Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Enikő Bollobás: "My son is a Magyar": Ideas of Firstness and Origin in Charles Olson 's Poems
7. Knowing Knowing is at least threefold here, happening equally by measure, by myth, and by word. In each case knowing is rooted in act and experience —that "doing" which Olson considered a primary form of living. "You see," he wrote to Vincent Ferrini, "I take it there are only two forms of mind about how it is human beings live on earth. They either do, or they build nine chains to the moon" (Maximus to Gloucester 16). In other poems this doing will reappear as the "onslaught" ("The chain of memory is resurrection ...") that narrows the "distances" ("The Distances"), while also accounting for "the brilliance of the going on" ("An Ode on Nativity"). Knowing by measure. This is the form of knowledge rooted in act and experience and offered by the explorers and navigators that Olson so particularly evokes in the Juan de la Cosa poem. Deeply interested in all kinds of beginnings, he cites various sailors traversing oceans: in addition to la Cosa, we have the 4th century, B. C., Greek explorer Pytheas, the Portugese Cortereal brothers, Giovanni Verrazano, John Cabot, Christopher Columbus, John Lloyd, and all the fishermen. Indeed, for Olson fishermen were the true explorers of the Atlantic coast, having been there centuries before the explorers sent by European courts. The Breton fishermen sailing from St. Malo, the Basque fishermen departing from Biscay, the English fishermen sent by Bristol merchants, and all the others heading towards such wellknown fisheries as Sable Island, Cash's Ledge, or George's are different in one very significant sense from the explorers on royal missions: they were after the fish and not power, after the fisheries and not the land. They did not set sail in order to colonize new continents and exploit new lands for profit, and their earning was commensurate with their fishing enterprise. Olson's interest in beginnings is matched only by his interest in narratives of beginnings. This "double vision" projecting a "'return' to nature, the origin, and the thing," on the one hand, and "a departure in and for a new discourse about nature, origin, and thing" [italics in the original ], on the other, is, Philip Kuberski claims, a persistent quality in American thought, ranging from the Puritans through Emerson and Whitman to Pound and Olson (175). Thus, the poem mentions several written documents in which travelers narrated their adeventures: the 11
