Book Review

Rusty Morrison's Book of the Given (Omnidawn, 2011) is beautiful in its symmetry. "The Given," in a structural sense, are bits of text from George Bataille. The large structure is composed of two alternating strands, that might be thought of as leitmotifs. There are five interweavings or five poem pairs. The first strand – the scripted strand – is built around Bataille's words. In all five poems, each stanza is built upon a fragment of a quotation that is displayed in its entirety at the end of poem. For example, the first stanza of the poem reads:

No chapel, no wounded-soldier-in-the-last-scene sacrament,
no field of windswept grass where lovers walk
as the background music swells to tell us
full communications resembles flames …

The italicized line indicates the line around which that particular stanza is scripted. As the title of this section indicates, it is "Assembled from the Script" but despite the word assembled, there is nothing mechanical about it. Quite the contrary, the way that Morrison decontextualizes the original fragments from the script she inherits and weaves them, almost seamlessly, into a poem of her own is a tour de force.

The second strand is the unscripted strand. Though unscripted, Morrison imposes her own structure on the unscripted section. Each section is a prose poem headed by a bolded title so that it has the following appearance:

Exposing the seen: a book of snapshots.

Beware nostalgia's elaborate snare – its tempting surfaces of gloss will tighten time around us.

As the initial sentence suggests, this unscripted section parallels, if not fugue-like at least in spirit, the scripted stanza of the same section. It is not just a shadowing though, but a development out of.

Book of the Given is about relationships. It is about identity. It is about corporeality. It is at once intensely physical and nearly mystical:

The way my hand must remove its layer of invisibility
to touch your face. I want to touch it.
To make that want, to meet it
is something monstrous, just like religion. Eroticism and religion

fill the space I try to befriend with a word like "body."

Consider how the lines "Psalm for the Script"

I want your fingers
to push my hair back, exposing my face.
I need you to hold my shoulders as doves
to release and then watch
return of their own volition
to your grasp

compare to the Song of Solomon in their conveyance of a physical longing that is at the same time a more existential longing.

I am my Beloved's,
and his desire is for me.
Come, My beloved,
let us go to the fields.
and in the morning we will go to the vineyards.
We will see if the vines are budding,
if their blossoms are opening,
if the pomegranate trees are in flower.

In one of the most exquisite expressions of what it is to be a created being, Morrison says:

We are not calm tonight, but creaturely with quiet
amassing between us
the one direction that two bodies breed,
a close-walled, convulsive passage –
eroticism is a ghastly maze where
the body knows no one

can follow it
into the earth
of its innermost workings, into the matter (do not call it death)
that flesh eventually will find
itself becoming in its final loss
of the way of touch.

To be a body is to face one's negation in death. It is also, in the universe we now inhabit, to be ultimately alone.

In the Middle Ages this longing for completeness and rescue from annihilation was answered in union with God. The Cloud of Unknowing gives classic expression to the paradox:

…you have this longing. When you first begin you will find only darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing. You don't know what this means except that in your will you feel a simple steady intention reaching out towards God. Do what you will this darkness and this cloud remain between you and God, and stop you both from seeing him in the clear light of rational understanding…

As Morrison says, however, "no chapel." In a universe from which God has been ousted, the longing, which has not disappeared, is turned toward other human beings. In a corporeal world, there is no ultimate unity of individual self with anything else, certainly not with another human being, even a lover. There is no I and thou, only I and it. What is left is a tension between longing for unity and resistance to losing individual identity.

Morrison's creation of this tension and the language she summons to use it is what gives Book of the Given its fascination and beauty. Postmodern literature is replete with writing of how the self is constructed and the relationship between the mental/psychological image and the body itself. It's the much-bashed Cartesian dualism that is simply an experiential fact of quotidian life. What creates the sense of self but that cobbling together of memory with the stream of current experience? But memory is comprised of many selves and "Any interpretation" Morrison writes "is shaped by the way I arrange my selves around it." The constructed self is ultimately illusionary.

What is left then is the giving up of self, the zen-like plunge - what Morrison christens generosities.

All the hours of dusk
are closed books to us if we do not

plunge into the silence that most frightens us.

This is the abandoning of self, of the conceptual and inhabiting what is purely physical, purely present. It is an impulse that seems a deeply primitive aspect of being human.

This plunge into the physical, the sensual is what allows Morrison to create some of her most intimate lines. It also returns the reader to the larger structure of the book built in part around the term generosity.

As mentioned above, one half of the poems in Book of the Given are built upon texts by Bataille. This strand is constructed from an inherited script and is a reflection of that self that is also a constructed form. Half of a dualism, it denies the concept of creation ex nihilo, whether it be a poem or a concept of self. The sequence of titles heading this strand of poems are a précis for the human condition:

Assembled from the script
Sentenced by the script
Psalm for the script
Faceless before the script
Betoken the script

The unscripted strand is Morrison's answer. It is her plunge. While it is still part of a whole from which it cannot be extricated, one can read the unscripted poems as a poem in itself, temporarily free of an inherited structure, as the choice of prose over lined poetry helps to suggest.

Two principle elements of Morrison's unscripted poems are their physicality and the language of generosity. The physical world is the world of nature and of bodies, lava outcroppings and skin against skin. "The weight of the palm of my hand, for instance, instead of a comforting word." The language of generosity toggles among three key words - generosity, seeing and given – around which the titles of the three prose poems in each section are built. The generosities are the givings and the conditions for what is given, but eventually amount to a leap:

Why go as a stick-figure into my own fear in order to answer your fleshed silence?...Instead, I will ignore all our previous pronunciation aides, and let the animal tell us it is an animal.

The given from which we must construct ourselves is also the given from which we give.

Though time and cosmology modify the vocabulary, there is little difference between the essential human longing in Morrison's words than those of Juliana of Norwich's:

But I cannot tell the reality of him who is my maker, lover, keeper, for until I am united with him in substance, I may never have complete rest or full bliss, that is until I am so fastened to him that there is absolutely no created thing between my God and me.

Eroticism and mysticism are never far apart.

Like all truly insightful books, Book of the Given is not reducible to easy summaries. It is at once intellectual and visceral, philosophical and sensual, religious and erotic. In short, it is poetry. It is one of those small books one will read again and again, then put away only to rediscover it some time in the future and begin reading once more.