This according to Mark Rothko, who himself was rarely silent, especially in the matter of his own work; extremely conscious of his path of intent, he dedicated thousands of words and multiple manifestos to it, going so far as to insist upon the exact distance from which it should be viewed and the dimensions of the rooms in which it should be hung.
But he said this nonetheless, and on this we agree. There is no mistake in silence, and there is no mistaking what is meant when one chooses to maintain it. The act of speaking is riddled with errata, and the intent that inspires it is often a riddle to the speaker. What's worse is the awareness of being just wide of the mark with every attempt, the almost-right word we must hang our hopes on in the absence of the one we really meant. And what's worse, being unable to speak at all, or feeling an urgent need to speak and having nothing to say?
This is what preoccupies me. I've been silent, and so have remained errorless. But I'm not good at silence; I don't rest there willingly. Something itches, but I can't figure out where to scratch. I look around intently, I observe, in the hope that observation will provide me some insight into how others manage to speak, or at the very least that looking will satisfy the need to feel engaged with something outside my own silence. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to be in the company of others whose voices please me more than my own ever could; at those times I'm happy to listen, and there is some comfort in knowing that my silence is understood. But comfort is another state of being I find strange and disagreeable in large doses--too easy, the slip into a life of quietude and simple contentment, deciding that the work is finished, and nothing to do but wait for the long, slow scrape of years to bring an end to the waiting. It's probably a failing of mine to view things this way; people seem to do just fine following that very plan of action, that gradual yielding to inertia. But it's the just part of the equation that worries me.
And in the midst of all this hand-wringing I allow myself, the irony of the situation doesn't escape me, in that my intent consists of doing away with words entirely. Avoidance of them isn't the answer, nor is a the panicked flood that so often stems from the fear that silence is a kind of disappearance, that if we aren't heard, we've made no sound. Both of which are, a little bit, what I'm doing right now.
The question for me lately is one of strength. It's gone elsewhere, or I have, and in its absence I've been mutely considering how much time is wasted waiting for its return, and how to make use of the frustration I'm left holding like a wet book of matches. I locate my own worth in work, and more specifically in working with words, in what the mind can hope to do; the issue at hand is that the mind is dependant on the body for its subsistence.
I've always struggled with the reality of inhabiting a body. I'm certain there are people who live their lives without ever seeing this as a problem, but once you've made that distinction and seen the two as mutually exclusive entities, once a divide has been located and one half found superior, I don't think there's much chance of reuniting them. And when the body fails, the mind bound to it tends to follow.
That's where I am right now; right now, I'm an empty set. I also happen to be a child of the 90s, and our default emotion is rage, accompanied by a large helping of self-sabotage and an excruciating awareness of our own inadequacy.
The question, again, is one of finding a use for this. I'm working on that. Nothing is so honest as the body and its demands, unless it is a mind that realizes those demands must be met.
There will be a short intermission, and then we'll return to the program, already in progress.
Recently I mentioned an individual who's been very influential in my life--a fellow seeker, and though his methods and the avenues of inquiry he travels diverge a bit from mine I believe we're both in pursuit of the same brand of truth. He knows things, and that's not a small achievement in this era of mindless surfaces and short attention-spans. He's always shared what he knows; his work focuses on the creation of a dialogue, and he'd like you to join him.
The conversation begins here. Please visit, listen, and contribute your comments and ideas. Tell us what you know, what you agree with, and what you think we're dead wrong about. There's a rapidly disappearing bottle of whiskey on the table, and smoking is allowed.
George Orwell tells us that "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." It's time.
I don't see myself anywhere but in that past... I'm no prisoner of reason. I said: God. I want salvation to bring freedom: what do I do?... If only God gave me heavenly, aerial calm, and the power of prayer--like ancient saints. --Saints! What strength! The anchorites were artists abandoned by the world... Ah, to rise back to life! To look once again upon our deformities... --But it seems my soul sleeps. Were it truly awake from this moment forward, we would be approaching a truth that, even now, may be encircling is with her weeping angels!...
Finally, I ask forgiveness for feeding on lies. Okay: let's go...
It seems that in order to survive, we tell ourselves stories. We soothe ourselves with tales of how we became who we are, pore over the minutiae of our pasts as if they would point a way forward, arm ourselves against uncertainty with the names we've established and the possessions that tell us we've achieved something real and lasting, a comfort and a legacy we can rest in.
The religious have the promise of salvation, a simple plotline to follow that assures them of a satisfying ending; turn away from the temptations of the world, strip yourself of pride and face up to the multitude of sins that cling to you, and you'll find a place made for you at the side of God. The secular are mostly concerned with the image they've worked all their lives in the service of, the belief that there is a just reward waiting for them if they stick to the plan society recommends as the right one clung to just as fervently as any spiritual decree.
We tell ourselves stories, as children are told fairytales that order a world too large and frightening; the good prosper, sacrifice is rewarded, evil will always be caught out and punished by the righteous hand of justice. We'll be safe and happy, protected in the arms of a family and leaders that want us to succeed. If we follow the example of the hero and steer clear of the shadows, if we drop a trail of breadcrumbs so we'll always remember who we are and where we came from, we'll never get lost. There's no such thing as monsters, it's just your eyes that deceive you. Anyone who has reached the age of majority with their wits intact knows in their heart that the truth is not so simple, and never easy to recognize.
More often than not we suffer, and we walk around pregnant with our own shortcomings, carrying the suffering to the end as a badge of honor because there seems to be no other way of coping. Victimhood as a coat-of-arms is the extreme example of this; giving in to the comfort of admitting oneself powerless means there is no more need to keep trying. The Queen of Swords is traditionally viewed as a widow, a spinster, a woman without a partner, and of all the tarot queens she's the only one defined by a loss or what she lacks as opposed to her own personal characteristics. And here, she appears wary of anyone stripping her of that mantle; she isn't quite powerless, but she's resolutely turned away from the future, seated, and has no apparent interest in being otherwise. She looks to the shield, her name, her defenses, centered in the four coins that mark the boundaries of a life.
The Hermit seems to have a different approach. He's always been identified as some kind of seeker, and here he raises his lamp to Judgement; is it his own resurrection he's looking for? The Hermit is, as his name tells us, solitary, and the work of revising a life, of re-vision in the service of moving forward, is of necessity a solitary act. No one can know what's in our hearts but ourselves, and much as we might try we cannot hide what is buried there from ourselves. The Hermit is wise, to a point; he works in the service of illumination. But the act of looking backward to see what has already died, digging up the corpse of the past again and again to inspect the wounds, doesn't necessarily show us a way to avoid suffering them in the future. Too often we stop at recognizing that the moment for a profound upheaval has arrived; and too often we acknowledge it only because it blares in our ears and we can hardly ignore it any longer. The truth presses upon us, and we can sit in the coffin waiting for the revelation, or we can climb out on our own.
The lies others tell us, the lies we're expected to collude with in order to be received into society, are easy to see and resist if we choose. It's our own lies that are so insidious; it's the stories we tell ourselves as we wait for someone else's permission to begin the climb out of the hole we've dug that are so hard to resist. Seeking forgiveness from a god to whom we hand the reins of authority and resting our hopes for the future on the illusions of the past, buying in to the role we're expected to perform or becoming a reliquary that forever exhibits our own failings; these are comforts we can't afford to keep.
Songs and images, mostly, and most often the ones I get stuck on have a repetitive, insistent quality of their own; I find in them a sort of obsessive knot whose end I'd like to tease out. Somewhere between their repetition, and mine, I feel there must be something caught that wants to be revealed.
Right now it's one song, and in particular the guitar's circular, slashing motif; it makes me think of oldmanuscripts I've seen where the handwriting loops back on itself as revisions are endlessly worked over, where a thought can't be released until it's reached perfection or a stalemate, where there's an occasional pause as though breath were being drawn before the hand leaps back in and resumes the attack again.
I Might Be Wrong--Radiohead, live at Maida Vale
It reminds me of Franz Kline's black and white paintings; the same feeling of ferocity and economy.
Are there connections to be made when we look across genres this way, when the mind tugs on the end of that string and finds a never-ending series of knots in it? What happens within this kind of repetion, both the personal and artistic urges? It's something I'll be returning to.
In the last entry of her diary Virginia Woolf wrote:
"Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.
This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls."
Four days later she walked into the River Ouse, her pockets full of stones, convinced that her work, her life, and her relationship with her sister Vanessa were irreparable failures. She believed she was again slipping away into the mental illness that had recurred throughout her life, and that she no longer had the strength to recover. She had saved herself several times already, it could be argued, and had been saved more often by the interventions of her husband, friends and family, and there is no telling why this time was different; maybe it was the threat of the German invasion of England, a very real threat in 1941, with serious implications for her own and her husband's well-being. She had completed the first revision of her last novel, Between the Acts, and at some point just after its completion she'd decided that the book was fundamentally flawed, and couldn't be fixed; she felt herself unable to write at all, telling her general practitioner, "I've lost all power over words, can't do a thing with them.", and maybe it was this loss of ability in the medium that had defined her life and brought her some feeling of independent success that she couldn't endure. She had begun to hear voices, she was sure she would become a burdensome invalid, and she must have thought she was doing what was best for everyone around her. The final letter she received from her sister might have convinced her this was so; this sister, her closest friend and ally, and at the same time her partner in a lifelong intellectual and emotional rivalry, writing to her that she must pull herself together in a time of great hardship for the whole country, and that she musn't create more worry to add to it.
She thanked her sister for this letter in the suicide note she left propped on her writing desk, and then she took a walk. And I haven't written this to praise, explain, or elegize what she did--it happens all the time, a person holding themselves up to the light and deciding that they can't cut something precious from the mess of inclusions they find, a ringing silence thickening the air to a bloodless, icy fist in which they're trapped. In a different context, earlier in her life, she had written, "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." The last hope of many, as it appeared to be hers, is to slip the bonds of the one life that feels so flawed from its very beginning and take on another, full in all the ways ours is found wanting, infinitely superior in its accomplishments and promise from the vantage-point of our own cramped, drafty corner. Virginia Woolf seemed to wish for this, appraising herself always in the light cast by her sister, whom she revered as a bountiful earth-mother, by her contemporaries in art and society, and by her predecessors.
We all do this. And if we do it enough these other lives crowd our own out of the picture entirely. We formulate a theory of the beautiful and worthy life using the examples laid out by others, and if we can't make an elegant proof of our own result from it, there is the fear that a life's work is lost. We're constantly running up against parts of ourselves that don't fit our view of what we should be, what we could have been, and the impossibility of reconciling the theory with the facts is often insupportable. This is the "Pythagorean terror" of Beckett's Three Dialogues; like Pythagoras, whose entire system of intellectual and spiritual belief was jeopardized by the discovery of irrational numbers, like Virginia Woolf, who said, "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order" and couldn't support the loss of that ordering power, we can find ourselves left hollowed out and breathless as the foundations we've constructed are blown away.
I don't know the remedy for this, if there is one. I'm just as suceptible to this kind of terror as anyone else, and I've felt the products of my life, myself among them, to be a pale reflection of the creations of others who came before and did it better, and always not what they should have been. Even as I write this I feel it, and I'm reminded of so many others I know who are feeling it, and the killing punishments we dole out to ourselves, the mountains of work we've destroyed.
I'd like to find a way out of that corner where the light doesn't reach and we're "shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to." Maybe feeling around within that blindness for the outlines of a life where we can at least express that terror, understanding that there is little perfection to be found in any theory, is the best we can do.
I wonder if we're too quick to decide what we believe, and too precise about it when we get there. Belief of any kind seems to hinge on our skill at either resolving or ignoring apparent contradictions; the entire focus seems to be reaching the endgame, where one may employ clear and calculated strategies and where it's preferable not to make any moves for fear of weakening one's position. The goal appears to be not having to think anymore; we make up our minds or someone else does it for us, and they're made of a few rote phrases we trudge out in the event that we're questioned. You must stand for something; you are, in fact, a collection of symbols couched in a tidy allegory, cradled in the sure hands of a narrative that carries you safely to a predictable end.
Ambiguity appears dangerous. There's too much room to wander around in, there's a chance of getting lost. It fosters an atmosphere of questions, and if these questions can't be answered comfortably within the sphere of our beliefs, if there is no right answer and no end to the questions, there is a fear that all our attempts to find meaning are fruitless. Language, one of the tools we wield in our attempts, is itself ambiguous, undermining the search for a single perspective from which we can bring order to an existence we're afraid we'll never understand.
In the beginning was the word. But the word is not as certain as we've been led to believe:
"the initial Hebrew words of the Bible, Bereshit bara Elohim, have, in fact, two contradictory translations. One way to translate the opening line...is to treat the word Elohim, one of many Hebrew names of God, as the subject of the sentence, thus rendering the translation as the familiar phrase: 'In the beginning, God created….' The other grammatically correct way to translate these words, however, is to treat Elohim as an object, thus rendering the translation: 'In the beginning ____ created God…' The blank in the sentence has an assumed 'It,' which compels us to read the opening, 'In the beginning, [It] created God, heaven and earth.'”
Whether or not you believe in God, It, or any part of the equation at all, this is an extraordinary paradox. Literalists will have nothing to cling to here--there is no way to take it at face value when there are two faces, both of them true. For the rest of us, the tiny bridge the mind makes between one and the other, the temporary space created as we shift the words around, becomes a path we may never stop walking and an opening through which those endless questions flood.
Is this so frightening? People have an innate distrust of the oracular and the irrational, but there is a huge difference between a few words that hold many potential meanings and a great hill of words that mean nothing at all. There is the emptiness that comes from overuse--the list of truths we recite and memorize like children learning to pray, the name-tags we pin to our shirts that in turn pin us to one black-and-white image, forever and ever, amen. There is a very different kind of emptiness, before we decide we must choose one face, one set of absolutes, a centralized belief we must abide by entirely. There is also the very human experience of being caught in the grey between, an undefined, vacillating, Beckettian void: "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
We're so sure we can't go on without a resolution, we can't tolerate that slipperiness we sense in the mind. We want truth, we want precision, a life free of contradictions. We want to create ourselves once, and for all time, if only the subject and object would stop shifting. But it's hard to ignore that when we're honest enough we might recognize that what we tell ourselves should be true, what we think we know, and what we feel can fail to add up. This can break us, leave us deadlocked, or keep us climbing up that hill of rhetoric where questions aren't meant to be answered. Or we can just go on, through the unresolved and unanswerable; we can keep going on and let the going be a story too large for simple endings, brief summaries that flatten out a life. If we don't stop making our minds up, we're always creating, and creation becomes a belief in itself.
No one is here, and yet someone is...Shall I disappear?
His kisses and embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind. I got used to it. I saw us as two good children, free to stroll through Heavenly sadness...
Love must be reinvented. That much is clear...
How simple it is, to become caught in the web of illusions others project onto us. Like getting lost in a house of mirrors, bumping into a million reflections stretching back to infinity, turned around and around until you can't be sure if you're the image or the real thing; we can vanish entirely. We can become so fragmented and compartmentalized that we wear a different face for every occasion, all of them ill-fitting, locking away the parts of ourselves that others might find displeasing until we cannot be sure we exist at all without the gaze of another to tell us who we should be.
We wish to be loved and praised, we want to feel that we are part of some all-consuming and shattering romance, or failing that we'd at least like to feel as if we belong in the world. If we want this badly enough it's no great matter to assist in our own confinement, the little amputation required to fit an ungainly foot into the glass slipper, the emptying of the will it takes to become one of many cells in a hive. We're adept at erasing and re-drawing ourselves over and over again, sketching in a personality so tenuous it's nothing but a mass of crosshatching and ghostly afterimages.
As mutable and ill-defined as our own personalities can be, we would prefer that other people remain who we think they are; when they change too much, too quickly, it calls everything into question--the bonds we build so carefully, the contours of a loved one's life we fit into so well, a routine we thought stable as bedrock until the foundation shifts and slides away. Suddenly the picture is canted, and we're reminded that no matter how close we come to each other, there is always a door whose key we don't hold between.
In the absence of religion, people cling to their belief in the redemptive power of relationships with a passion; I can save her. Through love and understanding, I will save myself. When there is failure we feel as if we've been cast out, fallen from grace and drowned in our own separate hell.
And so we're cautious, sending signals out from the tower in the hope they'll be received as we intended. We don't rock the boat, for fear of capsizing it. Compromise is necessary in any kind of relationship, but when it reaches the level of pathology and an identity is constructed entirely from self-sacrifice, when we're nothing more than a shadow on the lookout for a praiseworthy shape to take, we become as insubstantial as Sylvia Plath's "living doll", a frame for others to hang their wishes on: "You have a hole, it's a poultice. / You have an eye, it's an image.".
The eye is always voracious; the heart desires to beat for another despite the wounds it's so likely to encounter. It's easy to break apart, by ourselves and in our connection to others, and easy to forget that at the center is a place of power and self-reliance we can arm ourselves with, if we rid ourselves of the fears that nag like a thorn in the side.
The President appeared on my tv the other night to deliver an address to the nation regarding the current financial crisis, and what action his administration and Congress plan to take to remedy it. In short, he wants us to do this.
Seems just a touch ironic when almost the whole of his two terms has been dedicated to persuasion through terror.
This poster was comissioned by the British government's Ministry of Information on the eve of their involvement in the war with Germany, and was meant to convey to the public an "attitude of mind" appropriate to the unknown and very dangerous situation they'd confront in the days and years ahead. Mr Bush is well-versed in the rallying cry of a well-timed piece of propaganda, and this country has, up to a point, been agreeable in the face of his decision to use its people as cannon-fodder. Our George, however, is not George VI; there is no Churchill on the horizon. And this is no longer a matter of stoicism and the acceptance of hardships with an eye to the greater good, and the surety that comes from suffering for the common cause. This is a matter of people's money, and I'm thinking it's not going to be a simple matter of telling everyone to buck up this time.
As I listened to the President I was aware of the fact that he wasn't talking to me. He was talking about mutual funds, mortgages, retirement accounts, and credit flow. I have none of those things, am in no danger of losing what I don't have, and so don't really figure into the equation. And it seems that more and more people might be joining me here among the ranks of those who really aren't a part of the fabric of American society. Clearly, to be of matter within it is to be tied to those slips of paper; when you take away a person's money, you take away their reality. Words are cheap to begin with, but even more so now. I'm wondering what words people will be speaking to themselves if they lose even a part of what they always assumed was so solid, if the institutions they believe in fail them. I'm wondering how much they can lose and still function, and what will happen once a little too much is taken away.
In Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline writes about his experiences as a calvary officer in World War One. Early in the story his regiment is shelled by the Germans, his colonel is killed, and he is seriously wounded; somehow he escapes and makes his way to the rear, where he's put to work at a ration distribution point. He's just seen most of his fellow soldiers slaughtered, but remains full of his usual apocalyptic joie de vivre, until he's confronted with the sight of the regiment's butchers at work: "The squadrons were fighting tooth and nail over the innards, especially the kidneys, and all around them swarms of flies such as one sees only on such occasions, as self-important and musical as little birds. Blood and more blood, everywhere, all over the grass, in sluggish confluent puddles, looking for a congenial slope." And it's this moment, finally, that proves too much for him; he faints dead away.
It's interesting how we can become accustomed to almost anything, how we can ignore what horrifies us for so long, function despite the untenable situation staring us in the face, right up to the moment when it changes context and we see it as if anew, through defenseless eyes. It's interesting what happens to people, and what they'll do to survive, when that last, small piece of belief is taken from them.
And let's suppose for a moment we, I, do try to get free and fly off from that common morass the heart is so prone to settling in. Let's say this is more than just an exercise in literature, tarting up the corpse so it won't look quite as dead and we may admire it before closing the casket. Let's say I'm serious, let's say I'm working in the only ungoverned zone left to us; ideas as tangible agents of change. The age of philosophical and artistic manifestos is long over, and no matter how you slice it they were just another set of boundaries in novel costumes; we, the undersigned artists, exclude any vision not compatible with our own, and vow to slump into complacent old age once we've replaced our predecessors as the established brand-name of innovative thought. We have the formula, and we're locking it in the vault.
Is the entire aim of beginning to work the promise that we'll eventually reach an end? What end is there to reach when what we apply ourselves to isn't a product we can place on the market, when we step outside the arena of profit and loss, when there is no criterion against which we can measure how far we've come?
I wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I wanted to be a great writer, but I never asked myself why. Here in America we have a mania for producing, we're nothing without evidence of our usefulness to society at large, various slips of paper bearing large numbers and a string of polished bullet points. The money in the bank, the manuscript in the drawer we're sure will make us the next overnight sensation, the portfolio we rest our fate on, tidy columns reassuring us that all this will be worth it in the end; these things tell us that we exist, that there is reason and an order we can follow if we apply ourselves with a single-mindedness. I had my own work to do, a sense of purpose attached to my own slips of paper and the promise of some measure of success I believed they contained.
But I didn't know what form I expected that success to take. I was published a few times, in some small magazines, and that was pleasant. I participated in readings and workshops, I went to school briefly, I learned how to learn, I was on the right track. Sometimes I was satisfied with what I made, most times not, but as I had been told all writers feel this way I was undeterred. I had a product, I was producing myself through my writing.
This is the point in the story where I'm supposed to say that I was a colossal failure and couldn't understand why, or that I was a great success and was disheartened by the futility and emptiness behind the great machine that is the world of publishing. I was neither of those things. What I did was realize I had a desire that I had channeled into writing, but that writing couldn't possibly contain. And if writing wasn't the answer, then all of the trappings associated with it certainly weren't what I was after. I could go on to achieve my mature style, get a grasp on my subject-matter, maybe become part of a scene with like-minded people, or failing all that I could give up writing forever and get a real job. I chose neither.
There is no end to this story, and there is no end to the desires that don't tell us why they belong to us. We all have our own, and it's the lacunae in all of them--the missing text in those slips of paper that stack up to simulate a life, what is left to die outside the closed doors of the manifesto, the spaces we're left to fill in once we recognize we're not seeing the whole picture--that I'm trying to take the measure of. This might not be so productive; it's certainly maddening. William Carlos Williams wrote:
It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off
No one to witness
--and moving towards that elusive "something", out of order, without a terminus, is the work of a lifetime.
I feel so forsaken I orient my instinct for perfection on any sacred image...
--What can I do? I know work; and science is too slow. How prayer gallops, how light rumbles...
Take heed, soul. Don't fall prey to sudden salvation.
No hymns now. Don't lose the ground that's gained...
The moment we surround an image, a person or an idea with an air of inviolable sanctity is the moment we obstruct the very release that worship is thought to engender. To even attach oneself to an image, subscribe wholesale to a prepackaged movement or philosophy, or search in the eyes of another for our reflection eliminates any hope of transformation; we don't need inquisitors or zealots to kill us by gradual amputation, we do it to ourselves.
The human heart finds comfort in numbers, clear and concise rules, a grid the mind may fit itself and what it encounters into, a patch of ground where one is sure of where they stand and where there are few shadows and fewer choices. There is great comfort in belonging, faith and the light of logic. None of us are beyond the pull of the heart, there are no buddhas or saints walking among us. What there is no lack of are institutions, categories, tribes and authorities promising us that in a few easy steps, we too can be on the fast track to enlightenment, popularity and a spotless soul, if only we choose to follow the correct path.
So we have a cup surrounded by identical cups and embraced by climbing vines; we have a heart within a system, but the circuit is interrupted, the arteries that are essential to its functioning never reach the mind. Pursuing those comforts of the heart without questioning why and blind faith in someone else's answers are a kind of brain-death; too often we're suffering from a sort of intellectual hypoxia, starving for a belief that will take our lives out of our own hands, euphoric with illusions that seem to lead to the promised land but instead lure us farther into ignorance.
Or we may see an individual nestled into the cushion of society, a church, a worldview built by someone else and controlled by a few, always at a remove from those they lead, always higher up the ladder. The cups arrange themselves into a grid, each indistinguishable from the other, vanishing into sameness.
The wall behind the couple on the Sun card is another grid, and the man on the left seems almost to be in the process of merging with it, his leg turned to stone, frozen in an odd angular gesture like a figure carved in bas-relief. The woman appeals to him, but what is it that she wants? This could be a moment of choice; will he follow her, is following the only means of action he has? They regard each other warily, the way animals sniff out a stranger, each looking into the eyes of the other to see themselves. When we cultivate a pleasing image or act only according to someone else's whims and expectations, we're in danger of trapping ourselves within it, dancing in lockstep with no room for improvisation.
We're so desperate to inject our lives and our actions with meaning. If we can't find one we're happy to surrender our own will completely, if only someone will give us an answer and light up all the corners we can't see. It's not a question of rebellion purely for the sake of rebellion; any disenchanted teenager, clothed in the correct partisan uniform, worshipping at the altar of their various pop- and counter-culture idols can fail to accomplish anything with that. It's a matter of being constantly in the act of revision, reappearing to ourselves the way the Star reappears, never finished unburdening herself, emptying in order to fill.
Words aren't sacred, not our own, not anyone's. Rimbaud understood this when he dismantled his own work in "Alchemy of the Word", old poems he resurrected but appearing, as Graham Robb says, "curiously hobbled: syllables have dropped out like stones from an old wall.". And in the holes he pried open he saw through to a space where "From human praise, / From common urges / You free yourself / And fly off accordingly.".
So often we are not at all what we thought we would be, are not, in fact, what we think we are. The problem seems to be one of twos; there is the self, and there is the projection of that self, almost always lost in translation, in the same way poets speak of never quite writing the poem they have in mind. There is what we can only understand as the self, which is a falsehood from the moment we recognize it because recognition requires us to separate from, and think of as other, whatever it is we're recognizing. There is something beyond that self, we can comprehend that with little effort, but there again is another divide, and all these splits and dualities build up in layers around us until they are absolutely opaque.
I'm quite sure even talking about it is a mistake. So often all we do is talk, and this particular subject is not a novel one. Language itself contributes to the problem, as Aldous Huxley tells us when he says, "To formulate and express the contents of the reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages." It's nothing but a code that we've invented and don't, ourselves, understand. Some can find a way to work within its constraints, wrapping themselves in those layers in order to make a daring escape, using a heap of language as a fulcrum to achieve a momentary lift.
This is one way, and it's as ambitious and elegant a use of the tools and weapons we have as any other, but it doesn't go far enough. Maybe a better way to at least begin to formulate an idea of how the divide came to be is to think a bit smaller. We can think of a letter, and a few numbers.
Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There is some debate whether Aleph should be assigned to the number one or zero; it comes first, after all, but is last in presenting itself before God in the creation myth recounted in the Zohar. God chooses Bet, the second letter, to begin the Torah with, and Aleph is kept as the first letter, but with an important difference from the rest; it has no sound of its own---more properly it's the letter before sound, the preparation for sound, an inbreathing. For this reason it seems more logical to connect it with zero, which is the nullity that exists before we begin to count, the potential ability to define the size and shape of the palpable world.
Aleph is attributed to the element of Air, the breath and lungs in man, and the mind or thoughts of God. It's also associated with Kether, the first Sephiroth, in Kabbalah; this is the primal nothingness, the beginning of all that is, the void which may be glimpsed in the gaps of existence. It encompasses the beginning and end, and is present in all that unfolds in between. It's both part and whole, minimum and maximum, the source and completion, singular and myriad. This is all, of course, quite beyond the boundary of perception. It's at best unknowable, and usually unspeakable. To know it is to be distinct and separate from it, which is exactly the problem we're trying to solve when we think of it.
So zero is already perfect, in a state of unity with itself and the universe and the nothingness behind the universe, but since it is itself perfection and not separate from that perfection, it doesn't know that. Being the center itself, it can't know that it is the center. Potential wishes to realize itself, and seeds, by their nature, grow; we all have a desire to see our own reflection, become a being of matter. This is the beginning of consciousness, and this is how the break happens. The circle divides itself in half along a perfect line, and we have one. With it is born two--each number has in itself the next one, and every step can be traced back to the first one. When the circle splits, one (the fracture) and two (the halves) are born together.
One, and oneness, are an illusion, because oneness is not unity, it's the fracture, zero was the whole being. One lies between two severed halves, both uniting and separating them, as thin and unreal as a shadow, but still there. Nothing really keeps them apart, other than illusion. The veil of Maya, the ego which is another manifestation of one, whatever you want to call it, maintains the delusion of separation, keeps it in place, giving it the solidity of a concrete wall and strengthening it with the fear that is born of an ego that will do anything to maintain itself.
Two is, simply, duality, opposition, us and them, the always inscrutable Other. Zero was looking to know itself, but didn't realize that by breaking away from itself to look at its own face, it created the divide. Crowley came up with some bogus math telling us that 0=2, and this is valid, but I think what has to be done is to work in the opposite direction. The point isn't to go forward to two, but backward to zero--the journey isn't so much one of discovery, as it is one of recollection.
When we're caught in the illusion of two, we're stuck on the outside. Energy dissipates through the fracture. The self is a construct, built of stereotypes and imitation, it's literally the second-hand life. What is needed is a reversal, we need to go back to the unknowable and unspeakable, or so it appears to us from our side of the split. If we can go through that concrete wall that seems so solid, if what we see and hear stops being merely its corporeal self, it becomes a door to what can't be said. It is changed, and we are changed with it. The ego isn't judging, and putting things into their little boxes. When we are forced out of the rut, off the tracks, we can get a glimpse of the truth behind the surfaces. We're all stuck on the wheel, and maybe the idea is to turn the wheel backwards. And open the door, behind which waits the Aleph.
All of this is nothing more than a raft of symbols, which is not to say it's completely useless. The word "symbol" derives from the Greek symbolon, literally "to throw together". A symbolon was a piece of wood or porcelain that would be broken in two pieces, then held by two individuals that were about to be separated for a long time, and would eventually need something to recognize each other when reunited. A symbol is, therefore, a way of recognition, and the sign of a broken but repairable unity. Symbols give us the hope that reunion is possible.
All of this is nothing more than ornament, a fancy escutcheon around a keyhole we press an ear or an eye to. Where is the master key? If I find it, I'll let you know.
resurrected and revised. sometimes old emails are useful.
"A hyena you'll remain..."cries the demon that crowns me with many poppies. "Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin." Ah. It seems I have too many already: --But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way... Science, the new nobility. Progress. The world turns. Why wouldn't it?... But we don't leave. --We take the same roads, burdened with my vice, vice that since the age of reason has sunk its roots right into my side-- climbing skyward... Out of the same desert, on the same night, my weary eyes forever stare at-- a silver star, but without setting life's Kings in motion, the three magi-- heart, soul, spirit. When, beyond mountains and rivers, will we embrace the birth of new endeavors, new wisdom, the departure of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition...
The wheel, how we are bound to it, how we struggle to escape it, and how it turns endlessly is an existential phenomenon that is itself endlessly turned over; medieval thinkers had their Rota Fortunae, and saṃsāra is a central tenet of Buddhism and Hindusim. In its paradoxical way, Buddhism teaches that the only means of liberation from the wheel is the wheel itself, and the Buddha's turning of it through the teachings of the Four Noble Truths.
I'm not a Buddhist, and one doesn't need to be in order to see that what we have here are images of release and captivity, suffering and attachment, desire and surrender, all spinning off from the wheel at the center.
Normally I would read a sequence of cards from left to right, past to future, but these might also run backwards, or in a more circular manner: the queen appearing to turn away from the beckoning hand of the Devil, considering her apparently elevated status in the world, perhaps realizing that its foundations aren't as stable as they seem or that she is trapped by it, and finally coming back to the ground, unencumbered by symbols and unashamed to reveal herself, emptied of burdens and able to see to the roots of her own "Heart-mysteries there", as Yeats would have it. Read in this way we have a message of acceptance, and an acknowledgement of the need for liberation at the center of the human condition. Or we can imagine the four cards encircling the wheel itself, just as in the Carmina Burana it is captioned "I rule", "I have ruled", "I will rule", and "I am without rule" at its quadrants.
The danger, of course, is becoming resigned to this seemingly endless cycle, or getting stuck at one point in its circuit. There are as many ways to do this as there are ways to read these cards. In the same poem Yeats speaks of a woman who, "pity-crazed, had given her soul away, / But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it"; she is the Countess Cathleen of his mythic Irish history, who sells her soul to Satan to save the peasants suffering from famine and disease, but who escapes her fate when God grants her clemency for her sacrifice. She is one-dimensional, a "character isolated by a deed" in a morality play, resigned to dependence on the mercy of a distant deity. To see that we are are caught up in a circumstance sometimes called fate, to understand the nature of the beast, doesn't mean we should blindly hand ourselves over to it. This is the mistake of slavish devotion to religion--the perception of a world where we are helpless without the assistance of an unquestionable power outside ourselves, a world where everything is good or bad and there is no middle ground, where we are saved or damned on the strength of our adherence to a few reductive ideologies.
But what if we do read these cards from left to right, and swing the opposite way? If we see that the wheel turns regardless, and accept that this world is a manifestation of illusion, it's a small step to deciding that everything is immaterial, morality and the soul included. The Queen of Batons, instead of stripping down to the purity of the Star, or walking to her own martyrdom, may be seen as something akin to a Maenad, dancing away from the center and towards a dissolution that may appear to be liberating, but is in fact another kind of delusion. Worshipping destruction for its own sake, revoking responsibility in the pursuit of a release from the ego, or laying blame for our apparent suffering on the world's evils without looking for a remedy is as senseless as submitting to the will of a tyrannical ruler or a vengeful God. Even the Devil seems to want no part in it; he looks out from the card uneasily, and his captives are chained to nothing but each other, apparently complicit in their own bondage. The insanity plea, and "the devil made me do it", can be a bit too close to "thy will be done" for comfort.
We can define ourselves by what we lack, see ourselves as a skin wrapped around a void, choose to remain "in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart". We can do our best to secure our own release, and see through all the spin to the truth. The word "beast" derives from the Greek therion, meaning "trap", and its diminutive, thera, may also mean "door". Somewhere between the two is the key.
Excerpts from the opening passage of A Season in Hell:
Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed... I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate... I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it... Misfortune was my god. I lay in the mud, I withered in criminal air... And spring left me with an idiot's unbearable laughter.
What first struck me when I drew these cards was the contrast between ownership and dispossession--the Fool, deprived of everything up to and including his dignity, flanked by what may be seen as symbols of comfort and prosperity; two cups, displayed as if at a banquet-table, and two coins, wrapped in a banner that closely resembles the sign for infinity, peeled back and sprouting flowered vines. These two pips are, aside from any divinatory meaning they suggest, cards of ownership--in almost every Marseille deck they bear the name and location of the deck's creator, serving as both signature and advertisement for the maître-cartier.
We have a table set for two, and the promise of companionship. We have a name and an establishment taking their place in society, and the promise of wealth. And between the two we have a solitary wanderer (not counting the little beast who's quite clearly not a friendly acquaintance), a man without rank or stable address, a man who might not have two coins to rub together.
Unlike any other card in the Marseille deck, the Fool is literally without a fixed position. He is unnumbered, and so may move through the deck at will, appearing anywhere in the sequence or outside of it completely; he is that twofold fugitive I've spoken of. In the game of tarot he is something like the Joker, or wild card, but does not take on the identity of the desired card--he is called the "excuse", because he may be played at any time the holder wishes but is not given to the hand's winner, instead replaced by whichever card the holder wishes. He can never win a hand, but he temporarily excuses the holder from the rules of the game.
For whatever reason, he is itinerant, on the road, and seemingly oblivious to his own suffering, or at least resigned to it for the moment. He's left behind comfort, the symmetry and abundance of the two full cups, and he's looking ahead at the road that bears someone else's name, a road that appears circuitous. He may in fact be looking for work, but his gaze suggests otherwise.
We all know the story of the court jester, and how his lack of status frees him to speak the truth to the king, even mock him, without fear of the consequences. To be outside of the rules is to be exempt from following them. To be known by many names, or no name at all, is to remain unlimited right down to the level of our fundamental identity. The Fool is known by many names: madman, beggar, mystic, zero-by-proxy, idiot Buddha--but none of them define him, and he is under no obligation to accept them. He walks out of the frame, unowned and unburdened.
We may assume our Fool has chosen to walk away, and in choosing is a moment of sacrifice. Will we be defined by the choice, or the sacrifice? Will we allow what we've left behind to dog us, or will we see the infinite possibilities ahead? Truly, what is the price of freedom, and whose work will we be devoted to, ours or someone else's?
In the late summer of 1873 Arthur Rimbaud returned to his mother's farmhouse in the Ardennes countryside to complete the only work he chose to pursue publication of in his lifetime, A Season in Hell. According to the inevitable legend he locked himself in the attic, either under the influence of absinthe/hashish/opium/all of the above or suffering from their withdrawal (depending on who's telling the story), and in one great deluge purged himself of the sordid details of his life as a rebel poet, homosexual, criminal, homewrecker and near-murder victim. The most fanciful of the tales surrounding the composition of this work has him weeping and shouting into the late hours as he wrote, despairing over the fate of his jailed lover Paul Verlaine, and finally carving a cross surrounded by rays of light into the table where he wrote, renouncing his wicked ways and poetry itself, neatly tying up all the loose ends and walking away from his past into silence, forever.
Most of this is, of course, pure fantasy, as is the still-repeated legend of his return to his mother's house after Season's publication to burn every copy in the fireplace, as supposedly witnessed by his horrified sister. Most of the print-run he commissioned survived, as did a few of the manuscripts. Their numerous drafts show us a very deliberate and painstaking act of composition and a mind in complete possession of its faculties.
This was not the farewell to writing that it so fittingly appears to be. Rimbaud was not known for long goodbyes, and as Graham Robb writes, "The sheer biographical convenience of this scenario makes it deeply suspect. Literary works do not queue up patiently, waiting to write themselves into the chronology. The prose poems of the Illuminations overlap Une Saison en Enfer at either end."
Within this dense and elusive text we find a multitude of voices: a Faustian hustler who has finally been called to account for his debts; an illiterate savage caught in the juggernaut of colonizing white men, forced to submit to their clumsy attempts at edification; a cruel and careless "Infernal Bridegroom" trailed through the underworld by his long-suffering "Foolish Virgin"; a sinner begging forgiveness from a God he renounces in the same breath; a poet, who may or may not be Arthur Rimbaud, recounting his own history and that of his ancestors, finding them all, and himself above all, wanting for any redeeming qualities.
These voices may be read as allegories, brutal fables summarizing what it is to live in a state of disconnection from oneself, without a sense of direction, suspended in a sort of nihilistic purgatory. In this way they are "absolutely modern", as Rimbaud demanded of them and himself. Their cacophony echoes our own inner disputes, and how they bleed out into society at large. We cannot escape their grip, or their questions, as Rimbaud himself was well aware:
One of the voices, always angelic, --it was talking of me-- Sharply expressing itself:
--and Rimbaud's questions, what the voices say after the pregnant pause of that colon, remain relevant to us in ways even a self-proclaimed seer might not have known.
Rimbaud asks six questions in the section of Season titled "Bad Blood":
To whom shall I hire myself? What beast should I worship? What holy image are we attacking? Which hearts shall I break? What lie must I keep? In what blood shall I walk?
Questions as singular as these surely deserve thinking about. So I'm going to do just that, using the allegories I find in my deck of cards and its own multitude of voices.
The sound of the zeitgeist, putting aside the fact that it was recorded in 1996. Who were you in 1996, and did you understand then what was coming? What will you do now that so often, and so infuriatingly, what comes and who you are aren't what you thought they would be?
I don't do politics here, and my brand of social commentary isn't of the naïf-in-scenester's-clothing or cutting satire variety. I don't have to cover any of these angles to know that we're in a fair bit of trouble, folks.
America is a palimpsest, as are we. Some of us decipher the underwriting, and some of us do the scraping. I know that we are being effaced in two ways: overwritten by a heavy-handed bureaucracy kissing the hem of religion and holding the trump card known as "patriotism"; and corroded to dust by our own indifference in the face of this.
I can remember who I was in 1996. The only question I can ask is which action to take--reveal what has been hidden beneath, or scour away what remains and start again from the ground?
I understand that I've set myself a nearly impossible task. It would be easy to retreat into old methods of working; words considered only for their beauty, or their distressing lack of it, manipulating words just for the sake of artful adornment, the verbal equivalent of tasteful and inoffensive knick-knacks, shelves jammed with bits of china and crystal that fade into the background of our lives, that have no purpose, no longer seen the way anything too familiar is unseen. I have said that words are not enough, they don't go far enough, they are always constrained by their very nature. They are defined, in the sense that they have concrete meanings, and also in that they remain within their own clear, fixed borders. Between the Alpha and the Omega may be all that is, but by placing ourselves and everything we encounter within that concordance, by living a life reduced to an index of only what is explicable, we will never see what lies outside. I don't want to pin down all that should remain volatile.
The artist as saboteur has been a useful metaphor, but outside the insular world of high postmodernist theory tends to accomplish nothing other than building yet another barricade of words. One can live and die within the confines of a theory formulated more on shock-value than any real attempt to bring about liberation, whether personal or universal. There is no rebellion in adhering to manifestos, regardless of how innovative and clever their writers and followers imagine them to be. If we must apply any label at all to the transgressions against the routine that those in the vanguard commit, I prefer fugitive, and its dual meaning; one who escapes, armed and certainly dangerous, and one who is mutable, unable to be fixed within a frame.
I know a man who is this kind of fugitive, though he has never regarded himself in this way; maybe like the others out in front he has neither use for nor time to consider such a small detail. He reminds me of Yeats at his most visionary, the Yeats who wrote "The Second Coming"; a man who has the capacity to see the beginning and the end of the epoch we find ourselves stumbling through, and is furious to hasten it to that end; a man who is not cautious in his speech and rarely abides anyone who is in theirs; a man who is willing to cross the line, because he knows the act of crossing rips open a hole that exposes the truth so many others would prefer not to see.
Yeats ripped open that hole, and something appeared to him through it. He said, "I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction". This sort of subversive imagining was dismissed by the grey flannel crowd, including the didactic and mummified critic Yvor Winters, who remarked, "…we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying – he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality." What Winters missed, or chose to ignore, is the reality of the nature of existence; destruction igniting creation, and the undeniable impermanence of both. It's not a question of approval. It's a certainty that we cannot deny, both brutal and exhilarating.
We keep looking for that hole, that line, but above all we must look, in ways that those who adhere to doctrines would not dare.
Years ago, this man I know went with me to a museum, and we stood and looked at this painting. I stayed at the prescribed respectful distance one is expected to in a museum, but he walked right up to it; one hand hovering inches from its surface, walking up and down its length, eyes roving across the web of enamel stuck with cigarette butts and ashes, bootprints around the edges, the weave of the canvas exposed where a jet of paint trailed off into scattered mist. He looked for a long time, and when he turned and walked back to me, the painting at his back like a great pair of wings, I wondered what it was that had been revealed to him, I wondered what Jackson Pollock had wanted to reveal and conceal as he danced his work into existence.
His vision, Pollock's vision, and Yeats' vision are not mine to know. And what we can glimpse of them is only the slag left in the furnace, the vortice streaming off a star as it dies, stripping down and readying itself to be created again.
I believe in synchronicity. Whether finding it is the result of always being on the hunt, or if the belief itself makes it happen, there are connections to be made, small glimmers we can stumble upon that allow us to view that ineffable thing I keep talking about. Or is it what remains when things are pushed aside? The simple part is knowing that it happens, and seeing it when it does. The difficult part is understanding what has made itself present to our sight, and getting the message.
I stumbled upon a fragment of a poem by Edith Södergran that I'd never read, and it wanted to say something to me; "I long for the land that is not, / for everything that is I am weary of craving.". I wanted to think about where this land might be, being fairly certain I was also longing for it, being a little less certain of its location, and all too aware that a craving of one type or another is never far over the horizon. So I looked at my cards.
A small creature, who seems trapped underground or underwater, tries to break the surface. Arrows point to a place of crossing at the heart of the matter, behind which lies a straightforward path. A winged woman stares me in the face.
Crayfish are scavengers, bottom-feeders. They tend to dig trenches and burrow into the bottom of the river, they need a shelter to hide in, they shy away by nature. This is all well and good if one is a crayfish, but the rest of us might start feeling a little smothered, we might want something a little freer, a better way to find what feeds us. Up there in the open air the dogs seem to be having a great time, howling at the moon, feasting on its light, but are they a threat to something small, is there a wolf at the door if one decides to emerge from a safe place? The moon has a kind look about her, but she hides behind the radiance she excites the dogs with; she is veiled and inscrutable, heavy-lidded, and the crayfish waits in a little pool of light. Is he frightened? Edith herself seemed frightened by what might be found there in the dark, or what we cannot see when we look out into it:
When night comes I stand on the steps and listen, stars swarm in the yard and I stand in the dark. Listen, a star fell with a clang! Don’t go out in the grass with bare feet; my yard is full of shards.
And not seeing, or willing oneself not to see, seems to be part of the story the cards tell. The vines in the three of batons point to a red X at the center--what is hidden from view, what integral part of the message has been missed? When a webpage doesn't load properly, the images are replaced by an X just like this, and we don't receive all the information we were looking for. Something has been blocked out, and the batons seem to diverge from it, pushing against the frame of the card. Are they thinking of escape as well? Or should they backtrack to what has been overlooked, find a new path to begin the voyage out?
Edith Södergran was on the front lines of modernism. She says, later in the same poem where I found my fragment, "My life was a hot illusion", but if she was deceived, it didn't prevent her from reaching that land she spoke of--clearsighted, shedding the ridicule of her peers, she went back to the heart of her own vision, and spoke it without hesitation. The face of the moon, so mysterious and distant, is stripped of her veils, and Justice seems to ask us to see what she sees. She has removed her blindfold, she is prepared to weigh everything that comes to her attention and cut out what is superfluous. She reminds me of the tree of life, and its two pillars of Mercy and Strength. She might be wearing the crown of Kether, understanding all that we cannot see if we remain in the dark, hiding in the little pool of reflected light, if we don't go back to the center where our own vision starts. Or is she the keeper of everything we crave?
I don't believe in asking questions that can be easily answered. For me, finding answers is not the reason I look at the cards, or read poetry, and there are no answers as to what may be found beyond them. But by addressing to them the questions that they provoke in us, a space in the mind where change happens may be cleared. The yard may be full of those treacherous shards, but we may walk among them with an intent, and an eye to what they kindle as they land.
I'm sure that in this moment Jack was simply expressing his frustration at the lack of rapport he felt with his audience, their lack of participation in the sweat and fury and fire he injects into every performance, but since I specialize in focusing on the moment, this one speaks to me of a larger issue I keep running up against.
Just when did it become the last word in social stances to be utterly unwilling to admit to any strong emotion, display anything other than a cool and detached disdain in all circumstances, or allow oneself to indulge in expressing enjoyment in front of (shock, horror) other people? For the hipster, the dismissive sneer and the blank stare are de rigeur. They coordinate beautifully with the Ikea nesting tables and sideboard, assembly instructions and unwavering apathy included.
I realize that I'm out of the loop. I realize that I am, in fact, terminally unhip. And this isn't an attempt to hark back to a less jaded, simpler time. It was always the mark of high culture and good breeding to cultivate the attitude of the hipster. As goes the self-appointed upper echelons of the trendsetters, those who define what nucleus of cool the hangers-on should cluster around, so goes the vegan dude in the drainpipe jeans and strategically unkempt hair at the 7-11.
In 1958 Jack Kerouac was invited to a symposium at Hunter College to debate the question "Is There a Beat Generation?". He was under the impression that he was there to read his poetry, and he was wrong. Instead he was asked to participate in poetry's dissection, to display himself for the bloodless academics, professors of anthropology and sociology, Village Voice reporters eager to bury the corpse and attend the birthing of the next literary happening. I can imagine Jack climbing that stage, a little the worse for drink, Jack who did nothing but feel a little too much for his own good and express that surge of feeling his whole life, I can see him sitting there with a glass of brandy, looking into the face of that sniffy disdain, wondering why.
Jack said,"And now there are two types of beat hipsters: the Cool, bearded, sitting without moving in cafes with their unfriendly girls dressed in black, who say nothing; and the Hot, crazy, talkative, mad shining eyes, running from bar to bar only to be ignored by the cool subterraneans. I guess I'm still with the hot ones. When I walk into a club playing jazz, I still want to shout." He also said, "You came here prepared to attack me."
We can be sure that this dichotomy between the hot and the cool has always existed, and the cool always looks to temper the hot, quenching it in the bath of the ironic gaze, not allowing it to bend into a new shape or send off such uncontrollable sparks. Jack must have known how apt the tag of "subterraneans" was--burying all that is spontaneous inside themselves, nothing freely given, and nothing transformative taken away. A few years before, in On the Road, he'd written, "You don't die enough to cry." Who decided that erasing all but the surface of this life is better than that death?
Everything is waiting for us to see it. Anything may be read.
I'm speaking of seeing and reading in the sense of divination--not as a method of fortune-telling, nor of predicting the future, but of opening oneself to messages looking for a destination. Everyone has the potential to be a receiver of messages, and most have experienced spontaneous divination; anyone who has been profoundly moved by a work of art in a way they can't explain, felt that the lyrics of a random song on the radio were speaking to them in the moment, found a passage in a book that provides an answer to an unspoken question. Often these messages are wordless revelations--a door cracks open, and we can walk through it under our own power. Disparate pieces of a puzzle suddenly lock together. Maybe it's a divine proto-language we've tapped into, or the sudden flap of a wing, a vision descending.
We may also employ any number of tools to invite this way of seeing. Sortilege, or the casting of lots, may be the oldest form of divination; stones, bones or wax in a bowl of water, anything can be thrown down and a reading found in the spaces. The practitioners of this method took Mercury as their patron in antiquity, and the element of mercury seems to be a wholly appropriate metaphor for the act itself--its form and the meaning found there relevant only to the moment, ever-changing, impossible to pin down.
All of us have a natural affinity for images--they are the most direct form of communication, understandable at a glance, a shortcut around the gridlock our minds might encounter when we try to express ourselves with words. Images can also allow us to communicate more directly with ourselves as well. I read tarot, or rather I look at tarot and try to see what it wants to say to me, and listen to how it speaks. I use the Noblet Marseille, a restoration of a Parisian deck printed in 1650, and this is unimportant aside from the fact that the Marseille deck is free of any esoteric overlays; the history and iconography of the Marseille and its variants is a fascinating and hotly debated subject, but if we pull it out from under the weight of its history it may be read as pure imagery, and becomes a hotline to insights--literally a way of seeing into ourselves and the situation at hand.
The method I use with the Noblet is the creation of Enrique Enriquez, and he calls it Eye Rhyme. I won't explain it here, it should be read in his own words, understood using his examples. I believe it was this way of seeing, not just the cards but an entire life and its content, that Allen Ginsberg was speaking of in his famous aphorism, "first thought, best thought". This understanding of the visionary state is one aspect of what drove Rimbaud to write the second of his "Voyant" letters, where he says, "This much is clear: I'm around for the hatching of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I release a stroke from the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully formed onto the stage.". And later, in the same letter, "This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, thought latching onto thought and pulling.". The language he speaks of may be read by looking at the Marseille, where visions indeed act out our personal dramas again and again.
I can toss a few cards onto the floor and, like stones in a riverbed, follow their various paths to any number of ends. I can see how the figures on the trumps and courts regard each other, I can listen in on their conversations. The point in all of this is, simply, to look.
Look at the Bateleur, the first Trump:
As I write this he appears to me in the guise of legerdemain, and also as the seer I'm speaking of--he looks over his shoulder to the left, the past, perhaps engaged in memory and what can be found there, manipulating the mysterious objects on his table; is he casting lots, is he a practitioner of sortilege? The name he conjures for me, "legerdemain", and the word "sortilege" itself share the same root--leger, meaning light, or quick. Mercurial.
Look at the second trump, the Papesse:
She sits quietly, an open book in her lap. Has she found an answer she didn't know to ask there? She also looks to the left, but her manner suggests something altogether different from the gaze of the Bateleur, something other--is she a visionary as well? Is this the moment of visitation?
The point is to see. Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.". The tools are there for us to use, the tools are everywhere at hand.
Some of us, a very few of us, are what the omnipresent "they" refer to as gifted. Whether an accident of nature, primed DNA waiting for an itchy trigger finger, a red flare in the frontal lobe, or a bestowal from an unknowableother, some of us are touched, some are the fire-bearers. It doesn't matter what you call it or where you think it comes from, when you brush up against it you see it for what it is, and if you're at all like me, you still carry a hope that some of it will cling to you as it passes.
Do the gifted know themselves to be so? This is a foolish question. Whatever it is that inhabits them, whatever they embody, doesn't have patience for questions. It knows that beauty is worthy of expression, and it also knows that going beyond beauty, putting beauty on the rack to see how much it can take, is a far better use of time. A supernal voice, scraping itself against the infernal, and in the tracks and grooves left behind by that abrasion a bit of shining debris, the glitter of grit, the imprint of an edge.
Imagine being possessed of a voice like that, and pressing yourself up against the ecstatic. How far would you take it? And having gone there, what would you see?
Sometimes during the course of my wanderings I stumble across a piece of video, a song, or an image that resonates with me for no reason at all. I'm always looking for a bit of meaning, I expect to find it, and sometimes meaning can be found in the view from the back of a cab driving through London, fingerprints on the glass, the screak of a fiddle, and a honest voice.
The blues is the closest thing we have to an Ur-music. Captured on shellac discs etched in the back-rooms of general stores in prewar Texas, on a prison-farm in the swamps of Louisiana, in makeshift studios all over the Delta was the sound of man in extremis--supreme joy, crushing sorrow, mortal terror, spiritual loss and abandonment, bodily deprivation, the authoritative voice of one who has lived through all these and much worse, and the clear vision afforded those who remain always on the outside. What was captured on those discs in a place of fertile soil, grinding poverty, and not much else, was the spirit that urged the first men to stomp a foot on the ground to the rhythm of their hearts, to clap their hands in counterpoint, and to give voice to the experiences of that heart. The blues is a taproot plunging straight back to what is most alive in all of us; remembrance, forgetting, remembering why we so often choose to forget.
What we must forget now when we listen to the blues is the tired idea that the musicians who created it were noble savages, primitives, or illiterate sharecroppers artlessly plucking tunes on battered guitars they bartered for with their souls in the dead of night. This robs them of their art, their craft, and the genius they used to manipulate it--taking the tight form of the eight-, twelve-, or sixteen-bar blues and spinning out endless variations, expanding and contracting the rhythm and chord progressions, calling and responding to their fellow musicians with homages and outright thefts of language, and bringing to music a revolution in subject matter that resounds to this day. A blues song can be about anything, and is often about everything; two or three verses, a bridge and a turnaround that summarize an entire life, or the moment that completely changes it.
Just as Rimbaud stuffed his petrol bombs, street urchins, sheets of blood and priests in rotting cassocks into the corset of the alexandrine, working within the tradition on his way to undermining it, blues musicians took the events and fears and sorrows of their lives, so foreign to many of us now, and raised them to the level of universal truths. The bare facts of their everyday existences may be thin on the ground or altogether lost to history, but we can know them, and ourselves, through their work and the truth that work exposes to us; a truth beautiful yet unvarnished, beautiful because it is unvarnished.
Many of the recordings they left, despite the passage of time and their inevitable deterioration, retain an immediacy and intimacy that is almost shocking. Under the crackles, pops and hums that flaw even the best digital restorations we can hear the knock of the slide against the neck, the rattle of strings against steel. We can hear Robert Johnson turn his head away from the mic as he tells us about the mean things he's got on his mind, as if he looks over his shoulder and sees the end we know he'll meet approaching. He asks us to come into his kitchen, he asks us if we can hear the wind howling, he leans in close and makes it howl as he whispers in our ears.
Come On In My Kitchen--Robert Johnson
Other times his voice strains to the breaking point as the descending bassline dogs him, urging him on through a storm we can imagine so vividly, leaves littering the road and a woman his mind circles back to again and again.
Hellhound On My Trail--Robert Johnson
Some of these musicians lived long enough to be captured on film. Robert Johnson learned much of what he knew from Son House, part-time preacher, one-time inmate of Parchman Farm, full-time disjointed soul, a man whose music "is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one" according to Bob Groom; a man whose power never waned, even in old age, even in the moment when awareness and loss become one.
And in the end, the blues doesn't have to lean on the crutch of words to get the message across. Formless, and released from the possessive need to analyze and compartmentalize, to separate ourselves from what we feel and experience, it floats free. It, simply, is.
Dark Was The Night-Cold Was The Ground--Blind Willie Johnson
As Ralph Ellison said, "The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.". All men are fallen. Only a few can see beyond that to what lies on the other side, choose to walk through it with grace, and bring back to us what is found there.
I love words. I love what they do to me, and sometimes I love what I do to them. The pursuit of them, mine and those written by others, has been the defining feature of my life. Feeding on them, and being fed by them. Hunting, and being the prey. They remain the only tools at my disposal, even as I begin this work of going beyond them. This idea I've decided to implement, the beginning of a need to lift off of the page, or to turn it over the way one opens a door, to see what is behind words and to get rid of them as the middleman, requires me to use them. This is a complete contradiction that must be resolved. Ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a contradictory person, and here is the point where I begin to resolve both of these problems--the personal and the artistic, the word needing to be freed from the page and the self needing to be freed from the net of words.
The idea, simply, is to live the poem. To remove the artificial construct that we rely on to explain ourselves, to understand what is around us, to experience our feelings, to live in a world that seems senseless at best and insane more often than senseless, this construct that does nothing but place a veil between us and the truth. Words have been the best vehicle we've built to drive us to the truth up to this moment, and the poem has been the sleekest and most powerful of those vehicles--built for economy and speed, aerodynamic, an engine thrumming as we race to an encounter we hope will be more intense, more real, closer to the bone than those we experience in everyday life. We hope to meet, and be met, and as Miller Williams said, "The poem in print is the ground on which the meeting takes place."
This is true, and yet it isn't true enough. The poem as meeting-ground, as vehicle, places us at one remove from the impulse that brought us to poetry in the first place. There must be a way to go beyond that, to a place where we are united with truth, where we don't need the machine of poetry to cross that distance, where there is no distance at all and we are the locus of energy, no longer struggling to express who we are, but embodying that expression ourselves.
Many others have come to the meeting-ground. I have met them there, I meet them there still, in the open square, at the fork in the road, alleys, churches, the crossroads. Some have reached out a hand in greeting, asking us to join. Some have torn a few holes in the veil. I'll begin with a few of them, because there must be a beginning, and we could do worse than listen to the voices of those who have gotten close to completing the work I'm starting.
A conversation I keep having--the basic premise and the speakers remain the same, though the circumstances and the time of day and the level of inebriation keep changing-- goes something like this:
Poetry is dead, you know.
Yes. That is true.
It's not even dying. It's dead.
Yes.
Does it need to be said again? Others have done so for a long time. W.H. Auden, a dead man in a flannel suit if ever there was one, said in his elegy to Yeats, "For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making...".
This is that valley. There's a hell of a lot of stone around here that needs moving. There's a hell of a lot of cracks in the mountains on either side, just begging to be packed with explosives. Do you think we can rip a big enough hole to walk through? Or will it be just enough to crawl, will we be able to stand up on the other side? Once more unto the breach, dear friends?
I think that time might be coming. Meanwhile, I'll be here, peeling off the battered covers, looking between the lines, and rolling the scrolls up into fuses.
