Begin, Again, Finally: Poetics of Creaturely Failure and the Birth of Human Subjectivity
Begin, Again, Finally: Poetics of Creaturely Failure and the Birth of Human Subjectivity
Begin, Again, Finally
Begin
Organic bodies. Competitively divergent,
Striving to maintain
Separation. First creature, Rat.
Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored.
Ties a string-taut wire around his skinny neck
And kicks the stool.
Begin again
Second, Vulture. Stupidly well-fed on pride,
Invests heavy in guns,
Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically,
All the plutonium he can lay his talons on,
Ending in his own atomization:
The birth of stars.
And again
Snake. Slim, extremely good-looking
Distracted by sex.
Repetitive thoughts. Tan-thighed
Legs and a basket of hair implore his eyes.
He is risen, erects an assault,
Smears her body,
With a eucharist of blood and semen.
Spent and serpent-smiling,
Unhumanly scraping his swelling belly
In reptilian fashion,
He makes it to the far side of a grassy knoll.
But sulfuric grumblings,
Like the unfurling rush of molten fire,
Erupts and splits him in two.
Finally
And finally, from the mess, a fetus,
The boy Adam, puking and wailing,
Nistarot tattooed in Hebrew
Behind his left ear.
The look on God’s face was lustrous.
The poem Begin, Again, Finally stages a four‑part drama of creaturely existence in which successive organic forms — Rat, Vulture, Snake — attempt to secure autonomy through violence, pride, or desire, only to collapse under the weight of their own impulses. The final emergence of the fetal Adam marks not a triumph over these failures but a transformation of them: a new subject born from the ruins of creaturely will. Across its movements, the poem constructs a philosophical anthropology in which the human is not the origin but the residue of failed animal modalities, each exhausted into revelation.
Creaturely Separation and the Rat’s Self‑Annihilation
The opening lines — “Organic bodies. Competitively divergent, / Striving to maintain / Separation” — establish the poem’s central problematic: organic life is defined not by harmony but by competitive individuation. The Rat embodies this condition in its most pathological form. Described as “Disgusted, self-hating, heart-horrored,” he enacts a violent refusal of his own creatureliness by tying “a string-taut wire around his skinny neck / And [kicking] the stool.”
This scene is not merely a depiction of suicide; it is a metaphysical gesture. The Rat attempts to escape the burden of organic selfhood by severing the very principle of separation that defines him. His death marks the first “begin,” suggesting that annihilation is not an end but a reset — a clearing of the field for another failed attempt at creaturely autonomy.
The Vulture and the Hubris of Instrumental Power
The second creature, the Vulture, represents a different strategy for securing separation: domination through technological and militaristic power. “Stupidly well-fed on pride,” he invests in “guns, / Gas, nightsticks and, supercritically, / All the plutonium he can lay his talons on.”
The Vulture’s self-atomization literalizes the consequences of instrumental rationality pushed to its limit. His destruction is framed cosmologically — “The birth of stars” — suggesting that the collapse of pride produces not moral clarity but cosmic dispersal. The Vulture’s end is not transcendence but disintegration into the very matter he sought to control. His “begin again” signals another failed attempt to secure creaturely sovereignty.
The Snake and Erotic Repetition
The Snake introduces a third modality: erotic compulsion. He is “Slim, extremely good-looking,” driven by “Repetitive thoughts” and seduced by “Tan-thighed / Legs and a basket of hair.” His assault — “Smears her body, / With a eucharist of blood and semen” — is framed in sacramental language, transforming sexual violence into a grotesque parody of communion.
The Snake’s demise — split in two by “sulfuric grumblings” and “molten fire” — suggests that erotic repetition is not merely morally destructive but cosmologically unsustainable. His reptilian scraping across the knoll evokes a creature attempting to escape its own impulses, yet the eruption that destroys him arises from within. The Snake’s “and again” marks the third cycle of failed creaturely selfhood.
Adam and the Emergence of Human Subjectivity
The final movement breaks the cycle. From “the mess,” a fetus emerges: “The boy Adam, puking and wailing, / Nistarot tattooed in Hebrew / Behind his left ear.” The Hebrew term nistarot (“the hidden things”) signals a shift from creaturely immediacy to symbolic depth. Adam is not another animal modality but a new ontological category: a being marked by secrecy, interiority, and divine attention.
The poem’s final line — “The look on God’s face was lustrous” — suggests that Adam’s emergence fulfills a divine desire not for perfection but for a subject capable of bearing hiddenness. Human subjectivity arises not from triumph but from the accumulated failures of creaturely attempts at autonomy. Adam is the residue of collapse, the child of catastrophe.
Conclusion: Human Emergence as the Aftermath of Creaturely Ruin
Begin, Again, Finally constructs a mythic anthropology in which the human is not the pinnacle of organic evolution but the byproduct of its breakdowns. The Rat’s self-hatred, the Vulture’s pride, and the Snake’s erotic compulsion each represent modes of creaturely will that attempt to secure separation but collapse under their own excess. Adam emerges not as a solution but as a new problem: a being marked by hiddenness, symbolic depth, and divine attention.
The poem thus reframes human origin as a dialectical movement: the human begins only when creaturely strategies fail. In this sense, Adam is not the first creature but the last — born from the ruins of organic will, carrying the secret of what could not be sustained.
