"Darkness is Brighter"

It seems eerily appropriate to blog about this the day after Michael Jackson has died. There was certainly a sense of darkness around Jackson, although it had more to do (from what I have seen) with his life than with his art. But, looking back at the Thriller-era videos, it is astonishing just how outrageously talented Jackson was, and how much talent wound up being squandered. There is also, for me, the silver lining of a new understanding- I understand Beat It, for example, more thoroughly now, as a specifically L.A. song, written about L.A. teenagers who have to deal with gang war-fare. In any case, I am interested in writing something that is not part of the just-completed discourse, but can act as a sort of adjunct to it. Specifically, to explore the idea that lies beneath the entire discourse: that art that is primarily dark has a kind of superior power to art that takes a more positive or positivist stance. That, as the title of the post claims, where art is concerned, darkness is brighter. Thinkers since Aristotle have been dealing with this, but there are reasons to bring it up again in 2009. What do we want out of art right now? What about the Zeitgeist of this moment makes darkness brighter? I can only speak for me, but I have some very specific reasons to prefer darkness (and edge) to anything anodyne or comforting. This is especially pertinent to American poetry because so little of it is genuinely dark. What is dark about most of it is how lame it is, rather than how many genuinely rough edges are fitted in (think William Stafford and get back to me.) There is a kind of indirect darkness to over-used cliches and worn-out tropes, but it is the darkness of a perceived irony. The irony has to do with the fact that 2009 is a new time, unlike any other, and yet in most poet's heads it might as well be 1962. It is unfair to generalize, but specifically on the "Quietude" side of the fence, past-dwelling is rampant and unfortunate.

I do not believe that 2009 is characterized primarily by darkness; I do, however, believe that the newness of this moment is best reflected in dark-tinged work. Think how much time we spend on the Internet which, like everything else, has a dark and a light side. The dark edges of Net-life have to do with chasing phantoms, pursuing illusions, living in a self-created, Other-inhabited No Man's Land. Jim Morrison, in 1967, said that we are all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur, and the Net has magnified this one-hundred fold. The Net has turned us all (or most of us) into little stalkers. Art needs to reflect this phenomenon, because it is a phenomenon with spiritual overtones. Why are we so excessively concerned with other people? Why do we need to keep peeping at these bodies, these products of mind? Ultimately, art that looks at this side of Net-life will be more rewarding, more satisfyingly human, and much more dark than art that leans on the fun side of the Net. What, exactly, is dark? "Dark," where art is concerned, manifests as an unwillingness to sugar-coat hard realities, a willingness to leave in rough edges, and an emphasis on elements of human nature that are compulsive, destructive, and helpless. We need this now because all these elements have been given a radically new context. When I left home for the first time, in 1994, no one had a cell phone, not everyone had a computer, and the Net was something left of center. Think how much cell-phones alone have changed the way we live. Voyeurism is also aided and abetted by cell-phones: now, we can reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. Texts and cell-phones are both intrusive and, I might, effective contraceptives as well (pardon my archness.) Cell-phones have made intimacy more fragile; delicate moods get cut into, tenderness is easily thwarted, all because of a device that is supposed to make things convenient.

So, if you are developing intimacy with someone, better hope the cell-phone does not ring. This seems like a little problem, but it is not. And the fabric of the problem is a kind of darkness, the flip side of "fast, fluid, and without boundaries", as I wrote in my Internet Theory book. Cell-phones at their worst are Kafka-esque, and this needs to be reflected in works of verbal art. Poems need to be this specific, this intense, this willing to look at the minutiae of our lives, or they are useless. Of course, darkness is not a new thing, but new modes of suffering require new modes of art. The resigned Stoicism of the Objectivists, the suave urbanity of the New York School, and the austere beauty of Lang-Po were OK for their moment, but I do not think that any were sufficiently dark to render 2009. I have been toying with an idea, though I do not yet know if I will pursue it. I had the thought of writing a book called Stalk, and setting it in the mind of a compulsive stalker (whether on the Net or in person I do not know.) It would be an exercise not dissimilar to the one that Bret Easton Ellis pursued in American Psycho. 2009 is a moment in which an unprecedented amount of stalking is going on all over the place, and we are all guilty. What do we want from each other? What do we perceive the Other to have that we do not have? Why are we so comfortable staring at the (easily accessed) Other from a safe distance? The answers to these questions cannot be comforting, and reflect the terrible spiritual emptiness of our moment. Technology has become both a passion and a vice so that stalking has never been so easy or so sophisticated. We are living inside each other without really thinking about it, or what it means. Yet it all happens in darkness, without the Other knowing. And that is a dark edge that needs to come out in new poetry, post-avant and otherwise.