Labor of the Negative

...Every one of Dahlberg's wonderful sentences is a sentance too, a condemnation, a citing of the law, the first stone cast: The ancient conception of the peripatetic savant is finished...

...As the title of the first book suggests, we may jettison any rational, or at least any reasonable approach to these maxims, and rather pick and choose among them-among all of Dahlberg's anatomies of black bile: He is the Burton of our modern instance-as the spirit, the heart moves us...

...nor is it the sum of human insight in either the aphorisms or the poems, the wisdom of a life survived if not welcomed...

...The Choice is either the automobile or Buddha...

...For prose is the language that denies itself, that cancels out its being so that the mind retains of it only the effect, the action...

...What we come to in these works, even in their most lyrical concrescence, when Dahlberg would whelm us by his catalogues of the Mayan divinities, and in the fashion of In the American Grain (though with none of Williams' narrative thrust) would persuade us of our disinheritance by citing the very riches we have lost: the legacies of the old funeral mounds as of the Jordan-what we are lured to the end by, is the declarative (read diabolic) mind...

...When he pronounces: "Does not Cleopatra teach us that a basket of strawberries cannot cure one's miseries unless the asps crawl among them," we realize (strawberries...

...That is why I have so insisted on Dahlberg's genre as a via negativa, as prose, as the Diabolic...

...Indeed, it is not "the detritus of Asia, Tyre, Carthage, the Pyrenees" which keeps us going through these angry cadences...

...The Devil himself, as we are told, can cite Scripture...

...What is beautiful, then, about these aphorisms and these poemsabout this prose, which is the form to which argument is responsible-is its doubt, or rather its certainty that the meaning of experience is not self-evident...

...Yet the terrible enfilade of his learning does not carry the conviction, in the juridical sense too, that Dahlberg seeks to urge upon us...

...or of his continence: Some exist just to scratch themselves, and think that Lazarus in his mould and grave had as much contentment there because the dead itch...

...The Superior and the Illinois empty into the Huron, But where is our source...

...That is the Devil's Share, and it is Dahlberg's...

...That it does so move us it is Dahlberg's care to insure by his genius as a rhetorician, a master of language as a via negativa, for as Hegel puts it, he accommodates all the seriousness, the suffering, and the labor of the Negative...

...nor honey and wax, but bile and ink are his characteristic secretions...

...No, it won't be for sweetness and light that we approach this author...

...For that which declares is that which declares against...

...If they are not a dead loss to us, we must recognize these books, like the others by this man, as two things which are really the same thing: great prose, and a clear case of diabolic possession...

...both in the most gorgeous prose and, as this author's seven earlier books, utterly dependent upon what the Elizabethans called apomnemonysis, "by which the speaker or Orator for the cause of better confirmation, confutation, consolation, praise or reprehension reciteth some apt sentence, or fit testimonie of approved Authors, and applieth it to his purpose...

...That is why Dahlberg captures our minds, for nothing is so eloquent in the assertions of truth as in exclusions, the constatations of error...

...We love our lice, and that is all that coition is, and after we are satisfied we are downcast and crave non-existence...

...Dahlberg's genre is the Satanic, the proverbs of Hell before it was married to Heaven, or more likely, after the Great Divorce...

...and we question so much of the rest of it, the endless catalogue of Biblical curiosa and the luscious antiquities, that what we are left with-beyond question-is the sound of learning, the resonance of a belated dedication to the ancients that is called, as Dahlberg must know, opsimathy...

...The Erie pours into Lake Frontenac, And as it dwindles it is known as the Niagara River, But what is our name...

...that he has read neither his Plutarch nor his Shakespeare so scrupulously as he protests...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" A collection of scourging aphorisms, a series of scriptural poems...

...one cannot saunter and cogitate wherever there are machines...

...Silence is assent...

...Poetry, the naming of things by creating a silence around them, as Mallarmé defined it, is beyond him...

...We shall not ever hear that note of charity, of delighted humor, sounded in these sour crystallizations: "Only when affections ebb do we see the flats and the rubble our tidal emotions had covered...

...We do not argue about what appears to be true of itself...

...Compare, for example, a characteristic emblem from Yeats-after all, A Vision, from which I take it, is just such a preposterous cento, only with a tenderness in the mind as it moves through its elaborate postures: "Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain except that the Muses sometimes form in those low haunts their most lasting attachments...

...This writer affords an endless thesaurus of our detestations, our heresies, the scandal of the negative...

...A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall...

...And we smell the brimstone whether he speaks of our continent: The woods are pernicious gods, And the mountains are a dead hymn...

...And when Allen Tate refers, in his helpless foreword to the poems, to Dahlberg's intuitive sense of genre, we know it is not the works of love he invokes, but rather the productions of The Spirit That Denies...

...The simplest way of living as a solitary is to tell people where you are...

...It is a common fault," says Dahlberg, who has not escaped it for all his incondite learning, "to revile the whole human race because one has not studied his own nature...

...For these are but the charred and bitter bones of argument (an aphorism is literally something broken apart), a discourse which as John Logan has said is not conducive to love nor to interest in men and women...

...Dahlberg is more than acrimonious, he is desperate (the convinced form of paranoia), and in book after book we find the same bejewelled reproaches levelled-always at the enemy, and the enemy always located outside the self...