The silence of death is the worst kind of silence, because Rulfian silence is accepted and Rimbaudian silence is sought, but the silence of death cuts the edge of what could have been and never will be, that which we will never know. We’ll never know if Büchner would have been bigger than Goethe. I think so, but we’ll never know. We’ll never know what he might have written at age thirty. And that extends across the whole planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.
Roberto Bolaño, trans. Sybil Perez
The Last Interview & Other Conversations[1]
Is there a silence in poetry so stunning and so fatal, so inundating and so full as the one at the end of Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”?
Is there a silence so plural?
Is there a silence so deep?
Is there a silence so perfused?
Is there a silence so much like being hit on the head?[2]
Is there a silence so much like being brained?
I always thought it must be like that when the Muse arrives. To be brained. To be crowned with a blow that alters one’s thinking.
I always think of that silence at noon when the sun stands over the style.
Fatal attitude. Art’s arrival.
I always think of a wreath of poison blooms.
In Looney Tunes,
when one is hit on the head, by an anvil, safe, or a club
wielded by infant, mouse, or chicken, one comes to slumped
against a barn wall, rock, or trunk, one’s head orbited by a wreath
of whistling birds and stars, pound signs, dollar signs, exclamation marks,
other diacriticals. The eyes bulge, the wig zags out, and the tongue wags.
First, lights out. Then, staggering around under Art’s crown.
It altars one’s thinking.
§
This is an essay about error. It begins as an essay about an apparent factual error, but widens into a contemplation of error in its widest possible sense—a moral error, that is, a mortal sin. It’s possible here that I draw the connection between factual and moral error, and consider sin a type of moral error, because I am Catholic, and learned to sort my sins via the Baltimore Catechism, that is, to list, by rote, those that could be survived or worked off in Purgatory, i.e., the venial sins, and those that condemned one to Hell, i.e., the mortal sins. To make a factual error while reciting one’s catechism might be itself a venial rather than a mortal sin, but at any rate, the connection between sin and error was here, I suspect, cross-coded in me. To consider a sin an error in the etymological sense of errare, a wandering or straying from the path, is a convention of Western Christianity, as allegorized in any number of knights’ tales, in the straying-from-the-path that opens Dante’s Inferno, and, most iconically, in James 5:20 in the King James Version of the Bible: “Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.”
The reach of this error stretches centuries, and is planetary in scope, and still happening, like a hiccup in the proteins of cultural code that keeps inscribing itself into each new cellular edition, until the chain of error stretches away like a cordillera into a Sublime, obscene vanishing point where, to paraphrase Dickinson, one cannot see to see. To fathom such an unfathomable error, I will isolate just one peak. Typically one looks for peaks, pace Shelley, “on high,” but in keeping with the theme of error, and with the essential reversibility of the Sublime, we will look for our peak down low—that is, at the bottom of a sonnet by Keats.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly States, and Kingdoms seen;
Round many Western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
That deep brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a Peak in Darien.[3]
There’s the sonnet, and there’s the Peak, but where’s the error? For the first forty-five years of its existence and circulation, first in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and then thirty-one more times in a broad effloration of sonnet compilations and commonplace books, this sonnet was not perceived as erroneous. Then, in 1861, none other than Alfred Lord Tennyson spotted a factual error in the eleventh line. Where Keats placed Cortez upon a peak in Darien, staring at the Pacific, Tennyson penned, “history requires here Balboa—(A.T.).”
Critics have clashed noisily about this supposed error ever since. The scholar Charles Rzepka has written concisely and persuasively about the conception, drafting, and publication history of this sonnet; the state of Keats’s and his contemporaries’ knowledge of the conquest of Spain (extensive) and attitude towards the then-contemporary Bolivarian revolutions (positive); the muteness of thousands of pre-Tennyson readers of the sonnet on this supposed error; and then the critical forever-war litigating Keats’s supposed mistake.[4]
What all this debate and counter-debate points us towards is the truth that has been accruing all along over 200 years: this is a poem about error. About the gravest errors. About crime. About graves. About hemispheric, multigenerational crimes so vast that they are still happening, a total climate of damage that began with the Conquest of the Americas and the enslavement of both African and Indigenous peoples, a crime lodged into the tissue of American-led global culture as anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, a free-formed hate-response to difference mirroring the colonizers’ own status as matter-out-of-place. Scientists have lately given the name Anthropocene to those epochal, planetary effects which had their inception at Conquest, the human megadeath on American continents that led to the brief Little Ice Age followed by its inversion into persistent and deleterious warming. The harm of Conquest both as a crime of genocide and an engine of enslavement, capitalism, and environmental degradation is continuous and persists across the globe, dispersed particulates, damage lodged in every coral reef, slime mold, bird brain, human lung. This is a crime so temporally, geographically, morally huge in scale it can barely be spoken with the everyday (that is, compulsory, colonized, majoritarian) apparatus of human speech but requires a different speech, a different hearing.
This is the context in which I hear the silence at Darien: it is the silence of the dead and disappeared, a silence so intense it is both “loud” and “bold,” so intense it inverts peaks to declivities, heights to graves, a sky to a sea, fuller than full. This is a silence so immense in scale it can truly barely be grasped but requires a poet’s Sublime hyperbole.
A wild surmise.
§
When I close my eyes and think of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” I think of it from the end, that is, from the bottom up, that is, from the silence, from under it, standing at the foot of the peak, looking not at a sea but up its sheer peak toward the vanishing point where vision cancels out. I’m immobilized by that silence. That silence stops up my ears like a stopped clock.
Instead of the sea, I am a watcher of the sky, and that sky is a total sea that fills the holes of the head and blanks out thought. Drifting in that sky: colorless shreds of decaying matter. With my eyes closed, I feel it brush my face. I feel it cross my jawline, brush my throat, looking for the gills. I feel it drift towards my ears, where my teeth used to be, where, 120 million years ago, my ear bones left my jaw, allowing me to separate hearing and chewing. Strange baits, I think. Strange baits.
Strange baits rain from the sky. Surprising bait
falls upon the sea. Down below the ocean, up
above unusual clouds on a clear day. Surprising
baits rain on the sea. There was love raining,
there was a clear day that’s raining now on the
sea.[5]
This is the opening passage of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita’s INRI (2003), translated by William Rowe—a litany with a fish in its throat. Like all of Zurita’s work, INRI opens its throat for a generation tortured, killed, and disposed of, their bodies concealed in mass graves or dropped into ocean, mountain, and desert by Pinochet’s junta. Zurita himself was a victim of the junta—an engineering student and nascent poet arrested on September 11, 1973, tortured, terrorized, and held in the galley of a ship, jammed in with other prisoners. The imprint of this experience cycles through Zurita’s work over the past five decades, including the interlocked motifs of harm and (sacrificial) self-harm and of being subsumed into the blurred and pluralized body of mass captivity. This imagery of fragmentation and pluralization of the living but victimized body in Zurita’s work frequently becomes continuous with the mangled and commingled bodies of the dead—an intimate relation among the living and the dead that makes porous that supposedly most absolute of boundaries. In this way, Zurita’s vast poetic works, performances, and earthworks form a continuously efflorating zone which has outlasted the junta but cannot be wider than its harm.[6]
In 2001, the then-president of Chile confirmed that the junta which ruled Chile from 1973–90 had disposed of its victims in horrific ways, including loading the dead onto airplanes and helicopters and dropping them into the Pacific, the Andes, and the Atacama Desert.[7] This rain of fragmented bodies into icons of the Chilean landscape is the “strange baits” falling continuously throughout Zurita’s body of work and specifically in INRI. INRI obsessively charts the troposphere of the “strange bait” as it plummets into an immense landscape of mountains, desert, ocean, sky, where the scene of the crime becomes the Sublime: “All the bodies thrown down into the mountains, rivers, and sea of Chile float on the wind. They have been returned to the sky and they float” (91).
This rain of strange baits—both particulate and plural—spills from the wound of the specific historical crimes of Pinochet’s junta. In its exquisite particularity and expansiveness, it renders the landscape as paradoxical, somehow both “down below the ocean” as well as “up above unusual clouds.” Even the clear day is inverted and is raining. Every binary, every Cartesian either-or, becomes an impossible both-at-once, an impossible and.
These essentially Sublime contradictions are evident in the dicta Zurita inscribed in a variety of ultimate locations in the 1980s—in the sky, in the desert, on sheer cliffs that crash into the Pacific. These writings entail a represencing, an inversion of powerlessness, an overwriting of fascist-nationalist geographies and a claiming of Sublime scales for the Dead.
Contemplating Zurita and his Andean cordillera, his Atacama Desert, and his Pacific Ocean (now hardly peaceful, but charged with Death), all inverted and converted via the song of the strange baits, I realize that I locate Keats’s “peak in Darien” as a part of this supra-geographical Sublime, part of that multitemporal cordillera of crime. Everywhere the strange baits are eternally falling, a spine of crime stretching back to the Conquest, to the invention of Latin America as a flexing and ambivalent designation variously striated with both coloniality and anti-imperialism, to the Cold War and its golpes, smashed generations, contemporary US interventions, anti-Indigenous campaigns, capitalist predations and extractions. Strange baits, the material of History, the bodies of the genocided, femicided, poisoned, enslaved, exploited, experimented on, and Disappeared, falling down to convert the landscape, flipping heaven and earth, falling and rising. “The Andes are dead stars at the bottom of the sea of stones. The Pacific also is a dead star at the bottom of the sea of stones,” Zurita avers (65). This is my peak at Darien—a peak at the bottom of a sonnet, a stone at the bottom of the sea, a sea of crime, a crime scene invertida, a mass grave, Sublime, “The ocean waves float across the sky,” a sky which is a silent sea of crushing fullness, a fullness bold and loud as Silence itself (91).
Mount Crime.
§
I wonder if my reading would be so strong if I had not been raised Catholic, a subject and object of conquest, inducted into the language of mortal moral error, the birthright of mortals, moral gravity, and the grave. And not just the language but the sound, a golden bell with a peal so high it cancels hearing. The sight: human sufferings both shrunk and multiplied in the oceanic swirling of gilt frames. The odor: incensed and sinking, saturate, weaponized, a censer swinging from a chain like a mace. Lessons in vertiginousness. Important things happen high up. Jesus crucified on Golgotha, the Mount of Skulls. In Latin: Calvaria Locus. In Greek: Kraníon. The part of the skull that covers the brain.
I wonder if my experience of the brain-blow, the full cranial force of the silence of Mount Crime, would be so strong if I had not begun losing my hearing, little by little, over the last ten years. Per my audiogram, I’m only moderately hearing impaired. Yet I have lost the contours of conversation, whole registers of volume, tone and pitch, dire alerts, friendly asides and quiet confidences. The experience is decidedly benthic. I feel I’m alone on the bottom of the sea. The silence in my ears feels full and fluid, a total regime. Like old telephones in a landfill, my audial nerves ring and ring. The ringing feels wiry, tinselly, and communicative, like my nerves are firing of their own accord, rather than relaying a signal. After years of being mediums, now they are trying to tell me something of their own. I lean into the private sound. I close my eyes. I picture the canals of my ears, the broken hairs like broken reeds, that refuse to carry godly or mortal sound, the silent fosses and plata of the brain, above me, the little seams where the skull plates fused in infancy, a fused sky, this enclosed and interior landscape like classical models of the Underworld, its meadows, rivers, and fields. Its locked hydraulics. I picture every channel so stilled, so locked with fluid that no noise can travel there. The reeds are broken, all the little hairs.
And yet it does sound, this silence. A stopped clock that includes all the times and all the crimes, all the mortal sins and venalities (which are, after all, adjacent), it is saturated with fatality, and I am forever listening, forever listing through its signs.
§
I heard extraordinary plains raining on the sea (10)
I heard an unending field of white daisies (21)
I can hear the rabbit stunned by the headlights (22)
In these lines from Zurita’s INRI, a new kind of hearing is initiated, a hearing that attends to the silent and the silenced. A hearing of impossible sounds, a collapsing of distances, a Sublime equivalency of large and small scales, a hearing become synesthetically spectacular.
You can hear whole days sinking, strange sunny
mornings, unfinished loves, goodbyes cut short
that sink into the sea. You can hear surprising
baits that rain with sunny days stuck to them
[…]
You can hear the sky. (8)
So Zurita calls and responds to himself:
I heard a sea and a sky hallucinated, I heard suns
exploding with love fall like fruits, I heard
whirlwinds of fish devouring the pink flesh of
surprising baits.
I heard millions of fish which are tombs with
pieces of sky inside, with hundreds of words that
were never said, with hundreds of flowers of red
flesh and pieces of sky in the eyes. I heard
hundreds of loves that were stopped on a sunny
day. Baits rained from the sky. (9)
This is the silence that locks the peak at Darien. A silence of total, impossible hearing, plural and particulate, saturated with crime. The sea-sky locks it in its fluid thickness. A pure serene, a knockout punch. You breathe it and your lungs remember to be gills again, remember to be stone. A fossil sea, which is a desert. A sky which is a sea and a peak which is a grave.
§
I’m at the foot of Mount Error. And the air is thick with error.
Yet could I never judge what Men could mean
This is a phantom line of Keats’s poem, included in the first published version (included from the Latin: includere, to shut in) but subsequently obscured (from the Latin: to hide in shade), apparently because Keats found the line “too simply wondering.”[8] I consider the line a covert signature of the poem’s true theme: error. It startlingly inscribes Keats-the-novice, Keats-the-uncertain, Keats-the-late-arriver, as the speaker of the poem. When the first person asserts itself in the first line of the sonnet, the “I” blows in like the sonnet’s confident helmsman on a gust of figuration, construing the speaker as well traveled on the seas of classical literary knowledge. Yet reading backwards from the foot of Mount Crime and gazing back to this first line, the mention of gold feels shaded, shadowed, made sinister by its association with the mortal error of Conquest, the lie about the Cities of Gold and the total attitude of extraction/rapacity which mobilized the conquistadors, justifying the melting down of Indigenous sacred objects to gold bars for shipment back to Spain and the enslavement of both Indigenous and kidnapped African peoples as labor for gold extraction. This mortal moral error is the crime of Mount Crime, it turns a peak to a Mount of Skulls and sets Cortez on top—Cortez, the conquistador most emblematic of genocide. Eagle eyed, like a bird of prey. It represents the inception of massive racist and extractive crimes that persist to this day, eating holes in skies, turning rivers to poison, shredding lungs and seeding human tissues with plastic, clouting whole populations with outsize pandemic blows, crimes infinitesimal and specific in their pinpoint cruelty, but alike and continuous in their deleterious effects, crimes which cannot and will not conclude on any conventional time scale, but call for cosmic, anachronistic, mythic, and anti-Cartesian reversals.
In this deleted line, Keats-the-novice speaks out a little too frankly for his own comfort about what he lacks in status and stature, what it feels like to be excluded and locked out of classical and contemporary wealth, even the wealth of cultural inheritance, the loot and the gold. He must conceal this, must instead characterize himself as confidently travelling, happily breathing the air up there, its “pure serene.” He must adjust the line in the direction of insufflation, of literal inflation, to stay on the path, proceed through the foothills of the octet, to keep Mount Crime in view. Yet once he sounds the trumpet of Chapman’s name, the octet’s big buffeting claims drain out through holes drilled in the base, through the typographical mark of the colon, like this:
§
Now something can pour. Now something can swim in the sky (strange baits). Lying low, a nonheroic watcher of the skies peers up to see a fetal planet swim through the sea-sky, inside the dura mater where the brain with its own thinking swims a sea of ken, as the reader breathes the lush figuration through her own gills, taking in the sensual particulates of the poem in through every hole via the erotical flexibility of synesthesia—in which to be able to sense is an essential capacity, more essential than the senses themselves—a negative, inverted capability, wherein hearing is sight, the sky a place to swim.
After two lines of this hushed, fluid immersion, the word “Or” is introduced. It inverts the scene from the bottom of some sensuous cranial sea to some aerie. The big full clauses which comfortably filled the first ten lines go awry, dashes disrupt the clarity of the syntax, so that we don’t know how to confidently distribute the final adjective, Silent. The dashes lead the searching eye backwards, as like a bolt of electricity the current of that Silence leaps backwards up the poem, attracted, in my reading, to every hard “I” sound—the wild surmise, the eagle eyes, the watcher of the skies, the “I” of line nine. Then the current blunts against the colon, rebounds and runs down through the sestet again, till it reabsorbs itself in Silent and subsides in the short “e” of the last syllable in the poem, so quiet it points to a still fuller Silence in its own wake.
Darien.
This is the calm of the bottom of the sea, fixed in silence, gazing back up into that stunned asphyxiate sky.
§
You don’t go and read Chapman’s Homer after reading this sonnet.
The colon after the octet releases you from all that.
Once Keats takes a hit of that pure serene
which lets him hide away all his doubt
He reads with his mouth and inhales sound
He throws his gaze up to the skies and sees a planet swimming
swimming in a sky turned sea
a planet swimming in the maybe amniotic sky
which is the same as his “ken,” his new knowing of crime
yet could I never judge what men could mean
but I felt I like or I felt like
a fit of likeness, like and unlike
zaps the synapses of the sonnet, convulses with currents of association
till I’m standing so minutely on a placename in a map
and I’m staring into the vanishing point and I’m squinting my eyes
and the whole planet wants to race away from a crime like that
but can’t
What is the capacity of this sonnet to hold this crime
it cannot hold it so big a crime
it’s drilled full of holes for drainage
it collapses like a lung
posthumicity is contagious
and not always serene
you have to learn to breathe (like Keats) without your lungs
§
Over 200 years later, it’s amazing to me that critics remain concerned with the supposed mix-up in Keats’s sonnet rather than the incalculable crimes emblematized by the tableau Keats assembles, with its miasmic atmospherics, its total saturation with moral error. When we gaze up Mount Crime at Cortez, we are granted no glimpse of the Pacific, nor even Homer, let alone Chapman. Instead, Keats’s compulsive similizing proposes a torrent of substitutions linked by “or,” which further saturate the scene with moral uncertainty. With its decidedly Western-looking gaze, this poem uncomfortably dramatizes the physical approach to crime and the slow dawning of one’s sense of complicity, of reluctantly “looking into” the matter of adjacency, of one’s initiation into the sinister endeavor of predation. In one brief poem this dawning half-knowledge is figured three times—in the concealed admission “Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,” in the mention of the fluid, just-planet-altered “ken,” and in the infamous “wild surmise” with its wide, long “I” sounds, which to me stand in for the white saucering eyes of the supposing, not-yet-comprehending men, eyes which do not see but express affect, as milk is expressed—express the white material of “wild surmise.” To half-know three times is to more-than-know, to know too well and too much. When one stands at the base of Mount Crime and gazes back up at the opening lines, the dubiety of the Age of Discovery is admitted to the poem through the double lie of the realms of gold and Keats’s claims to know them, knowledge which, in the colonial enterprise, is akin to and supportive of possession itself. While the word “sun” is missing from this poem, two centuries later, at the end of Conquest’s daybreak, with the full noon of consequence beating down on the planet, suspended in its inundating harm, we must turn our eyes, our wild surmise, on what we fully know to be Mount Crime.
Notes:
[1] Roberto Bolaño, “Positions Are Positions and Sex Is Sex: Interview by Eliseo Álvarez,” trans. Sybil Perez, in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009), 91. First published in Turia (Barcelona, June 2005).
[2] For this orthodoxy I nod to Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” as extracted from the 1870 letter to Higginson known as L342a. For ease of access see “The Later Years: 1865–1886” on the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum, https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/biography/emily-dickinson-the-later-years-1865-1886/.
[3] This is the final version of Keats’s sonnet published before his death. I like its emphatic (and pneumatic) punctuation, and sourced it from Charles Rzepka, “‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘Chapman’s Homer’ Sonnet,” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 42.
[4] For the fullest account of this debate I direct the curious reader to Rzepka’s article, above.
[5] Raúl Zurita, INRI, trans. William Rowe (Grosse Pointe Park, MI: Marick Press, 2009), 7. Subsequent citations given in text.
[6] I’m thinking of Dickinson again, and her poem, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” which fairly spatchcocks the brain.
[7] This is discussed in the preface to the English edition of INRI and, among many other places, in the 2010 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, which focuses on the efforts of survivors to sift the Atacama Desert looking for fragments of the bodies of the Disappeared—another parable about the impossible relation of minuteness and vastness.
[8] For this version and for this remark from Keats, see John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 570.