The Crisis of the Crystal
Andrew Joron

What is the situation of the object in contemporary poetry? The form of this question, posed by André Breton in 1934, might seem disingenuous today. What concerns us now is not the object in itself but the system of signifying practices responsible for its construction. Yet for Breton, the "crisis of the object" is precipitated at this very point, at the juncture between the word and the world. Here, signification is unfailingly surprised by an emergent reality, a surreality whose hazardous objectivity moves in advance of all language games. Something like a surrealist philosophy of nature is implied here, where nature (both human and non-human) is conceived as an inherently self-revolutionizing process-that is, as an autocatalytic system. The emergent object has the capacity to convulse or negate the very system that engendered it. In poetry, this object would manifest itself by means of an image powerful enough to overthrow conventionalized regimes, not only of thought, but of bodily sensation as well.

No doubt the surrealist image, which was intended to violently reconcile perception and representation, can no longer revolutionize poetic language. At present, representation has gained the upper hand over perception; the content of the sensorium, to the extent that it is meaningful, is held to be "always already" structured by discourse. Today, the perception of strange and unprecedented phenomena, once facilitated by poetry, is pursued instead by revolutionary science, most recently in studies of the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems. Meanwhile contemporary poetry, preoccupied by a concern for textuality, has largely lost sight of the ontologically disruptive object, along with most of the frenzies, delights, and paradoxes of sense-perception.

In light of these developments, how is one to construe the object at the center of Clark Coolidge's poem The Crystal Text? The object is, in fact, a crystal, a naturally-occurring substance. An object that humans, in imitation of nature, have learned to produce but that owes none of its defining features-its stability, for example, or its symmetry-to human design. Coolidge, in the course of a book-length poetic contemplation of this object, discovers that the crystal itself is empty and still, that it can be filled and animated only by its reflections and refractions of human experience. In this poem, the natural object provokes memory and reverie. But Coolidge emphasizes that the crystal itself "cannot speak" (107). That is, nature without human presence is a deserted stage, a desert, as Kant declared, along with many other thinkers of the Enlightenment (Diderot remarked in the Encyclopedia that "it is the presence of humans that makes the existence of things interesting"). Likewise, in Coolidge's poem, the crystal "does nothing" (116); it seems to contain the light of experience, but remains "notionless of its fill" (111). Coolidge comes to realize that "What you see is only what you put there" (93). By treating mind as active subject and nature as passive object, Coolidge's work appears, at first glance, to be inscribed within some version of idealism.

Coolidge's long dialogue with the unanswering crystal is effectively a monologue, a day-book of the poet's frustrated attempts to communicate with "the stone." The apparent failure of this procedure would seem to confirm a scientific understanding of the crystal, and of nature in general, as a cold mechanical system, indifferent to human supplication. However, Coolidge's approach to the stone is anything but scientific. For him, the crystal becomes a magic mirror that transforms the questioner's own visage into an oracular mask, mouthing riddles and giving back the questions themselves as mirror-reversed answers.

Coolidge's poem thus participates in the prescientific tradition of crystal-gazing, of "scrying," as the practice was called by Renaissance magi. In this tradition, the scryer would retire, as Coolidge does, to a quiet room to consult the crystal. Beforehand the crystal would have been magically charged by a series of ritual incantations known as "the Call." The passages of poetic improvisation with which Coolidge frames his own questioning of the crystal similarly accelerate meaning, lending a polysemous "charge" to the object at the focus of the text. Finally, the scryer would fine-tune the sensitivity of the crystal through methods of astrological and numerological positioning. Coolidge also is alert to occult correspondences-as, for example, when he observes that "There are 13 letters to my name. . . There are 13 facets to this crystal" (99, 100).

Unlike the Renaissance magi, however, Coolidge is not interested in using the crystal as a means of clairvoyance. He pursues only the traces of his own presence among the crystal's baffling lights and silences. Because the crystal refuses the petitions of its scryer-poet, all his accounts of the stone's interior inevitably become self-reflexive. To keep a record of crystal-gazing is, as Coolidge states, "To write / a long book of nothing 'but looking deeply into oneself'" (12). But this is a prospect, he adds, to be greeted with "a laugh. / A scorn, not for oneself probably but for the possibility of a self view" (12).

In this passage, Coolidge compares the self to a mirror that, as a "reflecting surface," is incapable of reflecting its own image. As Coolidge confesses, "I dived at you, self, but you rubbed me blank / in all my own mirrors" (12). Writing of the crystal's emptiness, then, bears a strong similarity to writing of the self's own emptiness: "The crystal attains toward a transparency / my mirror approaches, face or no face" (13). At the same time, crystal and self mirror each other's emptiness within the "reflecting surface" of writing; as Coolidge states, "Writing is all reflections. And said reflection's stilled / connections" (115).

The self, the stone, and writing all appear to be faces of the same crystal: a diagram of their relation would form a triangle, the most basic of linear planes. The play of light in The Crystal Text is conditioned by the self-reflection of this triangular plane as it rotates through various configurations: "I crystallized myself out of flesh / but this is wrong. I learned to scratch / down words on paper by tendency of crystal / adjacent to sleeping area" (37). Later, Coolidge compares the written page to a facet of crystal: "Writing on the side of a page, a wall / in a world of inter-bladed and filtering walls" (47).

If writing is "all reflections," then the system of writing can never reflect itself. The true face of writing appears as the vanishing point at the center of a self-reflecting mirror. Consequently, Coolidge writes, "The text of crystal might / reveal everything but itself" (79). Musing on strategies of writing, Coolidge remarks that "One could divide it all up into / those who know how the work should be / and those who never know before the work" (33). Those writers "who never know before the work" are undoubtedly poets; after all, Coolidge asks, "How much poetry is unprovoked thought?" (27). Consulting the stone in this regard, he announces: "As the crystal says, speech without blindness is worth little" (84). The work must take shape blindly but surely, in accordance with a process that resembles crystal growth: "It fascinates me now to see if I find things to speak what shapes their sentences will take" (29). But even as the poet attempts to "find things to speak," he also finds that "The crystal cannot speak. The good book cannot speak" (107). At one point, the poet, "[b]ending over the crystal. . . wonder[ing] what writing would proceed," exclaims, "If only speech could talk" (42).

Coolidge's meditations on the inability of a reflecting surface to reflect itself seem to recapitulate the theories of the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor on the paradoxes of self-referential sets. In 1895, Cantor asked a question that remains unanswerable in terms of ordinary logic: Is a set that is composed of all possible sets to be counted as a member of itself? If not, then the set fails to correspond to its own definition. If so, then the set chases its own tail by becoming a number larger than itself. Here, Coolidge's doubts about "the possibility of a self view" are confirmed by the Hegelian philosopher Howard Kainz, who considers that "self-consciousness is that class which is a member of itself."i Neither the self nor its "text of crystal" can adequately reflect itself without falling into contradiction and, ultimately, silence. Looking into the crystal, Coolidge asks, "Is the heart of poetry a stillness?" (150).

Coolidge's question finds some precedent not only in logical, but also in linguistic theory. For example, structuralism posits a crystalline stillness within language, analyzing the relation between signifier and signified as a series of "stilled connections." As the hermeneutic philosopher Manfred Frank points out, in Saussure's structural theory of language "one and only one signified is assigned to every signifier. This, moreover, occurs according to a form and lasting rule that allows both the differentiation of signs and their recombination. . . call[ing] to mind the image of a crystal lattice." Frank goes on to observe that "In a crystal lattice the molecules are not only distinct from one another, they are, at a constant low temperature, fixed to their places; i.e., they cannot swarm outward, nor is there any blurring that would make their location and thus their application uncontrollable."ii

Yet for Coolidge the appearance of "stillness" is imposed by the paradoxes of self-reflexivity, not by the fixity of the connection between signifier and signified. Such fixity can be attributed only to a closed and stable structure, whereas Coolidge's text of crystal fails to either enclose or stabilize its own reflection. Furthermore, its "stilled connections" conceal another paradox: as the poet discovers, "Movement is the hidden / apex of the stillness / the crystal tends" (128). Here, fixity of structure is "collapsed in a calypso of eclipses" (62), a play of light and shadow that multiplies in all directions without benefit of a centralizing "self view." Thus, "there is something missing from it [the text]: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions."iii All the same, the work of Coolidge does not entirely corroborate the poststructuralist critique of centered, stabilized meaning. The moment of divergence is obvious: the depiction of language as a crystal, an idea supposedly shattered by poststructuralism, persists in Coolidge's poem.

The poet claims to be writing, or growing, a "text of crystal." And, as Coolidge acknowledges, "The crystal is a problem of structure" (142). But in what way is the structure of Coolidge's writing crystalline? Even as its paradoxes of self-reflection empty into silence, The Crystal Text continues to be filled with noise: with anecdotes, scraps of other texts, desultory notes, diary entries. The texture of the text-at once improvisatory and coolly detached, a kind of "writing without thinking" (115)-resembles the random swirls of atoms in liquid or in glass (a supercooled liquid) far more than it does the orderly rows of atoms in a crystal.

Nonetheless, Coolidge insists that "The window glass is but a gross imitation of the crystal, as speech is of poetry" (107). Here, the "glass" of speech is asserted to be an imitation-a poor reflection-of the "crystal" of poetry. In other words, the glassy disorder of speech is held to derive from-even as it distorts-the higher, crystalline order of poetry. For Coolidge, it seems, ordinary language is merely the projection into our three-dimensional universe of a higher-dimensional language, the language of The Crystal Text. Since we cannot visualize higher dimensions, we may find this order of language is inaccessible ("Poetry is the closed voice?" [107]), but at least its reflection, its "gross imitation," is evident in everyday speech. The tangled vernacular of Coolidge's lines turns out to be a cross-section of an elegantly structured hyperspace crystal.

Strangely enough, just one year after Coolidge completed his poem, researchers in a government laboratory discovered an "impossible" crystal requiring a theory of higher dimensions to explain it. In 1984 at the National Bureau of Standards, a metallic alloy was first melted, then rapidly cooled to produce a substance that paradoxically combines the amorphousness of glass with the interlocking structure of crystal. The atomic lattices of this new substance, dubbed a "quasicrystal," fit together as perfectly as those of an ordinary crystal. But the arrangements of quasicrystalline lattices do not repeat in the usual crystalline manner. Instead, such perfectly fitted, yet nonperiodic patterns appear orderly only when viewed as the projection of an abstract, higher-dimensional lattice.iv Of course, this picture provides only a mathematical, not a physical, explanation. As one scientist confessed, "no one could think of a mechanism by which millions upon millions of real atoms could arrange themselves spontaneously in those intricate patterns."v Most attempts at physical explanations have involved a theory of tiled surfaces. That theory, formulated by the mathematician Roger Penrose ten years before the discovery of quasicrystals, solves the problem of how to cover a surface completely with sets of tiles whose patterns do not repeat periodically. To ensure nonperiodicity, Penrose developed specific rules for fitting the tiles together, rules that govern both local and global features of the resulting pattern. But the blind workings of nature must act locally and cannot think globally. As one scientist put it, "Local rules for adding tiles are analogous to forces that attract and hold new atoms to the surface of a growing quasicrystal; they are plausible ingredients in the growth mechanism. Global rules are not. The atoms on a growing surface do not plan ahead. They respond only to the interatomic sticking force of their immediate neighbors. If quasiperiodic patterns could be constructed only with the help of global rules, they could not be assembled by real atoms."vi So far, this contradiction remains unresolved: the locally applicable laws for fitting the parts together are not sufficient to generate the whole pattern.

This contradiction manifests itself also in the "impossible" crystal of Coolidge's text. As Coolidge observes, "There is no overview but in / the strictly local system. . . . Back to the thought, the crystal / open while closed" (27). The structure of The Crystal Text, since it permits only a local rather than a global view, would seem to have more in common with that of a quasicrystal than with that of an ordinary crystal. This talisman of the self and of writing is "open while closed": open because "now we have no method and the crystal is as clear as unmixed air" (118), closed because the principle of its making, its poiesis, remains inaccessible and perhaps unknowable.

As Coolidge testifies, "Perspective lies, the / universe has no one comprehensible form" (81). This he demonstrates by the presenting an object that he himself defines as a locally interacting, non-globalizable system, one that cannot reflect itself as a totality. If the overall pattern of a system is determined, not by system-wide but by local interactions, and if none of these local interactions reflects the pattern of the system as a whole, then the behavior of that system fractures the mirror of cause and effect and becomes nonlinear: "Words that are shavings off the irreducible block. / Words that remain the elegance at Chaos Gate" (62). The defining feature of such complex systems, according to systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, is that they contain more possibilities than can be actualized.vii Coolidge concurs: "The crystal is but one nexus in the drain / of speeded possibles" (94).

Not all unrealized possibilities, however, hold the promise of revolutionary change. Many nonlinear or chaotic systems (a swinging pendulum, for example) cycle through endless variations, none of which need alter the character of the system itself. In many cases, the behavior of a nonlinear dynamical system is locally unpredictable, but globally stable. This is true of the formation of quasicrystals; is it true of Coolidge's text as well? In the citation above, the "words" derive from an "irreducible block," a state that implies stability. Coolidge further says, "It is perfect of imperfection. / The most perfect field a surfeit / of randomly bounding objects" (90). Now, in the vocabulary of nonlinear dynamics, a map of all possible states of a given system is called the "phase space" of that system. The phase space of The Crystal Text, then, seems to be represented by a globally stable "most perfect field" that contains a locally unpredictable "surfeit / of randomly bounding objects."

However, as the philosopher Manuel De Landa points out, "since phase spaces (by definition) include all the possible states for a given system, it follows that (by definition) no truly novel states can be represented by phase spaces."viii The emergence of truly novel properties within a system disrupt or even eradicate the topology of its phase space. For example, the emergence of living systems disrupts the phase space of chemical reactions governed by entropic flows, just as the emergence of language bursts the topology of instinctive social behavior.

A revolutionary rupture of this order constitutes the "crisis of the object," as the surrealists understood it. The surrealist object materializes (at) this unprecedented- and therefore fantastic-moment of rupture. In contrast, Coolidge's object conserves reality. The crystal remains a crystal, a field of reference within which everyday experiences randomly rebound. The transcendental emptiness of the crystal-and ultimately, of signification itself-defeats the senses and turns the mind back upon itself in an infinitely reflexive recession.

How is this different from Breton's declaration that surrealism seeks "the annihilation of being into a diamond"? First, Coolidge insists on the textuality of the object, while Breton insists on its inescapable materiality. Furthermore, the textuality of Coolidge's work leads to the object's dematerialization, while Breton's commitment to materiality recognizes the object's emergence from elsewhere (namely, the realm of the marvelous). Unlike the poetics of textuality, surrealist poetics shares the conviction of Enlightenment science that sense-perception has the power to overthrow the structures of the mind.

All citations of Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text are from the 1995 Sun & Moon edition. The poem was first published in 1986 by The Figures.

i Howard P. Kainz, Paradox, Dialectic, and System (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), p. 26.
ii Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 23-24.
iii Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 289.
iv Peter W. Stephens and Alan I. Goldman, "The Structure of Quasicrystals," Scientific American, 264, no. 2 (April 1991): 46-47.
v Hans C. von Baeyer, "Impossible Crystals," Discover, 11, no. 2 (Feb. 1990): 76.
vi Ibid., pp. 76-77.
vii Cited in Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 2.
viii Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 277.