ABOVE/BELOW
Urchins by Patricia Farrell, 2023
“A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine” (Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 206).
The German word, Igel, actually means “hedgehog,” a creature less aggressive than a porcupine yet still with sharp quills that keep intruders at bay. The isolation and completeness upon which Schlegel insists does not equate to our usual notion of closure, with its suggestions, through language and formalism, of finality. The quills tell us that the hedgehog is defined by its ability to resist—a hedgehog-poetry resists the familiar and the intrusion of the values of commodity culture. The fragment predicts a future, or aperture. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” describes a fragment (torso) the brokenness of which has now been perceived as a new whole that incites a proposition for the future: You must change your life. Closure means the end to the poetic event; aperture directs you forward beyond the event. John Clare ends a sonnet, “Emmonsail’s Heath in Winter,” with the words start again—words that contradict the closural appearance of the sonnet. Keats ends his “Ode to Psyche” with a future vision of aperture for Cupid and Psyche, “a casement ope at night,” for Cupid to return endlessly to his beloved, “To let the warm Love in.”
“To write the fragment is to write fragments.” When something breaks apart, it breaks into more-than-one. Conversely, one future of the fragment is the next one and then the next one. The fragment predicts seriality: it “starts again,” the same as before only a bit different. The fragment contains an open temporality, a continuum of the imagination.
Imagine the “creative process”: the originally whole object conforming to a commanding given (the Archaic statue of the all-reasoning Apollo with his head on) is then broken, the customary, tyrannizing, ideological source vanquished, and a vision of a new whole is transformed out of a fragment with a future not based on hierarchies. This is the meaning of Blake’s and other poets’ notion of poesis as double: creating and destroying. Creating can be multiple, destroying acts against the given. Like a hedgehog—such a bizarre and surprising analogy!—a poem continues to make, unmake, and remake itself, and the reader needs to attune to the process. The hedgehog is an argument against the canon.
A (German Romantic) fragment, though supposedly incomplete and thus “open,” actually, like a hedgehog protecting itself from the chance intrusions of the world, is closed. In fact, a (verbal) fragment has only a beginning and an ending that nonetheless is “our only access to the infinite” (Jabes) and lets in an infinite number of voices, allows for superimpositions from radically different domains. Paradoxically, the hedgehog’s sharp needles insures its autonomy but as resistance; a fragment poem defined thus acknowledges its being as a social and political act. The needles are also rays emanating from the knowledge center that is the fragment.
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
Patricia Farrell writes:
URCHIN
‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’
(Karen Barad)
A barbed hedgehog. A perverse and raggedy child (who calls out the Emporer). An adjacency. A juxtaposition. A visitation.
The word ‘disintegrate’ asserted itself in an unhinged, hynagogic moment. Not as a verb. But as a noun. ‘The disintegrate’. And calmed me, rolled into a spiny ball, primed to unfold diffracted dreaming.
What falls. Apparatuses for perplexing the mundane surface. Finding itself and turning. A palimpsest of peculiarities. Barad’s ‘agential cuts’. Rosmarie Waldrop’s ‘splice of life’.
A road I meant to look for when I thought I could. But (see I have the photograph) I have already happened on it.
Open your mouth and out pops a universe. Every utterance an answer. Incompossible and imperative. Lyotard’s ‘Müssen not Sollen’, ‘linking the unlinkable’. The must of radical politics. Contra the ought of the orthodox.
‘Fuck it. Next time they shoot us, we’ll refuse to die. Its raining again. Give me a cigarette.’
(Sean Bonney)
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