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THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY

TRENT UNIVERSITY
 WRITING 6

PROPRIOCEPTION

CHARLES

OLSON
PROPRIOCEPTION
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

[Link]
PROPRIOCEPTION

Charles Olson

WRITING 6

FOUR SEASONS FOUNDATION

SAN FRANCISCO : 1965

 'ojj

Copyright © 1965 by Charles Olson

Published by Four Seasons Foundation

with East Wind Printers

Distributed by City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue,

San Francisco, California 94111
 Contents

Proprioception 1

Logography 3

Postscript (to previous two) 4

Theory of Society 5

Bridge-Work 7

the hinges (of civilization) 8

GRAMMAR — a “book” 10

A Plausible ‘Entry,’ like 15

A Work. 16

223531
PROPRIOCEPTION
Physiology: the surface (senses—the ‘skin’: of ‘Human
Universe’) the body itself—proper—one’s own
‘corpus’: PROPRIOCEPTION the cavity of
the body, in which the organs are slung: the
viscera, or interoceptive, the old ‘psychology’
of feeling, the heart; of desire, the liver; of
sympathy, the ‘bowels’; of courage—kidney etc
—gall. (Stasis—or as in Chaucer only, spoofed)
Today: movement, at any cost. Kinesthesia: beat (nik)
the sense whose end organs lie in the muscles,
tendons, joints, and are stimulated by bodily
tensions (—or relaxations of same).
To which Violence: knives/anything, to get the body in
PROPRIOCEPTION:
the data of depth sensibility/the ‘body’ of us as
object which spontaneously or of its own order
produces experience of, ‘depth’ Viz
SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM
BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES

‘Psychology’: the surface: consciousness as ego and thus no

How because the ‘senses’ of same are all that
sd contact area is valuable for, to report in
to central. Inspection, followed hard on heels by,
THE WORKING
judgment (judicium, dotha: cry, if you
OUT’ OF
must/ all feeling may flow, is all which can
‘PROJECTION’
count, at sd point. Direction outward is sorrow,
or joy. Or participation: active social life, like,
for no other reason than that— social life. In the
present. Wash the ego out, in its own ‘bath’(os)

The ‘cavity'/cave: probably the ‘Unconscious'?

That is, the interior empty place filled with
‘organs’? for ‘functions’?

The advantage is to ‘place’ the thing, instead of it

wallowing around sort of outside, in the universe,
THE PLACE’ like, when the experience of it is interoceptive:
OF THE it is inside us/ & at the same time does not feel
‘UNCONSCIOUS' literally identical with our own physical or mortal
self (the part that can die). In this sense likewise
the heart, etc, the small intestine etc, are or can
be felt as—and literally they can be—transferred.
Or substituted for. Etc. The organs.—Probably
also why the old psychology was chiefly visceral:
neither dream, nor the unconscious, was then
known as such. Or allowably inside, like.
‘ACTION —OR, AGAIN, ‘MOVEMENT’

This ‘demonstration’ then leads to the same

third, or corpus, thing or ‘place,’ the
proprious-ception
‘one’s own’-ception
the ‘body’ itself as, by movement of its own
tissues, giving the data of, depth. Here, then,
wld be what is left out? Or what is physiologically
the soul is
proprioceptive even the ‘hard’ (solid, palpable), that one’s life
is informed from and by one's own literal body—
as well, that is, as the whole inner mechanism,
which keeps us so damn busy (like eating, sleep¬
ing, urinating, dying there, by deterioration of
sd ‘functions’of sd‘organs’)—that this mid-thing
between, which is what gets ‘buried,’ like, the
flesh? bones, muscles, ligaments, etc., what one
uses, literally, to get about etc
that this is ‘central,’ that is—in this
1/2 of the picture—what they call the SOUL,
the intermediary, the intervening thing, the
interruptor, the resistor. The self.

The gain: to have a third term, so that movement or action

is ‘home.’ Neither the Unconscious nor
Projection (here used to remove the false
opposition of ‘Conscious’; ‘consciousness’ is
self) have a home unless the DEPTH implicit
in physical being—built-in space-time specifics,
and moving (by movement of ‘its own')—is
asserted, or found-out as such. Thus the
advantage of the value ‘proprioception.’ As such.

The ‘soul' then is equally ‘physical.’ Is the self.

its own Is such, ‘corpus.’ Or—to levy the gain
perception psychology from 1900, or 1 885, did supply until
it didn't (date? 1948?)—the three terms wld be:

surface (senses) projection

cavity (organs—here read ‘archtypes')
unconscious the body itself—consciousness:
implicit accuracy, from its own energy as a
state of implicit motion.

Identity, therefore (the universe is one) is supplied; and

the abstract-primitive character of the real
(asserted) is ‘placed': projection is discrimina¬
tion (of the object from the subject) and the
unconscious is the universe flowing-in, inside.
9
Logography

Word writing. Instead of ‘idea-writing’ (ideogram etc). That would seem

to be it.

Leading to phonetization—as though we didn’t know identity of sounds,

meaning two things, any longer did mean. The proposition wld seem to be
that we don’t.

About the only way the character of the pun—and rhyme (which has
struck me now for some time as a most interesting crazy business of writing
right now)—makes sense. I quote (abt the earliest business we can know
anything abt, some Sumerian traders in cattle—“re cows and oxen”
is the tablet, 3500 BC from
Uruk
Erech
Orchoe
Warka

The need for adequate representation of proper names finally led to the
development of phonetization. This is confirmed by the Aztec and Mayan
writings, which employ the phonetic principle only rarely and then
almost exclusively in expressing proper names.
The procedure involved may result in a full phonetic transfer, as in a
drawing of knees to express the name ‘Neil’ (from ‘kneel’), of the sun for
the word ‘son’, or even together in a drawing of knees plus the sun to
express the personal name of ‘Neilson.’

I stop there. My own sense is 1 don’t know that we are any further. (In that
connection, negatively however, one can add this, at the same point from
the same man—Gelb:

That the need for indicating grammatical elements was of no great

importance in the origin of phonetization can be deduced from the fact
that even after the full development of phonetization writing failed for a
long time to indicate grammatical elements adequately.

3
Postscript to Proprioception & Logography

Further notes on what would look like fundamentals of any new discourse:

Landscape
“a portion of land which the eye
can comprehend in a single view”

to bring the land into the eye’s view:

COSMOS
All
creation
kinship
a verb
is known
vertically
NOTIONAL (GNA—know it
not
instantly
relationally

“carrying a full meaning of its own”

The other knowing is NOUN, proper (proprius)

noun—that which belongs to the self

nominal-ize all local relations are

nominalized
VID—vision of
Self: you I some other
God

4
Theory of Society

(we already possess a

sufficient theory of
psychology)
the greatest present danger

the area of pseudo-sensibility:

games

randomness -

haphazard
(1 (Thing¬
ness)
sorts
accidence
(anything goes or
all is interesting Of
nothing is
instead of novelty (“God is the organ of
novelty, and
as the true cast of
the sensible

probability -

(Kicks)
phoney disaffection: actually
political (the elite among
the masses accomplishing
a lateral coup d'etat

persons are hung along a line from birth to

death Some fell off at 5 etc some at
17 others 40, like No matter, they
are bombers (carrying forces) of the time

they fell off, not what

they look like talk like
seem etc Or arc
taken as
 (arriere to this thought is
the ‘phases’ used to be
causes of ‘forms,’ in
social — public as distinguished
from private — life: viz,

1st year infancy

2nd thru 3rd libidinal
4th to 6th oedipean
7th to 12th play
12th to 17th sexualization
etc
(upon which rites
de passage existed Opinion
has replaced all such

Superstition & idolatry also rampant:

anything can happen (BS

6
Bridge-Work

fr the Old Discourse to the New

men worth anyone’s study:

Edward Sapir
Edward Carpenter (Whitman’s friend &
Eileen Garrett’s
teacher

Carl O. Sauer!
Andrew Lang (on hypnagogic vision,
as well as trans. of
Homer—& friend of?
Mead
(Pistis Sophia etc

Aleister Crowley (? : particularly his

book on the Tarot

Ernest Fenollosa!
B. L. Whorf
L. A. Waddell
Edward Hyams
Victor Berard
Cyrus Gordon

March, 1961—with acknowledge¬

ments to Gerrit Lansing

7
the hinges of civilization to be put back on the door:

Hinge # 1 original ‘town-man’ put back to Aurignacian-

Magdalenian, for evidence of a more primal &
consequent art & life than the cultivation which
followed (the Deglaciation & the Wet Period
until 7000-5000 BC

Hinge #2 Indo-European, fr. the Bible or El Amarna

Age: 1 350 BC seen prior to itself, not forward
of itself (such includes
texts Hittite (& Sumerian behind it)
Canaanite—as leading to the Old
Testament, but showing earlier Cyprus
& Cretan—& Anatolian—conditions

invasion starts circa & roots: the linguistic values of Indo-European

2000 BC & covers languages, the original minting of
3/4s of the milleni- words & syntax
um ''Phoenician" al¬
phabet (Sinai)
dates 1850 BC (?) [as in other hinges of the direct line, there is an
advantage to the leaping outside as well as
connecting backward: for example American
Indian languages offer useful freshening of syntax
to go alongside Indo-European)

Hinge #3 to turn the 5th Century Heraclitus

BC back toward the 6th Buddha
& thus catch up Persian Pythagoras
& Thracian & Milesian Confucius
etc

forces not then lost (Homer-Hesiod to be

considered as Pisistratus
of Athens made them
texts etc; Miss Harrison
clearest among moderns
on Persian, & Cretan
preparations thus gained

8
Hinge #4 the 2nd AD back to the 1st:
an ‘affective’ time, the 2nd
—as well as brilliant
early secular: Maximus of Tyre
Marinus of Tyre
examples

but like the 1 7th later

costly in loss of some¬
thing the 1st, as later the
15th & 16th still held, a
sense of the divine

(gain here is to get a load of Gnosticism,

& Hans Jonas particularly useful)

Hinge #5 the 50 years 1200-1250, to turn the corner of

what has been all we've known: Aquinas
Eckhart Bacon etc etc

Hinge #6 the 17th, seen as the brilliant secular it was,

without loss of the alchemy etc it unseated

Hinge #7 the 20th, released fr both

18th— inadequate rationalizing
after Locke & Descartes,
& thus ‘weakness’ to in¬
creasing industrial revo¬
lution—

& 19th, the new progress of

Marxism

otherwise the present will lose what America is the inheritor of: a
secularization which not only loses nothing of the divine but by seeing process
in reality redeems all idealism fr theocracy or mobocracy, whether it is
rational or superstitious, whether it is democratic or socialism.

9
GRAMMAR-a “book”

why (“adv.”!) instrumental case of hwa, hwaet. See WHO

\ =
nominative who
how (adv. [AS. hu Goth hvas (Skt kas)
what
inst. case why

it\Ws
of qu: [AS the, a later form of
ne"rf page " us earlier nom. sing. masc.
se, formed under the in¬
rhe PT°cCS (pattern) fluence of thaet. See
THAT

that AS thaet, neut. nom. &

eachstep ( an atnt" °
acc. sing, of the demon¬
pi. those strative (?) pronoun and
adj.(?),
“Syn.
also used as a
see WHO”! relative pronoun
, nf a thtttg
Phi*'1 chf which n«asUte [also, a connective (!)
W^''Weotpiicabteto
derived by loss of stress!
ot nuihber ( lctcnwnc>-'
fr the demonstrative ‘that’

)thet- which pro! BODY

fr. stem who & that of lie (who-like?)
“of what sort or
AS lie =s body kind”
in “lich” Scot & Dial Eng

LIKE! “adj” f°rHES

AS gelic, fr ge & lie,
& orig. meaning
having the same body or shape
& hence, like

a adj. or indefinite article (shortened fr AN, adj)

AS one! (called adj ! fr numeral!

another
other (“adj”!—one of two, either other
actually is neuter of one, a pronoun!

[as what, neuter of who! /

10
 quantus pronoun - adj (?) [Relat. correl. with tantus,
of what size,
how much

(magnitude?)

followed by a clause of comparison

of such size, of such a measure,
so great, such
2_C>'
V/HO
stem absence of any such a word in English,
ST* *2 ^ fr tantus? Result, our confusion over
quantity? Therefore not understanding
pOSOS quo modo
quantus is the neuter case of a pronoun,
not an adjective???

Qui quae duoC^

bulk in Greek
ceterus, cis,
is pelikos
2 uter (quole)

Germ. *ere waS Wa'Um

Bn^J^sh°W

a.a*
, V\e him b
Lat^cf-EnS- ({0r older hb)

but quantus
POS (Pronoun! is posos

v. sub. £°-s
quis, quae
soSW
kas, ha
qua
kva
kutus qu“ quoniodo
Of Ionian G* katha
quurn
is 3- kada
= poteros, uter
kataras
 Active & VCAcE
II “Case” 7, in Indo-Eur.:

-:l&S ^
nominative
genitive Lat. with

TO CARRY
dative—to
accusative
j *1
ablative — removal or direction away, in Eng by from
AWAY
locative— where (place & in
PLACE instrumental— agent or means substantive (material
PROCESS content)
OR AGENCY

present, imperfect, & future / aorist, perfect, pluperfect

& future perfect indicative
(indicative middle ^middle
In the Middle A voice the subject is represented as
acting:

1. on himself: make oneself go, proceed [will!

persuade oneself, trust, obey [belief!

2. for himself: buy for oneself

send for a person to come to oneself, [grace!—
summon, send for or command
courtesy !
to take to the field, march [obey!

3. on something
belonging to oneself loose one's own, ransom [each takes care
bring one's own of themselves!

12
Ill The Indo-Europeans Anyway

They appeared circum 1750 BC—or 1800—out of South Russia

and east to the Caspian, and, as they dispersed, carried those languages
we have known thus (west to east):

Baltic Slavic Tocharian (!)

Celtic Germanic Latin Greek Hittite Armenian Iranian Sanskrit
(Fr. Sp. Ital.)

Sapir {Language) has this to say: “The first [of three drifts of major
importance at work in the language] is the familiar tendency to level the
distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter
in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases . . .
The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away
by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until only certain pronouns
retained distinctive subjective and objective forms.”

IV Syntax (“ordering”)

Sapir: “It is somewhat venturesome and yet not an altogether

unreasonable speculation that sees in word order and stress the primary
methods for the expression of all syntactic relations and looks upon the
present relational value of specific words and elements as but a secondary
condition due to a transfer of values.

“Thus, the of in an English phrase like ‘the law of the land' is now
as colorless in content, as purely a relational indicator as the ‘genitive’
suffix -is in the Latin lex urhis ‘the law of the city.’ We know, however, that
it was originally an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning, ‘away,
moving from,’ and that the syntactic relation was originally expressed by
the case form [ablative] of the second noun.

“An interesting thesis results: —All of the actual content of speech,

its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in origin limited to the
concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were
merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm."

13
V Concord, in Bantu and Chinook

an alternative to syntax [at least as we have understood it] altogether:

Every noun is classified according to five categories—masculine, feminine,

neuter [general], dual, and plural. “Woman” is feminine, “sand” is neuter,
“table” is masculine. If, therefore, I wish to say “The woman put the sand on
the table,” I must place in the verb certain class or gender prefixes that
accord with corresponding noun prefixes. The sentence reads then, “The
(fem.)-woman she (fem.)-it (neut.)-it (masc.)-on-put the (neut.)-sand
the (masc.)-table.” If “sand” is qualified as “much” and “table” as
“large,” these new ideas are expressed as abstract nouns, each with its
inherent class-prefix (“much” is neuter or feminine, “large” is masculine)
and with a possessive prefix referring to the qualified noun. Adjective thus
calls to noun, noun to verb. “The woman put much sand on the large table,”
therefore, takes the form: “The (fem.)-woman she (fem.)-it (neut.)-it
(masc.)-on-put the (fem.)-thereof (neut.)-quantity the (neut.)-
sand the (masc.)-thereof (masc.)-largeness the (masc.)-table.”

Sapir page 115

VI “Number” / the singular — exs. term (an end— not “ends”)

& image (instead of images,
in Nicholas Calas
(via Robt Kelly's
essay on verse in
Trobar 2)
“nominative” (plurals distribute)

14
A Plausible ‘Entry’ for, like, man
I: paleolithic man (brain-case, like the present
porpoise's, bigger than modern
to 10,000 BC man’s

art (morals, tools; ‘free,’ ‘traveling,'“women”

[the so-called ‘Venuses’

fr 5,000 BC: Sumerian to 2500 BC [a writing language in

(cities possible) existence c. 3250 BC]

1800 BC, Indo-Europeans appear (Hittite/ 1350 BC

& horse Canaanite
approx, ‘secular’ literature

HOMER. 850 BC

450, Athens: logos invented (universalism possible

II:
334-323 BC, Alexander's conquest of the East, and a unity possible
“larger than any that had existed before’’; and it lasted almost 1000
years “until destroyed in its turn by the conquests of Islam”
[but it was those conquests—623 A.D. on—, & not Xty or Rome,
which did it].

[Irish scholarship Mohammed born 570, lived to 632—

c. 500 - 800] Islam teaching Europe from Cordova
(Averroes) 1100 AD

fr 732 AD. date Martel turned back Moslems at Tours, one has to see
a ‘Europe’—and new “West”—arising

771 Charlemagne
790 Irish monks to Iceland
823 Norse, to Dublin
862 Swedes to Novgorod
871 Alfred
981 Eric the Red, to Greenland

15
A Work.
A work which would free much of the encumbrance upon man as himself a
universe—not microorganism, microcosm—would start with Hesiod, taking
him as a base-line and saying anything after him as ‘lost’ something and that
all which he does show and include is a beginning of dimension of man’s
place in the cosmos as it had been imagined before Homer or any such
better known ways man is placed which have come on since. What I am
gesturing in, is a ‘literature’ (of which Hesiod seems to be a conclusion)
which is now for the first time again available, and it amounts to something like
Hesiod’s own title, a theogony. As such—and not as it has sounded—it is
a total placement of man and things among all possibilities of creation,
rather than that one alone, of modern history and politics, and science and
literature, or arma, the Indo-European chariot, and virum, the old epic.
My confidence is, there is a new one, and Hesiod is one of its gates.
Immediately my purpose is only to wake up the time spans and materials
lying behind Hesiod, so that they can seem freer than they have; but
essentially I’m sure a line drawn through Hesiod himself will already demark
the difference the materials and times behind him will yield. The problem is
what seems still to be an unwritten history, the History of the Second
Millenium BC. Already in fact an historian-scholar of Hittite, such as
Hans Guterboch, has suggested that the classic three generations of
God-Fathers Absolute, and their Wives and Sons, is in fact some curious
summary of conditions in each of three successive millenia, the 4th, the
3rd and the 2nd, the series running thus:

Greek Hittite Phoenician Mesopotamian

3rd Ouranos (Saturn) —Anu
Millenium: Cronos —Kumarbi —Enlil (also El)
Zeus — Tesub — Baal — Marduk

And even—in Babylonian and in Phoenician—a 5th Millenium oldest of all

“Gods,” prior to Ouranos etc and ‘father’ of sames: A lain (Babylon), and,
according to Phylo Biblius quoting Sanchuniaton—the latter lived in the
“time of the War of Troy”—the first generation in Canaanite was Elium or
Hypsistos, “The Highest.”
I stress the 2nd Millenium because it is clear that the series set themselves
then, and though there are the wars of the Zeus and his brothers with the
Titans, or Giants, who didn’t rebel with the brothers, and therefore insert a
curious mixed evil set who trouble thereafter all the established edicts
of heaven and confuse the general cosmology, the fathers run out in the sons
decisively in the 2nd. At the same time the 2nd is the millenium of the

16
general overthrow of the ancient settled world, which was neither East nor
West, and the bringing into existence of what, even if unclear, comes
through to us—or has, up to now—via mostly the Greeks (allowing that
those who still read the Old Testament get a great deal of that previous time
of man slipping through the Israelite overlays).
The facts of the 2nd Millenium are loosely known. Around about 1800
things shook up. The main drive down on the older Mesopotamian-Egyptian-
Indus world seems to start with Hurrian and then Hittite people, the latter
at least certainly Indo-European, in and before that date. But there was
disturbance earlier, setting in between Mesopotamia and Egypt when
Western Semites called Amorites (meaning “the Westerners”) were fussing
at settled cities and people around 2200 and 2000 BC, actually founding
the Larsa Dynasty in southern Babylonia in 2020 BC.

But by 1800 results showed all over the known world: Egypt itself was
ruled by Hyksos, who are now sd easily to be “Phoenicians,” the
Phoenicians themselves (or Canaanites, to use the Hurrian meaning of
‘purple’) were mixed with the Hurrians—and the Hittite First Empire was
in full swing north throughout Anatolia. Crete itself appears already by this
date—by all the evidence that the identification of Linear A by Cyrus Gordon
now makes easier to lock in place—to have been conquered or infiltrated by
Phoenicians, so much so that in the period 1600 to 1400 the balance of
Aegean trade was in Phoenician favor.
Giving that history of that disturbance the most time one gets a period of
1000 years overlapping the next huge impact from which came Greece: that
is, by 1230 a whole new series of shift does come in, the Israelites invade
from the east, the so-called “Sea-Peoples” (the Philistines of the Bible)
sweep over the Eastern Mediterranean between 1225 & 1 175, devastating
the Hittite Empire and destroying Tyre and Phoenician power. Two great
battles or wars dramatize this time, Troy, 1183, and Kadesh, 1 188/87; but
obviously years earlier Greek and other new forces had been accumulating
and the overlap appears to come from about 1500 BC; Tatian in his Address
to the Greeks quotes Thallus, a 1st century AD historian, as saying that
Zeus’ victory in alliance with the Hundred-handed Ones over the Titans
of Thessaly took place “322 years before the siege of Troy.” This then can
be taken to be the line of the end of God-Father change and or transmission,
as well as a good controlling date for the emergence of the Mycenean or
Aegean Greek governance of the Mediterranean: 1505 BC.

We have then two ‘halves’ of the 2nd Millenium, starting with "The
Westerners” hitting Babylonia 2220, and ending with Troy and Kadesh
(1188/87 and 1183). In the first half of the Millenium Hittites and
Canaanites—or, a double Indo-European and Semite disturbance—replaced
older centers of power such as Babylonia and Egypt; and in the second half
17
a new Indo-European force, the “Greeks,” and a new Semite force, the
Israelites, overran the earlier like ‘pair.’
I believe this is a fair picture, despite how it leaves out much that we usually
think is ancient history, especially that 19th century stuff which stressed
Egypt and Babylon. It may in fact be one of the advantages of just the
literature, both which we have inherited, the Greek-Hebrew, as well as the

new literature these facts put into proper shape, the Hittite-Canaanite (as
well as the improvement on the oldest past which Sumerian gives us), that
they ‘right’ the history and give us this new picture of the 2nd Millenium.
With that one can then begin to work Hesiod back—as well for that matter
as the Iliad—and at the same time come forward toward Homer and
Hesiod’s day (850-800 BC) from a ‘true’ origin of much which they include,
the thousand years of writing some of which is now known and which precedes
them by a term of time as long as 1000 years. In other words Indo-Europeans
and Semites had, for that long before Homer and Hesiod, power and governed
an earlier literary and historical tradition which itself preceded them by
two full millenia, the 3rd and the 4th.
How much, then, of Hesiod and Homer is, (a) earliest man’s work and
story (3500 BC or before, and coming through relatively a unit to 1 800 BC
or so); and (b) how much is it the 1000 years of their own sort of people—
l-E’s and Semites—from 1800 BC to 800?
May 3, 1962

18
 T T VERS T.Y

0 64 0064267 8

PS3529 .L655P7
Olson, Charles
Proprioception.

DATE
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BRO-DART
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6 Edmon&on St r