Chris Nealon Essay on Infinitude & Dana Ward Now at Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group

After three years and change of working on an essay about Dana Ward's The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (now in its second printing, we hear!), Chris Nealon has published it in the Spring issue of Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. "Infinity for Marxists" "opens up a confrontation between recent critical articulations of infinity as it appears in, on one hand, eco-criticism, speculative realist philosophy, and object-oriented ontology and, on the other, totality as it appears in Marxian thought and, on Christopher Nealon’s account, in Ward’s poem." An excerpt:

In the title poem of his 2013 volume The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, the Cincinnati-based poet Dana Ward constructs a framework for comparing two distinct modes of infinitude whose significance, he makes clear, is not simply their vastness, but that they have come into play in his poem in a here and now. The poem is framed on one hand by Ward’s misremembering the title of a DC Comics series he came across at the mall, a series called Crisis on Infinite Earths. That twelve-part series, published in 1985, was designed to establish retroactive continuity among the many and contradictory plotlines that had accrued to the heroes and heroines in the DC universe over the decades. Meanwhile, the poem is also structured by its opening address to Krystle Cole, the young Kansas woman who was party to the last days of a massive LSD-producing outfit run by the now-imprisoned chemist William Leonard Pickard. Pickard’s facility was built in a revamped missile silo; in a subsequent memoir, Lysergic, and in a series of popular YouTube videos, Cole recounts experiences of intense LSD trips in the months before Pickard’s November 2000 arrest. So the poem is playfully framed both by reference to the question of how long a “pluriverse” of contradictory plotlines can last, and also by a sympathetic identification with the manner in which Cole describes the trippy, “lysergic” mind-bending which, depending on how the poet takes her tone, she either enjoyed or endured. It begins like this:

    Krystle

    Krystle Cole

    you’re all I thought about sometimes

    I watched you while our daughter slept

    your Sissy Spacek ways

    your laconic demeanor in relaying

    either ecstasy or trauma

    & the un-embittered empathy your voice conveyed

    on YouTube

    which is our loving cup

    the solution of butter

    & DMT you took

    anally that really made you

    freak the fuck out

    & your friends just stood there

    watching you

    as you hurtled alone through mirrored tunnels.25

What follows from this opening, already a richly articulated set of cross-currents of “empathy” and dispassion — devoted YouTube viewing, beloved children sleeping under parents’ gazes, friends looking away when they should attend to each other — is something like a super-compressed journey of the soul, not into Dante’s heaven so much as into the nature-less “universe” with which the ecocritics, object-ontologists, and speculative realists intend to beat back hermeneutics:

    It’s that frictionless feeling

    the smooth & vacant course

    that lacks abruption, one wave

    the clinical mania undifferentiated

    whiteness

    contains when cylindrical cloud

    hard & plastic comes to represent

    the mind to the mind

    & thus describe a model

    of terrible momentum

    with unity of purpose

    toward nothing so much

    as cold, radiant nature

    stripped of Eros, of becoming,

    just the mainframe

    & its withering severity

    without any predicate

    of others, save perhaps their

    gazes, no walls,

    no nothing, completely

    white light & your name

    when your consciousness was

    splitting time was stopping

    you were going always into that.26

Notice that the bare identificatory structure of address has not fallen away—that the poem is still, in the argot of infinity-theory, “correlationist.” The “you,” Cole, has all but stopped being a self in her encounter with this lysergic vastness; but she is still the object of the poet’s address. As we will see, this is not inadvertent, or a falling-away from some purer, more “speculative” form of thought — the project of the poem is emerging specifically as the attempt to think personless infinity through persons. Cole is not only his object: as his subject, she leads him to make a further set of comparisons. “You were always going into that,” he says, a little in awe; then . . . .

Read the rest of this great piece (long-anticipated) at Mediations. And read the full poem here, courtesy of our friends at Futurepoem.