the poem, the line breaks off giving a sense of speech being fractured
by ëthe speechjoltí which is associated with movement or ëtravelling
through darkness and moistureí, as a fluid excess. Once more, this
kind of image creates a sense of the inarticulable, while ëdarkness and
moistureí evoke a ëfeminineí, dark and moist realm; both a lack and
an excess that evades definition.
The effects of ëWhatís Naturalí and ëAlmost Thereí can be
understood at a philosophical level in terms of the fracture within the
sublime which is addressed in Immanuel Kantís Critique of Pure
Reason and his Critique of Judgement:^58
the faculty of presentation, the imagination, fails to provide a representation
corresponding to the Idea. This failure of expression gives rise to a pain, a kind
of cleavage within the Subject between what can be conceived and what can be
imagined or presented [Ö] This dislocation of faculties among themselves
gives rise to an extreme tension [Ö] At the edge of the break, infinity, or the
absoluteness of the Idea can be revealed in what Kant calls a negative
presentation, or even a non-presentation.^59Such a ëcleavageí corresponds with Lecercleís notion of dÈlire and
Paulinís ëglitchí, where there is a ëdislocation of faculties among
themselvesí giving ërise to an extreme tensioní ëbetween what can be
conceived and what can be imagined or presentedí. According to
Lyotard, the sublime is the relation between the representable and the
conceivable. The sublime takes place ëwhen the imagination fails to
present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a
concept [Ö] These are Ideas of which no presentation is possible.
[Modern art presents Ö] the fact that the unpresentable exists.í^60
The art critic Herbert Read comments that Kleeís ëconceptual
imagination is capable of creating new worlds, or organic variations of
the existing world. But these concepts can only be expressed in the
concrete terms of line [Ö] he was inspired by conceptual rather than
58 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans., Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1929) and Critique of Judgement, trans. J.C. Meredith
(Oxford: University Press, 1952).
59 Jean-FranÁois Lyotard, ëThe Sublime and the Avant-Gardeí, Postmodernism: A
Reader, ed., Thomas Docherty (London: Harvester, 1993), p.250.
60 Ibid., pp.45, 43.