It was a beautiful day today. I went running in the late afternoon and saw some amazing houses on a street I hadn’t been down before. A nice lady stopped me and asked about my dog.
Also, some new poems have appeared on Exquisite Corpse. My thanks to Andrei Codrescu for prompt acceptance and posting of these fairly recent poems.
A response to readings on Henry Darger
I have a friend in San Francisco. Call him Jim. He lives – but really one must find a verb that expresses every possible tense – he had lived, lived, lives, will live, will have lived (never lived?) – in a Victorian flat on the Panhandle near Golden Gate Park. For most people one knows, it is perhaps not too difficult to imagine their lives running on a separate but more or less parallel track; they have affairs (one imagines), intrigues, jobs, they travel, seasons change, the aging process one notes with chagrin on one’s own face has its distant reflection on theirs, perhaps they get married have children divorce, reach a point of despair, have an epiphany, there is a letter or a late-night phone call or an unexpected visit, and here the two lives converge and one is grateful and relieved to learn that someone else has struggled, been defeated, triumphed, and gone on, in not quite the same but more or less similar ways that one has – as if in the background of each person one had found a perspective from which to view the peaks and valleys of one’s own life, there and only there and for that moment could it possibly make so much sense and be affirmed in the other.
But if I were to re-enter Jim’s flat, not having been there in many years, I suspect that the basketball would still be perched on the mantel in the front room, the wooden shutters still slanted diagonally to the northern light, the darts in the dartboard still stuck in the hard foam at a lazy angle. The TV would still be in the corner with foil balled on the antenna, the futon against the wall, the answering machine, if I called, would speak in the voice of a roommate who moved out many years ago. And if I rang the bell on the front door, Jim himself would come shuffling down the stairs, looking perhaps more worn than the previous time I’d seen him – but only in the sense that a rock in a stream gets worn by the water rushing over it – his smooth features inscrutable until he broke into a familiar grimace or grin that seem to represent the range of his expressions.
Did I say “live� If to live is to love, grow, change, have passions, breakdowns, make decisions, have plans, then Jim does not live. He exists. He endures. Like “The Dude†in The Big Lebowski, he abides. I know that he eats, bikes, goes to a bar and talks to the regulars and plays pool and drinks beer. He owns a car that he hardly ever drives, takes the bus to work, has a sister in the East Bay he visits from time to time. We used to play tennis.
Mostly, however, what he does is write.
Let me take a step back. When I first met Jim, he was not quite like this. There was college, a trip to Russia with a buddy from school, a circle of friends, most of them links in the job he has intermittently had, a crush on a girl, parties, the drugs we all did in our twenties at that time in the City. But the circle dissolved, people moved away, he quit the job to work on his writing, gradually settled more and more into the rut of himself. A year of not working stretched into two or three – somehow he had saved enough, and lived simply enough, to do this. Meanwhile I had various girlfriends, jobs, moved a dozen times in six years, got to know an enormous number of people in various scenes, music, poetry, art, some very few of them crystallized into actual friends as I worked my way through the metropolitan maze of intrigue and acquaintance. Meanwhile Jim stayed in his flat, and I saw less and less of him, there were infrequent phone calls, plans to grab a beer that almost never materialized.
Then one night I got a phone call. From his sister. Jim had been hit by a car while riding his bike. He had been flipped over the car and crashed through its rear windshield on his way down. Otherwise, one supposes, the car might not have stopped.
Somehow even this senseless accident resolved into the pattern of his life. He had been wearing his helmet, and emerged, miraculously, with no damage whatsoever to his head. But his hip and leg were hurt, enough that he needed a couple of surgeries and therapy and still has pains that prevent him from doing anything too strenuous. The accident occurred right at the point where he had been about to go back to work, and although the driver was uninsured, there was some kind of large settlement, such that he was able to put off working another year or so. An extreme version, then, of the idle wish one has to crash an old car and collect on one’s premium, or to rob one’s own house, except of course this happened to him, and it had the added benefit of not only providing him with more resources to keep working, but reinforced and emphasized the physical isolation that is more and more a theme of his life.
Do I sound envious of Jim? At times, perhaps, I am. More often I stand in awe of it, I glimpse it from a distance those moments I am most alone, for that is the only time it comes into focus. When I actually see him it makes no sense and we have almost nothing to talk about. I know that I could not live it. I am too much in need of life, love, a sense of going away from and returning to, the thousands of little interactions and exchanges that both dissipate and feed one’s existence. Somehow it both comforts me and makes me tremendously uneasy, knowing that Jim’s there in his eternal flat, existing. I’ve come to need him there, doing that, even though I could never do it myself, to aspire to and differ from.
There’s something elemental about a life lived in such steady isolation and devotion, and to me that has always been the point of Henry Darger’s fascination with the weather. He is the weather, storming in his room, throwing his “tantrums,†declaring war on the little girls and the men in the pages of his novel and canvases. Then becoming gentle and “saintlike.†To hell with the Glandolinians! I would like to live, love, take a wife, make babies, have a nice Christmas, give and receive gifts, grow old, and die, but let me put it off a little while till I finish this. Perhaps for a year or two. Or a lifetime.
Films often capture the zeitgeist of a given moment, whether intentionally or not. For some reason, while watching The Dark Knight last night at our local theater, I kept thinking of one my late-80s favorites, Die Hard. Like the latest Batman flick, that film features a wily villain who stays one step ahead of the cops and plays a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the only man who, operating alone and outside the law, can stop him. Like The Dark Knight, Die Hard has clear overtones of terrorism and a theme that touches on the ineffectiveness of our vast police apparatus, with its rules and procedures.
But that’s where the similarities end. The villain in Die Hard — played by Alan Rickman with a delicious sleaziness — is not a terrorist but a thief, creating chaos as a subterfuge for a spectacular heist. The man who stops him — Bruce Willis, at the top of his smartass, wise-cracking game — is not a disguised billionaire with high-tech tools at his disposal, but an ordinary joe cop who uses his wits to beat the bad guys. In some ways, it’s prescient of the post-9/11 glamorizing of firemen and other quasi-invisible public servants. But the film’s really a weird commentary on excess and greed, an action-film version of Wall Street, Gordon Gecko with a gun and a greasy accent.
So what aspect of contemporary culture does The Dark Knight reflect? Here’s Andrew Klavan in the WSJ, asserting that Batman represents GW Bush:
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
Surprisingly, there’s some validity to this idea. I think thematically it’s a bit more complicated and less outright “conservative” (or neoconservative) than Klavan would have it, but certainly it’s there. Before I discuss why, however, I wanted to give a brief overview of some of the more remarkable aspects of the movie (spoiler alert).
First off, Heath Ledger’s Joker is great. Christian Bale, as Batman, might be the hero, and Maggie Gyllenhaal provides a real emotional center for the film as his love interest Rachel Dawes. But Ledger is the star of the show. That’s not only true of his performance, which is loaded with a sort of electrified anguish that makes him fascinating to watch every time he steps on screen — as if even the Joker’s a little confused at just how fucked up he is. It’s also true in the sense that every move Batman, the cops, and even the other crooks make is in response to something the Joker does. He’s a true “agent of chaos,” as he explains at one point; never more so than when he torches a mammoth pile of money just for the hell of it in front of an incredulous mob guy.
In that sense, it’s not that big of a stretch to compare him to a figure like Osama bin Laden, or at least our darkest fears about him. The mafia is out to make money — they have organization, structure, a “plan,” as the Joker puts it; he has none. He’s just out to “watch the world burn,” as Michael Caine’s Alfred puts it in some of the film’s characteristically wooden dialogue.
His unpredictable actions and magnetic presence also serve to mask some of the truly loopy holes in the film. Like the idea that all of Gotham’s various gangs — Italian, black, Latino, etc. — would do all their banking together, let alone with a slick Chinese dude based in Hong Kong. Or that a single bad guy with a band of what seem to be half-wits and teenage thugs is able to repeatedly overpower those mob guys and their henchmen. Or that the same bad guy — in a city already on red alert and with every cop looking for him — is able to somehow wire huge buildings, ferries, and hospitals with high-powered explosives. The incredible organization and sheer unlikeliness of the 9/11 attacks gives a terrorist like the Joker a grain of believability. We need to believe in an enemy as insane and powerful as the Joker in order to justify the response.
In The Dark Knight, that response is brutal and total. Maybe not total in the ultimate sense, as Batman appears to stick to the traditional hero’s prohibition against taking a life. But the “boundaries of civil rights” that Klavan writes about “pushing” occurs when Batman uses some of his techie toys to tap every cell phone in the city, justified of course in the need to catch the Joker. There’s a strenuous debate about this, and one of the final scenes shows Morgan Freeman’s highly moralistic tech guy — the only one with access to the rigged software — quietly destroying it on his way out the door. If one were to compare this to our current “debate” about warrantless wire-tapping, well, there really hasn’t been much debate, and no intention to tear down the machinery when the bad guys are caught, because the war on terror has no end in sight. The only parallel is the fantasy that there’s a highly moral person sitting at the controls, listening exclusively to the conversations of people who have something to hide.
Furthermore, if we’re to take GW as “The Dark Knight,” willing to do whatever it takes to capture the terrorists, even if it means being (gulp!) unpopular, how are we to reconcile that with Batman’s repeated desire to withdraw completely and support Aaron Eckhart’s D.A. Harvey Dent, who wants to do things on the up and up? Or Rachel Dawes’ finally choosing the latter over the former? One’s tempted to envision the love interest as a stand-in for the American people, understanding but unable to approve of The Dark Knight’s methods, wishing this bad boy could be more like the law-abiding D.A., and vice-versa. The only logical way to reconcile the two is to imagine GW as both Dent and Batman; he’s Batman in the sense that only he is willing to do what it takes to defeat the terrorists, but by legalizing those methods — or tearing down the parts of the Constitution that stand in their way — he transforms himself into Dent. Needless to say, this imaginative leap simply doesn’t work.
Finally, though, The Dark Knight is an accurate reflection of the current times simply by being so relentlessly dark. While Die Hard was chock full of Willis’ banter contrasting with the unintentionally funny Euro-trash villains, Bale never cracks a smile, and the only wit belongs to Ledger’s Joker. But it’s the blackest of humor, the tears of a clown. No wonder, when even the left has a hard time laughing at a silly magazine cover spoof. I’ve had a hard time lightening up myself lately, and it’s a mood I sense every time I open a paper or turn on the TV or just walk down the street. A dark night, indeed.
There’s much to think and say about this volume as I begin to wade through it for a class this fall. However, it’s far too much to begin that work of writing it down to a size that would be interesting or useful, even for a forum like this. Instead, I thought for now I’d pull out some of the more interesting statements about madness made by Foucault — the text is chock full of them.
Actually, I realize it may be necessary to at least define some terms and offer a very brief sketch of the book’s thesis before offering these. The book is not so much a “history of madness” as it is a history, or as Foucault might say an archeology, of how people have thought about madness over the years. How were the mad perceived, and how has that changed from the Middle Ages up to now? At what point did madness transform from something strange, almost mystical in nature, to an ordinary illness that might be treatable? What was the evolution of that perception? From the introduction: “As a history, the thesis of the book is that whether madness is described as a religious or philosophical phenomenon (an experience of inspiration, a loss of mind, etc.), or as an objective medical essence (as in all the classifications of types of madness that have been developed by psychiatry), these conceptions are not discoveries but historical constructions of meaning.”
Some key concepts:
The Classical Age: Foucault makes a distinction between how the mad were treated during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and what he calls “the classical age,” which roughly covers a period beginning in the 17th century and continuing through the 18th.
Unreason: Not to be confused with madness, unreason is simply anything that doesn’t jibe with reason. Important because according to Foucault’s thesis, unreason had an important place in Ren. thought (philosophers like Erasmus, artists like Brueghel and Dürer, etc.), yet in the classical age it became more and more suspect. Eventually, “unreasonable behavior” of any sort became an excuse to subject someone to confinement.
Confinement: Or what Foucault sometimes refers to as “The Great Confinement,” began with the opening of large hospitals like the Hôpital Général in Paris in 1656. Foucault argues that originally these had nothing to do with medical treatment and everything to do with locking up anyone society wanted to exclude.
Extracts from the History of Madness:
In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman…
What then is madness, in its most general but most concrete form, for anyone who immediately challenges any hold that knowledge might have upon it? In all probability, nothing other than the absence of an oeuvre.
A history not of psychiatry, but of madness itself, in all its vivacity, before it is captured by knowledge. We need to strain our ears, and bend down towards this murmuring of the world, and try to perceive so many images that have never been poetry, so many fantasies that have never attained the colors of day.
But in the early Renaissance, the process of signification underwent a reversal. The beasts were let loose, and they made their escape from the world of legend or moral instruction and took on a fantastical life of their own. In an astonishing reversal, it was mankind that began to feel itself the object of the animals’ gaze, as they took control and showed him his own truth.
So what, precisely, is the knowledge that madness brings? Most probably, as it is forbidden knowledge, it predicts both the reign of Satan and the end of the world, ultimate happiness and supreme punishment, omnipotence on earth and the descent into hell.
The classical age invented confinement in the way that the Middle Ages had invented the segregation of lepers…
From the classical age, and for the first time, madness was seen through an ethical condemnation of idleness in the social immanence now grounded on a community of work.
Through this gesture, something inside man was placed outside of himself, and pushed over the edge of our horizon. It is the gesture of confinement, in short, which created alienation.
By inventing the space of confinement in the imaginary geometry of its morality, the classical age found a homeland and a place of redemption for sins of the flesh and faults committed against reason.
Family and its requirements became one of the essential criteria of reason, and it was above all in its name that confinement was demanded and obtained.
The most common grounds for confinement were debauchery, prodigality, inadmissible liaisons and shameful marriages… The habitual practices of confinement also reveal a further grouping: those who fell foul of the various categories of profanation.
The movement of confinement displaced unreason, removing it from a landscape where it had been everywhere present, and firmly localized it. Freed from dialectical ambiguities, it is now circumscribed in its concrete presence, within the distance necessary for it to become an object of perception.
At the base of so many of these obscure alienations that cloud our perception of madness there must at least be that: the recognition that when society one day decided that the mad were ‘alienated,’ it was in society that unreason first alienated itself, and it was in society that unreason exiled and silenced itself.
Is it not important for our culture that unreason could only become an object of knowledge after it had been subjected to a process of social excommunication?
We moderns are beginning to understand that beneath the surface of madness, crime, neurosis and social inadequacy lurks something resembling a common experience of anguish. Perhaps, for the classical world, in the economy of evil there also lurked a common experience of unreason.
To me.
Here’s a little video to help celebrate.
A response to Martin Heidegger’s “The Thing” (Poetry, Language, Thought)
As someone recently pointed out, no one has yet satisfactorily explained Zeno’s Paradox – that of the arrow, because of the distance it has to travel being infinitely divisible, never hitting the target. It has taken science two millenia to arrive at theories of relativity and quantum physics that really do no more than propose further contradictions. On the one hand, the ability to look at things in greater and greater detail has revealed the intuitive wisdom of the paradox – those infinite divisions, the breaking down into atoms and neutrons and electrons and so on and what’s between them. But still you can’t explain what it is that the arrow pierces and passes through, what the something consists of, as a fact having occurred.
Heidegger gets further into this, it seems to me, by writing into the thingness of things, in this case a jug, and there is a further analogy here in the paradox of what is near also bringing its distance, that is, what is close at hand demands that I break it down in all its minuteness, in order to begin to understand it. Then there is what he gets to, after many words and arguments, of a thing having this four-foldedness, earth/sky/gods/mortal, melded into the one-foldedness of its thing. Which is perhaps a way of saying that a thing cannot exist at a single point in time but must be apprehended in the flow of all its uses, bundled together – jug is the earth of the jug itself, the void it contains (air), its “giving forth†of water to drink (mortal), and its “gushing forth†of libation for the gods. But I realize that in using the word “uses,†I am presuming too much. The point is there is an error in logic that we make, every day, in order to merely use the jug and not stop and contemplate it for six hours in all its thingness, that it exists in the form of its outward appearance, and this is enough for us.
The wonderful and exasperating thing about poetry is that it never stops at the outward appearance, but it also does not linger for six hours in contemplation working through various arguments, but cuts right to the heart of the matter. That is, it expresses or contains the paradox as its primary material. Wonderful, then, because it recognizes the inability of words-as-explanation to express the truth behind the paradox. Exasperating, because it must still use words to express it. Demands a different kind of thinking that is perhaps not a thinking at all, but a knowing, no, a dreaming, not quite that either, an apprehending, that is, a containing and then giving forth in the same sense of the jug, a constant motion that both does and doesn’t reach the target. All these are a clue to what a poet is and what a poem does, it can only point to, the leap and piercing the target must belong to someone or something else.
I could go into signifier and signified, and how the poem siezes the territory of the former to try to contain both in that, rather than constantly (futilely) pointing at the latter, as even Heidegger must finally do because he’s thinking and writing in prose. But I’m not well-versed in theory, I can only surmise this aim of poetry. And perhaps even that is over-shooting, but let me give an example. In Rilke’s “Panther,†as Jim Gavin spoke about with regards to the cup in a poem being a real cup, you get the sense there is a real panther stalking around in there. This is achieved through the tremendous skill of the poet in recreating the sense of an animal stalking in a cage and the barely contained danger of that and frustration, all through rhythm and sound and image. You see and feel the panther, and you sense that it is real. Yet it is not description or an advertisement, it is not sentimental, doesn’t propose to speak for or interpret the panther or tell us what it says or means. Just leaves it circling there, as disturbing and memorable as the sight of a real animal in a cage, leaves one with as undigestible a question as that. And the proof of it is that it’s just as susceptible to change over time, it is not frozen there like a snapshot, it moves as you move, shifts, like any living thing, it has angles, it continues to work and squirm inside you.
Another way. In Creeley’s poem “Do you think…â€, it seems to me there is a supposition or expression of this paradox, the paradox of being and not being, of moving towards but not hitting, of containing several realities at once. “Do you think that if / there’s an apple on the table / and somebody eats it, it / won’t be there anymore.†Next stanza, an elaboration: “Do you think that if / two people are in love with one another, / one or the other has got to be / less in love than than the other at / some point in the otherwise happy relationship.†This then foregrounds the problem of language in expressing reality as it exists in the dimensions of time and space. Eats what? On what? In whom? At when? Which one? Each stanza in the poem is a question with no question mark. So: a rhetorical question, “a question to which no answer is expected, or to which only one answer may be made†(or both?), also a question having to do with rhetoric, its inability to express ultimate truth in its however-many foldedness. The last stanza of the poem breaks it down even further. Language breaks down. “Do you think that if / I said, I love you, or anyone / said it, or you did.†And so on. No answer. Or: the answer must be worked out alone. In silence.
To look at a clock and see an hour is to see all hours. To imagine what one will be doing an hour from now, or at this same time tomorrow, or remember what one has done, to recognize that one has existed at all previous hours and will continue to do so until one ceases to do so, but this is unimaginable. To look at a clock and see the time is to recognize all the myriad infinite others who also exist at this time, the children on the schoolbus, the moths on the screen, the buds on the tree, water, air, faces, coins, grass, wheels, pens, so on and so on and so on. Also unimaginable. And yet, there it is. Was. Will be. Language is sort of the same thing. A tool that we necessarily use to deal with these competing, contradictory, into-each-other-flowing realities that stand above and behind it.
A response to Lorca’s speech on Duende
I want to start out with this concept that Lorca tosses out, almost off-handedly, towards the end of the main part of the Duende speech, of the “interpreter’s duende†making up for a lack of same in the original source material, e.g. (as he describes) a singer making something extraordinary out of a vulgar song, or an actor with duende infusing that into an inferior play. I’m not going to try to re-interpret duende, as the concept seems to invite us to do, and as poets have done from the moment it first became known, nor will I question its existence or whether it’s a good or bad thing, or the same thing as inspiration, emotion, the muse, what-have-you. For the sake of expediency I’ll take it as given that it’s this ineffable, form-altering thing that Lorca says it is. That it is there for some and not for others. That it brings “freshness,†“an almost religious enthusiasm,†that “no emotion is possible without it.†That it must be “awakened from the remotest mansions of the blood.â€
Having assumed all this, I will now posit that the interesting cases Lorca described, of duende being inexplicably culled from some “vulgar trifle,†is not a freakish instance of duende but a precondition for the existence of duende itself. The cases he cites, I would argue, merely show their banal origins in a more explicit way than is usually done. And again, I don’t know how to prove this, exactly, other than to bring in all sorts of examples and endlessly elaborate on them, which really amounts to no proof at all, but then again, this is sort of the same method Lorca uses to discuss the concept of duende in the first place.
First I’ll explain why this is so. It is so because without risking the banal, the vulgar, the ordinary, there can be no tension in the poem for the depth of emotion, the freshness the duende provides, to play off of. The merely profound, the heightened thing, winds up seeming isolated and absurd. (And in my mind Lorca at his most heightened and profound is also quite absurd.) The trick is to somehow embody both, to be the poet of no duende infusing one’s own inferiorities, if you will, or vulnerabilities, fears and whatnot, with the duende that comes along from the “mansions of the blood.†This is why in the poems of Lorca, for example, the ones that seem to work best are coming out of the old folk and gypsy songs, where he infuses them with new life, a sincerity informed by the modernity of his surrealist impulses. Surrealism in itself is a sort of sickness that tends to act on a work of art or an artist’s body of work as a viral infection, performing the trick of surrealism over and over again, but the real interest in Lorca’s poems comes out of the simplest turns of phrase, the repetitions, the chorus-like effects of seemingly banal phrases they turn on.
And for some reason the question seems to keep wanting to go back to the idea of song. I think again of Creeley’s “anonymous as any song†as a standard to aspire to in his poetry. I think of picking up the rhythms of ordinary speech, which are at their most natural when discussing the most ordinary things, picking one’s son up from school, going to get the groceries, the sorts of things one says off-handedly, without any forethought whatsoever. Now Lorca might say there was duende there to begin with – in those old gypsy songs, in the unpremeditated utterance, in the immediacy of whatever sparked a sentiment or song – to which I would reply – perhaps – but it is an argument that ultimately resembles the paradox of Zeno’s arrow. You are everyone and no one at the moment you pick up the strand of speech, which perhaps comes out of the spiritus mundi or the collective unconsious or some other place that all of us can sense but no one can prove the existence of, and make a poem or a song out of it. Is that strand a gift from duende or the devil’s gumwrapper? Does it matter?
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been reading Borges that I think of Troy. What we have now is the incredible gift of the Iliad, in all of its richness, emotion, and depth of detail, its epic clashes of spirit and flesh writ large and broad as the sky; what’s there underneath all those layers of actual dirt is a dusty little town that some men struggled over with pathetic little wooden swords thousands of years ago. It doesn’t matter that the Trojan Horse was an ox-cart, that Helen was a hag, that Priam was a minor chieften. It matters that someone or several someones we now refer to as “Homer†came along and puffed duende into the tale. One couldn’t have been without the other.
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