First reading of Rae Armantrout's 'Spin' (5)

Stephen Burt’s short essay on Rae Armantrout’s “Spin” is the fifth of five first readings of that poem we are publishing in this new series. The series page can be found here. — Brian Reed, Craig Dworkin, and Al Filreis

* * *

           That we are composed

Composed: put together, by someone, like novels, cantatas, or poems; or else put together by no one, as rocks are composed of chemically and geologically distinct minerals, as atoms are composed of electron shells around a nucleus. We have distinct and separable elements (we contain multitudes). We may not know it. What are those elements?

            of dimensionless points

Six syllables, after five: do we have syllabics? We do not, but we will soon have a normative line length (six-ish) and a normative beat count (three), from which deviations will stand out.

Point: the goal of an argument, the demonstrandum, QED. In general, such points in Armantrout are no sooner made than undermined: they tend to disappear under examination, they rely on unproven assumptions, they have no depth, they are “dimensionless.”

Mathematical points are also “dimensionless,” by definition — no contradiction there.

So far we have a phrase that permits us to read it as a value-neutral statement about ideas from mathematics or physics, but also permits us to read it as a controversial claim about our ability to hold, indeed to organize our lives around, poorly supported beliefs.

Is the whole poem going to proceed along these double lines? Will the whole poem turn out to be a flipping sentence, like Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit, a controversial and political claim about how we think (from one direction) that becomes an explanation of physics and math (from another)?

These are points

            which nonetheless spin,

             which nonetheless exist
             in space,

With “space” comes blank space, as the poem violates its line-length norm. With “nonetheless” comes insistence: these things are real, they exist, though they may not be “things.”

Our selves, our loci of consciousness and emotion, are “composed” of claims for which we have no warrant, pieces of “spin” meaning rhetoric or suasion, claims that correspond to nothing material, nothing beyond dispute, nothing in the mathematical nor in the physical world.

According to the model that Armantrout explicates (a form of superstring theory), the most basic components of mass-energy have spin (like quarks) but no volume (no dimensions). We cannot assign them a size, though we can assign them a probabilistic location

            in space,

            which is a mapping
            of dimensions.

“A mapping”: not a map, not a thing you could map and then walk away holding, but a process of mapping, something produced by, and something that in turn produces, the model we have “in our heads” of the thing that we believe we have seen, or known, “out there in the world.”

Once you know what Armantrout says, you can listen for how: astringent, unsettled, reluctant, uneasily terse.

So far the physics and math have been up front, the implications about human rhetoric, politics, selfhood, decisions upstage. Now they’re going to change places.

                        The pundit says
                        the candidate’s speech

                        hit
                        “all the right points,”

If you’re used to Armantrout’s effects this stanza might strike you as almost predictable, too pat, too easily framed and too easily undermined: in case you had not noticed that “spin” could belong to politicians (not just to quarks), “points” to speech-makers (not just geometers), you’ll notice it now.

You can hit a point, or hit a baseball, or be a hit with people (compare “How Come You’re Such a Hit with the Boys, Jane?,” the great, sarcastic 1983 non-hit by the English band Dolly Mixture). But you should not hit people. Is suasion like hitting? Is rhetoric like violence? Is rearranging somebody’s ideas anything like rearranging — or threatening to rearrange — their face? Why does “hit” have a line all its own, and why will it become the key into which the poem modulates (replacing “point”)?

            hit “fed-up” but “not bitter,”
            hit “not hearkening back.”

Why did the politician’s speech succeed? She or he had studied the nostalgias; he or she expressed some kind of frustration (“I’m fed-up and I’m not going to take it any more”) without sounding tragic, or passive, or resigned.

Armantrout can sound fed-up, if not indeed bitter, herself: could she use a distraction? Should we keep ourselves apart from, aloof from, politicians’ distractions?

            Light strikes our eyes
            and we say, “Look there!”

Is the light an illusion? Is it a mistake, a distraction, to think that we can be enlightened, that we can speak without casting illusions?

At the level of physics, space as we know it may be a mathematical construct, different from different perspectives, abstract, “unreal,” so that “there” and “here” are effects of “our eyes.”

At the level of politics, metaphysics, psychology, what looks like enlightenment could be just distraction, what seem like new truths just effects propagated by people with some interest in changing our minds.

Armantrout’s poetry conserves some sympathy for the Sophists, the ancient and modern thinkers who insist that ideas are instruments, rhetoric everywhere, no such thing as disembodied, constant, knowable truth …

And yet against that (literal) sophistry (which can make other writers despondent, or playful) Armantrout gives us the affect of an austere ironist, or even a moralist: she wants to be sure that we recognize illusions as illusions, that by them we do no (or at least that we do less) harm.

If we are to distract ourselves — by ideas, by sounds, by works of art — let them at least reveal their means of illusion; let them shed this sharply defined, this wryly wielded, light.

* * *

Rae Armantrout, “Spin”

That we are composed
of dimensionless points

which nonetheless spin,

which nonetheless exist
in space,

which is a mapping
of dimensions.

*

The pundit says
the candidate's speech
hit
“all the right points,”

hit “fed-up” but “not bitter,”
hit “not hearkening back.”

*

Light strikes our eyes
and we say, “Look there!”