The Fetish of Language is the Ultimate Quietude, reposte
OK, Silliman linked to this, and when you click on the link the excised post appears, so I may as well put it here for all to see. My mood today sees it differently, though I’m not sure if Silliman is making fun of me or not. It is what it is. I’ve qualified my statements in the retraction in yesterday’s post. All I say is, I don’t advocate violence! I believe in civil discourse. I VALUE it. I FEAR its breakdown. The below is a ‘performative texte’ i suppose.
The Fetish of Language is the Ultimate Quietude
Today my thoughts are all over the place, fiction, poetry, politics, the future. I guess they started (my thoughts) spinning around Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, and their books The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Fortress of Solitude. But also of the poetry wars, and the odd fact that two poets whose blogs I follow seem always to be engaged in the same agon as I am, that is in struggle with the so-called avant-garde or experimental wing of poetry, the former post modernism, post langpo, what have you. There must be thousands of popets out there who view the so called binary of SOQ (School of Quietude) and Experimental as ludicrous. Why bother fighting about it? What is it about the salvos coming out of the so-called left camp that so exercises the ire and imagination, so stirs up the bile? I can’t answer this question. I just know that i don’t give a shit about the SOQ folks, what they think or say, but the Langpo Posts? Their every word incites me to write against them. On the political front my thoughts are increasingly irrational, full of violence and rage. I am blinded now by the horror of a future that seems certain, by grief for my children’s and grandchildren’s world, by fear of what the next 20-30 years will be like. My frustration with the stupidity and cupidity of our self-appointed leaders, in academia, industry, government and art, rises and never falls back to the same level. I want to kill republicans. I want to kill bankers. I know my emotions are not my own but shared. Herein lies the root of civil war. Apoplexy is the failure of language and the start of violence. The alternative is withdrawal or the utopian dream of successful engagement, the possibility of reform. I have lived my entire life in the last sentence. Yet i would certainly chase an evangelical child fucker down the street with a burning pitchfork. To my evangelical brethren, the day of the lord is indeed upon you, if ever people like me get off their bloghs and do something.
I like Lethem and Chabon, but there is a complacency in their writing, an emotional disengagement that isn’t just disturbing, or boring, but that is, given the current circumstances, given what’s at stake in the world, criminal. I do NOT believe art has to be political, but I do prefer art that is suffused with emotion, that is engaged. Where is the resentment, the envy, the disappointment? These negative, destructive, sinful emotions are played for comedy in these books. These men are at peace with their world. They are calm. Fortress is a book written by a detached observer of the human comedy. What we need is rage at the human tragedy. I want novels that are at war with themselves, the books of intellectual savages, satiric books that mock and humiliate their targets, that tear down city blocks,that explode biotas. Chabon and Lethem are intelligent men who follow the rules. They are successful. They are mature. They don’t blame the world for their failures, and they have no insight into failure. They are tourists in the land of failure. They write noir fiction that has not got the cobwebbed heart and poisoned guts of true noir. They show, they don’t tell. We need to be told. You cannot show a starving man a picture of food and then hand him some seeds and tell him to start farming. We don’t need mature books that say, ‘well, it has always been so’. Mark Twain didn’t write this way. Not about the things he loved, not about the things he hated. Artists need to enter the arena with sharpened knives and in this day with sharpened claws and fangs bared.
In poetry, the idea that language is about language or that poetry is an exercise in language or that poetry is a kind of literary/political criticism of language or an examination of language is insane. Language is not a self referential system of arbitrary sounds where meanings arise through difference and are preserved by self-interested convention. Language is not the ideological police department of a culture’s available meanings. Language is not the structure of the unconscious, nor is language thought, nor is language consciousness or mind. Language is communication, how we mediate, create, imagine, invent, understand, describe and discover our selves, each other and the world about us, in time. It is communication. It is how we love and lie to each other. It is how we change each other. It is one of the ways we know truth from error. Language is our most valuable tool and it is the opposite of war. The way of language is the way of non-violent conflict. We have turned language into everything and into nothing. And in so doing poets, philosophers, critics, have abandoned any relevance or engagement with the actual world, and have enabled, directly, the most evil and short-sighted among us to seize control of reality. Avarice is the only virtue. And the left abandons the notion of virtue as a right-wing value.
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Care to comment?
I’m glad you put this back — I was going to write a nasty comment telling you how frustrating it was for your readers when you print a retraction to a post most of them hadn’t read. And now reading it, I wonder what all the controversy was about. Why did you disown this, of all rants? A little extreme in places, but so what? Desperate times, etc. And who takes blog posts literally anyhow? Now you have to reprint the original comment that sparked the original second thoughts. By the way, Sillman’s snide summary makes no sense either way in relation to this post.
Comment by Philip — March 12, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
well, it’s fear of appearing to advocate violence, which is part of what I’m talking about. I think people tapping away at their keyboards, Clark Kents for the most part, enter the phone booth of the internet and sprout red capes. but you’re right, it doesn’t seem so crazy and of course recanting something without saying what it is you’re recanting is wrong. the whole thing is silly, but i’m getting ten times the usual traffic. i’m clark kent! someone i meet at a staff meeting will google me and not find the mild mannered stacks manager but a left wing jihadist without a coherent ideology. ah fuck, should i join the coffee party? but i can’t decide if i like arugula more than radicchio. as for ron, every poet blogger in the universe is grateful to his site. and i was indirectly quoting recent posts of his, so he bit back, and in the process, sent a whole lot of people my way. maybe one of them will like one of my books, who knows.
Comment by jonfrankel — March 13, 2010 @ 7:16 am
Jon, you are Clark Kent! You have the look, the mild manner, the surprising barrel chest under the disguise….
But, I’m glad you re-posted this, even though my comments inadvertently caused you to retract, for a day anyway!
We pretty much share the same opinion on this subject; we are angry because we care, because “dialogue” is worth about two sheets of used toilet paper and because the frustration of watching the radically ignorant and prejudiced steal the national dialogue is humiliating.
I wish I could remember my orignal comments for the benefit of the first commmenter, but I can’t. It wasn’t to cause you to retract or to tsk tsk tsk you. You know that, of course.
My point was that it would only play into the hands of those who would frame us as bitter, dangerous and on the fringe. When in fact we are hard-working, family-oriented, law-abiding (mostly) artists wanting to get beyond this pseudo-libertarian pablum being shouted at us by people more motivated by racism and weaned on conspiracy theory than any cogent arguments against “socialism.”
Apparently, as people go jobless and lose their homes because they have to pay the doctor, we are radicals, Nazis, fascists, Christ-haters, attackers of Christmas, pedophiles, revisionists, Communists, America-haters, dolites etc etc.
Sad to see, but true. I think I mentioned in those comments that I’d just as soon turn a gun on myself than on another human, that we are not killers, that violence is anathema to where we are at. Unfortunately, I feel like an ostrich.
But, I , liberalitarian, exile in Europe, poetry scribbler, likable guy, can also handle a firearm….would I use these skills if the time came?
I flatter myslf in thinking no, whereas some flatter themselves in thinking yes. These would-be revolutionists, do they have the stomach for it? Do we? Are we down for the killing and the lynchings? Could you sing the Inernationale as you faced the Falange, courting death, perhaps for nothing at all?
Somebody certainly is.
I’m tired of fighting. I just wanna collect rainwater for my tomatoes and other plants. Skim fitfully among the reeds and the ripples. Write some, grok what’s worthy, have fun, raise the kidlets in a non-toxic world where Jesus fascism isn’t shoved down our throats 24/7.
Sigh. Unfortunately, this seems impossible. Oddly, it’s what these right wingers also seems to want, except the Jesus part.
Why then, are they so angry? Same reason ans us? Broken system, who to blame? Are they right?
They can’t seem to see that who they support is more to blame for their woes than Obama, secularists, last benderers or any number of sillimans.
Am I drunk?
Yes, a little.
Do my words contain truth? Some.
I think of Robert Anton Wislon: not true or false, but how much truth does a text contain?
I would hope to think it contains some, a little anyway….
Not as brief or cogent as the first comments but woot! there it is. I’m not sure I even make sense. Which is a valuable insight of a sorts.
Fuck ‘em all seems appropriate somehow, says the ostrich, head in sand, hand gripping rum in glass, fingers typing blindly…..
Anyway, Jon, glad you popped this back up, with caveat. Anger is an energy, extremism in the defense of liberty no vice, the last priest strangled with the entrails of the last televangelist….
I miss the Phoenicians….
Comment by Daurade — March 15, 2010 @ 2:52 pm
If you haven’t read this, Jon, you oughta:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?_r=1
The quote from this that got me was:
“The [Bush] aide said that guys like me [a reporter] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
Comment by The Gid — April 23, 2010 @ 9:39 pm