiking with the Appalachian Mountain Social club and climbing Mount Katahdin, hence his interest in alpine activities and his preference for walking in the clean mountain air. He published several other articles on dynamic posture including one on the physiology of the feet and another on dynamic posture in mountaineering. Howorth is a pregnant figure in the development of modern orthopedics, authoring the important Textbook of Orthopedics (1952). Practicing at the New York Orthopedic Hospital (function of Columbia University), some of his inquiry in the early 1940s was in pediatric orthopedics. Even though in that location is no evidence apart from the to a higher place quotation, it is entirely possible Williams, whose master focus was pediatric medicine, would accept known of research taking place just across the Hudson. Paul Mariani has suggested that Williams'southward use of the quotation was ironic ("to serve as an ironic foil to the theme of walking" [536]), but a closer look shows that peradventure Howorth should non be so hands dismissed. Williams was both a poet and a physician, participating in (and often mixing) both discourses. Posture, both static and dynamic, was an of import social and medical issue in the first half of the twentieth century, and for a physician treating poor patients whose diet and working conditions were often not ideal, it would have been a fundamental concern.
In the JAMA commodity notes, Howorth describes his research technique which included wearisome motion and close-up films of human movement. No stills are reproduced in that essay. Instead he provides a serial of simple outline drawings showing proper posture during specific motions (see Figure i). His technique recalls twentieth-century posture enquiry through a host of technologies adult to produce those outlines. For example, the American Posture League (1914–1943) promoted the use of the "Mosher-Lesley Schematograph," a mechanism that used bright light, mantle screens and tracing paper then a researcher could produce accurate outlines of people's static posture. Many school systems adopted such strategies in an attempt to document and diagnose the posture of the general populace. All the same, Howorth was primarily concerned with understanding human movement, which links his research agenda to the much earlier piece of work of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. Early in his article, Howorth describes the proper way to view walking posture:
The body should be vertical and substantially direct when seen from the side as well as from the dorsum. The vertical line should laissez passer through the ear, shoulder, center of the hip and ankle when seen from the side; physiologic thoracic and lumbar spinal curves should be slight and the pelvis erect rather than tilted forward. (1399)
Figure 1
Reproduced with permission from Beckett Howorth, "Dynamic Posture." Journal of the American Medical Clan CXXXI, 17 (24 August 1946), 1398–404; 1402, 1403 (fig. six). Copyright © (1946) American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Meet too Appendix B in Weaver 206.
Effigy 1
Reproduced with permission from Beckett Howorth, "Dynamic Posture." Journal of the American Medical Association CXXXI, 17 (24 August 1946), 1398–404; 1402, 1403 (fig. 6). Copyright © (1946) American Medical Clan. All rights reserved. See likewise Appendix B in Weaver 206.
Such imaginary lines think the actual ones captured by Marey in the nineteenth century. He clothed his subjects in blackness, tightly plumbing fixtures clothes marked with white lines on the arms, legs, and torso and used his chrono-photographic device to produce overlapping images where abstruse patterning of lines articulated simple actions such as walking. That work helped lead physiology toward establishing "normal" human movement. Proper static posture was defined and regularized in etiquette manuals across the 19th century (Yosifon and Stearns, 1059–60) simply Marey's research began to articulate humans in motion. To use Howorth's term, Marey studied dynamic posture.
For everyday people, the very idea of posture is usually associated with nagging parents, the military, or social pressure, but for physicians—particularly pediatricians—posture dictates orthopedic development and affects mobility. Every bit Yosifon and Stearns explain, in the twentieth century practiced posture in child-rearing books was increasingly medicalized:
With this connection between posture and character, the great medical-physical teaching campaign essentially revived the nineteenth-century insistence on posture equally a measurement of social and personal quality. But the revival was now part of a widely publicized, institutional movement, ranging far across etiquette. And the moral fervor intensified equally well, for at present the boxing was being joined not just confronting personal vagaries simply confronting measurable deteriorations in American posture overall, against working-class as well as center-class children, and, ultimately, against broader cultural trends that undermined posture and sound values akin. (1074)
Aided past a range of representational technologies, the physiology of movement was of increasing concern for physicians. Weak posture tin restrict mobility and productivity and is linked with diverse concepts of degeneration—both physical and moral. Who can forget the epitome of William Butler Yeat'south "rough beast" "slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem"? (187).
Yosifon and Stearns note that after Darwin, moralism nearly posture was linked to evolutionary tropes virtually becoming ape-like— seeing poor posture equally a class of degeneration. In a 1946 film chosen Dynamic Posture, Howorth deploys that trope; his narrator intones: "In the development of posture, man has risen from the horizontal position to the hunker to the vertical or cock continuing position, but some individuals have gone on to a hyperextended standing position while others accept slumped back into a slouch." His master business organisation in that picture is proper dynamic posture of middle-form housewives performing the sorts of housekeeping activities expected by order at that betoken. He wants to meliorate back strain, demonstrate how to autumn without injury, and reduce concrete stress performing various tasks. His slouchers here are not part of what Williams'southward Dr. Paterson calls on several occasions a "great beast" (P 41, 62, 75, 264) just he makes clear that proper posture is a stay against degeneration, and such practices are of business concern to all classes. The discourse of proper posture is often intertwined with the discourse of degeneration.
Social concerns about degeneration are commonly directed toward the working classes, people Williams oft depicted in his writing. In The Condition of the Working-Grade in England in 1844, Frederick Engels voices a reformer's concern for a physically degraded working class quoting a Dr. Ray nearly the affect of mill work on the mobility of laborers,
the knees were bent inward, the ligaments very frequently relaxed and enfeebled, and the long bones of the legs aptitude. The thick ends of these long basic were peculiarly apt to be bent and disproportionately developed, and these patients came from the factories in which long work-hours were of frequent occurrence. (153; meet also Solnit, Ch. 10)
Williams's short stories depict a world that does not appear much changed in the intervening 100 years. "Jean Beicke," a macabre look at deformity and infant mortality at the summit of the Bully Depression, tells of an eleven month-old infant suffering from a range of problems, including her head which
was all up in front and flat behind, I suppose from lying on the back of her head so long the weight of information technology and the softness of the bones from the rickets had just flattened it out and pushed it up forward. And her legs and artillery seemed loose on her like the arms and legs of some inexpensive dolls. (FD 161)
She dies from an undiagnosed infection, but also stands in the story as a parable of biological degeneration resulting from social and financial inequality. Had she lived, Jean with her plain-featured extremities could never have exemplified ideal "dynamic posture." In "A Face up of Stone" (written at roughly the aforementioned time), Williams's doc/narrator opens giving voice to the vilest of stereotypes: "He was one of these fresh Jewish types y'all want to kill at sight, the presuming poor whose looks change the minute cash is mentioned" (FD 167). After examining the couple's child, the doctor turns to the mother whose husband has asked him to examine. The dr. describes, "Her lower legs were peculiarly bowed, actually like Turkish scimitars, flattened and somewhat rotated on themselves in an odd way that could non have come from anything only astringent rickets rather belatedly in her childhood" (FD 174). Farther questioning reveals that she had lived through the Great War in Poland severely malnourished and had lost her unabridged family. Only so does the doctor/narrator drib his narrow-minded judgment of the couple and limited some pity —"I was touched" (FD 176). As readers of Williams'southward short fiction well know, he often expresses complex and conflicting attitudes toward his usually poor, immigrant patients. They are a source of inspiration, exemplars of beauty, and at the same time they are frustrating and prompt a range of negative moral judgments. What is significant hither is that, from a medical perspective, orthopedics is role of that moralistic mix.
Dr. Paterson's Sunday stroll takes him out of the immediacy of his immigrant medical do and sets him down in a space occupied past a cantankerous-section of the region'southward populace. Simply following the Howorth quotation is a letter of the alphabet from "Cress," a immature poet who complains of Williams'due south neglect which has resulted in a damming upward of her creative abilities. The last paragraph of her letter asks, "That kind of blockage, exiling 1's self from one'southward self—accept you ever experienced it?" (P 45). She describes psychological trauma at least in part inflicted past Williams's perceived indifference. 5 What is telling in these passages is that in articulating his own walk, Williams reveals and explores his own multiple, sometimes "exiled" selves—the outside equally an incursion, a body walking, an empirical observer, a nostalgic traveler, and a moral estimate with a diagnostic center trained to see deviance from an abstruse norm. Each of these selves jostles for attending forth the Garrett Mountain paths. Formally, this section is fractured and disjointed, but its underlying continuity is the walker's experience.
Dr. Paterson finds "himself among the others,/—treads there the same stones/ on which their anxiety slip equally they climb" (44), just he tries not to abandon his diagnostic eye in favor of indiscriminate perception or by reveling in the sensual. He seems to want to maintain a position as impartial observer, only as walker he is still very much a part of the scene. In an earlier verse form "Odor!," he berates himself for doing just that:
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
olfactory organ of mine! what will you lot not be smelling?
What tactless asses nosotros are, you lot and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now information technology is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. [. . .] (CP1 92)
Here Williams humorously condemns both his own sensuality and his failure to maintain a suitable professional distance. Smell is a particularly powerful sensation for walkers, cartoon them close to the landscape. In the park, Dr. Paterson is flooded with sights, sounds, smells, heat, and retention. He does maintain enough distance to diagnose the scene, and from his position, it is not pretty. He sees "the ugly legs of the young girls,/pistons also powerful for delicacy!" (44), describes the cheap sensuality of teenage girls, condemns a lightly clothed young couple smoking and lounging on a blanket (fifty–1), and encounters drunken lovers in a hidden den (58). Dr. Paterson'southward words include the single, isolated line: "deformity—" (lx), and his walk reveals "Minds beaten thin/by waste—among//the working classes SOME sort/of breakdown/has occurred" (51). Such sentiments are typical of Williams's complex attitudes toward his patients and townspeople. His work frequently celebrates the dazzler his medical practice enables him to run across, even in the almost squalid of circumstances. His search for a true American idiom leads him to the houses of the working poor, so his denigration of those very people here in Paterson is odd. Instead of being representatives of all that is vibrant about modern America, they are "The 'not bad beast' come to sun himself" (54).
Williams had ended the earlier Book One with a long quotation from John Addington Symonds'south Studies of the Greek Poets on "lame or limping iambics," noting "The choliambi are in verse what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. [. . .] [T]he Greeks [. . .] recogniz[ed] the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt—" Tellingly the quotation ends with "Deformed verse was suited to deformed morality" (40). His walk in the park is generally upright and proper, and would likely have fabricated Howorth proud, but he encounters the great beast(s). Clearly there is a conflict between cloth connexion and objective perception. Within that tension, it is hard to ignore the rhetoric of degeneration. Here again, Howorth provides a helpful gloss. In his discussion of babe and adolescent posture, he notes, "[g]ood dynamic posture is common to such animals every bit the cat and the equus caballus and often to children and primitive human being only is uncommon in developed civilized human being" (1404). Williams's own preoccupation with youth (the result of his medical specialization) oft led him to value the wild freedom of children and to condemn the degradation that civilisation (or adulthood) can bring. 1 demand only recall of "The Girl with a Pimply Face" where he describes his adoration for a teenager who shows a certain vitality: "I brutal for her immediately. There was that hard, straight affair about her that in itself gives an impression of excellence" (FD 117). Of course Williams's admiration is complex, and even troubling given her age, but it is about her vitality and, incidentally, her posture. She may suffer from a skin status, but she is strong and athletic, someone who could serve as a model for Howorth'southward dynamic posture demonstrations. His stance of her parents is considerably less enthusiastic.
This commemoration of youthful, insouciant vitality puts Williams in a long line of American thinkers who reject quondam-world traditions (Thoreau's walker's ever headed West, away from the strictures of an adulterate Europeanized society and pointedly rejected the wisdom of elders), but the central here is that Howorth'south statement is social as well every bit biological. The trappings of modern life—restrictive clothing, sedentary piece of work patterns, environmental degradation—mitigate confronting pure, healthy, free walking. Equally if to underline Williams's own circumstances in a city park in one of the near polluted regions of America, Howorth further notes, "[c]rowded city pavements and dirty fume-laden air ordinarily promote bad walking posture, whereas the varied topography and surfaces in the clean air of the state make good walking posture easier" (1403). Dr. Paterson surveys a scene that is crowded and polluted, and so information technology is small wonder his diagnosis of his beau walkers is dire.
Equally his walk and mean solar day progress, Dr. Paterson struggles with his initial opposition, how to articulate the incursion of the "world outside" and at the same time participate in information technology. He feels the limitations of his on-the-basis perspective, recognizing he is walking in the same place as the rest of the "keen beast" and "seeks to induce his basic to ascent into a scene,/his dry out bones, in a higher place the scene, (they will not)" (P 81). The insight for walkers, unlike poets, is that they cannot achieve aerial vision. Maps might present the world from above but, like Ezra Pound's sailors, they come across information technology "not every bit land looks on a map/simply every bit ocean bord seen by men sailing" (Canto 59 324). Soon afterward the realization that his old bones keep him on the path, Paterson slips into an internal dialogue, discoursing on the problem of language in the poem and of divorce (themes introduced in Volume I). Alternating "and he" "and she" in a give-and-take about poetry, invention, and the material globe, this section is interrupted by some other extract from Cress, one that puts the question of literature in the context of 18-carat human connection (and reiterates the problem of divorce):
You might besides have all your own literature and everyone
else'southward and toss it into i of those big garbage trucks of
the Sanitation Department, and so long as the people with the
top-cream minds and the "finer" sensibilities utilise those minds
and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human
beings than the average person [. . .] (P 82)
Her sentiment is consistent with the content of the rest of her letters published in Book Two, merely here it is specially poignant as the peripatetic poet at this bespeak in his stroll has been struggling between his own solitude, his professional person objective judgment and 18-carat human connectedness with his fellow citizens.
Paterson absently makes his way out of the park, noticing the people dispersing from the evangelist'southward gathering (another crowd he views with some suspicion), and and then encounters an actual monster:
His anger mounts. He is chilled to the os.
As there appears a dwarf, hideously plain-featured—
he sees squirming roots trampled
under the foliage of his heed by the vacation
crowds equally by the anxiety of the straining
government minister. From his eyes sparrows offset and
sing. His ears are toadstools, his fingers accept
begun to sprout leaves [. . .] (83)
The deformed, the degenerate, the neat beasts, all coalesce in this encounter, just the passage remains indeterminate because of the pronouns. The "he" could be either the poet or the dwarf, or the dwarf is actually one of the poet's exiled selves. Both are some sort of chthonic beast, role of a degraded woodland scene with fingers sprouting leaves, becoming tree. Unable to drag his bones upwardly to a bird's eye view (though his eyes become sparrows), unable to maintain his professional altitude, Dr. Paterson is momentarily rooted in the scene every bit role of the wild disorder he had previously been diagnosing and "(his vocalism is drowned/under the falls)" (83). The poet, dwarf, and the female voices are plunged into the sound and spray which overwhelm the meaningfulness of a language which is "worn out" (84). Then the woman interlocutor gives phonation to the theme that has been unfolding across the book and the walk: "Exist reconciled, poet, with your world, it is/the only truth!" (84). Dr. Paterson cannot only regard the earth every bit "outside myself" but rather must alive with and as the other beasts.
As a doc concerned with the overall physiological health of his patients, Williams would have been drawn to studies similar those of Howorth. As a poet concerned with representing modernity through formal innovations, his search for a new poetic mensurate might very well have taken him to scientific studies revealing the previously unseen in human movement. vi Williams's admiration for modern art is well known, and he knew Marcel Duchamp's work (Whittemore 113–124), including "Nude Descending a Staircase" which some claim was inspired at to the lowest degree in part by the abstraction of Marey's chrono-photographs (Dagognet 149–fifty). Since Marey and with the dynamic refinements of Howorth, the simple left-right step of an iamb was giving way to minute variation. In his essay "The American Idiom," Williams expresses need for such variability: "Exist bodacious that measure in mathematics as in verse is inescapable; so in reply to the fixed foot of the ancient line, including the Elizabethans, we must have a answer: information technology is the variable human foot which we are beginning to discover after Whitman's advent" (INT 102). Indeed, for Williams finding a proper modernistic mensurate was fundamental to more than just poesy, equally he notes in the essay "The Poem every bit a Field of Action": "The only reality we can know is MEASURE" (SE 283). This claim puts the problem of noesis into a dynamically unfolding space. His measure out is non absolute, not rigid, nor stable, but instead varies over time and circumstance. In Book Two, he asserts, "Without invention nothing is well spaced,/unless the heed change, unless/the stars are new measured, according/to their relative positions, the/line volition not change [. . .]" (P 50).
Perhaps information technology is all too easy to link the metrical term human foot to the human bagginess— film Wordsworth stomping out his poems on the paths around Pigeon cottage—and Williams's "variable foot" is surely non simply the result of his own walking, but information technology is equally of import non to discount the significance of moving human bodies—dynamic posture— in his measure of Paterson and the larger world. The variable foot is usually embodied in his triadic footstep-downward line. His foot is non a counting of steps/syllables but instead is a unit of idea with infinitesimal variation. Walkers are acutely aware of the variability of any step. Different striding on apartment sidewalks with an easily counted pace, trekkers often detect themselves shortening steps, scrambling up rocks, creeping across scree-fields, slipping from a three mile-per-60 minutes pace to a slow crawl. Dr. Paterson expresses some of this variability on Garrett Mount:
Walking—
he leaves the path, finds hard going
across-field, stubble and matted brambles (47)
The reader also experiences this different stride. Williams's alternation of literary forms and typography—the minor type and length of the letters specially toward the end of Volume Two—can make for some "difficult going" but, in a lesson long familiar to walkers, Williams's shifts in tone, style, and content simply reflects a different footstep of thought and a temporally different expression of being. His new line is a new measure.
In Office III of Book Two, Williams offers a perhaps the best example of the shifting pace of his variable foot:
The descent beckons
every bit the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of achievement
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are towards new objectives (78)
Later published separately every bit the opening of "The Descent" in his 1954 Desert Music, these lines too appeared in the 1962 anthology Poet's Choice edited by Paul Ingle and Joseph Langland. There Williams includes this comment: "I write in the American idioms and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot. 'The Descent,' is the get-go poem in that medium that wholly satisfied me" (CP2 486). As a dissever poem, these lines point to a certain abstraction, with its descents and ascents linked to emotions associated with memory and crumbling. In Desert Music those can be continued to the death of his mother (1949) and his ain wellness setbacks (center attack and several strokes), but in the context of their starting time publication in Paterson these lines are anything but abstruse.
Readers of literature often climb metaphorical mountains, while in the material world automobiles render actual ascents and descents inconsequential and even unnoticed. For walkers, changes in meridian are felt throughout the body and eat both focus and energy. It is curious to imagine how ascents or descents "beckon," only walkers feel them both as call and command, every bit something that determines the rhythm and satisfaction of the day. In "Dynamic Posture in the Mountains," Howorth details the range of complex micro-adjustments made in posture when climbing or descending steep terrain, and fifty-fifty moderate elevation changes prompt different concrete and mental forms of attention (indeed, the distinction between physical and mental attention on a steep slope is specious). Of course Williams'due south step-down lines resemble stepping down, but more significant is the variability of his measure out. Dr. Paterson'due south walk upward Garrett Mount includes easy striding on a path, simply also scrambles. Walking rhythm varies past circumstance: changes of surface and inclination, changes in thought that change pace, and vistas that beckon, calling for momentary slackening. When crossing varied terrain, thoughts that might think memory are tightly coupled to the immediate physical circumstances of the path. Minute variation is measured non just past pace but besides thought. Physical gestures in response to changes can think other, long past gestures and open spaces for thinking, bringing the thinker/walker/poet to "places/inhabited by hordes/heretofore unrealized" (P 78). Williams'due south variable human foot is a mode to catch something of the walking world's measure out, to let for the dilation of space, pace, and fourth dimension, and for the production of memory.
NOTES
1.
Roy Miki has explored in some detail the role of the auto in Williams's writing, come across also Crawford, Ch. 5.
2.
He met and admired Philippe Soupault in Paris, later translating the French writer'due south walking novel Last Nights of Paris.
iii.
229. Mike Weaver speculates that Williams was thinking of Thoreau'south essay when writing Paterson (85).
4.
Roger Gilbert calls them the "three great powers"—mind, body, world (19).
5.
Mariani details the comedy of errors surrounding Williams's attempts to help Marcia Nardi, the author of the "Cress" letters, find piece of work and get published (473).
half dozen.
There is no prove that Williams knew whatever of Howorth'south piece of work across the JAMA article he references in Paterson, but his keen involvement in framing verse within gimmicky science is well known, including for example Einstein's relativity (meet Friedman and Donley). Of course, medical science as well clearly structured many of his poetic ideals (run across Crawford, ch. half dozen). The physiology of human movement is an intellectual resources he could draw on.
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