The initial charm of this nicely-produced, richly-illustrated large book is the immediacy with which it brings the sixties to life, at least for anyone who spent his twenties there, as I did. Just about everything of the era is in it: the sometimes jejune but always impassioned and compassionate politics; the sometimes jejune but always free-ranging and committed devotion to art; the struggles over obscenity, complete with busts; marijuana and various psychedelic drugs; the paraphernalia both physical and mental of exotic Oriental religions; and the wonderful, if sometimes frazzling, sense of everything’s coming to fruition at once.
Almost always an implicit or louder part of the textual poems that make up about half the book are the politics of the time, as in his “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” for example, where he writes, “Really/ the police try to protect/ the banks – and everything else/ is secondary,” or in his four “visualized prayers to the American God,” which are comprised mainly of dollar signs.

The devotion to art is burstingly there in the sheer amount of poems and collages in the book, particularly considering that they are a mere selection from the ouevre of a man who died at 26.

As for the obscenity wars, they explode in the excellent over-view from the early seventies of levy’s life provided by Douglas Blazek. Twice, according to Blazek, levy was arrested for distributing obscene poems. AND THIS COURT HAS A RIGHT TO PROTECT KIDS FROM THIS KIND OF FILTH FOR THE SAKE OF FILTH AND NOTHING ELSE as one of the judges involved thoughtfully put it. Levy was clearly a victim of persecution, for one of his arrests was for publishing a poem by a minor that contained the word, “fuck,” in it. Although levy was never convicted of the charges against him, the persecution took its toll on him and certainly contributed to his eventually killing himself.

Drugs are only peripherally in levy’s poems and collages, but get more attention from levy’s friend, the poet D. R. Wagner, whom the book’s editor, Ingrid Swansen, interviews, and in the personal reminiscences of levy by Kent Taylor, as well as in a wonderfully black-humored fragment from a radio talk show featuring levy and a few of his friends which ends with a woman caller’s saying, “I think the boys are absolutely right! I think it’s great! Why don’t we all just bug out, and we’ll see who provides the groceries, and makes the shoes…” with Levy interrupting by asking who needs shoes and the host’s observing that levy is wearing a pair.

Buddhism permeates levy’s poetry and collages, though in tension with his propensity for agitation and despair. As for the sense of going-somewhere that the sixties symbolized for so many, it is there not only in levy’s poems and collages, but in the descriptions of his publishing (via offset and then mimeo), his organizing of and contributions to poetry readings, his leaving free copies of books he’d published at public libraries, and selling them on the street, and all his interactions with people like Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg.

By now it should be apparent that a signal virtue of this book is its bringing levy himself, through his friends’ reminiscenses of him, to life. Literary Biography and Social Document– as just these two things alone, Zen Concrete is well worth buying. But its greatest value is as a collection of levy’s art.

That begins with Zen Concrete, 1967, which consists of a sequence of what levy called “experiments in destructive writing.” Its first page contains something that apparently was a poem, but all its letters have been blacked out. Trivial? Perhaps. But considered as a kind of drawing of literary process, it begins to say more than On one level it says not of silence but of silenced writing–and this no doubt refers, in part, to the attempt of the police in Cleveland to silence levy as a poet by twice arresting him for purveying obscenity. But it also speaks of the poet’s disappointment with his medium. Also, the canceled words look like they’re seeping larger, flowing toward the paper’s edge, or even misting upward off it, into subtler expression. Other things that cross the mind: that some portions of the poem are only lightly scratched out, and others heavily, and passionately, defaced suggests the poem’s personality–as does its still apparent shape. As a composition its author turned against, it is amusing, too, particularly at its start, where lines between lines had to be canceled–as if the poet, dissatisfied with his effort first tried to rewrite the beginning of it, then gave up. The title, “Selected Writings,” which is left unmarked at the top of the page with levy’s name and the year of composition, suggests something of the artist’s sardonic self-contempt for his presuming to work up an Ouevre out of matter better blacked out.

But the piece is most important for setting up levy’s series as a whole. The second work in it, “Totem,” consists of more blacked out lines of print, but with a little oval sun added off to the left, and the text reversed (due, d.r. wagner informs us in an interview included in the book, to levy’s practice of “backfeeding” pages through his mimeograph). Most of the text is in a narrow, irregular column, and looks like a totem pole. But not all the letters in the thing have been blacked out. The result? Words in the process of going against themselves, and into self- obliteration in an act of worship? Or the reverse: letters backing out of a dying act of worship and on their way toward asensual pragmatism as normal words? Both, I contend–into a tension of opposed magics.

In the third segment of levy’s sequence cut-up texts are superimposed on a silenced text; one of the additions concerns Cambodian statues of the Buddha; another is a snippet that contains just the word, “(dharma).” The main addition, however, is an upside-down text, mostly blackened out. But scraps of material remain readable: “come,” “gain refuge” and “they didn’t,” among them in the upside-down portion; “red walls” “as twilight formed” and “staring at” in the rightside-up text it covers. Many meanings are possible: a world of words and orientations going meaningless, but with havens preserved within? And of course more than a hint of the salvation of levy’s brand of Zen. So, like many poets after him such as Doris Cross, John Stickney, Greg Evason, jwcurry and Tom Phillips, levy is here silencing a given text down to some poetic or otherwise aesthetically meaningful essence.

As the sequence continues levy adds more and more subteties, e.g., a half-page with just a few scattered fragments of illegible words above a text on . . . the Beginning, which opposes a page whose silenced text looks like a brick wall. As a whole, Zen Concrete becomes a treatise on the Varieties of Disintegration and Ressurection, as well as a visual poem one can go back to as often as one can to the best paintings.

A year later levy was adding visual cut-outs from girlie magazines, books of reproductions of Buddhist statues and other artworks, and elsewhere, while building on his techniques of textual destruction and collage for even richer though sometimes disorganized-seeming work that looks contemporary, and has had a wide if not yet academically- acknowledged influence on the best visual poets of the present..

Meanwhile he was turning out visio-textual work of an elegance that almost seems slick. Ny favorite of these appears to be something clipped from a Greek newspaper. Three circles of equal diameter have been collaged over the clipping, and two more circles of the same size drawn intersecting two of them. One of the first set of circles contains blown-up Greek lettering in white on a black ground; a second has similar lettering in black on a white ground. The texts are perpendicular to the clipping’s text. The third of the cut-out circles is mostly blank, with just a shade of small disappearing lettering. Some dots, a dotted line, a solid line and a bent line have also been drawn on the work to suggest, for me, some kind of geometric analysis.

What to make of such a jumble? I’m not sure. But I find all kinds of hints of antiquity versus the ultra-modern field that particle physics, with its extensive re-use of greek lettering, is; headline-topicality versus details of Final Importance that are turning away and rising from them. Platonic ideals.

As a textual poet, levy was not as significant or groundbreaking as he was in what I call “pluraesthetic art” to mean art that is meaningful in more than one aesthetic way, as visual poetry is expressive both as words and as visual images. An early extended poem, “Cleveland undercovers,” is mostly angry stream of consciousness near-prose in the manner of Ginsberg’s “Howl” about levy’s hometown, and perhaps greatest obsession, for he wrote about it constantly, and could not seem to leave it for more than a month or two at a time, in spite of the growing attentions of the police. But some of its lines have a poetic flare, for example, “i have a city to cover with lines,/ with textured words &/ the sweaty brick-flesh images of a/ drunken tied-up whorehouse cowtown/ sprawling & brawling on its back.” He was only 23 or 24 when he wrote it. Others of his longer poems are as energetic, and solider. My favorite of them (at the moment), “Warriors Rest,” performs all kinds of incantatory, surrealistic zigs on the idea of a “Spade Queen” as playing card, queen of night, queen of death, black woman, whose “dark dancing is/ a shadow moving across/ the moon at dusk,” versus a warrior’s white horses, and other whites until “later the shadows/ of new sun dances/ enter her mind/ like frightened moons// in the morning smoke/ like black bridges to cross.”

There is so much more to be said, but, oh, the Cleveland of space considerations! So I will end with my conviction that it would be no disservice to Keats, one of my greatest heroes, to describe d.a. levy as his 20th-Century American equivalent.

Back in the spring of my 26th year I was mulling over an article I’d read somewhere on memory when I became convinced that to understand memory would be to understand the entire workings of the human mind.. I have therefore over the years spent much time thinking about memory. In fact, in an earlier draft of this chapter, I used several pages to describe the theory that resulted, certain it would provide, in the most dazzling manner possible, the Final Neurophysiological Basis for all I’ve so far said about poetry, and all I would later say. Well, those pages so baffled the readers of my first final draft–and me as weIl, if the truth be known–that I decided to withdraw them. They will, however, reappear (revised) in a later book. I can’t remain entirely silent about my theory, though. Otherwise my forthcoming discussion of aaaesthetic affect, and how it relates to poetry, will make little sense.

So, on to the “master-cells” (or “m-cells”) in the brain which my theory places at the center of the human memory-process (or “retroception”). These cells are connected to sensors, such as the light-sensitive rods and cones in the retina, which are turned on by exposure to certain environmental stimuli. Once on, a sensor activates its m-cell, whereupon the m-cell distributes energy to other m-cells (and, occasionally, back to itself). This m-cell-to-m-cell energy can also activate an m-cell. Whenever an m-cell is active, the mind will experience its state as a sensation. The sensation arising from a given m-cell’s activation will always be the same sensation, a sensation unique to it. That will be the case whether the cell has been activated by sensor or m-cell energy. I call sensor-mediated sensations “percepts,” however, to distinguish them from m-cell- mediated sensations, which I call, “retrocepts.” (A given sensation’s context is generally what the mind uses to tell whether the sensation is one or the other, I might add.)

Many, perhaps most, percepts and retrocepts occur randomly and transiently. But some tend to occur together often enough for the m-cells responsible for them to form what I call a “knowlecule” (or “NAH luh kyool”). A knowlecule is a cerebral representation of some significant piece of knowledge such as the image of a car, a cat, an apple or one’s Aunt Jenny–or, for that matter, the idea of knowledge itself.

For my purposes here, the main thing to understand, is that a knowlecule is a unified group of m-cells that can be perceptually or retroceptually activated (or both), whereupon it will transmit stimulation to other knowlecules in an attempt to activate them as memories. It does this via a chain of storage-cells (s-cells) called the “mnemoduct” which is responsible for routing m-cell stimulation. How it does this is, of course, the crux of my theory–but too complicated to get into here. It isn’t necessary to know anything about it to follow my theory of aesthetic affect, anyway.

According to that theory, each knowlecule, in effect, tries to predict what will follow it in the awareness. Its success in doing so determines how pleasurably, or painfully, one experiences what actually follows. If a given knowlecule predicts what ensues too strongly, the result will be boredom; if it fails to predict it strongly enough, the result will be pain. If it predicts it neither too strongly nor too weakly, however, pleasure will result.

For example, if I heard the name “Laura,” those of my m-cells active as a result might try to rouse a memory of my niece Laura’s appearance; they would do this by sending energy to cells involved in imaging blue eyes and the other main particulars of my niece’s visual appearance. Three outcomes would then be possible: (l) the energy the auditory knowlecule, “Laura,” caused to be dispersed could succeed in activating a memory; (2) that energy could fail to do this but the environment present a picture of Laura, or the girl in person, and I would experience an image of Laura anyway; or (3) both the energy and the environment together could fail to provide me with an image of Laura. I would, to summarize, remember what Laura looks like, or be shown, or neither. In cases (1) and (2) the spoken word “Laura” would, in a manner of speaking, have predicted the visual image of Laura which followed. The probable result would be pleasure. In case (3), however, the word would have failed to predict what followed it and I would probably have experienced pain.

I have, of course, grossly over-simplified the matter. The word “Laura” would undoubtedly have tried for many more memories than that of Laura’s visual appearance, and some of them would undoubtedly have become active. On the other hand, any image of Laura that came into my awareness would not likely have exactly matched what was “predicted” if certain cells would have gotten energy but failed to become active. And the environment would certainly have contained elements unlooked for which would have added unpredicted material to what I experienced. All that is unimportant, however: if a given knowlecule sufficiently resembles the one the knowlecule just before it “predicted,” the person involved will experience pleasure; if not, the person will experience pain, or some state in between pleasure and pain. If a knowlecule is too like what the previous knowlecule predicted, though, the result will be boredom.

To account for this in more detail I hypothesize the existence of value-points of which there are two kinds: “realization-points” and “frustration-points,” or r-points and f-points. Each m-cell that receives retroceptual energy (or m-cell energy) during a given event (or instant of awareness) will release r-points or f-points depending on whether or not it is activated during the next event. (Whether it then becomes active retroceptually or perceptually, or both, incidentally, is irrelevant.) The number of value-points produced will be proportional to the amount of retroceptual energy involved.

The key to my theory is that the aaaesthetic affect produced by a given knowlecule depends simply on the value-points it causes to be produced. First a brain-center determines the number of the two kinds of value-points caused by the knowlecule’s activation, then what percentage of this number consists of realization-points. If this percentage is high, the knowlecule under consideration must be boring–because a very high score indicates that it was expected–or predictable. On the other hand, if the score is low, the moment is painful, because such a score indicates the knowlecule was unexpected–or disruptive. It is only a score neither too high nor too low which causes pleasure–a score (and this is only a guess) between 50 and 60 percent, perhaps. There is one further way a person can feel about an knowlecule: indifferent. This will occur when a score is either higher or lower than optimum but neither so high nor so low as to cause boredom or pain.

To sum up, my theory of aaesthetic affect is that we automatically consider that which is too familiar to be boring, that which is familiar but not too familiar to be pleasurable, and that which is unfamiliar to be painful, and that there are levels of familiarity between the boring and the pleasurable, and between the pleasurable and the painful, which are emotionally neutral–and, I might add, probably occur far more often than any other kind.

All this, it seems to me, fits in with the fact that human beings tend to withdraw from that which is painful, shun the boring, and advance toward that which is pleasurable. If, as my theory has it, it is the under-familiar which is painful, it would make sense to withdraw from it: better to retreat from something until one has come to understand it–i.e., become familiar with it–then chance its being dangerous. It is equally sensible to embrace the familiar since, if something were not good for us, it could not generally become familiar– it would injure or kill us first. But if we stuck with the familiar too slavishly, we would never work out cultural improvements or zestfully explore our habitat; hence the value of the over-familiar’s causing boredom.

As for my theory’s fit with everyday experience, surely it is a rare person who has never heard some song he considered ear-damagingly bad which, when he’d heard it a few more times, turned into a favorite of his. . . only to become, after he’d heard it too many hundreds of additional times, boring beyond endurance. Tschaikowski affects most reasonably intelligent admirers of classical music this way, but there are sundry other examples. My theory similarly accounts for the importance of simple repetition in all the arts–such as the use of symmetry in architecture, repeated phrases throughout music, from popular songs to Mozart, and the recurrence of steps in dance routines. As it also provides a plausible explanation of the pleasurable effects of simple melodation like rhyme’s repetition–and the avoidance of repetition by equaphors (metaphors and the like).

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