Lecture on Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide
As promised, here is the first of several planned lectures of the poems of Zumwalt. I have transcribed this from an audio recording as mentioned in my previous post. I am posting the text of the poem below and then the transcript of the lecture.
Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide
I. Judge Crater Is No More
Help!
There is a fandango up my nose;
This is justice?
O ironic gods -- can they
Really repossess my pancreas?
And Black and Decker tread on the cosmic puddles
URRRP!
II. Moira
My ravioli molded to day...
The wispy green fuzz eating
Away the corrupted entrails of Alpha Beta
Ground sirloin.
Pathos. Tragedy. Trichinosis.
Such is fate.
III. Cry the beloved wingnut
Bladderwort lied.
Bigot! And the hungry children cry
In their farina. Would Rothschild give
Them Twinkies? Ha! Let them eat Spackling paste.
Spush! Time, the rain-bird, spews
Its indifference towards the continuum of OHM.
-- Zumwalt (1973)
LECTURE ONE: TRILOGY OF THE OBLIQUE CARBIDE
Good afternoon, and welcome!
For those of you visiting the zumpoems website the first time, I have offered to do a series of lectures on the poetry of S.H. Zumwalt — the poet more commonly known as simply Zumwalt.
Zumwalt’s poetry has long been admired by me, and he is not only a personal favorite but arguably the most important poet of my lifetime. I am, to put it plainly, a tremendous fan, and it is a privilege to explore some of Zumwalt’s works with you.
We begin this series with the poem that started it all: “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide.” This was the very first poem Zumwalt ever submitted for publication. It was published as the first of two of Zumwalt poems in GHLM (Good Humor Literary Magazine), a standalone literary magazine issued in a single print run of 500 copies, most of which were rapidly purchased for the inconsequential sum of 25 cents.
This poem, “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide” is a stunning debut. It’s the work that immediately established Zumwalt’s singular voice and set the tone for a series of poems of incredible insight and poetic worth that would soon follow.
Now, let us turn to the text. This is a work of uncommon density and ferocious intellect. The poem, “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide,” does not announce its philosophical intentions with the systematic rigor of a Kantian critique. Instead, it performs its philosophy. It shoves it up our nose, serves it to us molded on a plate, and dares us to find meaning in its chaotic pronouncements.
The very title is our first and most important clue: “Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide.” A “trilogy” suggests a structured, epic form. But its subject is “oblique” — indirect, slanting, refusing a straight path. And the material is “carbide — an industrial, hard, unyielding, and brutally material compound. This title prepares us for a violent collision between our innate human search for transcendent meaning and the hard, indifferent stuff of the world. This poem is a gauntlet thrown down to the entire Western project of meaning-making. It holds up this grand project and answers it with a belch.
To understand its radicalism, we will proceed, as the poet did, in three movements. We will explore how each part engages with, and then violently surpasses, the philosophical canon. We will analyze not only its philosophical content and social critiques, but also its psychological underpinnings, its very linguistic form, and the bleak ethical landscape it leaves in its wake, ultimately venturing into a conceptual wilderness that I will call a state of post-canonical despair.
I. The Abject Sublime: Beyond Reason and the Existentialists
Our first movement is titled “Judge Crater Is No More.”
I. Judge Crater Is No More
Help!
There is a fandango up my nose;
This is justice?
O ironic gods — can they
Really repossess my pancreas?
And Black and Decker tread on the cosmic puddles
URRRP!
The Western philosophical tradition begins, in many ways, with a quest for a rational and just cosmos. For Plato, Justice is an eternal, perfect Form, an ideal standard against which our flawed world is measured. For the Enlightenment, human Reason was the key to unlocking both the secrets of the universe and the foundations of a just society. This poem opens by taking a sledgehammer to that entire edifice.
The invocation of “Judge Crater,” the magistrate who famously vanished in 1930, immediately establishes a theme of epistemological collapse. We begin in a void of knowledge, a mystery that reason cannot solve. The cry for “Help!” is not met with a rational diagnosis, but with the visceral, surreal complaint of a “fandango up my nose.” This is a pristine articulation of the Absurd condition. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his novel Nausea, described the sickness that arises from confronting the brute, contingent fact of existence. This fandango is a perfect image of that Sartrean nausea: an internal, rhythmic, yet utterly nonsensical agitation. The narrator then asks the quintessential absurd question: “This is justice?” To demand a cosmic, rational explanation for a nasal fandango is a savage parody of our search for meaning. It degrades the noble confrontation between a rational man and an irrational universe that Albert Camus described. Here, the subject is not a Sisyphus heroically pushing his rock; he is a man with a dance in his sinuses.
This reading is enriched when viewed through a psychoanalytic lens. The “fandango up my nose” can be interpreted as a hysterical symptom — a physical manifestation of a psychic crisis that cannot be articulated in rational language. It is the body performing the mind’s breakdown. The poem’s speaker is suffering not from a philosophical conundrum alone, but from a psychological unraveling. This deepens with the bizarre plea regarding the pancreas. From a Freudian perspective, the fear of having an organ “repossessed” by ironic gods could be read as a profound castration anxiety or a masochistic desire for punishment from a cosmic parental authority. The final “URRRP!” is the eruption of the repressed Id — the primal, instinctual, unthinking part of the psyche — shattering the thin veneer of the Ego’s quest for order and meaning. It is the body’s final, triumphant veto over the mind’s deliberations.
From this personal chaos, the poem turns to theology: “O ironic gods — can they / Really repossess my pancreas?” The Book of Job presents a man wrestling with a powerful, inscrutable God. The poem offers a third, more terrifying option: the universe as a divine pawn shop, run by a cosmic repo man. The gods are “ironic” creditors, and our relationship to them is not one of faith, but of finance. This suggests that the logic of late-stage capitalism has infected the heavens themselves.
Here, the perspective of the Frankfurt School is indispensable. Philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, argued that Enlightenment reason, in its quest for total control and efficiency, inevitably flips into its opposite: a new, more insidious form of myth and domination. The poem’s vision is a perfect surrealist depiction of this process. The “repossession of the pancreas” is the logic of instrumental reason applied with bureaucratic cruelty to the human body. The cosmos is no longer mysterious; it is administered.
This culminates in the section’s climax: “And Black and Decker tread on the cosmic puddles / URRRP!” Here we must invoke the specter of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw the world as the manifestation of a blind, irrational, ceaselessly striving force he called the Will. The “URRRP!” is a perfect, guttural expression of this mindless Will. It is a belch in the face of metaphysics.
But the poem surpasses Schopenhauer in a uniquely modern way. Schopenhauer’s Will was a grand, unifying, metaphysical principle. The poem replaces it with “Black and Decker.” A specific, branded, consumer-grade power tool company. This is the poem’s radical move. It suggests that the ultimate driving force of the cosmos is not a grand metaphysical Will, but a mundane, commodified brand name. The sublime has been privatized, trivialized by the very instruments of technical reason that the Frankfurt School warned against. The horror is not that the universe is driven by a blind force, but that this force is nameable and recognizable from a hardware store. This is a pessimism so thoroughly saturated with the specific banality of consumer culture that it leaves the grand pronouncements of 19th-century philosophy looking almost quaint.
II. The Fungal Fate: Beyond Stoicism and Materialism
The second movement, “Moira,” deepens this commitment to the mundane as the arbiter of our destiny.
II. Moira
My ravioli molded to day…
The wispy green fuzz eating
Away the corrupted entrails of Alpha Beta
Ground sirloin.
Pathos. Tragedy. Trichinosis.
Such is fate.
The title “Moira” summons the entire classical tradition of Fate, from Sophoclean tragedy to the Stoic philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, who preached a dignified acceptance of one’s destiny as part of a rational, divinely ordered cosmos. Their ideal was amor fati, the “love of fate.”
The poem presents a grotesque parody of this ideal. The catalyzing event is not the prophecy of an oracle or the fall of a king, but molded ravioli. It forces the question: when we compare the fate of Oedipus to the fate of our lunch, is there a difference in kind, or only in scale? The mock-epic language, “corrupted entrails of Alpha Beta ground sirloin,” mocks the high diction of tragedy. The mention of “Alpha Beta” — at the time of the poem’s writing a thriving, ubiquitous American supermarket chain — is a crucial detail. It anchors this event not in the eternal, but in the historically specific and disposable world of 20th-century groceries. Indeed, if you’ll excuse the obvious pun, it is the ground sirloin that grounds this tragic fate in the brutally mundane.
This points to a philosophy of materialist determinism, recalling the ancient atomists like Lucretius. But where Lucretius found a certain cold grandeur in his atomic universe, this poem finds only “wispy green fuzz.” The poem’s materialism is not grand; it is pathetic. It is the materialism of the back of the refrigerator. Again, a psychoanalytic reading adds another layer. The poem’s fixation on decay, rot, and “corrupted entrails” can be seen as an expression of Freud’s “death drive,” or Thanatos — the unconscious, instinctual pull towards dissolution, decomposition, and a return to the inorganic state. The “fate” here is not just a philosophical proposition; it is a psychological yearning for oblivion.
The poem’s most devastating argument is performed through its very language in the sequence: “Pathos. Tragedy. Tricanosis.” This is a direct assault on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy produced catharsis — a cleansing of pity and fear that leads to a higher understanding. The poem’s linguistic structure performs an anti-catharsis, a philosophical reduction. It moves systematically down a ladder of abstraction: from the raw human feeling (Pathos), to the structured art form that contains it (Tragedy), down to the ugly, clinical, material cause (Trichinosis). The language itself performs the reduction of meaning. It replaces aesthetic purgation with clinical diagnosis.
This is how it moves beyond the canon. The Stoics asked us to nobly accept a rational fate. The poem asks us to witness a fungal fate and respond with a sarcastic, “Such is fate.” It is not amor fati, but a bitter, sarcastic surrender to the sheer dumbness of matter. It is a resignation to meaningless, material decay.
III. The Cosmological Spew: Beyond Nihilism
The final movement, “Cry the beloved wingnut,” completes the philosophical demolition, moving from the personal and social to the cosmological.
|III. Cry the beloved wingnut
Bladderwort lied.
Bigot! And the hungry children cry
In their farina. Would Rothschild give
Them Twinkies? Ha! Let them eat Spackling paste.
Spush! Time, the rain-bird, spews
Its indifference towards the continuum of OHM.
Before we even analyze the content, we must look at the form. The stanza’s structure is an exercise in the poetics of the avant-garde. Its shocking juxtapositions and non-sequiturs are hallmarks of Dadaism, the artistic movement born from the trauma of World War I, which sought to destroy logic and reason with absurdity. The abrupt, contextless cry of “Bigot!” is a purely Dadaist gesture, meant to jolt the reader out of passive consumption.
The stanza opens with its most enigmatic line: “Bladderwort lied.” The initial temptation is to see this as a reference to the carnivorous plant, suggesting a breakdown in the natural order. But why would Zumwalt choose this specific word? A deeper reading suggests that “Bladderwort” is not a plant, but a surname — a stand-in for a particular kind of person or authority figure. The name itself is a brilliant, layered metaphor. A “bladder” is a hollow organ that holds waste. A “wort” is an archaic term for a plant, often one with medicinal or humble connotations. A Mr. Bladderwort, then, is a figure who appears simple or perhaps even beneficial on the surface (the “wort”), but is in reality hollow, full of toxic refuse, and predatory — much like the plant that bears the name, which traps its victims in its empty sacs. This “Bladderwort” could be a politician, a philosopher, a media pundit, or a guru — any figure of authority who builds a system of thought based on hollow, deceptive, and ultimately poisonous promises. When Zumwalt writes that “Bladderwort lied,” he is signaling a betrayal far more profound than a trick of nature. He is describing the foundational lie of a trusted authority, a lie so deep it poisons the very possibility of truth itself. This leads us, as the simpler reading did, to a state of ontological nihilism, but now it is a nihilism initiated by a specific, symbolic human failure.
This broken reality provides the backdrop for a broken society. “Bigot! And the hungry children cry / In their farina.” This brilliantly mimics the chaotic and illogical nature of our social discourse, where moral outrage exists as semantic noise, completely detached from the material reality of human need. The critique then becomes a savage assault on our ethical systems. “Would Rothschild give / Them Twinkies? Ha! Let them eat Spackling paste.” This post-Marxist vision offers utter hopelessness. The response to suffering is not revolution, but a cynical gesture from the apex of capital — a “Twinkie,” a product of the Culture Industry. And even this is retracted in favor of active cruelty. “Spackling paste” is a simulacrum of charity; it has the form of a solution but is, in fact, an industrial poison. The dismissive “Spush!” is the sound of this system operating with brutal efficiency.
And now, the final lines, where the poem achieves its most radical vision. “Time, the rain-bird, spews / Its indifference towards the continuum of OHM.” The Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus gave us the image of time as a river: panta rhei, “everything flows.” The poem transforms this river into a “spew” — a violent, biological rejection. And what is the target? Not humanity. But “the continuum of OHM.” The Ohm, whose symbol is Omega (Omega), is a unit of electrical resistance. It represents a fundamental law of physics, a piece of the rational Logos that undergirds reality — the last refuge of order.
The poem denies us this final comfort. It posits a Time so profoundly apathetic that it dissolves the very laws of physics. This is a nihilism that surpasses Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s nihilism was the devaluation of human values. This is a cosmological nihilism, the devaluation of reality itself. In the face of this ultimate horror, language itself finally gives out. The poem ends in the pre-verbal, onomatopoeic sounds of “Spush!” and “spew,” because in this universe, there is literally nothing left to say.
Conclusion: The Ethics of the Wingnut
“Trilogy of the Oblique Carbide” is more than a catalogue of philosophical despair. It is an evolutionary leap into a new species of it. It systematically takes on the pillars of Western thought — Justice, Fate, Truth, and Reason — and replaces them with their most banal and degraded counterparts: a fandango, molded pasta, a predatory promise from hollow authority, and spackling paste. It surpasses the canon by refusing its terms. Where philosophy seeks universal principles, the poem offers specific, branded commodities. Where philosophy seeks noble confrontation, it offers undignified biological spasms. And where even the most radical nihilism stops at the boundary of physical law, this poem has Time itself attacking the very math of the cosmos.
It provides no answers. It offers no hope. It is an anti-philosophy. Its purpose is to show what it feels like when all systems of meaning have not only failed, but have curdled into something grotesque. But if we are so bold as to ask one final question: “how then shall we live?” The poem, in its very title, may hint at a bleak way forward: it offers us the possibility of a final, desperate moral stance: the ethics of the beloved wingnut.
This would be an ethics stripped of all cosmic significance. It rejects the heroic rebellion of Camus and the serene acceptance of the Stoics as luxuries from a more orderly universe. Instead, the ethics of the wingnut might be built on three shaky pillars:
- Dark Humor: Acknowledging the cosmic joke of the “fandango up my nose” and finding a grim, ironic solidarity with others who feel it too.
- Clear-Eyed Cynicism: An unwavering understanding that the structures of power will never offer real sustenance, only the political equivalent of “Spackling paste.” It is an ethics of radical disillusionment.
- A-Cosmic Compassion: Feeling for the “hungry children cry / In their farina” not out of a duty to a universal moral law (which has been spewed upon), but out of a simple, ground-level recognition of immediate suffering. It is a compassion that expects no reward and has no grand justification; it just is.
This is, perhaps, the only ethical posture possible in a carbide world. It is an ethics that functions without hope, without truth, and without a net of meaning, yet somehow persists in the small, frantic movements of a wingnut holding things together, just for a moment, against an overwhelming and indifferent force. The poem leaves us not with a new philosophy to live by, but with the performance of living without one, here in the silence that follows, with the lingering taste of spackling paste and the faint, final echo of a belch in the void.
Thank you.
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