I brought Nathaniel Tarn’s Atlantis, An Autoanthropology with me to Albuquerque, New Mexico for an archival trip this past March. Archival work is quiet work, and so Tarn’s voice offered me companionship each evening. I read until there were only a few dozen pages left and then put the book down. Since then, I’ve read a few pages at a time, reluctant to reach the final line. Tarn, whose steps Atlantis follows, believes in maps only by “pacing them out” for himself, stepping foot within the land of each outlined shape (175). This desire for map-making guides the life traced and hoped for in the book’s pages, and this life itself forms a map only believed by pacing out its contours, perhaps for author as much as reader. To finish the book would be to take a step off of this map, to relinquish the voice carrying me through and into time with an addictive rhythm, and to enter the realm of the elegiac. Yet, as Tarn tells us, for the poet, the elegiac overflows (and lies barren, as the vita brevis / vita longa allows) with “that rest which never rests, that stillness perpetually in motion, and that extreme puzzlement which will keep [the poet] occupied till the final day” (203). Atlantis is a book which accompanies its reader in mesmerizing fashion and provides brilliant revelation in clear form. The map Nathaniel Tarn is able to weave, by way of memory’s materials and silences, time’s encounters and losses, and the wisdom collected by an insatiable reader who has spent a lifetime desiring and dwelling within language and culture, is an extraordinary feat of will and of hope. Atlantis leaves its reader stunningly stranded between the world Tarn has witnessed, the world Tarn created as he witnessed, and the world of the prophetic, awaiting language yet beyond its realms.

Tarn writes that the “I,” the voice, exists within the body from the body’s beginnings but is heard only through effort and will. As we heed the incoming world through our senses, we can locate this voice within us. We are thus both threatened by the noises of the world and require them to make sense of ourselves, to locate our self amidst and through an “us.” Tarn writes: “let there be the mystery that the deeper the body is an ‘I,’ the more collective, the more us-lich or even uns-lich, to coin a term, will be that voice” (3). Continuously elaborating language to more completely hold the world as it is sensed and seen, Tarn enacts the process of this mystery in Atlantis. He gathers the world around him, through memory, to approach an “I” deeply sensitive to the world as it spins and brimming with the sounds of the collective.

Atlantis’s process of holding contains an aspiration to the impossible: the knowledge that the earthly—all that can be remembered and recorded, translated from object to word—must sit next to the unattainable. “The intruder lies low, in a cot perhaps, looking up,” begins an image of Tarn’s childhood. The small intruder looks up towards “any father that might present himself,” through air that is “yellow, appears to be yellow.” Tarn notes that this book was written without the aid of decades of journaling and instead is the summation of memories, replete with that which is and that which appears, with the “perhaps” of memory’s elusiveness. Tarn insists that the past must be approached with an awareness of its distantness; the elegiac poem looks back at previous poems, at previous cultures, and at the sense of a life “fully realizing, fully attentive to, and possessing that backward look” (281). To acknowledge the past’s resistance to translation is to hold the possibilities and impossibilities of the elegiac, of memory and of language, at once.

Walter Benjamin writes of time and the role of the historian in his Theses on the Philosophy of History that the historian must align the events of the past in a constellation, conceiving of the present as the “time of the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” In Atlantis, the past arrives in constellations of encounters with the likes of Octavio Paz and Salvador Dalí, with witnessings of an Atiteco declaration of love in Santiago Atitlán, of a spider web destroyed and rebuilt overnight, of the intimacies between human body and nature. Loss and beauty, or the loss of beauty, radiates out from the center of recollection. Yet this loss, Tarn recognizes, “contains its own consolation…I tell myself with fear that it is perhaps the very sense of loss that is the beauty, for starting from that sensation and then going around, heavy-looking, pregnant with loss, gives one a sérieux, a look of wisdom, of fulfillment, that links one in kinship with prophets, seers, mystics, saints, ascetics, the mighty fathers in the college of the sky” (53). Where is memory in this process of loss and consolation? Atlantis is a book of the senses, of a body and mind attuned to the highest, to the smallest, to the just felt and just lost. It is a book filled with the beauty of sensing above, around, and inside of each lost memory, each trace imprinted on the mind’s wax tablet with a sensorial stamp. Atlantis holds on to the chips, the falling fragments, of memory as it approaches, shatters, and then persists. As Tarn aspired to in his cultural anthropology work (yet found impossible, he writes, due to the infuriating limits of the market, of the discipline), Atlantis holds the literary potential of a language of anthropology wholly intact. This holding in part lies in Tarn’s meticulous attention to the loss and beauty of the backwards look as the observer observes and the rememberer remembers. This is a feat worthy of true pause.

The persistence towards the impossible, the “stillness perpetually in motion” in the elegiac means, for me, that hope is at the center of Tarn’s work. Tarn admits that poetry without “hope” has always felt impossible. Despair necessarily accompanies this hope, and the two circle around one another in the worlds of communication and of structure. These worlds apply to life as they do to poetry: “belief in the push and in the limitlessness is necessary to the illusion of an ongoing process of creation but [it] is also necessary to know that all process eventually has to fall back into structure—i.e., to bear and tolerate limits—from which, when the impulse is present, process can set out another time” (78). The poet must unspool and respool the structures of language burdened by scholarly jargon, the links of communication broken by new technologies and postmodern “business,” and write and utter her or his language with precision. A turn to a heraldic order, Tarn writes, could also bestow upon society a sense of security and a structure which values each person “above his or her individuality” (125). Throw Fifteen (Atlantis is divided into “Throws,” clay thrown onto a spinning wheel and turned by fate and human hand) writes of this heraldic system as a form “of manageable simplicity” with constant elements, complicated by the permutations of these elements. Simple form and complex content meet one another and are, perhaps, emblematized in a primal or archetypal form, an “Eden” which stands “at the fountainhead of each system of topography” (141). To impose the original Eden upon the mass of formless data that encircles us is “the initial move in any act of creation.” This move includes an act of gathering, “that dawn-like shimmer of the lists [in primitive and archaic poetry],” which is full of potential (of hope) and of dread that one will not be able to catalog all elements to create a totalizing image (142). So what must the poet do? What can the poet do? Tarn, in his early years of writing, created an idea of “a privileged garden, a hortus conclusus, that would be lit only by an inner light emanating from the garden itself and no other source” (147). Hope for the appearance of an unknown and new object was continually balanced with the depressing repetitions of the already existing. The “structural messianic” appears: a future that remains open without any promise of a Messiah, with only the truly unknown, the wholly unuttered, waiting around the bend. Where does this futurity, this hope and despair for a messianic future lacking a Messiah, for the creation of the poem, meet the elegiac? The past is entirely created—it has been said; it has been uttered—and so how can the poet gather her or his memories with an eye toward totality (toward ‘truthful’ and complete transference of the past into the present), an eye toward the privileged garden and its emanating light (the past preserved as past, only made up of its own materials), and a third eye which acknowledges the poet’s backward look, preserves the sense of the past’s unattainability, and creates something entirely new? Atlantis opens for its reader the sonorous spaces amidst and between these lines of vision.

Tarn continually returns, in dream (almost) and in body, to Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands, the site of his first anthropological fieldwork. The Lake became for the “Wordsworthian youth” a spiritual home with Edenic overtones, lost and regained across a lifetime. At the site of the Lake, the ritual of loss meets the ritual of beauty, the traveler’s sense of personal or intimate Time meets (gently or abruptly, in turn) the Time of environmental collapse, of origin myth disturbed by colonial presence, and of history marching ruthlessly forward. It is between these two realms of Time that the possibility of voice, the limited but hopeful power of the poet, emerges and stakes its claims. In a rare citing of a notebook entry, Tarn transcribes from ~1961: “The poet is the original Janus. Faces forward and backward at the same moment, advancing and retreating simultaneously” (230). In Atlantis, memory turns its head both ways, and in the movement of this turning we find the poet, caught in this wake and attempting to tell (to throw) a beginning and an ending at once. Tarn, the character, has trouble with the time between, with transitions. Atlantis not only works through this trouble but asserts that this betweenness is the center, the emanating core, of the poet’s hardships and abilities. In The Hölderliniae / A poem (2021), a requiem to Hölderlin and Susette “Diotima,” his Beloved, the poet asked:
Tarn writes that “ritual is a form of re-creation of the world itself” in which belief may not be required; one can act “as-if” we are performing the ways gods and ancestors of the past performed (165). “As-if” is not a consolation in Tarn’s opus, but a means of facing backwards and forwards at once, of asserting the elegiac and the lyrical (as he unpacks in The Embattled Lyric). Tarn wonders about the borders between the one life and the many, the path we choose in each instant and the infinite paths we don’t, the spaces between the part and the whole, the unknown and the known. Memory, as engaged with by Tarn, suffers and thrives within these gaps, resisting any feigned resolution of binaries. Memory refuses to settle in the past, present, or future but instead wanders amidst the three, in a Time guided by ritual, by myth, and by doubt. Where is the base of the world?

---

Rachel Kaufman is a PhD student in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA and the author of Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021). Her poetry has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Southwestern American Literature, Western Humanities Review, JuxtaProse, and elsewhere, and her prose has appeared in The Yale Historical Review and Rethinking History. Her work explores diasporic memory, religious identity formation, and the ways in which poetry translates history and the archive.