As I began my journey to campus yesterday, walking to the stop to wait for a cross-town bus to the train station, where I’d catch the subway to the shuttle from south to north campus, I realized how seldom I’d slowed down enough lately to really pay attention to the materiality of my surroundings. Even to stand on the corner feeling the snow crunch under my boots, wandering out into the street every so often to watch for the bus, seemed a forgotten sensation, one of those timeless, in-between moments that get lost in the day-to-day hurry and grind.
When the bus came, right on schedule, I remembered odd rides on San Francisco buses that would stop and wait for seemingly no reason, making their way in fits and starts along their route according to some mysterious set of factors that no one — not even the bus driver, I supposed — was privy to. I certainly voiced my displeasure to the driver on numerous occasions when, having caught a bus and trying to get somewhere on time, it just… sat there.
This day, I pulled out the latest issue of Sous les Paves and began reading straight from the front. How refreshing to have the jigsaw puzzle of mundane transit, into which I’d been thrust by circumstances, reflected so vividly in the pages of this newsletter, cohesively and enthusiastically edited and published by Micah Robbins.*
*Full disclosure: I am a regular contributor to said newsletter, which can be ordered at Interbirth.
Before getting to that, though, I had also of necessity been looking through C.S. Lewis‘s large tome English Literature in the 16th Century. What struck me there, in the introduction, was Lewis’s lively account of the shifting attitude towards magic as Europe emerged from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. A nice quote: “The medieval author seems to write for a public to whom magic, like knight-errantry, is part of the furniture of romance: the Elizabethan, for a public who feel that it might be going on in the next street.” This is not to be confused with witchcraft or superstition, writes Lewis; it’s the “high magic” of Ficino (1433-99), Paracelsus (1493-1541), Agrippa (1486-1535), and characterized in literature, e.g., by Dr. Faustus.
A kind of magic that had “recovered” some sort of wisdom from the ancients; that, though ostensibly Christian, held a “pagan” belief in “the invisible population of the universe … those ‘middle spirits … betwixt th’ Angelical and Human kinde’.” Lewis adds, “This mass of mysterious but not necessarily evil spirits creates the possibility of an innocent traffic with the unseen and therefore of high magic or magia.” We see this “demonology” everywhere in Shakespeare — Caliban and Ariel are two such spirits. And of course, in Shakespeare as in other works of Elizabethan art, humans not only interact with spirits and magic, but partake of it; again, Prospero, Dr. Faustus, etc.
This condition of possibility, of richness, couldn’t and didn’t last; already, something was underway that would change it. Lewis asserts it was “the new astronomy”; “not the mere alteration in our map of space but the methodological revolution which verified it.” In other words, modern science. A longer quote is necessary here:
By reducing Nature to her mathematical elements it substituted a mechanical for a genial or animistic conception of the universe. The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colors, smells, tastes … Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. This process, slowly working, ensured during the next century the loss of the old mythical imagination: the conceit, and later the personified abstraction, takes its place. Later still, as a desperate attempt to bridge a gulf which begins to be found intolerable, we have the Nature poetry of the Romantics.
I read this as quite simply the “war of/on the imagination” that Diane di Prima has written about, a war that is not merely waged on poetry from outside but within the walls of poetry itself (if poetry can be said to have “walls”) — this flattening out (of space, possibility, magic) is so much a part of our lives now that it’s the very air we breathe, and as difficult to break away from. How often do we look up at birds, clouds, stars? Or down, at stones, sand, sea? Which brings me back to my bus journey and excursion into the pages of Sous Les Paves.*
*Even the title, of course, poignantly alludes to the transformation indexed by Lewis: sous les paves, la plage; “under the paving stones, the beach.”
The first piece, “FACT AND REALITY,” by Dale Smith, explores just such an environmental materiality, and as such is the perfect way to kick things off. Smith has always had, continues to have, a cheerfully bleak outlook* about the path of destruction that empire and capital are leading us down, and his current reading and research have taken him in this instance to Roberto Bolaño and Evan S. Connell. Of the former, he writes, “Roberto Bolaño’s digressive quests … establish necessary inquiries, for he presses readers right up next to the facts of the world.”
*By “cheerfully bleak” I don’t mean that he’s cheerful about the bleakness, only that he manages to be deeply pessimistic without ever bringing you down, or seeming like he’s particularly down about any of it. A remarkable feat.
Smith brings out something in the massive 2666, Bolaño’s last novel, that hadn’t really occurred to me, in reading it, on a conscious level: the incessant, careful mingling in of concrete details with the otherwise “flatness” of terror this author’s the master of, as if to remind us of the richness that lies beneath that surface, forgotten. Quoting a long passage in which Bolaño makes a point of mentioning the names of things, Smith writes, “the details of ‘andesite rock’ and ‘rhyolite’ and that quicksilver mirror lodge his words in a materiality … this poetic interlude in a novel of pain and suffering gives some reckoning, some relationship and perspective, to brief movements and probings over the rocky exterior of the earth.”
Readers will be less familiar with Connell, who wrote a description of Custer‘s Little Big Horn disaster that, as Smith notes, “reads like a wicked poem, penned by the damned.” (MUTILATIONS — Eyes torn out and laid on the rocks… Noses cut off… Ears cut off… etc.)
Why, Smith asks, does this “perverse insistence on fact and reality matter?” Smith has his own speculations on this; I was already thinking about Lewis, and magic, and science, and the “Midas touch” that lets us know and master everything, while experiencing nothing. Materiality “matters” because it’s precisely that which escapes the “rational” mind.
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The next page features a collage by Brooks Johnson called “REAL HEADLINE,” perfectly picking up on the accent of the previous piece. It is made of, in fact, a real headline from a newspaper, along with images (perhaps from a newspaper, or some other text), which are spliced, copied, and made to overlap with each other, almost as if this “reality” (and it is, again, a brutal one) were washing up on the shore of consciousness, over and over again. There’s a ship, a face, dates, type, along with various travel brochure-type effluvia, all of which resists submersion — to stick with the water image — into the blurry unreality of avoiding such materiality.
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At this point in my journey I had reached the Delevan/Canisius metro stop, and descended into the bowels of the subway system.* I hurried down the escalator, slipping from the melting snow on my boots, and then waited with a few others on the dark platform for the next train to arrive. Consulting a timetable, I saw a flier taped there which announced, “IF YOU KNOW IT, TELL IT,” over the face of a young black man, seeking information on a recent homicide. As I sat down on a bench, a kid strolled over to the edge of the platform where some women stood in a loose circle, chatting, and with a sudden gesture scattered some coins onto the tracks. I continued reading.
*That sounds like a cliche or exaggeration, but when you go down into the Buffalo subway, it really feels like you’re going DOWN. First there’s a looong escalator from street level, then another looong escalator down from there.
*
Keston Sutherland‘s piece is simply titled “10/11/10,” and registers in urgent prose the recent protests in London and the police crackdown and violence that followed:
At the corner of Parliament Square the teenagers are standing on bus shelters; they are shouting for what they believe and feeling what you never will; think of the anger you waste on gifts that might be used on money; masturbation is not beloved, it’s betrayal of the workers;
Here one must reflect, somewhat uncomfortably, on the reality of resistance as it intersects with the police state. During this crisis I recall that a British friend had posted — on Facebook, appropriately — a link to an interview with a British police captain who wanted to make clear that the police should not be thought of an arm of the government, i.e., not be held responsible for unpopular government actions (such as extreme cuts to education and so on). At the same time, we’ve been so weaned on “nonviolence” and generally not being a bother to the state that I wonder sometimes if we realize what actual resistance is. What it looks like. How it feels.
Sutherland brings it into focus, mingling first and second person, his own jumbled thoughts, your thoughts, with images and impressions from these events.
*
Riding up from the subway (on the looong escalator), I remembered the unfailingly followed etiquette throughout the Bay Area — if you’re standing still, stand to the right, so that walkers can pass on the left. In Buffalo, nobody does this. Stationary riders are scattered on either side, so you have to weave between them; on a crowded escalator, everyone just has to wait. Two cops wait at street level, chatting. For a moment I wonder if they’ll ask to see my ticket, but they don’t.
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Richard Owens‘ piece is titled “SKINNER AND COLLIS: Hasty Notes on Their Use of Neglect.” This foray into the “neglected spaces” theorized in Jonathan Skinner‘s “ecopoetics” project is a welcome break from the harsh materiality that culminates in the first few pages of the zine with Sutherland’s piece. But it’s not terribly much more comforting, since the “wildness” and “wilderness” of this space is more in the manner of weeds coming up through cracks in the sidewalk, exactly the image that Skinner uses to describe those zones of the urban environment — so plentiful in Detroit and Buffalo — which capital has left behind, in many cases to be stunningly reclaimed by nature.
As Owens notes, however, these bursts of environmental relief are not some sort of return to a lost utopia: “‘Corridors’ and ‘buffer zones’ may cut through and around the space we in our species-being inhabit, but they do not … escape this space of habitation.” There is no return to the Garden. Which does not mean there’s no hope; Owens adds that “if we are trapped in what … is imagined here as a social totality, then not only is escape from it impossible, but the utopian itself — the way out of this mess — can only be worked toward by taking a deeper plunge into the mess…”
In other words, the answer is again to attend to these things that are so difficult to really perceive against the backdrop of capital and culture. The second half of the essay attempts to do just this, putting into conversation with Skinner’s ecopoetics an essay by Stephen Collis, “Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons.” As Owens describes, Collis compares poetry itself to one of these neglected, liminal spaces in our culture, to revealing effect.
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By now I’d reached campus, so I folded Sous les Paves up and slipped it back into my backpack, open to the page where I’d left off. Still to look at: images from Linh Dinh, surrealism from Sotere Torregian, poetry by Susan Briante, cartoons from Sommer Browning. And lots of other stuff. It was a welcome moment of breathing in, looking up, adjusting the viewfinder once more.
