An Empty "Outside"

 “But on what grounds could one deny that these hands and this entire body are mine?” (14, Meditations).  If dreams unfold like madness, a space opens in the relation between waking and sleeping; a place where error has permission and radical doubt becomes a possibility.   Mean Free Path employs a kind of dream logic. The final lines of the book’s first poem are, “for I had dressed/ in layers for the long/ dream ahead, the recurring /dream of waking with/ alternate endings/ she’d walk me through. For Ariana.  For Ari.”(6) Thematically, the impending threat of referential displacement or syntactical rupture fracturing the joint between the speaker’s body with his or her self-consciousness places the text close to the tradition of dream poetics.  But unlike traditional dream poetry, dreaming in Mean Free Path never severs the mind/body connection.  Instead of thought peeling away from matter as it does in the Cartesian sense, the relation between consciousness and the body in Lerner’s text radicalizes into a kind of an index; a placeholder whose concept is empty.   Consider the following lines,

Little contrasts flicker in

Distances complex because collapsing

Under their own weight like stars

Embossed symbols.  I can’t compete

It’s like the moment after waking

When you cannot determine if the screaming

With devices designed to amplify

Was internal or external to the dream

Starlight so soldiers can read in their sleep

A reader’s temporal ekstasis, the condition of being always already ahead of oneself in time, permits the stanza to produce surprising effects. The third line’s phrase “like stars” suggests that the collapsing objects that produce little flickering contrasts are embossed symbols. A latent concept of raised symbols reflecting light emerges.  Of course, light emitted from the stars does not hit earth until the final line.  In the time it takes for the phrase “Little contrasts flicker” to reach “Starlight so soldiers can read in their sleep,” an entire scene has taken place.  In this scene four ideas collapse into a stream of rupturing consciousness: “Little contrasts flicker in embossed symbols,” “Distances complex because collapsing under their own weight like stars,” “I can’t compete with devices designed to amplify,” and “It’s like the moment after waking when you cannot determine if the screaming was internal or external to the dream.”

 I suggest that insofar as the stanza destabilizes a unitary presence of consciousness, the category of thought, defined as limiting an “inside” essentially insulated from an alienating “outside” world of matter, becomes more of an index than a substantial concept.    In Mean Free Path, when the inside/outside dichotomy collapses, volatility, or wildness as such, subsumes the text.  The category of mind becomes as “alien” to itself as so-called wildernesses typified by untouched terrains and craggy landscapes.  Indeed,  William Cronon argues a similar point. For him, the concept of wilderness causes problems “only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to remote corners of the planet (24)  He remarks that, “We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away.” (24)  Mean Free Path, in its radicalization of a thought process, appears to actualize what Cronon attempts to describe.