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
like, in Ralph Maud's superb reading of "The Kingfishers," "the birds demanded the poem" (27). Olson's alternative to America's beginning, then, is not another definitive "discovery" preceding the supposedly "original" act, but a whole series of discoveries whose existence simply suspends the very idea of origin. As such, it rehearses some new knowledge about origin being not only an empty concept, but one that is repeatedly being emptied out. Since every "discovery" was preceded by previous discoveries, origin is always already preceded by another origin: history is a Moebius strip, an empty structure always returning onto itself. "A man within himself upon an empty ground," as he says in the poem with this title ("The Moebius Strip"). Not only does Olson fold origin into process, but also collapses direct experience into the narrative and cultural paradigm of this experience. Indeed, as much as he valorizes direct experience, he recognizes, in each instance, the textual nature of this experience. His heroes are necessarily those who have been recorded in history: mapmakers, chart makers, and authors of journals and letters. Even the fishermen, who preceded the colonizers, have left portulans and periploi behind, and are remembered in rituals and city records. Ultimately all forms of knowing —by measure, myth, and word —are semiotic and/or textual. In addition, the poem gains its interest from the tension between a context-based reading and its decontextualized focus on the particularities of la Cosa's perceptions. We who live four centuries after la Cosa do know the cultural significance of his landing: his seeing the shore for the first time is not innocent because neither la Cosa, nor Olson, looks with the eyes only, but through cultural concepts that are just being constructed. La Cosa's eyes are, so to speak, making their cultural objects right on the spot. In portraying the experiencing of experience, neither the captain nor the poet can avoid using language and cognitive constructs that were evolving as la Cosa arrived on this scene of a supposedly first encounter. 3. Apocatastasis as process and textuality. Olson's fascination with the possibility or impossibility of restoring some original condition figures in another poem too, one that has 16
