Atom and Void by Aaron Fagan

 

Atom and Void begins with the poem “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” which begins with the line: “For starters, my ignorance is what resents what outlasts me.” Riffing on ancient Roman literature, the title (along with others like “At Capacity” or “The Last Night of the World”) suggests a sense of imminent collapse, empire’s fall, or even of being at the end of the human project. 

 

(Interestingly, Atom and Void is the title of a book of essays, also published by Princeton University Press, by Oppenheimer—a key figure in hastening that end.)

 

Heard in this context, the resentment—which I read more so as disaffection—of the poem’s first line could be read as virtuous, since the ultimate legacy of “what outlasts me,” from Ancient Rome to the atomic bomb, is violence. Except that Fagan, while persistently stressing the fallenness of humanity and the fallibility of knowledge, still declares knowledge to be his “ultimate end.”

 

The knowledge of Fagan’s poetry shares traits with gnosis, as it views the world as fundamentally flawed—

 

A glance at so-called history proves nothing can be done

Where enlightenment, spiritual education, and similar 

Absurdities are concerned.

 

—its “progress” and its promise actually being the opposite:

 

I dismiss this heaven and call it hell.

I belong to the silence of the end.

 

In other words, because the world is failed or flawed its offer of heaven is intrinsically ersatz heaven. Any project directed towards redemption or transcendence tries to outthink the fundamental entropy (another kind of “fallenness”) at the heart of things:

 

Flesh may smile or weep,

But the skull sits stone still

Inside and the twin purpose 

Of loss or gain is that we 

Arrive, without fail, at 

The wrong conclusions.

The story never ends, which 

Means the story never changes.

 

Ultimately, any “meaning” assigned to the order of things is ultimately a hubristic projection of what’s in our own heads:

 

Who knows what has

Happened or that anything 

Has—the tides advance 

And recede—you can make

The sea sounds say anything,

The still pitiless waves altar

Transcendence

 

You can say the sea is saying something but that’s not “really” what it’s saying. After you “transcend,” the waves will go on—proving that it was never about the ocean anyway. 

 

Speaking of hell, Fagan writes: “The duty of the damned is to be exact.” Each poem in Atom and Void fulfils that criterion, though not because of concrete imagery or clear descriptions. After all, the book’s disaffection/gnosis calls concreteness and clarity into fundamental question. In “The Cloud of Unknowing,” he declares that “[t]he solution to most problems / Is to destroy the illusion of clarity.” Elsewhere, he characterizes concreteness as more likely a “deluded permanence … give[n] to things.” 

 

This is not to say that there are no memorable concrete images, like “a tiny soft pencil against / The paper folded small inside my pocket,” “[m]onuments teeming with weeds,” or “[r]eflecting light in cupped palms.” It’s just that the concrete becomes an occasion to descend into a philosophical line of questioning, somewhat like William Bronk’s poetry, that ends in light, color, and form. Fagan’s exactness therefore shares qualities with hard-edge abstract painting.

 

Each poem in Atom and Void is a sonnet (speaking of “what outlasts me”), tasteful and meticulous (“The duty of the damned is to be exact,” Fagan writes). Rather than being open and sprawling with implication, each sonnet is finely whittled, resulting in tongue-twisting lines posing the reader with a philosophical problem to decode—as in “Deepfake,” which stretches one riddle across the 14-line frame:

 

Once you

Realize you

Cannot be

Anything

More than 

Who you 

Already are,

Why would

You ever

Want to 

Let anyone

Know who 

You have 

Always been?

 

Here, self-improvement is subjected to the same treatment as teleological knowledge. The poem warns against trying to be somebody, while also admonishing being who you already are. It’s probably better to be nobody, a quick reading of this sonnet would say, which is serendipitous, as that is actually who we already are… (Aporias like these abound in Atom and Void, spoken as if from a voice-from-the-other side, which can sound mean or matter-of-fact, depending on your own level of disaffection.)

 

One of the most memorable poems in the book is “Pretty Soon,” which nests declarations one after the other, the compounding periods creating music:

 

The self is lost. One less thing to care about.

As I walked, I held a tiny soft pencil against

The paper folded small inside my pocket.

It has been formulated but not established. 

Everyone keeps asking if I can see the cat.

You were meant to eat the fortune cookie

Whole and unread. So little time. I want

It now. Look at the blurry reality. A world

Too real for our sensibility. Find something

Softer. There is a split second from the film

L’Inhumaine that lit the whole gallery pink.

What is real is everything we know is false, 

But what we know is currently the best false.

It might be considered less than successful.

 

You were meant to eat the fortune cookie whole and unread because regardless of whether or not the message comes “[i]t turns out,” Fagan writes, “we turn out the way we turn out.” The fate of Schrödinger’s cat doesn’t matter one way or the other in and of itself, only to our drive to mean, measure, and make sense. Order is always an accident:

 

All points both are and are not an accident:

To know how to make—anything one makes—it’s by accident.

Life foresees death, yet hardly lives it out as death foresees, 

Transformed by the actual. One knows only a little of what 

The point will be. One wants order, but one wants it to come

By rules of chance distraction.

 

Atom and Void ventures as far as outer space with this outlook, with one poem ending with the image of:

 

An untitled ray of light 

Strains against the waves

Of self-emptying stars.

 

Here, I wasn’t sure if “we” were the ray of light or if the ray of light was the sign of similar activity or urges of light from another universe. Either way, human activity is demonstrated to be quite insignificant. Straining in vain becomes one less thing to worry about.

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