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

journal of Nathaniel Bowditch, the globe of Behaim, the mappemunde of Juan de la Cosa, the map of Richard Hakluyt, Hieronymus Verrazano, Maggiolo; the letters and diaries of Columbus; as well as the spelt onto which fishermen drew their maps while drinking in the taverns. What is common in these records is their primary interest in the sea as opposed to land: their mission was to traverse the seas and give true record of how they did it. Their vision was directed toward the oceans, of which they were part. So Olson's insistence on this kind of seeing, knowing by measure, and the textualization of experience onto journals, maps, portul ans, etc., might be read as one version of what Tadeusz Slawek describes as "Phoenician eye-view" (taking its cue írom a two-line poem in Maximus, where Olson assigns this capacity to Gloucester painter Fitz Hugh Lane): seeing (vs. recognizing), belonging, while looking with passion, to the world seen. "The Phoenician eye," Slawek explains, "looks at the world and SEES it (for the first time) rather than merely recognizes it (works along a pattern of reconstructive activity which only re-collects things somehow well known even before the act of looking)" (72). "It is a most awkward eye whose power is almost surreal: it looks outside and maps the world [...] even before the very thought of the world being settled and explored occurs" (73). This view is not limited by the land, not even by the bottom of the ocean, for that is unfathomable. What we have here, then, is an early conceptualization of the abyss, or endlessness, for which Olson coined the word "landlessness" in his journals. Landlessness here refers to that condition of the sailor where no land is seen on the horizon and no bottom can be fathomed below. It suggests not only a longing to go to sea and encounter such conditions, but also a kind of limitlessness of form and idea concomitant to sea voyages. This is, in Slawek's words, the "unfathomable bottom towards which the thought must reach only to discover its always progressing erosion and collapse" (25). Knowing by myth

. Mythic narratives of Hercules and Odysseus offer early models of navigation. Odysseus, instructed by Calypso to keep the Big Dipper on his left hand, represents as legitimate and useful a source of knowledge as experience informing maps and portulans. In fact, the best maps and records seem to contain mythic details too. Martin Behaim's Nurenberg globe, for instance, was showing various legendary islands, such as St. Brendan's. St. Brendan 12