The Haunted Spatio-Temporality

O’Hara’s poetics of the present, or as discussed previously, the poetics of the

photographic presentness, serves as a peculiar techniques through which the poet’s

immediate experiences of the “here-and-now” can be embodied in a highly visualized configuration. A hauntological understanding of such presentness, therefore, lies in how the notion of the “here-now” is perceived in Derrida’s contemplation on photography. For Derrida the phenomenological living present, “the punctuality of the instant,” always

“emerges as a synthesis” in that it contains within itself “both the past – retention – and the future – protention” That is, the past and the future are always “simultaneous with [the living presnt].” “[N]onpresence,” therefore, “has always already been contaminating the presence”

(Londoño-Becerra 164-6). And this “originary contamination” ((Londoño-Becerra 174) is constitutive for it “simultaneously conditions and makes possible the self-presence of living present” (Londoño-Becerra 167). In photography, however, the captured present is haunted less because of its being contaminated by and coexistence with the past and the future as a series of modified forms of present(s), but because that the present in a photographic image has never been a present itself. The preserved present has never been present in photography.

The living present captured in photography is always in a state of “future anterior,” the tense of the captured present which always “escapes the time of the present; it simultaneously points to a future . . . and a past . . . ” (Critchley 115).

According to Simon Critchley, the future anterior, which “Derrida has exploited

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throughout his work,” is a temporal structure “irreducible to what Derrida would call ‘the metaphysics of presence’ or what Levinas would call ‘ontology,’ and one which envisages a language that would escape the dominant interpretation.” What the structure of the future anterior points to, Critchley goes on asserting, is “the temporality of the trace of illeity [otherness, as opposed to ipseity]: it is perhaps the time of ethics” (Critchley 115-6). Being the “time of ethics,” the future anterior is the temporality that introduces the radical otherness in time, which always already opens up a “spacing” or crypt in the living present captured in photography, and thereby suspending that present between the states of what Roland Barthes formulates as “this will be” and “this has been” (Wike 7). The will-have-been is the spectral temporal structure of death and originary/primordial mourning, for it always pre-envisages the death that will have already happened (“this will have been dead”). It is the temporality of the thanatographicality of the archive, representation and signature; that is, it is “the

temporality of the signifier” (Wike 12), which “liberates time from its subordination to the present . . . [and] no longer takes the past and the future as modes, modifications, or modulations of presence” (qtd. in Wike 13).

In his reading of Derrida’s contemplation on photography in Athens, Still Remains, Michael Naas points out that the will-have-been of the photographed images, or in the case of the present study, of the presentness captured photographically, demonstrates a submission

“to a law of both death and survival.” To be photographed means to submit to the fact that the photograph should live on, “[live] on as an archive that will survive [the photographed] for an indeterminate time beyond the moment it will have been ‘taken’ or the moment it will have

‘taken place’” [emphasis added] (Naas 213). What the temporal structure of the

will-have-been of a photographic archive illuminates, according to Naas, is the fact that for

Derrida, “[i]f the now bears its own future, its own mourning, within it, then that is because the now is itself achievable and photographable from the very beginning. . . . [T]he

possibility of survival, of repetition, the possibility of the archive, begins at the origin.” It is

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not that there has been a present in its fullness, a present that is in its self-presence, which can

be captured by means of photography and thus turned into a preserved “past present;” rather,

“a photographic archive . . . is the very phenomenalization of a time that is never present except as or through its own archive” (Naas 213).

And this point again brings us back to Derrida’s notion that the archive is in fact

constitutive of lived events. What Derrida intends to make manifest through his comments on photographic events is that the now in photography, or in any idiomatic gestures for that matter, including writing (representation) and signature, is always this will-have-been which has never been present. As Naas further suggests, “every now already bears within it the traces of what is not now, . . . every now already brings along with it the possibility of its own archive.” “[T]he present of every now,” therefore, “has to be thought in relation to what is not present, . . . the life of every subject in relation to a death that is promised or owed it the possibility of its living on” [emphasis added] (Naas 213). The future anterior is the

temporality of this spectral living-on, of “an experience of the singular” which is “divisible enough for an archive to separate off from it somehow.” This is what Derrida calls “the law of death and mourning:” “an archive would remain; it would survive, whereas that of which it is the archive has disappeared – . . . the archive remains and refers to [the present] as to a non-reproducible referent, an irreplaceable place” (Derrida, CAS 2-3). Every photographic image, as Naas suggests, “archives a loss and, in archiving it, keeps it as loss” (Naas 214).

The structure of the will-have-been thus exhibits “a heterogeneous time [of death and loss],” “a differing/deferring and differentiated duration,” that is borne by the singular

“onceness” of the event (Derrida, CAS 8). And how are we to perceive this will-have-been of the archived here-now, as that which announces the “imminence of death,” (Naas 214) in the presentness in O’Hara? That is, how does this photo-thanato-graphical temporality manifest itself through O’Hara’s poetics of the present? If we see the photographic presentness in O’Hara as that which preserves the poet’s immediate experience of the ephemeral living

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instant(s), then we find ourselves faced with the question Derrida poses: “How to imagine an archive that is somehow immediate, a present that consists of its own memory or its own reproduction” (Derrida, CAS 2)? Here I shall focus on O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”

through which the questions discussed above can be investigated:

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

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The poem begins with an intensification of presentness through the poet’s punctuating of the specific space and time (ll. 1-3). The punctuating of the spatiotemporal coordinates here, according to Todd Tietchen, in some ways “dramatizes our existential dependence on technical temporalities” to the extent that “the imperatives of technical time continue to structure our experience of leisure” (Tietchen 47-8). The poet’s obsession with self-reporting and technical time to some extent transforms the poem into a sort of “live microblogging,”

such as tweets or Instagram posts, in which the “synchronous self-narration with a new simultaneity of lives” can deeply unsettle “the spatiotemporal qualities of human existence”

(Tietchen 50). Such is the “aesthetics of mobility and immediacy” that the poet pursues, in which “[the] poetic space . . . becomes an extension of a newly experienced mass-media event” (Tietchen 51-2). What Tietchen’s observation illuminates here is that O’Hara’s desire to document the present in its most immediate form finds its modern counterpart in the programming of Twitter or Instagram. What should be noted here is that O’Hara documents this immediacy not only through the rapid succession of events but also through their

photographic simultaneity. What the simultaneous occurrences of events shows, according to John Lowney, “is less stream of consciousness than consciousness of stream, the stream of urban streets reported in rapid succession” (Lowney 258).

This simultaneity is what presents “The Day Lady Died” as a photomontage: the

synchronization of activities and temporal distribution “in two or more spaces simultaneously”

constitutes what Tietchen suggests, by adopting Sherry Turkle’s idea, the experience of

“copresencing” (Tietchen 50). Such “co-presencing” is precisely the effect of the radical

“instantism” that characterized the spatiotemporal simultaneity in O’Hara. However, although the notion of the juxtaposition of instants is crucial here, as indicated by the idea of

“instantism,” the function of the captured instants in O’Hara does not resemble that of those

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in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in which the “isolated images arrested in an empty space” are grasped in order to “[slow] us down and [concentrate] our attention on both the object and the words representing it.” Rather, in O’Hara the instants are captured not for the stasis of elements but to make manifest the “fleeing, ever-changing experience of temporal process itself” (qtd. in Cappucci 380).

Given this spatiotemporal dimension of the presentness in O’Hara, it is then crucial for us now to consider the question Derrida poses: “How to imagine an archive that is somehow immediate, a present that consists of its own memory or its own reproduction” (Derrida, CAS 2)? And how should we reckon with the temporality of death, mourning, and of living-on in such an archived present in O’Hara? To pursue these questions, here we should first

contemplate the nature of the “fleeing, ever-changing experience of temporal process”

presented in “The Day Lady Died.” What I aim to contend is that it is precisely this “temporal process” that acts out the working of the Derridean spectral topography. As discussed in detail in the first chapter, the spectral topography introduced by Derridean hauntology points to the traces of the absence, or the pyramidical structure brought about by death. It is “the dead in us, . . . by whose death – or at least by the possibility of whose death – the ‘within me’

or ‘within us’ becomes possible. This spacing is what the dead ‘give’” (Castricano 3). It is through death and loss that the specter holds a place (spacing) of infinite alterity within presence. In “The Day Lady Died” the immediate presentness seems to be always already inhabited by the “not-yet” and “no-longer” and thus can never direct towards the

here-and-now. That is, the temporal process in the poem exhibits a dialectical tension between the “haven-been” and “will-be” which escape the living present. The notion of the living present here is pre-inscribed by a spectral structure of “internal self-differentiation”

(Richter xxi) which “splits the present and dislocates time” (Wall 240), presenting the present as that which is “already dead in the future anterior and past anterior” of its own archive

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(Derrida, WM 39). And this self-differentiation of time in “The Day Lady Died,” as discussed earlier, can be seen as in part the effect of the visualized collage-like simultaneity, the

“co-presencing,” that the poem manages to present, which can disturb “the spatiotemporal qualities of human existence” (Tietchen 50).

The point here lies in that it is through O’Hara’s photomontage-like juxtaposing of the

“instant(s),” the “co-presencing” of the immediate present(s), in which the temporal succession of the verbal coexists with the spatial simultaneity of the visual, that one can observe the present as always already “dead in the future anterior and past anterior.”

Appearing to resemble the Cubist technique which presents the narrative in a picture through

“an obsessive recounting, not a consistent description but a series of impressions, polarizing coherence and cohesion,” “the immediately contiguous, but discrepant, image fragments” in the poem here function as both the distraction of attention and the focus of “obsessive inspection” (Scott, TSI 227). The temporal process of the poem is less a “fleeing,

ever-changing” succession than “a spatial event” in which time is turned into space [emphasis added] (Herd 82).

The immediate instants which have passed and those which will be are apposed in a collage fashion and thus can be observed “as all-at-once” (Shank 79). Neither of them, however, can be immediate in this simultaneity. They always point to a past moment

(has-been) or a moment to come (will-be) yet never to the here-and-now. In “The Day Lady Died” the present tense, except for the last two lines, is insistent throughout; however, such immediate presentness creates a temporal ambiguity in that if the temporal process is to be presented as fleeing and ever-changing, it is therefore impossible to “imprison” every act in the state of present tense. That is, by the time the poem proceeds into the second stanza, the

“It is 12:20” and all the successive acts in the first stanza have always already become a past, a “dead present”, which is “petrified” and “embalmed” (Saghafi 90) in the eternal present

tense as the entity of death rather than that of the immediate presents. According to the same

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logic, every stanza, or even every line, written in present tense is always already in the temporal structure of will-be and have-been. Just as Josh Robinson helpfully notes, up until the “poem’s first use of continuous present” (which will be discussed later), “every action has been something either that has happened or that will happen” (Robinson 156). This is strange temporality of the archive, which suggests at the same time “a suspension of life . . . and the instauration of death, producing the ‘posthumous’ character of lived experience” (Saghafi 90).

And in O’Hara’s poetry such is the consequence of time’s being spatialized through the juxtaposing of succession with simultaneity.

This point can be further illustrated by seeing O’Hara’s poetics of the present as bearing the effect of “photodynamism.” The spatialization of time is achieved through the poet’s capturing of the presentness through the rapid flowing of movements, just as the images of photodynamism in which “time and movement” are made “visible in its passage” [emphasis in the original] (Scott, TSI 216). Not only is time spatialized in such a passage, but space itself is temporalized in that the space here, according to Timothy Gray’s observation, following Michel de Certeau, “is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it . . . ” (qtd. in Gray 16). The

“synthesized duration” and “gestural movements,” in which time is “imprisoned,” are performed “in staged sequence, so that the continuity of movement [is] combined with the perceptible ‘anatomy of the gesture’” (Scott, TSI 218). Again, the notion of “synthesized duration” here shows that it is through the tension between the have-been and will-be that time is turned into the spatial event. The time and movement are indeed made visible in their

passage, but instead of the immediate presence, what such passage reveals is the temporal

processeing of the have-been to the will-be; it is a temporal presencing which always escapes the present. The passage therefore is that which visualizes the deferring self-differentiation in time. The point here is similarly investigated in Jean-Luc Nancy’s observation of On

Kawara’s visual art, in which Nancy insightfully comments that “[t]he present can be as such

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only in the spacing of the present” [emphasis added] (Nancy 202); the present here can only be something other than itself in order to be itself.

The strange temporal structure of such spacing of the present is rendered manifest even more radically in the epiphany-struck moment in the last four lines, which are generally considered by the critics to be the climax of the poem, the “apocalyptic closure” that retrospectively casts an uncanny light on the vitality of the narrated events in previous stanzas:

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The shift in tense (from the present simple to the present continuous) which causes a sudden pause or slowing down in these last lines, as opposed to the rapidity of the movements in previous stanzas, appears first as the poet’s gesture aiming for a further intensification of the present; however, the sense of strong presentness generated by the present continuous tense here is in fact activated by an ecstatic emotion that belongs to the past (“while she whispered a song along the keyboard /to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”). It

depends, as Altieri suggests, on “our union with [the poet’s] memory” in which “”the moment of stasis” becomes that which “divorces [the poet] from the normal (and insignificant)

activities of his daily life” (Altieri 104). That is, the moment of this ecstatic stasis, a memorialization of a past instant, divorces him from the rapidity of the immediate present.

The “I am sweating a lot by now,” which is the consequence of both the haste and his seeing the photo of Billie Holiday on the New York Post, seems to further locate his experience in the “right here, right now,” in the immediate present in which he acknowledges Billie Holiday’s death.

Nevertheless, this sense of immediate present is always already undermined by a

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spectral temporal presencing that denies the notion of an atomic isolated point of the present;

as discussed previously, this presencing is the temporal spacing in which that the present is eternally deferred. The present continuous of the poet’s “thinking of / leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT” here in fact defers the immediate present in that the “thinking of” itself carries double temporal connotations. It can be read as O’Hara’s describing of his

remembrance of the experience of once listening to Billie Holiday’s performance, or, on the other hand, the poet’s expressing of his “desire” for going back to the moment in which he was overwhelmed by Holiday’s performance; that is, he is “wanting to” return to the

breathtaking moment of ecstasy. In the first case the “thinking of” (remembrance) points to a

past that is absent, whereas in the second the “desire” refers to the anticipation for the same

absent past that is eternally irretrievable due to Billie Holiday’s death. The act in the

immediate present thus carries with it a complex temporal structure that points either to a past (have-been) or to a future (will-be), yet never to the here-and-now.

The notion of the future as related to the anticipation, however, perhaps cannot be simply reduced to a desire for something that “will be happening;” rather, it is the

anticipation for the “have-been,” the moment of Billie Holiday’s breathtaking performance that has become a past. Here again we see the spectral photographic temporality of the

will-have-been; it is always a future anticipation for that which has irretrievably lost. The

remembrance of Holiday’s singing here brings back the ghost of the past, which, as Derrida would suggest, keeps returning through the act of mourning. It is literally the “return of the dead” (Derrida, WM 53). And this bringing-back of the ghost, as Anne Lovering Rounds notes, “is a contrast to the poem’s multiple other signs of one-way temporal and spatial progressions” (Lovering Rounds 45). It is indeed a ghost of the past, yet it is also that which always demands a future.

The futurity here lies in the effect of the “encore” that O’Hara weaves into the closing stanza. According to Lovering Rounds, the notion of encore brings in a complicated

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perception of time in that it “extend[s] the performance event at the same time as being a

perception of time in that it “extend[s] the performance event at the same time as being a

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