Yes, light, there is not other word for it.
-Samuel Beckett for Terresa
The rainbow ball
bounced round about me
while eluding my grasp,
like Blumfeld's, even though
I called to it, sang to it,
cajoled, cooed, prayed.
It will not be mine.
I should get used to it.
But even with my eyes
like two red suns my
bedpost knobs become
in the nighttime black
rainbow balls of unequalled
luminosity, unapproachable
grandeur. I will hold
out my hand, flex and
release until the muscles
are toned to the tee.
I will fortify with vitamins,
will think positive thoughts,
will say the glass emerges
halfway from a full,
a secret heart:
spectrum hand,
sphere of light.
He's trying to take my place again
While I hang tied he wants to walk in my shoes
Playing the part with aplomb
Finesse I could never master
With relish lighting the match
To what I wore holes in my jeans building
I see him now through the eyeholes
Making a friend of you
Please, don't believe him
He won't love you
Like I do
Mr. Self (gotta love the name) is worried that the imagination itself is eroding and withering in contemporary culture, that it is a faculty - indeed a muscle - in poor circulation amongst the younger segment of the population. The health of the imagination, according to Self, depends on suspension of disbelief; the higher the level of suspension required the more vigorous the workout to the muscle and therefore those things requiring the most suspension are the most important activities to the health of the imagination. No doubt Self would place prose fiction in this category, but the one example he gives is opera. Because opera is so artificial, because the narratives are so preposterous, because, sitting in the theater, it is impossible not to be highly aware of an intensely artificial situation, one must make a strong effort to suspend disbelief to the point of even being able to enjoy the experience, much less participate imaginatively with it. Perhaps some of you have been to such a production and have seen individuals in the audience squirming in their seats, and are inclined to agree. I'm inclined to agree, but to what extent?
It seems to me the WWW is a hyperextension of an already existing situation. Self admits this in one of the related videos. The printing press and the sudden proliferation of novels, followed by radio and then TV - it's an old argument about low culture. What I find interesting is Self's claim that the internet is inherently psychotic. In "real life" a sane person knows the difference between fantasy and reality; on the internet, Self claims, the distinction is blurred. Everything that occurs in the world of the internet does so arrayed on an even patina - a "screen-based life" to use Self's phrase. Everything that happens, he says, has the same "ontological status". Since it's not real, but treated as if it were, it's inherently psychotic.
Now I wonder, doesn't engagement with the WWW require a more sophisticated sense of suspension of disbelief than ever before? Unless someone is psychotic to begin with, will engaging in internet activities necessarily drive a normal person towards psychosis? Or does the normal person know this stuff ain't really real? Virtual reality is a lot like reality, may even have some reality mixed in, but it ain't really real, right? Don't we all know that, unless we're hopelessly fucked already?
Is it necessarily a symptom of a contemporary disease that our idea of reality itself is not quite the same as it once was? Or is it just a mutation of the disease itself of humanity, which we can trace back and back and back....
Two quick observations: 1) For a long time, hundreds of years in fact, people have been attracted to realism in the arts, high and low. They still are. New technologies have allowed more dimensions to the trompe l'oeil effect. The more real it looks the more intense the WOW factor. Realism in painting, the movies, in fiction, even in poetry - people love it. and 2) There is a genuine level of reality in some of the social aspects of internet activities - it's absurd to deny that.
Will Self reaches out via the internet to warn me of the dangers of the internet. He does this as himself, no one else, just a man talking. I echo the edge of unreality in his words back via the internet as just another man writing. This virtual dialogue will bounce around a little bit, and who knows, maybe spark another virtual dialogue or two. Whose mind is this discourse taking place in? Is it real?
Fernando Pessoa has come into the poetic arena just in the last couple of decades, with the rise of internet culture. He was a lonely man who created at least 72 personas with their own biographies and writing styles. He is thought to have anticipated internet culture. But I don't think Pessoa would be successful today. He is successful as he is: a fascinating glimpse of the future. Today the internet has made it too easy to create avatars, to play at being someone one is not, to hide behind masks, to lie. It's a wonderland for predators and victims of all kinds. Here is what is difficult: to be aware of these dangers and yet strive to present something of one's true face and character, to be an individual, and not to run from it, but to find inventive ways to uphold it online.
A massive difficulty, a huge hurdle, is in being believed. One might argue that this is one of the inherent difficulties of the internet, but I would say the difficulties are different, not greater, than in real life. The much touted importance of face to face interaction, the body language and so forth creates difficulties of its own. For example, a common problem of middle-management in large companies is the promotion of unqualified people based on irrelevant factors such as height, aggressiveness or a ready smile. A young woman whose sex appeal might be a distraction to me in real life can approach via the internet with nothing other than her poetry - how refreshing for us both! By the way, Self cites the dark side of internet romanticism, that it too easily becomes an obsessive-compulsive search, renewed daily. But there's a harmless edge to romanticism that he does not mention. It's the romance of never really knowing who is on the other side, and being content with not knowing. You can't embrace everyone, and I'm sick to death with every aspect of our culture being pushed into false intimacy, from customer relations in the service industry to Orwellian corporate or political language that presumes a familiarity that only exists, and should only exist, between friends. We don't really know each other, and that's just fine. All you have are my words, and I always attempt to put something of myself into them, but in the end you will have to decide whether I'm lying or not. It seems to me that the only reason the James Frey controversy over A Million Little Pieces was a controversy at all (really, who cares if he stretched the truth a little bit over minor details about his own life?) is because the true person, the true face - and not some avatar - is a precious commodity in our world.
Of course, for Self, this only ties into the psychosis. Notice me! Notice me! But I don't want to be just me, I want to create myself from bits and pieces, like a new Pessoa, so I don't really know me, and neither do you - and it's all so much alienation. To which I answer: what else is new? The internet only helps perpetuate what we've been doing for generations.
Finally a fear and a hope of my own. I have anxieties of my own about mass psychosis, but I think it's too easy to blame the internet; I think it goes to a deep-seated human impulse that goes into the far reaches of our ancient past, and will probably spell our doom. We humans either think we know better (than nature) or just don't care if we do know better or not, we'll drive blindly into the future anyway creating ourselves as we go. As robotics and genetics advance, so too will the illusion that we can freely create ourselves. We'll begin with our pets. We'll continue with our babies. Will a point come when we have become so divorced from Mother Earth that we can't get back, even if we want to? And every attempt to correct an error delivers a more insidious frankenstein? That's the fear, and the hope....
Well, it's not really a hope. It's a belief. Fat good it does me. It's a belief, no better than any other. Like Will Self, I believe in the imagination, I believe that it was made to soar and it should soar, but that, like a kite, it should be rooted to the good ground. Like Self I believe that some of the most difficult - most unrealistic - kinds of art are the healthiest. It seems to be a paradox, that realism does not promote health the way more abstract forms of art do, but that is my belief. Doesn't it seem strange that articles about artists like Pessoa are constantly written that run something like this: he was a postmodernist before the term existed! In fact modernism and "postmodernism" have always existed side by side. It's only fascinating (and controversial) because people are just beginning to realize that there are two parallel forms of artistic creation that have been going on side by side for generations. Postmodernism is the term pasted onto this flickering realization (which is why it's so notoriously hard to define). This realization - a discipline of awareness, a regular exercise for the muscle of imagination - is where I place hope. It requires a willingness to go deep into the forests of nonrepresentational and abstract types of art.
To those interested, I've written a bit more on this view of art.
I Don't Know How Many Souls I Have
by Fernando Pessoa (as Fernando Pessoa)
I don't know how many souls I have.
I've changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I've never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.
Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey—
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can't feel myself.
That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it.
Listen, Daisy, When I Die, Although On an Orient-bound ship December 1913
by Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos)
Listen, Daisy. When I die, although
You may not feel a thing, you must
Tell all my friends in London how much
My loss makes you suffer. Then go
To York, where you claim you were born
(But I don't believe a thing you claim),
To tell that poor boy who gave me
So many hours of joy (but of course
You don't know about that) that I'm dead.
Even he, whom I thought I sincerely
Loved, won't care.... Then go and break
The news to that strange girl Cecily,
Who believed that one day I'd be great....
To hell with life and everyone in it!
I Feel Sorry for the Stars
by Fernando Pessoa (as Fernando Pessoa)
I feel sorry for the stars
Which have shined for so long,
So long, so long . . .
I feel sorry for the stars.
Is there not a weariness
Felt by things,
By all things,
Such as we feel in our limbs?
A weariness of existing,
Of being,
Just of being,
Whether sad or happy . . .
Is there not, finally,
For all things that are,
Not just death
But some other finality?
Or a higher purpose,
Some kind of pardon?
Oporto-Style Tripe
by Fernando Pessoa (as Álvaro de Campos)
One day, in a restaurant, outside of space and time,
I was served up love as a dish of cold tripe.
I politely told the missionary of the kitchen
That I preferred it hot,
Because tripe (and it was Oporto-style) is never eaten cold.
They got impatient with me.
You can never be right, not even in a restaurant.
I didn't eat it, I ordered nothing else, I paid the bill,
And I decided to take a walk down the street.
Who knows what this might mean?
I don't know, and it happened to me . . .
(I know very well that in everyone's childhood there was a garden,
Private or public, or belonging to the neighbor.
I know very well that our playing was the owner of it
And that sadness belongs to today.)
I know this many times over,
But if I asked for love, why did they bring me
Oporto-style tripe that was cold?
It's not a dish that can be eaten cold,
But they served it to me cold.
I didn't make a fuss, but it was cold.
It can never be eaten cold, but it came cold.
I don't Know if the Love You Give is Love You Have
by Fernando Pessoa (as Ricardo Reis)
I don't know if the love you give is love you have
Or love you feign. You give it to me. Let that suffice.
I can't be young by years,
So why not by illusion?
The Gods give us little, and the little they give is false.
But if they give it, however false it be, the giving
Is true. I accept it, and resign
Myself to believing you.
Privileged to be a lone witness
Yet not granted access
To eat of the fruit or secure it
Against assured decay
A stage abandoned by actors
(arrival unimaginable)
Like a made bed awaiting a dream
A bed made by robots made by men
In locked rooms where
Fluffy clouds of smoke
Or steam send signals to those
Who don’t know how to read
The echoes of memory
A brass ring in a dream
Eclipsed by shadow
Rising like dew and
Silent
In the day air
It is my great pleasure to play host for this week's poetics session at dVerse Poets Pub, where poets are encouraged to take a cue from the art of Giorgio de Chirico, one of the fathers of Surrealism in painting. If you'd like, follow the linkto learn a little bit about this fascinating artist, and if so moved pen something poetic and share it.
If I were to pick out just a few of the thoughts that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road brings to mind, one would be the question of how bleak the novel really is, another would be the issue of prose as poetry, and a third would be an odd comparison.
Bleak?
People say the novel is bleak, depressing, that McCarthy’s vision of the future is pessimistic. McCarthy has said, “I’m pessimistic about a lot of things, but there’s no reason to be miserable about it.” Whatever one may think about the future of the human race, we do know that in times past most of the population of the earth has been wiped out, and under incredibly harsh conditions a few thousand individuals held on. If it happened before it could happen again. It seems to me the real question is not whether a scenario like the one presented in The Road is bleak or pessimistic, but how one responds to historical and scientific facts. McCarthy’s statement about not being miserable in his pessimism says a lot about his character, and is also at the heart of his novel.
In a world where all but the luckiest, hardiest and meanest have perished, we follow a man and his young son heading south in hopes of finding warmth and possibly a community of friendly survivors. The conditions are so hostile that surviving a single day is a kind of triumph. They are never named. Another nameless survivor explains why he won’t give his name: “I couldn’t trust you with it. To do something with it. I don’t want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean, you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody. I think in times like these the less said the better.” [p 171, Vintage paperback] McCarthy tells us at the very beginning of the book that the man and boy are “each the other’s world entire.” The man tells the boy they are carrying “the fire”, which surely means more than the kind that comes from his makeshift lighter. Is it a weakness that the man could not follow his wife into self-destruction? That he could not use his last bullets to put a quick and merciful end to himself and his son? That in his very last breaths he still could not take his son with him, instead choosing to tell the child to go on, that he would be lucky? Was this a lie, and was this lie a weakness, or was his stubbornness in believing it a form of denial? Each reader of The Road will have his or her own answers. One thing is for sure, the man is not a pessimist, he is a survivor, for there is no doubt that in the end he passed the fire on to his son. To my mind this is not a bleak story at all. I think of the kind of question the faithful sometimes pose to the doubters. How can you have a life of value and quality and joy if this is it, with nothing but oblivion beyond death? And the answer: especially because this is it.
Prose as Poetry
I have no investment in arguments about the definitions of poetry. Most will agree, however, that such things as prose poems exist (and if you don’t, I have to wonder why you are reading The Bricoleur), and there’s nothing controversial in saying that prose can be poetic. Whole chunks of The Road read like poetry to me. Just look at the way the book begins:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child had led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granite beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease….
I would follow that writer into the bowels of hell. Revisiting the opening words after completing the book I’m impressed all the more in the way the little child leads the man. I have always thought that civilization as a corpus of ideals and as a concept is only ever carried forward by a fraction of society at any given time. A very scared and starving little boy represents civilization in The Road.
An Odd Comparison
I have read Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar five or six times. I once gave a copy of it to a French girl I knew because I wanted her to have something I considered to be a uniquely American and beautiful product. For years I remained blissfully ignorant about the author of the book. Then one day a coworker and I were discussing authors, just dropping names, and he casually mentioned that Richard Brautigan committed suicide by bullet. I subsequently learned that Brautigan grew up without knowing his father, in abject poverty, and that he struggled with depression and alcoholism. He had been dead for weeks when his body was discovered. His suicide note read, “Messy, isn’t it?” My coworker also declared that the book I loved so much was unfulfilled, that Brautigan failed to achieve whatever it was he was aiming for.
These comments got me to thinking that perhaps the sense of dissatisfaction my coworker felt (which he was unable or unwilling to explain to my satisfaction) was a result of the book’s theme. The novel is like the imperfect recollection of a perfect dream. Say you had a dream about a great mystery that has lain upon your soul for a long time. And your dream was the answer. But you can’t remember it, only that you dreamed the answer, which hovers before your searching eye like a wraith. The novel is this ghostly outline, this attempt at recollection.
Like The Road, In Watermelon Sugar is about a world after the end of our world (and the story is told by a man with no fixed name). The characters retain the values of our world like a dimly remembered dream. Beautifully, Brautigan has gone through the looking glass. But just as the characters cannot hold a vision of our world, it is impossible to have a firm imaginative hold on the wholly other vision of a world that they inhabit. We can only glimpse it.
Knowing that he dreamed of something he couldn’t have and couldn’t even define properly lends a particular sadness to Brautigan’s suicide. The unsatisfied nature of the novel comes from the inability to decide if the book represents dream or recollection, or whether the two are supposed to be one indissoluble dyad. Such questions can be tedious, but In Watermelon Sugar is not tedious. It’s as beautiful as the dream which is so intimate it cannot be named or defined, and can only be alluded to by song. Indeed, for me the book is a poem masquerading as a novel.
We couldn’t have two more divergent visions of a post-apocalyptic world: McCarthy’s lowest circle of Hell, and Brautigan’s return to Eden. Which do you think is a more likely scenario? McCarthy, clear-eyed, refuses to be miserable, but is accused of promoting bleakness. Brautigan dreamed an incomparably beautiful dream, but he was so very unhappy.
Both are a salve on a sore world, as far as I’m concerned.
Here is an excerpt from the section My Name from In Watermelon Sugar:
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—”Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game that you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There was somebody near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
Tender you
tender
a skipping child
dreaming drips
an ocean of sleep
showering on me
still some seed
a man sprouted green!
you let me nourish you
let yourself be seen
until a burst into dance
opened the sky for me
I saw all as One
you up to my down
connected on ground
doors quick with wind
streaming fast
up to our necks
who to save first?
man torn from woman
to be men and women
without some kinds of love
I thought there was one
split in two
a dance echo
tender you
tender
you
