Map Skills: John Ashbery Travels to Other Selves

By Jane Mendelsohn

The Village Voice Literary Supplement, May 1991

Flow Chart

By John Ashbery

(Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)

Emerson mentioned in his journal that he felt shy about reading Shakespeare’s plays because he found that the interest of the story stood in the way of the poetry. “It is safer, therefore,” he wrote, “to read the play backwards.” This sounds like the kind of impossible advice that might be delivered in a poem by John Ashbery. The most celebrated contemporary poet in America, Ashbery writes with the confident surrender of someone who knows that his self-addressed, bottled messages will be contemplated and misunderstood by those who find them, perhaps even by himself. In this sense, he’s an American poet in the tradition of Emerson, Whitman, Stein, and Stevens, and like these other writers, he displays the playful, reckless seriousness of someone stranded on a desert island with nothing but books, which makes his work both difficult and thrilling. I can’t imagine higher praise for his new book-length poem, Flow Chart, than to say it is as mystifying, beautiful, comic, and moving as Shakespeare read backwards.

Emerson worried about the pull of narrative in Shakespeare’s plays because he distrusted the socially conditioned nature of plots and actions. Equally obsessed with the status of self, Ashbery also looks for a release from accepted forms in his efforts to disrupt of transform the given vocabularies of existence. Inclusive yet cryptic, filled with the debris of everyday cliché’s yet as elliptical in their meanderings as a foreign language, Ashbery’s poems are ways of talking about the self, or what gets lost in the story, and they illustrate in their ruminative, thoughtful progress tha passage of time, which is for Ashbery the only plot worth following. Whether they discuss love, or friendship, or language, or death — and generally all of these poetic concerns are at issue – Ashbery’s poems approach aspects of living as they arise in aspects of language. In so doing, his poems become maps of their own making, or flow charts, and the experience of reading them can be as alternatively breathtaking and baffling as the experience of getting through life.

Ashbery sees the task of American art in these explicitly abstract terms, as his poems, plays, art reviews (he was an art critic for many years and the executive editor of Artnews), and scattered interviews reveal. In an appreciation of Fairfield Porter, one of his favorite painters and his friend, Ashbery wrote that Porter was “only the latest of a series of brilliant know-nothings who at intervals have embodied the American genius, from Emerson and Thoreau to Whitman and Dickenson down to Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore” and that Porter’s paintings were intellectual in the classic American tradition” because “they have no ideas that can be separates from the rest. They are idea, or consciousness, or light, or whatever. Ideas surround them, but do not and cannot extrude themselves into the being of the art.”

Ashbery’s poems also illustrate the inextricability of idea, in life and in art. Often he uses music as a paradigm for the fabric of being, “the way music passes, emblematic /Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it/ And say it is good or bad.” Elsewhere he turns to water to invoke this notion, as in the titles of many of his books —“Rivers and Mountains,” “A Wave,” “April Galleons” —or in the poem “Clepsydra,” whose title refers to a water clock, an instrument that measures time by the flow of liquid. “An Invisible fountain” that “continually destroys and refreshes the previsions.” For Ashbery, one of the central ideas that a poem embodies involves the passage of time and how it flows, like music or water, both to preclude our understanding of it and to provoke our interest in it, our desire to live in the present as it moves from one moment to the next. As he says in Flow Chart, with characteristic irony and cheerfulness, “Sometimes one’s own hopes are realized/ and life becomes a description of every second of the time it took.”

However, working against the flow of time is, of course, the elusive, necessary self, without which it would be impossible to apprehend the present but which, ironically, prevents us from fully appreciating it. Thus, for Ashbery, the self exists as something to be overcome as well as found. Like Emerson, Ashbery’s always trying to think himself out of himself, as, for example, in the difficult opening of “Wet Casements,” where he proposes an impossible vision of extrapersonality: “The concept is interesting to see, as though reflected/ In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through/Their own eyes.” But at the same time, Ashbery wants to isolate himself, as when at the end of the same poem he says, “I shall keep to myself./ I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.” Naturally, this is a doomed effort—the self is forever floating away when we want it and returning when we don’t—but that’s what makes the project exciting. The impossible task of charting the self’s movement through time keeps poetry alive. The diagram of the poet’s heartbeat, it confirms at least, that he’s still emitting signals.

Flow Chart is concerned with the poet’s capacity to continue, and it begins, in a sense, where his famous long poem “Self-Portrait” moves through a series of reflections that progressively dismantle the illusion of narcissistic desire. At the end of the poem, after Ashbery has identified with, rejected, dismembered, and dismissed the portrait, he tells us that “Its existence/ Was real, though troubled, and the ache/ Of this waking dream can never drown out/ The diagram still sketched on the wind,/ Chosen, meant for me and materialized/ In the disguising radiance of my room.” In other words, something did happen to the poet and it left a trace of itself, a poem on a page, or a diagram in the eerie meaning of the word Emerson uses when he says in his essay “Life,” “We learn geology the morning after the earthquake on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains.” But whether Ashbery’s “diagram sketched on the wind” redeems the dark conclusions his poem’s philosophical investigations come to remains, as always, unclear.

A figure composed of lines which illustrates a process, a flow chart is also a diagram, like a poem. In the opening sequence of Flow Chart Ashbery addresses his poem the way Steven does in the preamble to “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:

Still in the published city but

not yet

overtaken by a new form of

despair, I ask

the diagram: is it the foretaste

of pain

it might be so easily? Or an

emptiness

so sudden it leaves the girders

whanging in the absence of wind.

The sky milk-blue and

Astringent? We know life is

so busy.

but a larger activity shrouds it.

and this is something

we can never feel, except

occasionally, in small signs

put up to warn us and as soon

expunged, in part

or wholly.

Flow Chart emanates from its initial mysteries into a six-part, 216-page poem whose structure can best be described as a description of itself, if that’s any help. Each section develops out of a self-referential remark into a ravishing amalgamation of statements of purpose, disclaimers, excuses, jokes complaints, incantations, mock recollections, parables, and unfinished stories. The first section ends in an ironic apology. “Oh I’m so sorry, golly, how/nothing ever really comes to fruition.” The second relaxes into a position of not having to apologize, a freer, more hermetic realm, which lifts the poem to its central, not entirely comforting acknowledgement, “This is the place/ to be.” The third section floats from affirmation, “I had/many ties to the region,” to a more desperate discussion of defeat and memory, and the fourth section moves no closer to any resolution than the previous three, although it does end the work in a different place from where it started. Perhaps the most accurate comment possible about an Ashbery poem is that it takes you somewhere else.

And it takes you there, more often than not, on as many different vehicles as it can imagine. Ashbery’s writing moves by way of abandonment, continually discarding one discourse, tone, or vocabulary for another, perpetually running, as he puts it, “in a paradoxysm of arrival.” Ashbery has said that he writes his long poems as if they were diaries, working an hour or so a day on them, fossilizing elements of his day-to-day life in the syrup of his ruminations. Very often what gets him from one line to the next is a remark on the experience of having written the previous line (“I was depressed when I wrote that. Don’t read it”) or a thought generated by what he has just written (“It was decided to proceed another way/ while I was out of the room”) or a comment sparked by the atmosphere he has created:

And so just as the mirthless

sequel was being

disinterred, a feeling of rage

came over him, but also of

relief, because

you couldn’t do it now.

They’re lost somewhere out

there between the trees

and muck, besides all cars

have them now. And the

colorful glasses and

telephone

are there; he came for a

fitting. It was proper, and in

its time. But no

matter what you do someone

will be malevolent about it,

and try to stop you,

though there is no stopping

them. He came for the

fitting and tried

it on and it fit, just like that.

What a laugh. Oh yes she

laughed out

of the closet I’ll be there n a

minuet dear. You see

how fond of him she was, and

he, well he just took it,

like most things, change,

pretzels.

He’s talking about the problem of inspiration here, of having a muse whom he perhaps too unselfconsciously trusts, and he’s talking about it as the experience occurs, or so he says. It’s these slippery shifts from opacity to transparency that make listening to Ashbery’s voice strange and familiar, like tasting a new variety of water.

This shifting sound comes, in part, from the poem’s alternation among speakers, or selves, or, more accurately, among aspects of the speaker’s self, as in the multiple pronouns employed in the passages above. Many of Ashbery’s finest critics have written almost exclusively about the tension in his work between the self and others, ,including other aspects of the self, and his poems do express an ambivalence toward all forms of otherness, veering between the temptation to see the self as available only in the external world and the attraction of fooling the self to be utterly isolated. Moreover, he often speaks in a variety of voices, dividing himself up between an “I” who washes through life, experience, and the outside world, and a “you” who remains so deeply submerged as to be unavailable: “(how long up/ Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter).” In Flow Chart, his internal dialogue filters Whitmanian desires through the usual Ashberian pathos:

Which reminds me:

when are we going to get

together? I mean really —

not just for a

drink and a smoke, but really

invade each other’s privacy in

a significant way that will

make more sense

and later amends to both of us

for having done so, for I am

short of the mark despite my

bluster and my swaggering,

have no real home and no one

to inhabit it except you

whom I am in danger of losing

permanently as a bluefish

slips off

the deck of a ship, as a tuna

flounders, but say, you know

all that.

Ashbery’s thoughts on these matters generally echo his accepting, deceptively cheerful observations about life and art: “So it seems we must/ stay in an uneasy relationship, not quite fitting/ together, not precisely friends or lovers though certainly not enemies.”

One way he has developed of talking about the uneasy relation of selves is by punning, often obscurely, on his own name. He has said that he thinks of himself as John and of Ashbery as the person who writes the poems, and the image of a name recurs throughout Flow Chart, beginning with “the day/ I wrote my name firmly on the ruled page.” In an earlier poem, “Rural Objects,” in one of his more overt references to his name, he spoke of “Mountain ash mindlessly dropping berries.” In Flow Chart he further divides the repeated image of ashes, “this mound of cold ashes,” acquiring a dusty aura of death and the bees (as in he verb and the insects) talking on the buzz of life and thought, “that hive/ of activity as you think of it.”

I hesitate to say that Ashbery strews his ashes over any chartable path in Flow Chart; however, they do fall in a pattern of cumulative dissolution, as if he began with the hope that the ashes were hiding something, only to gradually discover that he has no sense of their passing presence at all: “an unconsumed coal among ashes”; “Somebody dust these ashes off”; “where is the one who takes out the ashes”; the ashes have been left far behind/ on a nameless road”; “stray ashes in the grate”; “no trace/ of his passing, no flicker of ashes in the grate.” In part, the ashes manifest what’s left after one has been consumed, or let oneself be consumed, or let oneself be burned, in the present, which Ashbery almost always imagines as a flame. So they are remnants of himself, like his works, and they are the most he can leave behind. I take “grate” in the poem to be a pun on “great,” as in the great writers, and Ashbery’s obsession with ashes as an indication of his classical concern with immortality, as embodied in his name, which refers not only to his physical body but also to the boy of his work, his poems.

However, Ashbery has always appeared to be eminently unconcerned with maters of poetic fame and fortune. “Stellification/ Is for the few,” he has written, with convincing disinterestedness, and his aspirations have come across as fantastically limited. “This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.” Of course, he’s right. Stellification is only for the few, yet although he sounds as if he were casually dismissing the possibility, acknowledging its difficulty doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t what he’s after, particularly when you realize that “small and clear and free” might also be taken as a description of a star. Ashbery’s evasions have made it difficult for readers to recognize his desires, although he states them over and over, because, like the poets he admires, he has adopted that American “know-nothing” persona that has so cleverly disguised brilliance since Emerson. It’s as if he worried that by shining too brightly he might be mistake for a satellite instead of a star.

Nevertheless, the wish not to have wanted anything is a desire like any other, as Ashbery says toward the end of Flow Chart, “still, nothing shields us from the aspirations of the sunflowers,” by which he means the ambition to move with sun, the brightest star. The line comes from a radiant sequence, a parable about the sun and the sunflower written in the form of a double sestina, the climax of the poem. Ashbery knows how good it is, as he tells us beforehand: “I can tell you a story about something. The expression will be just right, for it will be adjusted/ to the demands of the form, and the form itself shall be timeless though/ hitherto unsuspected.” “You will be amazed,” he warns us, “at how touched you will be because of it,” and he’s right, although his warning does shed a slight menacing light on our amazement, which is not inappropriate, since the parable is about death and poetry and their relation to each other and to us.

The parable tells the story of a dream journey the poet takes with “her who becomes my poetry” to “the Sunflower,” a “gigantic, decaying apartment complex” that “no one liked.” Here, in the poet’s ramshackle mind, “as confusing as casbah,” the poet “went out and plucked a sunflower/ but it was empty,” leaving the poet “feeling lonesome and sorry” for himself:

I’m both those things, though

one would suffice. What’s

done

is done, the say, yet I cant

help wondering whether, on

a different day,

you might have turned around

and walked back to where I

was lying face down in bed

and told me all the love, all the

respect you had for me, that

was like a shining inyou at

me,

and we could have gone off to

analyze our situation and

add up the particulars.

In the end, the sunflower, or the poem, has the last laugh; “Be strong,” it says, “you that are now past your prime! When are dead/ we’ll talk again and see how you understand this thing men call death…” When the poet wakes from his dream, he keeps dreaming, he says, but without the fear of death, which he now imagines as “a sense of gaiety, of irresponsibility.” The moral of the story, as the poet tells us, is that “the ubiquitous sunflower/ knows the secret and cares,” that the poem, although empty, turns or tropes with the sun,

… and in his turning unlocks

the rusted padlock of death,

that flies apart and at once I

am shriven. Take me in,

teach me her

ways, but above all don’t leave

me for dead:

I live, though I draw only a

Little breath.

Of course, in turning with the sun the sunflower never goes anywhere, but Ashbery finds heroic beauty in its perpetual starting out.

In its ambition to be “a description of every second of the time it took,” Flow Chart enters into a competition with the sun and the result is, ambiguously, “so/ deeply fought for, hardly won.” “Hardly won” leaves open the possibility for both failure and success, which is the quintessentially Ashberian place to be, neither here nor there, free to move backwards and forwards. In the past, Ashbery has used the image of a bridge to convey this sense of movement, specifically between selves, as in “Wet Casements” in which he resolves to build a bridge “on which people may dance for the feeling/ Of dancing on the bridge.” At last he will see his “complete face” in the worn stone floor of his bridge. In other words, Ashbery’s poem forms a bridge between himself and others.

This is, unfortunately, neither as simple nor as desirable as it sounds, and Ashbery, ever ambivalent, finds it necessary to resurrect the image of the bridge several times in Flow Chart, burning and rebuilding it along the way. Nevertheless, the poem does end on it, closing with a sense of transport: “By evening the traffic has begun/ again in earnest, color-coded. It’s open: the bridge, that way.” A diagram of the possibility of travel, the bridge appeals to Ashbery not only as an image for communication among selves, but also, I think, as an image of the timelessness of art that, unlike the parade we call life, can be experienced again and again, and even in two directions. “How does one explain,” he asks in Flow Chart, “that by never looking back one is always/ seeing backward…?” By affording passage to others, he answers, as he suspends himself from a great height and builds a gangway across the water, on which people may dance, or read, or dream.