Description
Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian’s book is a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.
Finalist, 2013 Northern California Book Award in Poetry
One of The Volta‘s Best Books of 2013
For Lyn Hejinian the concept “everything” or “everything living” is the greatest seduction. In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides (the behavior of birds, the behavior of ghosts; the dramas of capital, species, percipient individual), “everything” is captive to life and continuation is queen. Like Scheherazade’s ploy, to which it more than nods, The Book of a Thousand Eyes spins out scene after moral after speculation merely for the payoff one wakes to daily—the privilege of beginning again. “Nothing has been proved,” of course, but the combined exhilaration and outrage of what experience means in the language of the twenty-first century is robustly nailed in this book. “Sleep,” Hejinian says, “can’t put interpretation to rest”—far from it; regardless of which consciousness these antic and anti-summary works probe, they propose the very opposite of rest. Hejinian’s sallies are at once pragmatic, mysterious, and an utter delight to read.
Jean Day
A third of the way into The Book of a Thousand Eyes comes the question, “Isn’t sleep fitted to this world?” And the easy answer—abundantly Yes—both masks and unveils the bigger shape. (As the Earl of Anglesey noted, “To this Rhetorical Question the Commons pray they may Answer by another Question.”) The devil’s in the details every night, all night. Lyn Hejinian knows that familiarity breeds the predictable but she knows as well that—and how—“contact produces uncertainty.” So this is a brilliantly uncertain book, a book of practical and fantastic connection, connection as multiple and as hopeless as love might be, connection as big and leggy as the night is long. Here, the old bifurcations and faultless authorities are broken down into a continuous waking hour. Waking?—owl-like, magnificent, traveling. Continuous?—“Our sleep has no conclusion.” This book is night itself.
C. S. Giscombe
About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. Her most recent published book of poetry is Saga / Circus (2008). Her compendium of “night works” titled The Book of a Thousand Eyes will appear in the early spring of 2012 from Omnidawn. Other books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. Hejinian is also actively involved in collaboratively created works, the most recent examples of which include a major collection of poems by Hejinian and Jack Collom titled Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008). Other collaborative projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited in 1996; a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian; two mixed media books (The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill and The Lake) created with the painter Emilie Clark; the award-winning experimental documentary film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs; and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, co-written with nine other poets. Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, Holland, China, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment for the Arts; she received an Award for Independent Literature from the Soviet literary organization “Poetic Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has traveled and lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description (1990) and Xenia (1994), two volumes of her translations from the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is also the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. She is currently serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Chair of the UC-Berkeley Solidarity Alliance, an activist coalition of union representatives, workers, staff, students, and faculty fighting to maintain the accessibility and affordability of public higher education in California.
A brief interview with Lyn Hejinian
(conducted by Rusty Morrison)
What aspects of your history and/or what particular obsessions of yours do you see apparent in The Book of a Thousand Eyes?
Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. I see The Book of a Thousand Eyes as a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.
Some readers may want to read my essay “La Faustienne” (in The Language of Inquiry) to learn more about my interest in the Scheherazade figure and its relation to the Faust figure that plays such a foundational role in Western literature. As I points out in the essay, the two share several remarkable features. The medieval Faustbook (a compilation of stories about magic and magicians) was the basis for Goethe’s and for Christopher Marlowe’s respective plays about the titular hero in quest of knowledge (for which he sells his soul in the process). The Arabian Nights (or The Thousand Nights and One Night) is similarly a compilation of stories about knowledge, but in this case it tells of the bestowing of knowledge (by a woman named Scheherazade, who is described, in the “back story” introduction to the unexpurgated, full version of the work, as the wisest person in all the land who knew all stories and all the ways of men and women and djinis, etc). The Faust story is about Western man’s rapacious quest for knowledge at all costs; the Scheherazade story is about an Eastern woman’s generous gift of knowledge to a tyrannical ruler who is made kind and wise by it.
One can discern the feminist undercurrent here.
How might you compare this book to your previous books?
This is perhaps my most accessible book of poetry, and as such, even as it will be of interest to readers of experimental poetry, it may interest a more general readership.
How did this book come to its title? Why did you choose this title?
The title of the book makes a nod to The Arabian Nights, one of whose equally well-known titles is The Thousand Nights and A Night (the title that Sir Richard Burton, creator of its greatest English translation, gave it). It also alludes to “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” a popular Victorian-era poem by Francis William Bourdillon, whose opening lines are “The night has a thousand eyes / And the day but one.” The poem goes on to offer a parallel statement: “The mind has a thousand eyes / And the heart but one.” Bourdillon’s point is that the sun (as the one eye of the day) and love (as the one eye of the heart) are superior to the thousand eyes of night and the mind; I suggest that the multiple views available to the night and to the mind have something in their favor, too.
What interesting story might surprise readers about the inception or process of writing this book?
It took me 20 years to write this book, in large part because it spawned a number of books along the way. A Border Comedy, my 350-page book published in 2000, for example, grew out of what was to be a one-page addition to The Book of a Thousand Eyes. The Thousand Eyes project proliferated; it might be thought of as a source work, one element of a larger process, as well as a creative compendium in its own right
I should also mention this: since I worked for so many years on this book, portions of it have appeared in magazines and portions of it were included in my many poetry readings; as a result, this has become a long-awaited volume.
Circuses, ships at sea, and small bits from canonical poets (Robert Frost, for example) circulate regularly throughout—like recurring figures in dreams. Hejinian’s familiar taste for dry abstraction finds a useful foil in dream’s tendency toward images and sleep’s resistance to linear thought: “Dreams are like ghosts,” one meditative page says, “achieving ghosts’ perennial goal/ Of revoking the sensation of repose.”
“A dream” works by alliteration, enjambment, and metaphysical wordplay, as when the poet says that a new day has “the psychical quality of ‘pastness.’” … Disdaining traditional conceptions of meaning, these pieces teeter sometimes pleasingly on the edge of incoherence.
Hejinian sets this jumble of poems, prose fables and writings that don’t fit neatly into any category in a “bed … made of sentences,” using dream-logic to skip from Da Vinci on painting (“my heart is driven wild”) to “two jazzy jellyfish setting up to jam.” You probably won’t read this one cover to cover, but wherever you dip in, you’ll find something to linger on.
There is a great range of thinking in these poems; many topics are taken up, poetics figures significantly. The book is as much a primer in the possibilities of the imagination as an enactment of the imagination. Nonetheless, the poems are tightly formed, impeccably constructed, with a tonal precision and continuity that remains one of Hejinian’s hallmarks.
Thus the most powerful example in The Book of a Thousand Eyes is its sheer accumulation, the insistence of page after page, night after night. Star-divided sections record sleep that refuses to be satisfied. “Promises exist inside of time,” Hejinian writes, and “time is unwavering in its usefulness.” She reminds us: “Our sleep has no conclusion … / Sleep is as abundant as the world is incomplete.”
Dutifully relaying not only the visceral details of her dreams but also their understood emotional implications, the dreams Hejinian recounts feel convincingly familiar and realistic. In one, she sweeps from a family vacation at a frozen lake to patriotic drumming in the space of a stanza break. “I’m not supposed to be drumming — this is a defiant gesture — but I’m very good at it,” she writes, and the dream, that unspeakably intuitive personal place, is opened for the reader to enter.
Reading The Book of a Thousand Eyes requires us to substitute provisional, contextualized forms of knowing for the assurances given by sound bites that inform to convince rather than to inquire. Although contextualized knowledge may seem more unstable, it is when meaning becomes discursive that events recover their capacity to be useful, applicable, and personal. Instead of exhuming a world of our own construction, the activity of writing these poems, as much as the poems themselves, provokes us to move beyond our previously held beliefs about the world.
The night will change
as I strive to depict precisely
to avoid the light since
to understand what
I can’t explain
I want to attribute a cause to it
which is to say a change to it
Every passion is
an eccentricity emitting detail ecstatically
irregularly to mind again—
the neck, the knob,
the hub and ram
and rise precisely—to avoid
avoiding the light
The night though
lit is not complete when gone at dawn with the details
it keeps despite the sound of this
awake deliberately and willing
to wait to try for the light it keeps
