More Trouble Every Day (thoughts on 'the wild')

(This is an excellent video. Too bad it stops just as the jam is about to kick in, but you get the main theme and lyrics.)


After thinking about the wild for several weeks, writing some wild prose fragments, writing a prompt on the wild for dVerse Poets Pub, and then reading the poems displaying a wide range of reactions to and interpretations of the idea of wild, my mind is still churning with it. Is the wild nature, is it everything other, everything that is not us, everything we are incapable of being, that we don't want to be? Is it people going nuts? Is it the weird impulse to put words in italics?

"Wild" is one of those words that acts as an explosive in the mind, firing off ideas in every direction. If one of the primary tactics of poetry is to place a word or phrase in such a manner that it allows a refraction of ideas, then some words are inherently poetic. Wild is such a word.

Why then, in wanting to write a poem on the wild, did my efforts keep getting swept into the unrestrained flow of prose (albeit a poetic one)? My problem was, at first, how to address the wild. Should I stay on this side of it and offer a meditation? Or would this effort, like writing about madness, remain a description of rationality, of the familiar and tame? Should I use memoir, and recount a tale from a wilder youth? Or would a philosophical approach be more useful? - the explorations of a questing mind, alternately assertive and doubtful? Maybe a mashup, a hybrid text, my preferred mode, but that text has yet to materialize.

One thing I would not do: pretend to go into the wild. I would not attempt to evoke the wild through my manner of discourse. If there are wilds within me, and I think there are, let them come out in a way that does justice to the concept, that shows respect for the wild. I've never been good at playing games, and the idea of playing games with the reader is repugnant to me. If what I write remains unclear, it is due to my failures and insufficiencies, not willful opacity.


Maldoror and the Wild

Last week a fellow named John came to my post on Lautréamont and his views encouraged me to push harder for clarity on a matter that ties in with these explorations on the wild. The questions that apply here are on the unconscious mind, the practices of the literary Surrealists, and whether the unconscious mind can be equated with wild. Are we wild when we dream or engage in an unrestrained flight of the imagination? Are the thoughts that flit through our heads without our conscious control connected to the primal wild deep within us? Or is the wild closer to the surface?

It seems to me that the perturbing quality of these questions points to the wild as being at the root of our humanity. In grappling with such questions, the questing mind is in search of the root of our humanness. For generations we have been defining ourselves as beings apart from the rest, and even the most hard-core, go-green, animal rights types have to admit that we feel different, even if, hypothetically, we aren't. That feeling constitutes a reality of its own. The legend of The Fall tells us that far back into the ancient past our gradual feeling of disconnection to All (we call it "nature" today) in conjunction with our increasing sense of 'humanness' created a breach. We have never been able to heal this breach, not with God, not with love, not with art, and certainly not with science. I can't escape the feeling that many of our activities are motivated by the desire, deep within us, to feel the oneness with It All that we have lost, so long ago, and that many of our "wild" acts, resulting in varying degrees of self-destruction, are often due to the pain of disconnection and the misguided attempts to escape it.

I see the literary Surrealists, hot on the writings of Freud, in love with Rimbaud, as practicing the impossible with regard to the wild: they wanted to prove their sincerity with objective demonstrations of wild utterance, if the wild can be equated here with the unconscious mind. They wanted to break through, all at once, to a greater reality (surreality), as if automatic writing could achieve such a thing.* But of course it can't, nor can anyone ever provide objective proof of their sincerity. Faith and trust will always play a part in human interactions. Just look at the feuding that went on between the Surrealists - love speech followed by hate speech, in the group one day and out of it the next. The failure of automatic writing to achieve a greater reality is implicit in the very act of writing a manifesto, leaving the status and indeed purpose of the conscious mind troubled.

Not only was Lautréamont not a Surrealist, but his book, Maldoror, is against the basic principles of Surrealism, as defined by Andre Breton. And not only that, but the purpose of the book is to educate and instruct (and to entertain, of course) and as such succeeds where Surrealism fails on teaching us about the relationship of language and poetic utterance to the conscious mind. Lautréamont was a champion of the conscious mind, not the unconscious, and his "surrealistic" passages serve his demonstrations, which are designed to lead the reader to greater lucidity and conscious control. There is a point to the madness. That's the whole point.**

I have yet to study Jung, but from the references I've seen in my travels, he was concerned with understanding the so-called dark places in the human mind and heart, of respecting their reality, not denying it, so that in our everyday behavior we are not slaves to what the popular mind likes to call "wild" behavior. This is what Lautréamont is all about. But Maldoror is such an incendiary book that its lessons are not at first apparent. In addition it contains so many dimensions that the casual reader is easily dazzled or confused. I have repeatedly seen readers stuck in one of these dimensions, steadfastly refusing to budge, blind to all the others. I once met a famous member of the early New York punk music scene and we discussed Maldoror. I won't mention his name out of respect for the fact that our conversation was private, and he probably wouldn't remember meeting me anyway. He was convinced that the book was a primal scream of rebellion and rage - and that alone. With every point that I brought up to demonstrate that it was also something else, he only shook his head, "No, no," he kept saying, like an alcoholic in denial. Truth is sometimes so ugly that people have to build cartoons to protect themselves; they Disney-fy the wild. And unfortunately, the perpetual campaign to keep Lautréamont aligned with Surrealism only obscures his value, at a time when we could use all the help we can get.


*It is worth reminding ourselves of how Breton defined Surrealism.
** The careful reader will demand examples, and she should have them. Here is one passage among many, chosen almost at random:


Hitherto poetry has followed the wrong road. Raising itself up to heaven or groveling upon the ground, it has misunderstood the principles of its existence, and has been, not without reason, constantly flouted by honest folks. It has not been modest.... As for me, I would exhibit my qualities; but I am not hypocrite enough to conceal my vices! Laughter, evil, pride, folly, will appear each in its turn between sensibility and love of justice and will serve as examples for the stupefaction of mankind.... Thus hypocrisy will straightway be chased out of my dwelling.

I do intend to post an article the sole purpose of which will be to cite more examples from Maldoror and how they follow the theme of instructing us on language and the conscious mind.