ARMAND SCHWERNER, THE TABLETS
Joseph Donahue

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.
—Walt Whitman
I
Amid a recent rereading of Samuel Beckett, it was difficult to pick up The Tablets and not sense a resonance, possibly with the totality of the Irishman’s work, but most immediately regarding Waiting for Godot, and the speech of the enslaved abject, cruelly christened Lucky. Let it be for the moment more than merely whimsical to see in the compulsively explicating and comically unfortunate walk-on a proto scholar translator, of sorts. Dragged onto that spare postmodern stage with a leash Lucky erupts with wit and pathos and unintelligible nonsense in a pseudo-scholarly poetic mania:

“alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold an sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it”

II
Lucky, too, has read venerable books. The works of Puncher and Wattmann, as well as “the labors left unfinished crowned Acacacademy of Anthropopopometry of Essy-in-Possy of Testew and Cunard.” He has taken in the methods of modern scholarship. He knows about contradictions and aporias in the texts. He is aware that modern textual analysis is rooted in and returns to theological disputation. Lucky holds forth in cruel and ludicrous quasi-eloquence in grim contrast to his situation as serf or servant or slave to Pozzo, the modern avatar of instrumental reason. For the length of his oration, Lucky provokes pity, wonder, and mischief from the now famous prophetic vagabonds in our post-messianic times, Vladimir and Estragon. And Lucky embodies the failing possibilities of uncovering meaning in the past, of finally knowing something about our existential situation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATOKNbV3CKY&t=20s

III
As ancient as it is modern, Lucky’s speech takes a place in the long history of satires of learnedness, from before Juvenal to Rabalais to the present. Beckett brings the matter of ridicule beyond mere ridicule. He finds in it a method for moving the subject of satire from learnedness to ignorance, from knowing to unknowing. Satire is theodicy and finally, tragedy. Beckett brought to Broadway the postwar, postmodern age the inexhaustible relevance of epistemological skepticism. With Beckett’s send-up of knowing in one’s ear, it’s hard not to hear in the commentaries of Schwerner’s Scholar/Translator, and in the texts he purports to translate, a flourish of Beckettian quaquaquaqua. With Armand Schwerner, as with Beckett, we often ask what knowing is. Both authors in their critique of scholarship, of the good of books and of the good of their uselessness, awakens us to larger, overtly spiritual concerns. In Schwerner’s case, these concerns are those of Buddhism, such Buddhism as postwar Americans found their way to. The Tablets, Schwerner’s masterwork, can be read as the fruit of contemplative strategies, the adept peeling away the illusion of what was thought to be known. For Schwerner, such the satire of learnedness is ultimately in the service of what the poet would call a “significant metaphysic,” The Tablets is a satire that readily leads the reader into crises of unknowing and transports of mystical ignorance. “The spiritual inscape of Tablets,” the poet tells us, “is terror . . .”

IV
The Tablets grounds itself in the contrary states of knowing and not knowing. For all its delightful sport with the traditions of research and interpretations around the recovery of ancient languages, what The Tablets offers, ultimately, is a “significant metaphysic.” Taken in its totality the poem is nothing less than a vernacular anthropology of religion disguised as frets about textual editing. The Tablets gather themselves where much traditional theologizing begins, at the midpoint between old books and new books. They hold forth about the nature of knowledge in a way that might amuse an earlier satirist of learnedness, Jonathan Swift, for whom books themselves battled for the soul of the moderns. (As one reads more deeply into The Tablets, another issue dear to Swift appears: the relation between books and madness, or, in this instance, between poetry and pervasive, debilitating anxiety.) For Schwerner, the schism is not between old books and new books but between no books and proto books. Glyphs and pictographs exist within The Tablets, as if within a lost world of a higher knowing. Nothing is quite the same since alphabets came to be. In The Tablets, the primordial moment of the transmission of truth from ancient times to now would fail but for the heroic, and often ludicrous, expostulations of that lavish act of invention, the Scholar/Translator. The Scholar/Translator makes exegesis epic. The Tablets is therefore the consummate example, if not the outright apocalyptic conclusion, of a range of modern long poems which proceed by summoning further imaginative life from the depths of their own previous passages.

V
The Tablets is a fantastical addendum to Enlightenment and Romantic era inquiries into the nature and authority of New Testament texts, which coincide, as Peter Gay has argued, with the ever-new pertinence of the ancients. Schwerner’s poem redacts a deep cultural dream: that the true past has yet to happen. The exegetical adventures start right up front. That unreadable glyph in Tablet I, does it signify a god, or a pig? The quest, or is it simply the poet’s anxiety attack, evolves by way of the incongruities and pathos of textual black holes. Cracks in the imagined clay let the visionary light in. Our epic hero might just be Lucky’s Belgian cousin. Pointing to disputes in the interpretation of the founding scratch marks of world literacy, the Scholar/Translator makes them seem at times joyfully inane while purifying us of the oppressive self-consciousness of our own literacy. At odd moments in our reading, we can again be touched by ancient and unsolvable mysteries. Our hermeneutical Moses, bearing tablets down from the mountain, brings with him from the fire of the divine a dexterous critical imagination, on extravagant display in the closing Tablets. There, endless dilemmas of meaning conclude our mythic pursuit of the primordial text. One might almost think such is what is our reward for our desire to know some ultimate origin. However, as a newcomer to Schwerner’s work, I’m drawn to those Tablets where the Scholar- Translator disappears, the Tablets that offer no commentary, no emendations, no contexts, no digressions, no contention over cruxes. (As if I might find in these unembellished feints of immediacy and knowing the truth of The Tablets, the counter-discursive start of the poet’s mania for knowing and not knowing, as if these unexplicated texts were the creation before the creation making itself known. As if they were what first called that last avatar of secular reason, the Scholar/Translator, into existence.) Schwerner debated whether to simply present the faux founding scratches of human history without the rituals of scholarship. The record of humanity’s first thoughts could then shine forth unadorned as unmediated communications from the primordial silence. As it is, the power of these poems is dramatized by the very disappearance of the Scholar/Translator. (The lineation and the additional non-verbal indicators of editorship, the ellipses, the crosses that stand for unintelligible text, are still ample signs of his presence.) But apart from the intrusions of antiquity into the ignorant present that the translations represent, The Tablets also create poetic energy by modulating signs of the Scholar/Translator’s presence. “Tablet I” features an energetic intrusion of interpretation that arises, as through a logic of Blakean contraries, from the textual reliquary of irretrievable meanings. While seeming at times to vanish, the Scholar/Translator returns in the concluding Tablets, streaming clouds of exegetical glory. And how do we feel about that? We will end up almost giddy from the extravagant and ingenious display of learnedness, as if to establish texts and understand them were to bear witness to a life-force. But first we’ve got to find our way unaided through the semiotic depths.

VI
Of the twenty-seven poems that comprise The Tablets, four betray no sign of the Scholar/Translator’s hand (aside from punctuation and indications of missing or incomprehensible texts which are omitted). These Tablets convey an unmediated feel for the vast and unrecoverable realities that the raw archeological data evoke. These four poems counterbalance the Scholar/Translator’s own interpretive drive to translate and comprehend. Where did our guide go? Does he falter? Is he simply confident his services are not needed? Is it frivolous to suggest that his withdrawal is related to his later claim that the experience of the last unadorned Tablet, “Tablet XXV,” is also an experience of gnosis? These texts shorn of critical apparatus remind us that Schwerner has, in Wallace Stevens’ words, studied the nostalgias, chief among them, the dream of an untroubled and immediate revelation of our long occluded essential nature. As initiates, which is to say readers, we work to decipher this ultimate avant garde Rosetta stone, hoping firstness will be made known at last in artifacts that predate the invention of the alphabet, the alphabet which Schwerner depicts as an irrecoverable fallenness from the immediacy of pictographs and glyphs. Is there in these poems some encounter with the Original Mind closing in on us in our own ineradicable nostalgia? The unglossed translations are strategically placed. Factor in the only lightly annotated Tablets’ eruptive force that the presumably translated passages demonstrate wherever they occur in even the most highly mediated Tablets, and the theatricality of the poet’s form stands revealed. (And does an eruptive incursion of some ancient elsewhere lurk between all our explanations that aspire to an ultimate knowledge of beginnings?) The transition between the last of the four unadorned Tablets, “Tablet XXII” through “Tablet XXV,” and the cascading fantasias on method of “Tablet XXVI” and “Tablet XXVII” is stark, giddily provocative. The sharpness and cruelty and wonder of the contrast is itself almost Blakean. On one hand, however odd and incomplete the eruptions of ancientness, what they tell us is not the past, but the future, in that they are relentlessly focused on the horrors of bodiliness and death. On the other hand, the Scholar/Translator’s contribution to the poem is in its way paradisical, an almost delirious hermeneutical fantasia of commentary on the problems raised by reclamation of purportedly ancient works, of bringing the dead back to life. What interests me here is the suggestion that the interpretive quandaries might derive not so much from the conventions and comedies of textual scholarship, or parodies of the relation between sacred scripture and commentaries upon it, as from the bickering of practitioners in Buddhist communities. I have no experience of Zen centers, but I suspect the speculative forays of the Scholar/Translator in “Tablet XXVI” and “Tablet XXVII” parallel disputes arising around meditative practice and the nature of enlightenment in the American reception of Zen.

VII
“Tablet XXVI” and “Tablet XXVII” can readily be read as the poet’s testimonial to a longstanding commitment to Buddhist thought, as well as to his likewise longstanding contention with it. Unschooled in those traditions, I am not that reader. Let’s just say that the speculative forays and the satire on debates concerning relatively abstruse subjects offer a critique of interpretive communities of all sorts, whether it be textual scholars, meditating Buddhists, or contemporary poets. The final Tablets luxuriate in the tensions given by the recognition of a revealed truth. A community will gather around it and attempt to control the revelation’s implications. Schwerner in creating the supreme fiction of The Tablets needed to imagine a hierarchically organized wisdom tradition, one that can perpetuate itself and provoke satires of itself, in contention with which a poet can concoct texts that may or may not propose meanings at variance with the imagined received opinion. But there is a note of severity in Schwerner’s depiction of how poetry and Buddhism relate. In an essay written for Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary Poetry, Schwerner recounts a vocational crisis. He had been in earlier work, he says, innately inclined towards Buddhist concerns without even knowing it. He then encountered works by Buddhist writers. He began his study and meditative practice. In an especially telling remark for readers of his poetry, he confesses, “I was searching for a psychology that—as I then formulated it—existed within a significant metaphysic.” This would be the life of a Zen priest. The desire is demanding, to find a psychology—an understandable personal and interpersonal world—within a structure of ideas that could account for this world and the world of some order beyond the world. That it be “significant” suggests that the metaphysic Schwerner imagines carries with it a history and a tradition. The start of Schwerner’s spiritual quest is telling: “my first attempt at meditation . . . was preceded by weeks of anxiety. I was sure that yielding to the process would once and for all ruin me for poetry—or would ruin the poetry within me” (p. 244). He can’t be both Zen and a poet. The two ways of being are at war. It turns out this fleeting moment offers no further trouble. Schwerner enters a Buddhist community. He keeps writing poetry. But an atmosphere of anxiety pervades his essay, escalating to panic when panic is held forth by a mentor as a step towards enlightenment. Poetry is within Buddhist religious culture but is not of it. To be clear, Schwerner is grateful for his experiences at the Zen center. He is appreciative and praiseful. Poetry even occurs in relation to ritual practice. But also, poetry seems to arise from a resolutely noncommunal selfhood:
What is notable about Schwerner’s account of his Buddhist life experiences is his focus on the student/teacher relation. Getting along with teachers would seem almost the whole of it. Buddhism is largely an anxiety about whether the initiate has found the right teacher. I am looking in from the outside. I can well believe that the quality of discipleship is essential to a narrative of spiritual progress. In that we are dealing with the author of The Tablets, however, it’s striking that there may be what Pound would call a subject rhyme among the three imagined communities of Schwerner’s concerns, that of the scholarship that provides the foundational trope of The Tablets, that of the communities of Buddhist teachers and students, and that of poets, a cult of self-explicating isolatos. The vocations that Schwerner is torn between, Zen Buddhist and poet, make differing claims made upon the initiate. As a Buddhist, Schwerner is uneasy about but open to the possibility of discord. Despite the ecstatic gratitude expressed elsewhere in the essay as to the fellowship of practitioners, to become part of such a religious community is to be in contention with others. Perhaps more radically, Schwerner seems to feel that to have anything in common with others is a problem. In the passage just quoted, note how the poet blurs the distinction between Buddhist and poet, asserting a fortified self against others, an insular self, “mine is mine.” Polis is not quite this.

VIII
Anxiety, panic, terror, gratitude, what drives the poet towards and away from these seemingly antithetical identities? Whatever it is the poetry Schwerner is summoning and memorializing with The Tablets arises from it. The extravagance of figuration and fiction around the possibilities of meaning, the satiric possibilities of meaninglessness, what Beckett might call the quaquaquaqua, are the fruit of a significant metaphysic, or rather, the desire for a significant metaphysic. The Tablets draw their imaginative strength from inviting and destabilizing received meanings, and from continually reinvigorating a belief in some primordial mind that existed before alphabets. The poetry’s eternal delight, its Blakean energy, comes from the asserting of a strange and ineradicable otherness in the translations themselves, an otherness that receives definition and clarity by erupting within the life of an interpretive community of scholars, Buddhist teachers, and possibly, Poundians. Modern poetry knows about this. Certain poets lavishly imagine a hierarchy of learnedness, or at the least, a closed community that would provoke interpretations, that would intensify and focus the anomalous eruption of poetic force, of dictated passages. (Consider Finkelstein’s Immanent Foundation, or the elaborate configuration of war dead and Tibetan deities in Gray’s Salient.) In his essay Schwerner gives an account of how “Tablet XXV” came to be. This description may apply to all the passages of purportedly ancient poetry in The Tablets, or to no others. I suspect this is not the only Tablet that arrived in such a manner, as “a penetration of the forcefield of psychic events.” Or, as what a subsequent Tablet will call simply, gnosis. This dictated section, Tablet XXV, is the pivot of the larger poem. With what will follow The Tablets turn from translations unadorned by commentary to a paradise of explication. “Tablet XXV” is not the result of long labors over dead languages but of a meditation. The poem is an intrusion of otherness and suggests a reading of Schwerner as one in an ongoing tradition of dictated poetry, from Yeats to Duncan, Spicer, and beyond. The poet as a patient scholarly meticulous archivist of lost cultural treasures is as far from Armand Schwerner as the Beineke is from The Place, the home of Spicer’s Magic Workshop, not to mention the legendary “Blabbermouth Night.” Here is the poet’s account:
IX
Schwerner’s account of the writing of this section places the poetic act within the traditions of Buddhist meditation, a meditation that brings to be from beyond the bounds of doctrine what Jeffrey Kripal would no doubt call an anomalous experience. A Tablet, put forward as a reconstruction of humanity’s first verses, turns out to be a wacky moment in the head of a meditator at a Zen center in Riverdale. The Scholar/Translator has disappeared. The poem is freed from commentary, as if it were authentic remnants of an anomalous psychic intrusion treated as a foundational moment of human cultural evolution. The poem is a template for conscious embodiment within the context of a spiritual community. The speaker or perhaps the conduit, of the poem begins in a state of transport, “swimming,” which, given the mythic ancientness of the poem, would likely be in some metaphysically significant river, some proto-Tigris, some amniotic Euphrates, or perhaps some Edenic Hudson. The speaker announces a moment of self-discovery, “clearly I’m the swimming animal,” perhaps a moment of evolutionary regression, where the poet in classifying himself as an animal already supposes the category of animal. Following upon this proclamation, song is born, song, divided into light and dark, proliferating the dualism implicit in being a “swimming animal “who can understand the category, “swimming animal.” The poem surveys the sensorium of the alleged animal. We are in a world of intimations, of ritual and fire, of shelter and solitude, and of a peculiarly exact state of self-awareness, “humbled by distractable eyes . . .” The initial terms of the poem return and evolve. The “small getting older house,” is that a cultic site, perhaps a liminal space in an ongoing ritual? Are we in a Zen center, or in the cradle of civilization, in an outtake from Altered States? The poem fuses the exterior and the interior. Body and water interpenetrate. The river reaches around into the hollows behind the shoulder. An onset of temporal uncertainty genders the air (“the thickness of the vagina smell of another room”). Suddenly, a fully operational vatic state (”my pictures whose songs in my dreams look like my story”) which then is interrupted or repudiated. The speaker wants to turn his attention from what he has just imagined back to his sense of being in a body and in a place. The notion of narrative, of story, and so of history, is fended off. The poem leads us to a moment of lyric purity, a reminder that The Tablets is not about the past but about an enhanced, vivified present that is always about to be nothing. We are, in our bodies and our souls, what The Tablets themselves are, a continuous process of Emptying and Filling.

“A vast invitation of voices, wet through by flooding,

Alive with drone and crawl, track and shimmer of beings in love

With the hazy dusk of water”

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Joseph Donahue’s most recent volume of poetry is This to That and Thus, poems 1983-1998, and The Palace of Boundless Cold. Volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida XII-XXI , and Disfluency: Collected Uncollected Poems 1973-2023 appeared in 2024. He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000 (Talisman, 2002). A new volume of poetry, The Breeze Behind the Breeze, is forthcoming in 2027.