Cries of Perfunctory Things: Brendan White Reviews William Fuller’s Daybreak

Many considerations of William Fuller’s poetry mention, as a novelty among poets, his private sector employment with The Northern Trust Company in Chicago. Northern Trust is a bank, so he is sometimes referred to as a banker, but that is not his job. His job, as a “Principal Advisor to the trust department,” involves reading and reviewing contracts and wills and rulings and administering personal trusts. This line of work manifests in his poetry, primarily in Fuller’s love for the sturdy officious tone of such legal documents, especially when they veer into or near nonsense.

For a real-life example: on February 11, 2020 U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero approved T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint, writing this in his opinion:

How the future manifests itself and brings to pass what it holds is a multifaceted phenomenon that is not necessarily guided by theoretical forces or mathematical models. Instead, causal agents that engender knowing and purposeful human behavior, individual and collective, fundamentally shape that narrative.

This is Fuller’s aquarium. To get fully acclimated you probably need to spend ten to twenty minutes in a submerged Ziploc bag.

Daybreak has thirty poems, nineteen of which are set in justified prose. The longest prose poem is 9 pages long, while the longest lined poem is 13 pages long. The shortest poem is only four lines, though most poems hew to one or two pages. The prose pieces, though not without oddities, tend to follow standard sentence structure, while the poems in verse use their line breaks to agglutinate absurd sentences with shifty referents. In this stretch, the subject is, I think, “the mountain,” which is engaging with the world like some combination of curious grizzly bear and espresso snob:

the mountain sacred

to output traits

of quick-drying

misfits

leans over

the visual world

like some

misgoverned

beef stew

conglomerate spinoff

flipping open

random binds

and telling us

how coffee tastes in the

upper branches

One’s enjoyment of Fuller’s work will, to some degree, depend on whether or not the reader finds him funny. I happen to find him funny. Most may disagree, and I’m wary of explaining a bunch of jokes, but a brief consideration of Daybreak’s epigraph should serve to illustrate my point. Do you think this is at all funny? “Acts of counting arise and pass away and cannot be meaningfully mentioned in the same breath as numbers.” —Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations.

To me, the tone reads as “comic haughtiness”; I’m amused by the idea of taking a condescending tone towards the concept of counting. There is something ridiculous in person assuming the condescending tone with which the eternal regards the transitory. Sometimes Fuller reads like a visitor from the ethereal plane of pure forms, reporting back in elevated abstract language the goings-on of the humans who have memories and pass time in a succession of days.

Here is how the alien describes forming memories of having a nice weekend:

We lined up the chairs according to their colors and then sat down to watch. Over the course of the ensuing hours impressions came and went, and some of them were retained in the memory. Of these the most remarkable tended to reinforce one another, causing us to experience them as one sustained event, which slowly rose up above the rough, exposed surfaces. This has now happened twice.

Fuller’s embrace of this vantage point and legalese often make his long prose poems seem like satires with an unspoken target. I read in the following a broad condemnation of the way opaque firms or governments attempts to deflect outside concerns with “vacant affirmations that nothing further need be done, that everything to be accomplished was accomplished well before current advocates approached the threshold, coaxed forward by the desire to indulge their own vanity.” This seems applicable to nearly any City Council, State Legislature, British Petroleum, or Wells Fargo.

Fuller also goes in for logical slapstick and delivers a satire on writing a highly specialized dissertation:

…defending the thesis that no thesis has been asserted, so there is nothing to defend, thus avoiding contradiction at the cost of emptying everything into a magic frame through which one might picture what words could express were they abruptly uprooted and sent off to a small room in some foreign city to be accessed only by trained personnel.

To keep things weird, the subject of “defending” in that sentence is “the day.” Fuller happens to also be the author Symbols of Thought: Browne, Traherne and the Neoplatonic Tradition in Seventeenth-Century Literature, which the University of Virginia Library did not allow me to read remotely.

Lawyers can seem particularly wordy when writing trusts and contracts, when their intent is to guard against any conceivable misapplication in any conceivable scenario. To a nonspecialist, contracts brim with obfuscatory language intended to be assented to rather than understood. Fuller enjoys blending this genus of verbosity with visionary exoticism: “The golden tortoise of misconception doesn’t absorb any point being made or not being made.” Or he goes in for a jumble of paranoid-psychedelic-fastidiousness:

Ordinary objects plot against you, and time ceases to extend itself to you, that is, duration and succession chase each other out of the room leaving you alone and unaccounted for, consoling yourself with reveries constructed from handwriting, type, print, telex, facsimile transmission, lithography, photography, and other modes of representing or reproducing words in lasting and visible form.

Most of what appeals to me about Daybreak are these shifts and amalgams of tone. I feel very strongly that the narrator generally has a serious face on (like Buster Keaton’s) and that there’s a tuba somewhere bomp-bomping away in the background. Fuller isn’t afraid to lean into portentous vagueness and take mock-heroic jaunts with the diction: “The next stage, the stage of / Impenetrable secrecy, whose faint outlines / Match the exact shape of the thing you’ve lost.” Fuller quickly toggles some contradictions for a jolt of surprise: the faint outlines match an exact shape, and the answer to the impenetrable secret is within you already. He also feels comfortable letting the pronouncements be a little bit silly but still satisfying on their own level: “On the shoulders of time sat pathos and tedium.” A man pulling the rug out from himself, over and over again, is a strangely compelling spectacle.

Part of what contributes to this effect is that the narrator frequently finds himself at the mercy of his own personified ideas and abstractions. These swarm the narrator, who always seems like the center of the universe. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, Fuller imagines something like a vibrant ecosystem of ideas and abstractions and forms. I imagine something like Richard Scarry’s Busytown but with the eternal forms instead of cats and dogs and so on. It’s like nature poetry but for the garden of abstract thought:

Whenever such terms fight for space, we should listen to what they have to say; often their uses are far from clear, but without them how could we conceive of what we lack? If they mystify at first, we slowly come to learn that there’s something precious they pursue, over the mountaintops of thought, still warm from the secret of its birth. And with great conceptual industry we begin to rethink our former views, convincing ourselves that if the means by which we achieve what we desire are flawed or false, the sights they evoke might still be real enough, and could be perfect, the foretaste of a state that flutters through all prior states, bringing them to a close.

There is usually some kind of submerged actual situation involving work or family life or travel, but conveyed in Fuller’s daffy learnèd register it suggests ineffable capital-r Reality underlying the day-to-day. This is sometimes put forward baldly:

a great dreaming dome echoing with cries of perfunctory things, sandwiches, trashcans, deep but dazzling, or the discreet sound of a shelf of words separating branch from leaf, plus ‘something else as well,’ he says mysteriously, lost in the soft center of nowhere, clicked shut inside a flowering eye?

A life emerges in negative: a life perusing contracts, preparing reports, traveling, commerce with abstractions.

Some also strike me as commuter poems. The cover photo looks like a suburban Chicago Metra train. “This morning I caught a single thought, coaxed from the end of a pencil, only to watch it dissolve for lack of discipline…” seems to me a mind wandering while taking the train, and the attempts of lapsing attention to capture interesting thoughts. At times there’s clear vexation at being entangled in the world, with a kind of dedication to visionary workplace disassociation: “Certain moments reached out to me, which awakened my interest in not paying attention.” He also does straightforward office humor: “assistants sent to make a task more difficult.”

The range of reference for this book encompasses world music, free jazz, neoplatonism, Husserl, Schopenhauer, and visionary Buddhism and Daoism. Potentially baffling opacity and the promise of transcendence are common to all. Fuller thinks that bafflement has its perks, if you pay attention to it. He imagines “some invisible but compensatory terminus drained of all surface interest or rather separated from it to allow for deeper investigation of its absence.”

The first poem of Part 2 (“At the House of the Rhyming Weir”) includes probably the closest thing in the book to a thesis statement. “An idea sometimes sweetens by refusing to be expressed, if it attends, solicitously, to this failure.” Fuller turns the subject around though, and personifies the idea, which then urges us. The deterrence of mastery invites further mastery, being baffled can be a drive to discover the source of one’s bafflement and general self-improvement, because of “people’s need to test the strength of a membrane designed to repel assault.”

A lot of Daybreak seems like code that makes you want to feel like you get it. It’s elusive enough that you can spend a lot of time with it, and it thematizes the elusiveness of life and identity and time and conception. Perfection is possible but not by a bounded creature: “All that happens could easily have been predicted given surplus time” but “No information will ever be adequate to the task of judgment.” We are able to reason a way in which we could fix everything, but we also see that would require a) more time than we have, and b) a lot of paperwork.