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Simon Jarvis

Quality and the non-identical in J.H.Prynne’s ‘Aristeas, in seven years’

This piece is 7,200 words or about sixteen printed pages long.

... from Parataxis magazine, Cambridge
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J.H.Prynne’s poetry has been comparatively little written about, and it seems likely that many readers first come across his work through Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), in which Prynne makes a brief appearance as a Hardyesque poet of modest political hopes whose principal concern is to rebuke those who aspire more immoderately than himself.(1) The approach of Peter Ackroyd, though it contrasts sharply with Davie’s, appears equally tangential: in his Notes for a New Culture (1976), Ackroyd presents a proto-Derridean Prynne whose poems have a ‘completely written surface’ and eschew ‘extrinsic reference’ entirely.(2) Although there have since been other and more attentive critical accounts than these, a note to the collected edition of Prynne’s work which appeared in 1982 still felt it necessary to attempt to deflect the course which interpretation of it had previously taken: ‘Much early critical response to J.H.Prynne’s work mistakenly took its cue from the first line in this book: ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’, failing to establish that difficulty as being the ardent ‘matter’ and the accompanying breadth of imaginative and political reference.’ Whilst this note has sometimes been read as a parodic one (as for instance by Dennis Keene writing in PN Review in 1982) (3) there are advantages in taking it seriously.

      The difficulty is claimed not to be a manner of presentation supposedly separable from subject matter, but to be inherent in the matter addressed itself. Moreover, the insistence upon ‘imaginative and political reference’ gives notice that this inherent difficulty is not to be taken as an epistemological one: Prynne’s poetics is not amongst those which believe themselves to be criticising the referential shortcomings of an hypostatized ‘language’ simply by exemplifying them. The work draws on a lexicon which does not restrict itself before an imaginary ‘general reader’ of average competence; instead the breadth of vocabulary draws attention to, and asks readers to resist, the division of intellectual labour by which powerful practices of knowledge are made to serve sectional interests. The matter is difficult, that is, because although the matter which is to be engaged with is conceived of as a ‘whole thing’, the languages and knowledges which are at our disposal are cognitively and politically partial. Or rather, they are not at all at ‘our’ disposal in the covertly inclusive sense that such a pronominal adjective would claim for itself: as ‘Die a Millionaire’ notes, ‘we are the social strand/ which is already past the twist-point &/ into the furnace.’(4) That pronoun appeals as if to a community of speakers and writers, which is as yet no community but a series of markets and hierarchies, of a language, which is no common tongue.
      In such circumstances the notion of linguistic competence resembles that of political competence or citizenship in that by it a formal or juridical equality conceals substantive inequity, which can then be discounted as contingent or accidental. Calls for all writing to be accessible to all competent readers given a modicum of effort have as their corollary a double exclusion: of thought and reference which does not fall within the terrain of such average competence; and of the incompetent reader, apparently self-disqualified before writing judged accessible by appeal to a consensual notion of competence. These considerations do not mean that Prynne’s work is cavalier about the question of accessibility. But the routes of access that are offered to these poems are not falsely immediate ones: rather, they discover (as the poem ‘One Way at Any Time’ schematically demonstrates) that linguistic understanding is necessarily socially mediated.(5) In consequence, working with the poems will not be only a question of reading them off against a competence which has been accumulated in advance; readers are asked to become researchers, to take purchase on the whole body of the language and the history and polity sedimented within it, rather than acquiescing in their dispossession in the name of the figment of a common readership.
      Yet it is not generally the intention of this work to assemble a surrogate public language and life from fragments of sectional knowledge, as if the privatised segments of knowing practice could be taped together to constitute or reconstitute such a public culture. Commenting on volumes IV, V and VI of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems in 1973, Prynne wrote that ‘this poem, which might in some ways seem close to that panic-stricken encyclopedic impulse, as in Cassiodorus, which merely confronts the decline & splitting of awareness, is in fact something else; i.e. not secondary assemblage but primary writing;’.(6) The claim of divided intellectual labour, that it does or will eventually add up to complete coverage of what is thereby made into the material to be known, is resisted; enquiry which has restricted its thought at the point where thought threatens to cross the boundaries between faculties is not limited only in the extent of its coverage but damaged within itself. But since what Prynne refers to as ‘the decline and splittings of awareness’ are not only to be thought of as a series of bad intellectual habits which can be shifted by exhortations to a more holistic methodology, but as a stubborn and powerful social process, what kind of ‘primary writing’ can there be which does not simply mask these divisions, by offering epistemologically to transcend them, or by painting the consolatory picture of a unified culture which once was, or could in future, be ‘ours’?
      One answer might be suggested by the exhortation of ‘The Numbers’, the first poem in the book:

Signs or array,
we should take this, we should
really do so. There is no other
beginning on power.
Such is to elect terms,
to be the ground for names.
We should come to the other thing, the in-
fluence of terminal systems, from there. [...]
Here is the elect, the
folds of our intimate surface. (7)

The parataxis leaves unclear whether the demonstrative ‘this’ which ‘we should take’ is to be identified with ‘Signs or array’ or not, but this failure to specify is just Prynne’s point here: what the demonstrative pronoun refers to remains unspecified since the ‘intimate surface’ faced by each reader is various and to be taken up by readers rather than prescribed by the poet. But what the passage does clearly insist upon is that ‘the in-/ fluence of terminal systems’ is not to be approached externally, so as to provide a causal narrative in which the supposedly prior determinations of such systems upon each particular are set out, but immanently, through the particularity of linguistic, conceptual, and bodily experience. Any other procedure amounts to a defeatism of reason which, on the one hand, surrenders in advance the critical purchase of the subject to determining powers which are always conceived of as being elsewhere, and yet, on the other, implicitly claims for itself a standpoint outside such systems from which they can be disinterestedly described. Such is the point of Prynne’s secularization of both the political and religious senses of the notion of ‘election’. After a political election the voice of each voter in the polity is transferred to a representative, who will speak for each voter. The salvation of an elected soul is decided upon by an external deity. In each case, election acts as a deferral of the subject’s agency to some end elsewhere. For Prynne, to regard as the ‘elect’ ‘the folds of our intimate surface’ is literally to choose to start with the particulars at hand rather than to start by disempowering or disqualifying such particulars as mere contingency, accident, or appearance, whose significance is to be redeemed elsewhere. In such circumstances ‘we’ might become a real collective rather than its representative image.
      This is not a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to external determination: the passage quoted does still insist on arriving at an account of ‘the in-/ fluence of terminal systems’, and the range of political and economic reference made by subsequent pieces in Kitchen Poems and in the later collections bears this insistence out. Attempts (such as that of Michael Grant in the Dictionary of Literary Biography) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start from individual experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his acknowledgement that to understand individual experience is also to go beyond it.(8) Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediatedness. To do justice to what lies at hand would eventually be to understand how it does lie enmeshed in ‘terminal systems’.
      A later and more extended statement of Prynneian poetics than the review of Olson, is the ‘Letter to Andrew Duncan’ printed in the Grosseteste Review for 1984. In the course of the ‘Letter’ Prynne considers the consequences of such thoughts for the practice of writing:

... in many different contexts I observe habits of language formation which are not only grammatically retarded; they exploit the potential for thought and feeling to which they refer by milking it of potency and in the same sweep drastically abridging its connection with the physical substrate. ‘Steel is the pacer of the will’ (p116); ‘Love is the glove of anxiety’ (p54); ‘The act lives under the lintel of time’; in each of these cases the force of the idea grabs strongly the means for its apodictic assertion. The verb is an imperious recruitment and material is suppressed in the very act of claims for its release. (9)

In the phrases of Duncan’s quoted here, the words referring to what Prynne characterizes as ‘physical substrate’ or ‘material’ — ‘the pacer’, ‘the glove’, ‘the lintel’ — are appropriated in a merely illustrative way. They offer to make more satisfyingly concrete or imaginable the supposedly abstract concepts to which they attach: ‘love’, ‘the will’, ‘the act’. But, as Prynne indicates, they in fact have a different effect. On the one hand, it is implied that ‘love’, ‘the will’, and ‘the act’ are too general or abstracted to make effective reference of any kind, since they require the help of the ‘glove’, ‘the pacer’ and the ‘lintel’ to supplement and illustrate them. On the other hand, it is implied that the ‘physical substrate’ or ‘material’ has more than accidental significance only in so far as it can be appropriated to illustrate a concept. Prynne’s criticisms take the appropriations made by the writing’s rhetorical practice as an epitome of (both analogous to and exemplifying) a political appropriation, in this case the appropriation recommended by Duncan’s instrumentalist politics: ‘The verb is an imperious recruitment and the material is suppressed in the very act of claims for its release.’
      The point of such criticisms is not to recommend a ‘materialist’ poetics supposedly granting direct access to a realm of concretion undisturbed by concepts. As an earlier passage in the ‘Letter’ remarks, ‘That which is prior to the plasticity of thought and its expression of course provides the physical modes for a method of thought itself, without which the imagist merely counts bricks.’ Rather, it is to remind us that metaphorical or comparative identification may enrich or empower writing at the expense of that to which writing hopes to do justice; so that the habitual laudatory adjectives for admired poetry — that it is ‘rich’ or ‘powerful’ — may in themselves bestow no more automatic praise than they would when applied to a person. At a time when, as David Trotter has pointed out in his book The Making of the Reader (1984), the ability to come up with striking metaphor and simile is widely taken as a sufficient test of poetic merit, Prynne’s literalist poetic clearly places him at some distance from poetic institutions employing such criteria.(10)
      But Prynne’s criticism here is not only a criticism of one rhetorical figure. In two of the three instances cited by Prynne, the verb of ‘imperious recruitment’ is the apparently innocuous copula ‘is’. What it might mean to think of the verb ‘is’ as being capable of an ‘imperious recruitment’ can perhaps be better understood in the light of the critique of the predicative judgment given in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences:

... the untruth of the immediate judgement lies in the incongruity between its form and content. To say ‘this rose is red’ involves (in virtue of the copula ‘is’) the coincidence of subject and predicate. The rose however is a concrete thing, and so is not red only: it has also an odour, and a specific form, and many other features not implied in the predicate red. The predicate on its part is an abstract universal, and does not apply to the rose alone. There are other flowers and other objects which are red too. The subject and predicate in the immediate judgement touch, as it were, only in a single point, but do not cover each other. (11)

The point of Hegel’s critique is that there is more to the word ‘is’ than predication: the copula contains the implication that it identifies subject and predicate, rather than merely asserting that the predicate belongs to the subject. The predicative judgement, therefore, may be ‘correct’ as Hegel concedes: but its ‘untruth’ lies in its one-sided abstraction of the meaning of ‘is’, which performs a similar abstraction upon the qualities of subject and predicate. T.W.Adorno’s Negative Dialectics pursues this thought and considers it not merely as a logical but also as a social problem. Adorno argues that the belief that true thinking may simply be equated with correct predicative thinking both reflects and enables the imperative to a universal exchangeability of objects within organised economic life:

The exchange principle, the reduction of human labour to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification. Exchange is the social model of the principle of identification, and without the principle there would be no exchange; it is through exchange that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total. But if we denied the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule — we would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice. The exchange of equivalents has long since consisted in just this, that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labour would be appropriated. If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the exchange principle — as rationality, of course, but also as promise — would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques. (12)

The way in the which the qualities of concept and object are suppressed in a predicative proposition reflects and assists the way in which the different qualities of commodities (including commodified human labour) are regarded as irrelevant to their expression as exchange-value. The limitations of the predicative judgement, that is, are not merely contingent limitations of this particular mode of expression, but are representative of the limitation upon thought as such within a society in which all qualitative difference is increasingly required to become commmensurable and exchangeable. The consequence is that thought experiences the difficulty of doing justice to its objects within the structure of its own most elementary identifications; but also that there is no transparent conceptual medium, set apart from identificatory thinking, which would give direct access to qualitative difference. Rather, Adorno would argue, overcoming the contradictions of identificatory thought is not the work of thought alone: critical thinking seeks to bring concealed contradictions to light, but not to pretend that their resolution is a purely cognitive problem.
      It is not clear that Prynne would wish to endorse all the terms of this argument, but they do nevertheless indicate the nature of the difficulties facing any writer who wishes to do justice to the non-identical or qualitatively different. Such an aspiration, as the frequent recurrence of the word ‘quality’ both in the title and in the texts of Prynne’s poems themselves suggets, is important to Prynne’s poetic undertaking. Adorno’s argument suggests, as does Prynne’s own ‘A Letter to Andrew Duncan’, that any writer wishing to do justice to the non-identical will experience these difficulties not merely as an abstractable thematic content but also within the form or style of the writing itself.
      If these arguments themselves seem excessively cognitive ones with which to address the work of a poet, their relevance is nevertheless confirmed not only by the terms of Prynne’s ‘A Letter to Andrew Duncan’ but also by the refusal of his work either to surrender as non-poetic the aspiration to do justice to minute particulars or to take up the sheltered but displaced ground of a relative aesthetic autonomy whence whatever is written need not be taken literally. This distrust of the offered partial haven of relative autonomy indicates why it is that dialectical logic, rather than dialectical aesthetics, most usefully addresses Prynne’s work. The most extended effort at taking up with the question of qualitative difference or non-identity amongst Prynne’s earlier work is the poem ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’ which first appeared in the volume Aristeas in 1968 and was then reprinted in The White Stones in 1969. The poem is amongst the most rebarbative for any who would regard the minute particulars of political, historical and philological enquiry as embarrassingly and unpoetically specific: its closing list of references to academic books and articles produces further embarrassment by suggesting that reading should not be contemplatively confined to the text itself, but prepared to enquire beyond it. It should be said that it cannot be the hope of this short discussion to exhaust all the arguments and informations which might animate this poem: but since the point is not to give a brochure of all possible arguments but to argue those which are most important this should not give too much disappointment. Moreover, although the list of references asks for further reading to be done, such reading by no means provides a key with the aid of which the poems might simply be decoded. The poem might be thought of as writing rather than assemblage in the sense that it takes up with and recasts its sources rather than simply taking them over, so that attention to its lexicon and syntax is attention to the matter at hand rather than to decoration.
      The figure named in the poem’s title is the seventh-century B.C. Greek poet Aristeas of Proconessus, an island in the sea of Marmora between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Of Aristeas’ lost poem, the Arimaspea, only a handful of lines of variable authenticity are extant.(13) Herodotus, however, gives in his Histories a substantial report of the poem’s contents, which purport to be an account of Aristeas’ seven years’ journey north with the assistance of Apollo from the fuller’s shop [*] in Proconessus, his native island, where he was thought to have fallen down dead, to the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples of the Russian steppes, and of the reports given to him by those peoples of the inhabitants further north: of the allegedly one-eyed Arimaspians and their antagonists, a race of griffins guarding large reserves of gold; and further still, of the Hyperborean paradise beyond the north wind.(14) Prynne’s poem is concerned as much with the nomadic peoples reported by Aristeas as with Aristeas himself: and while the same passage from Herodotus is one of the primary historical sources for research into these peoples, a variety of ethnographic and philological sources are also referred to both in the poem and in the list of references given at its close.

[ * ] Full: 1. to cleanse and thicken (cloth) by special processes
in manufacture. 2. (of cloth) to become compacted or felted.
[Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary]

      It becomes clear on a first reading that the poem’s structure is not a straightforwardly narrative one, for several reasons. In the first place the elements of a simple past-tense narrative concerning Aristeas do not, even fragmentarily, run sequentially from the beginning to the end of the poem. Instead, the pattern of their narration is a recursive one, in which events mentioned earlier in the poem may be reverted to and amplified. Thus it is not until towards the end of the poem’s third section that the simplest narrative information in the poem, ‘Aristeas removed himself for seven years/ into the steppes ...’ is given.(15) Secondly, and more importantly, many passages of the poem are in the present tense. This combination of tenses is not the result of a wilful attempt to question the viability of a temporal framework for narrative as such, at a purely epistemological level, but reflects the necessarily fractured method of any investigation of the nature of prehistoric societies: historical accounts, by definition, give a severely limited report of prehistory, and ethnographic or anthropological evidence drawn from groups still existing separately or only recently assimilated into more extended polities is essential to any conjectural reconstruction of pre-historic social organisations. So that the present-tense geographical peripheries of the centralised polities from which the pre-historian writes coincide cognitively with the past-tense periphery of pre-history.
      But several passages of the poem indicate that the poet wishes to surrender the central vantage-point granted by the extended and settled polity from which nomadic cultures come to seem peripheral. Such a vantage-point is explicitly questioned: the description of the Cimmerian invasion of the settled territories of Asia Minor as ‘ruinous’ is placed between quotation marks and then glossed: ‘as any settled and complaisant fixture/ on the shoreline would regard the movement of pressure/ irreducible by trade or bribery.’(16) So that Aristeas, the researcher-poet who is both the poet’s topic and his model, is taken as proceeding quite otherwise than as a chronicler of the displaced from the established place of civic settlement. The poem’s opening lines give a compressed and multiply layered account of the surrender of any settled perspective:

Gathering the heat to himself, in one thermic
hazard, he took himself out: to catch up with
the tree, the river, the forms of alien vantage (17)

Initially, the ‘he’ referred to in these lines is liable to be identified simply with Aristeas: Aristeas gathered heat to himself for his journey into the north and ‘took himself out’ of the settled civilisation of Proconessus both in the literal sense of removing himself from that city and in the metaphorical sense of staging his own death, as to take a village out in modern warfare is to destroy it. He catches up with ‘the tree, the river’ in his journey north in the literal sense that trees and rivers have already, long before humans, occupied the northward terrain left by the retreating glaciers; the rivers and trees are forms of specifically ‘alien vantage’ upon the land in the sense that they are other than human. But ‘the forms of alien vantage’ are also, for Aristeas, the purchase of alien groups of humans, of non-settled and non-Greek communities, upon the earth. Aristeas seeks to catch up with, to understand, the relation to a place and its qualities that is not determined with reference to a fixed city.
      But another reading of these lines would notice that although there is a strong presumption that the ‘he’ referred to is Aristeas himself, this cannot be taken for granted. The two articles by A.F.Anisimov on Evenk shamanism in Siberia given in the list of references to the poem suggest that ‘the tree, the river’ are also to be intepreted as the concepts of ‘clan-tree’ and ‘clan-river’ around which Evenk shamanism revolves.(18) Both clan-tree, represented by a larch-tree used as the central pole of the shaman’s tent, and clan-river, thought of as flowing through the tent, are devices by which the shaman claims the ability to move between the upper world of immortal spirits, the middle world which the clan itself inhabits, and the lower world of the clan’s dead ancestors. The Evenk word khamat-mi, ‘to catch up with’, is also used as a technical term within Evenk culture for the shaman’s dance performed with the hope of attracting animals and securing success in the hunt. As Anisimov explains, whoever would become an Evenk shaman by any other means than ancestry must ‘take themselves out’ by departing from the clan for a period of trial in the forest; at the same time shamanistic activity as such involves taking one’s self out and temporarily inhabiting spirit-forms of the lower and upper worlds. So that the first three lines may be read as referring not only to Aristeas, but also to a shaman-figure of this kind. The point of the way in which these first three lines allow a double thread of reference to be pursued through them is not necessarily to endorse the view that Aristeas was a shaman, but to suggest at the poem’s outset a structural analogy between the risks taken by Aristeas in abandoning his settled community and his settled personality and those taken by the shamans in the religion of those with whom Aristeas wishes to catch up. The researcher-poet must attempt to give up a fixed vantage over what is to be sung or written about. Such analogy persists throughout the poem, but never becomes simply identification:

Aristeas took up it
seems with the
singular as the larch
tree, the
Greek sufficient
for that. (19)

Aristeas’ ‘Greek sufficient’ (where ‘sufficient’ is to be understood as a substantive rather than as an adjective) for the shaman’s larch-tree, the world- or clan-tree by which the shaman can move amongst the upper, middle, and lower worlds is named as ‘the singular’. Such a formulation appears opaque at first, but it becomes clearer as the poem proceeds. There ‘the singular’ carries, firstly, the sense of ‘not plural’: Aristeas takes himself out of his collective and of his collectively defined settled identity into a definition of self simply by his lone trajectory, in which, as the poem later remarks, ‘who he was took the/ collection of seven / years to thin out...’ Aristeas’ nomadic self is not, unlike the civic self, defined by a series of returns to the same place: as we’re told later, he is ‘no longer settled / but settled now into length; he wore that/ as risk.’ (21) This leads us to a further sense of ‘the singular’ as ‘that which occurs only once’: Aristeas’ departure from Marmora having apparently fallen down dead is an extraordinary or miraculous event, a ‘singular’ occurrence.
      An amplification of Aristeas’ ‘singularity’ is to be found later in the poem:

... it was
himself as the singular that he knew and
could outlast in the long walk by the
underground sea. Where he was as
the singular
location so completely portable
that with the merest black
wings he could survey the
stones and rills in their
complete mountain courses, [...]
With his staff, the larch-pole, that again the
singular and one axis of the errant world. (22)

The staff of Apollo, who is not only the god of poetry but also the pastoral deity of flocks and herds, is here linked to the larch-pole which holds up the shaman’s tent and represents the central axis of the clan-world. The world in such a construction of place is taken as itself ‘errant’, as wandering past the nomads, rather than vice versa, since wherever the larch-pole of the shaman’s tent is placed is the clan’s portable and temporary location. This singularity is not reserved to the heroic class of poets and shamans: singularity, as Prynne conceives of it, is not the mastery of self-sufficient subjectivity. Rather, that the clan’s collective gatherings take place around such a temporary and portable focus allows a constellated movement in which individuality is neither subordinated to the collective nor imagining itself as independent of, as master of, the collective:

The
spread is more, the
vantage is singular
as the clan is without centre.
Each where as
the extent of day deter-
mines, where the
sky holds (23)

The clan is without centre but it is still a clan: as a flock or herd of birds or animals has no centre but is still a flock. Whereas the established city-centre measures all places with reference to itself, so that many of the earth’s qualities becomes accidental to it, the clan measures itself with reference to places and qualities of the earth, where light falls on its surface. Anisimov notes that amongst the series of meanings for the Evenk words buga-bua-ba are both ‘place of birth’ and also ‘weather’: in such a semantic series transient qualities of the world would appear not to have been distinguished from supposedly permanent ones.(24) Such is the point of Prynne’s insistence upon Apollo as not only the poetic but also the pastoral deity: the shaping imagination of the shaman or poet is not a ‘frenzy/ of spirit’, but is akin to and partially enables the constellated individuality within collectivity of the clan, and Apollo’s divinity is earlier referred to as ‘fixed in the movement of flock’.(25) This relationship between the clan’s pattern of movement and poetic or shamanistic imagination is more directly referred to later in the poem:

Prior to the pattern of settlement then, which
is the passing flocks fixed into wherever
they happened to stop,
the spirit demanded the orphic metaphor (26)

The ‘orphic metaphor’ refers to Orpheus’ supposed ability to charm animals, trees and rocks by his song: as the Evenk shaman is supposed to populate the entire clan-world with auxiliary bird-, fish- and animal- spirits which protect the clan from whatever lies outside it. Such a notion of course risks presenting us with the all too familiar figure of the poet-king, able to shackle up all accidents to the poetical polity which he makes, a figure of whom poets have been understandably fond. But the poem immediately and pointedly cuts back upon any attempt to regard the poet or shaman as effectually the maker of the polity or clan:

that they did migrate and the spirit excursion
was no more than the need and will of the
flesh. The term, as has been pointed out,
is bone, the
flesh burned or rotted off but the
branch clacined like what
it was:  like that:  as itself
the skeleton of the possible
in a heap and covered with
stones or a barrow. (27)

So that whereas the ‘need and will of the flesh’ as an economic demand leads spirit to the ‘orphic metaphor’ which will organise the clan-world in whatever location it occupies, the term (or, glossing this word etymologically from Greek terma, the ‘limit’) to such metaphorical construction of a clan-world is physical death, whose remnants of bone remain irreducibly literal: ‘calcined like what/ it was: like that: as itself’. The bones of the dead represent the limit to the clan-world both in the general sense that they represent a limit to its metaphorical construction as made by the shaman and in the straightforward sense that the bones buried as the nomadic clan moves on leave a map of the clan’s literal itinerary, its limits. The excursion of spirit and the need and will of the flesh don’t get placed in a causal or historical order of priority: neither is the unquestionable base, nor is either merely superstructural. But such reminders of the material moment in the clan’s existence, critically, prevent its constellated organisation from being taken as a mere way of thinking which could be uncomplicatedly transplanted, like a set of attitudes, to settled industrial and agricultural society.
      Thus a recursive pattern is set up whereby the poem extends trust to apparently fictional and archaic religious motifs, but always counts the cost of such trust by recounting the material needs and desires which such motifs both support and depend on. This applies equally to Aristeas himself: although his departure into the northern steppes is credited as a spontaneous self-exile at the poem’s opening, the poem later speculates on the material circumstances of his departure: Aristeas’ region, Asia Minor, is ‘ruined’ by an invasion of Cimmerians, themselves displaced from the steppes by the Scythians, and Aristeas himself is touched by this danger, so that his departure to the steppes is not simply a spontaneously heroic expedition but has its own material motives. These motives are expanded upon later when the Cimmerian invasion has once more been mentioned: ‘Hence/ the need to catch up, as a response to cheap money.’(28) Once more, what appears at the poem’s opening as a spontaneous leap has its financial logic: any invading clan treating gold as ornament or use-value rather than as generalised money-commodity would from the point of view of a monetary economy merely devalue the coinage. So that Aristeas’ apparently exceptional flight represents a financial crisis experienced by his city as a whole: he sets off to discover where such cheap money comes from: bluntly, to find gold. But the extent of this trip adds up to more than its immediate occasion: more questions are asked than answered in this search for gold:

From here comes
the north wind, the
remote animal
gold     how did
he, do we, know
or trust, this? (29)

The ‘this’, the knowledge or trust of which is in question, has multiple referents. On the one hand, this story: how did Aristeas know or trust this, the story that gold was to be found in the extreme north? How do we know or trust this, the story of Aristeas’ journey, with its fabulous elements ‘beyond belief’? On the other hand, this gold: how, in what way, did he or do we know or trust the qualities of gold, as ornament or value? Both Aristeas’ expedition, and the poet’s attempt to imagine it, are efforts at knowing or trusting what is remote which lead to a questioning of what appeared most familiar: the apparently ‘solid’ value of gold.
      What then, are the perspectives afforded to Aristeas by his surrender of settled vantage and adoption of ‘the singular/ location’? The answer is a complex one:

And looking down, then, it is no outlay
to be seen in
the forests, or
scattered rising
of ground. No
cheap cigarettes nothing
with the god in this
climate is free of duty ... (30)

Aristeas can see ‘no outlay’: which might here have either the sense of ‘layout’, or that of ‘expenditure, investment’. The first of these senses is readily grasped: no political map of the land as colonised, as laid out, is presented, since the nomadic clan does not organise land as territory in this way. In the second sense of ‘outlay’, the clan’s geographical drift is not an economic expansionism which ‘invests’ a financial outlay in (that is, buys up) the land it occupies. This contrast between the clan’s movement and the expansion of a fixed power dominating an expanding economic territory is further pursued in the closing three lines of the passage: the place where duty-free goods like cheap cigarettes can be bought is a contrived gap between polities whose tax regulations are there suspended, a ‘free’ trade area where there is no duty paid to the state. The passage recalles Prynne’s contrast between Asiatic and Greek economic organisation in the prose piece ‘A Note on Metal’ (first published in the same pamplet as ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’) :

On the great alluvial plains of Asia the condition was one of power rather than value; that is, substance, and not (in the first instance) transfer as exchange. Flocks and herds can be stolen, bartered, given in gift or tribute, so that wealth for the most part is the power of a technique to hold all that, again the politics of limit. Whereas the Greek traders were already middlemen with no political standing, Sardis no city but a commercial centre working on the trick of abstract distance between real supply and real demand. Lydia, as Childe again said, was ‘a frontier kingdom owing its prosperity to transit trade.’ (31)

Whereas amongst the nomadic or semi-nomadic societies of Asia wealth appears directly for the power that it is, in Greek economic organisation relations between people begin to appear as a relation between things, so that the Greek commerical centres allow for the partial appearance of a formal juridical equality concealing substantive inequity. There is ‘nothing’ ‘free of duty’ in the steppes because no sphere of trade notionally and misleadingly separated from that of political power has been established. The contrast between Greek economic life and that of the steppes is amplified in the penultimate section of ‘Aristeas, in seven years’’

      ‘7       is gold, in this northern clime
     which the Greeks so held to themselves and
           which in the steppe was no more
           than the royal figment.
                     This movement was of
           course cruel beyond belief, as this
           was the risk Aristeas took
    with him. The conquests were for the motive of
    sway, involving massive slaughter as the
    obverse politics of claim. That is, slaves and
    animals, life and not value: ‘the western Sar-
    matian tribes lived side by side not in a loose
    tribal configuration, but had been welded
           together into an organised imperium
           under the leadership of one
           royal tribe.’ Royalty
    as plural. Hence the calendar as taking of
    life, which left gold as the side-issue, pure
           figure.’ (32)

Whereas in the steppe those who inhabit it hold the use-values to themselves, as ‘A Note on Metal’ argues, with the Greeks it is gold that they ‘so held to themselves’, as the means and measure of their standing. So that gold in the steppe is not the currency of value but the ornament of power: as the gold taken from Scythian burial chambers is generally worked into figures rather than coins or ingots.
      This passage of the poem leaves its contrasting polities and economies awkwardly at odds. Do not the italicizations, ‘life and not value’, ‘Royalty as plural ‘, seem to urge us towards the recidivism into the direct exercise of power which Adorno warns is the price of a glorification of the irreducibly qualitative? Any reader following the antithesis developed between Greek trading and Asian nomadic cultures up to this point could be forgiven for seeing its outcome as a simple recommendation of the latter: the description of the Cimmerian invasion of Asian Minor as ‘ruinous’ is sceptically placed within quotation marks and taken as the partial response that any such settled fixture would make. But here the movement of peoples across the steppes is frankly admitted to have been ‘cruel beyond belief’ and to have involved ‘massive slaughter’. So that the italicized words do not urge approval of the life of the steppe but recognition of its qualitative difference in all its aspects from that of the trade economy. At the same time the poem’s use of both past and present tenses reminds us that this qualitative difference is not to be consigned to the ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ stage of a unilinear narrative of history: such a narrative would already have settled into the vantage which Aristeas, and the poet, have attempted to surrender. Prynne takes up with the irreducible difference of nomadic cultures not nostalgically or recuperatively but dialectically: these cultures do not provide a plan or model for social justice but their difference does limit and measure the claims of a system of universal exchangeability to provide the self-evident structure of equity.
      It may now be possible to address the aporetic and puzzling coda to the seven sections of ‘Aristeas, in seven years’:

Guarded by the griffins, which lived close to the
mines, the gold reposed as the divine brilliance,
petrology of the sea air, so far from the shore.
The beasts dug the metal out with
their eagle beaks, rending in the
cruel frost of that earth, and
yet they were the guardians, the figure of flight
and heat and the northern twist of the axis.
His name Aristeas, absent for
these seven years: we should
pay them or steal, it is no
more than the question they ask. (33)

Griffins appear not only in the report of the contents of Aristeas’ lost poem given by Herodotus, but also as visual representations in the ornamental figures (often themselves made of gold) found both in the Scythian burial chambers of the South Russian steppe, and in Siberian burial chambers. E.D.Phillips, in an article cited by Prynne, compares the Scythian griffin to the heavenly gold-guarding dragon of Turkish, Mongol and Tibetan mythology and suggests that ‘gold found anywhere may have been regarded by the Scythians, as by other Asiatic nomads, as a heavenly and so a sacred metal’.(34) The poem draws attention here to what might appear as a contradiction in the ancient accounts of the griffins: the metal is dug out of the ground, but to no end other than to be guarded from those who would expropriate it. It is sacred and ornamental use-value, not the money-commodity as exchange-value. The last point of the ‘northern twist of the axis’ of which the griffins are said to be the ‘figure’ is the Hyperborean paradise: but the griffins are the utopian figure, not of a life without labour, but of a labour which would not be for sale. What restitution could there be for the golden figures removed from Scythian and Siberian burial chambers and melted down to make coinage or collected in state museums? None, of course: to pay or steal would be equally absurd when not only the griffins but any who believe in them are no longer to be located. It is not an answer that these figures or these seven years of Aristeas’ journey will provide, but a question: by which the incommensurably qualitative comes to measure what it has been measured and sold by.

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