Twist in the Tale

Eddie got totally
boner, followed her
home, this was at
Sixth & Pine, it
was in the kind of
springtime weather
in which coldness
& hotness infringe
upon each other, she
wouldn't let him in,
yet he was totally
boner, he tried to
knock down the door,
I am saying this
because I was in
there, I heard the
pounding, I had to
come down to tell
Eddie to fuck off,
(I've learned that
you can't reason
with fools, although
I like Eddie), & the
twist in the tale
is that once I got
totally boner and
pounded on the door
too, but she let me
in. It's all random.
Now I can't get out.


This poem later appeared in Denver Syntax and previously on As-Is.

The Book Death Mood

Samuel Beckett is who I think of when I think of this. Most great artists have a myth, and the Beckett myth is very compelling to me: a lone man in a small room, staring at the wall. Every so often, he moves over to a desk and scrawls a few words. Then he retires to a couch or bed, and the process starts again. This is, in a word, torture. The Beckett myth hinges on the artist's ability to derive solace from torture. It is viewed by the artist as good torture. Beckett's famous I can't go on/I'll go in shows the abraded edges of a psyche pushed, through enforced solitary activity, to its limits. Yet Beckett pushes himself; he is not a martyr to circumstance, or a jail-bird, or an invalid. He has chosen a kind of auto-erotic lifestyle, and staring at the wall confers a despair that has a few dollops of comfort in it. It is like a spider making a web only for itself; self-containment and self-sufficiency are distinguishing characteristics of the Beckett myth. It is a myth not of ease but a myth of silence and slow time, and of one man, one vision, one room (distinguished from Proust, by Beckett's relative, agency-granting health.) Beckett may be a prototypical manifestation of the "Spartan greatness" I've been describing here lately.

I don't mean to be cryptic. I am simply describing the state of consciousness that arises when you have burrowed deep (maybe too deep) into a self-made labyrinth, that takes the form of a manuscript. It goads you into working on it. It won't let you rest. It makes passages that initially seemed secure insecure, and grants security to passages you hate. Most importantly, it effects your affective state. You feel like you have a hellhound on your trail. Is there anything more miserable than being half-way through a really demanding book? Needless to say, I am writing this because this is more-or-less where I am. It began suddenly; I had time to pick up Held, which I hadn't touched in months. A huge gust of momentum led me to spend all of yesterday writing, but at one point I looked up from the page and there it was: the hellhound. The book death mood had descended, and will remain until I put down Held again. What, you might ask, about the B.D.M. is redolent of death? It has to do (for me, anyway) with claustrophobia and entrapment. It also has to do with the contradictions that have been preoccupying me: spending time on work for which there is no material reward, and even (to be honest) no guaranteed spiritual reward either. In truth, every book is a risk, and most books that are written wind up being wastes of time. I don't want to be cynical, but posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts. Everyone wants to think that they are doing something important, but the truth is that most of us aren't. But you have to keep going anyway, just because. And the hellhound slobbers all over your sneakers and you have to let him. Those who write for pay must experience something different, but I am not writing this for them. Nor am I writing it to valorize myself.

I think a lot of my feeling regarding Held has to do with my current preoccupation: narrative. Rather than a fractured Beckett-ian narrative, this book has a straightforward one (it is the sequel to Chimes, though done in projective verse.) Here, for me, is the weird thing about narrative: to use straightforward narrative in the context of post-avant winds up being far more tricky than being disjunctive (and I've done both.) In the end, there are few things more difficult than telling a good straight story. Narrative done badly is very easy; narrative done well, with rigor, is a hellhound and a half. Roland Barthes said (and he was quoting someone else who I don't remember) that every narrative is a staging of the father, and creating a father winds up feeling (I imagine) like creating a Frankenstein. At times, it's enough to make me wish I were one of those poets who just throws sixty poems together and calls it a book. On a certain level, I am in awe of the gumption that would allow a poet to do such a thing. But it is irrelevant to me, because (to be frank) my ambition demands that I write books that are books. I'm sure this makes me a snob, but so be it. To bring this back to Beckett: just as Cleanth Brooks said of Waste Land, Godot implicitly implicates a secular and secularized world; however, unlike Eliot, Beckett never resolved this qunadary by retreating into Anglicanism. If there is no God, then there can be no resolution to the vulgarity of secularization, because the alternative is just as bogus and just as vulgar. Religion is a subject that seldom seems to come up among post-avant poets. So, let me ask: what do we believe in? The book death mood aside, is writing books enough? I mean, here, to touch on realities deeper than ideology: teleology, ultimate essence, etc. Because, ultimately, this will inform how and what we create, and why. It may even land us in a space where the book death mood disappears (for those of us who suffer from said mood.)

Tom Stoppard on Greatness

Considering the extent to which questions of greatness were relevant to Oscar Wilde, it is not surprising that distinguished playwright Tom Stoppard would have occasion to address them in his 1997 play The Invention of Love. In the context of the play (which centers on the life and frustrated homosexuality of Shropshire Lad poet A.E. Housman), an implicit comparison is drawn between Housman and Wilde. To compress for the sake of argument, Housman, a classics scholar, is resolutely "never now," while our Oscar, of course, is "now or never." This applies also to their gayness; Wilde's is consummated (and winds up being the instrument of his downfall), while Housman's is constipated (and marks an uneventful, largely dissatisfied life.) However, there are two key differences to Wilde, as he is presented in this play, and Wilde, as I presented him in the last post. Through the pen of Stoppard, Wilde is not merely "now or never"; he is at war with history, and determined to efface it with his own genius (rather than submitting to it or embodying its finest aspects.) The circuit I posited for Wilde moves from "Now" backwards; present and past are equally accounted for. In Invention of Love, Wilde, through pure effort of will (bolstered by genius), is taking "Now" and moving it forward, so that prescience and genius are combined.

The interchange between Housman and Wilde towards the end of the play is, for me, the highlight of the thing. If there is any justice in the world, it will go down as one of the classic confrontations in English theater, almost in a league with Hamlet meeting his father's ghost. In the scene, "now or never" and "never now" apply not only to art but to life (further blurring the boundaries between art and life, in a way that I imagine Wilde would approve of.) It is a "posthumous confrontation," which takes it out of the realm of the quotidian and etherealizes it. Each poet must defend his position regarding the other. Because Wilde suffered public disgrace, Housman is determined to view him as a failure. Housman has lived a life in which "not disturbing the peace" became a priority. His first impulse with Wilde is to feel sorry for him. Wilde, however, is in no need of pity. He knows that he has had a tremendous impact on a wide audience, that his excesses have a redemptive quality owing to their gutsiness and novelty, and that he has lived by principles that, while illegible to the demure Housman, are consonant with a philosophy that art and life can be interwoven, and that present-mindedness can create a viable future. It will be worthwhile, I think, to present the pith of the thing in its entirety:

AEH: I'm very sorry. Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error. The choice was not always between renunciation and folly. You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song unto all posterity...and not now!-- when disavowal and endurance are in honor, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument.

Wilde: My dear fellow, a hundred francs would have done just as well. Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness-- sullen in the sweet air, he says. You 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. You are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, steal, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!?-- think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up-- the New Drama,the New Novel, the New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?

AEH: At home.

The first thing to notice about this exchange is that is hinges on Oscar. In a back-handed way, Housman compliments Wilde by focusing his attention on his life, which shines with the quality of a beacon. Housman has no myth and no story to tell; that he happens to have written a successful book of poems is incidental to him, at best. As a classics scholar, he has led a retired life of study and contemplation. When the specter of "present greatness" comes knocking at his door (which it, indeed, did), Housman does not answer. The power that he sees in himself is what he has avoided, rather than what he has accomplished. No one knows of his gayness, though a few may suspect it; no one can reprimand him for grandstanding and trying to be a poet; no one can interfere with his antiquarian reveries; he is safely hidden from rumor, scandal, and inquiry. The very vividness and brilliance of Oscar's life is "terrible" to Housman, because he has neither the guts nor the self-belief to sustain "brilliancy" himself. Not only is greatness "never now," for Housman, but it is ignored altogether!

"Never Now" or "Now or Never"

Joseph Hutchison's excellent response to my "greatness" post raised a fundamental question that needs to be addressed. I made the claim that "greatness is either now, or never." Implicit in this salvo is the notion that greatness is not regulated by an economy of retrospective, historical judgments; that greatness arises spontaneously as a response to present conditions, whatever they happen to be; that greatness manifests organically, as an embodiment of specific moments; and that greatness cannot be separated in any meaningful way from the moments that are encapsulated within it. My vision of greatness is interior, what greatness is from inside its own confines; Joseph took the opposite tack, in defining greatness. For Joesph, greatness can only be discerned with the wisdom conferred by hindsight; the moment that greatness encapsulates cannot be seen with clarity until it has passed; the pursuit of greatness in an eternal present is thus a wild goose chase; and winds up distracting us from the work at hand, rather than bracing us. I would like to turn our two opposing viewpoints into a dialectic, using as a kind of fulcrum an artist who seldom gets name-checked on poetry blogs, but whose career is a testimony to the pursuit of greatness from both ends and in both modes: Oscar Wilde. Wilde is an artist who proclaimed his own greatness from day one, and did so with full awareness of both points of view presented here: the greatness that is "now or never" and the greatness that is "never now." A look at Wilde, both the roots of his aestheticism and its manifestations (textual and otherwise) may be informative in attempting to develop a broadly applicable synthesis of two seemingly irreconcilable positions. Wilde spent his entire life in the public eye attempting to answer this question: how to be great both in timeliness and in timelessness. While I would not suggest that all of us need to start wearing leggings and daffodils, it is worthwhile to note that these are, in fact, old, old issues, that many men have wrestled with.

The first backward glance that will be instructive for us is not, I think, to Oscar himself; it is to his teacher and mentor, Oxford don Walter Pater. So much of Oscar's philosophy is derived from Pater's writings that it would be foolhardy to ignore Pater in a context of this nature, where we are looking not only at works of art, personas, and stances, but at the roots of these things. Pater's philosophy, as manifested in writings about the Renaissance and elsewhere, posited a kind of Epicurean fascination with sensation and pleasure, as quickened and activated by works of art. For Pater, art is about enjoyment, and the different enjoyments that different kinds of art could stimulate. This is relevant to us, because it has never been in doubt that in the context of the present discussion, subjectivity is desirable as a standard. Neither Joseph nor I (correct me if I'm wrong, Joesph) feel that objectivity is possible any longer (or was ever, perhaps, really possible, though generations of critics aped it.) If Pater is right, and art is about enjoyment, there is nothing holding us back from saying that what we love right now is great, has achieved greatness, deserves to be valorized. Pater is very big on the concept of "the moment," on two levels: "moments" in which works of art are created, and "moments" in which works of art are enjoyed. For Pater, greatness is literally "momentary." When these two levels converge, when we behold a work of art that is new, vital, and fresh, and when we let the work elevate, nourish, and sustain us, there would be little doubt that we are actively participating in "greatness." When Pater reaches back across the centuries, it is seldom to retrospectively proclaim greatness; it is to make the two levels of his art-schema converge, so that the moment of enjoyment coincides, to whatever extent possible, with the moment of appreciation. Thus, ultimately what we see in Pater is a blending of "now or never" and "never now." He can help us to synthesize, when we are looking at the works and endeavors of others. What about our own endeavors? What about our own struggles to be great, for those of us who want to be great?

Here is where Oscar comes in handy. Oscar said, on arriving in America in 1882, I have nothing to declare except my genius. Whether the remark was intended facetiously or not is irrelevant, because of its produced effect. Oscar dared to call himself great, and dared others to believe or disbelieve as they wished. He rooted himself in his present moment, and demonstrated to others exactly what constituted that moment. He says something in De Profundis to the effect that he knew, from earliest manhood, that he stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of his age, and forced the age to recognize it afterwards. Was this hubris? I would opine that it was not, because Oscar produced a solid body of work to validate his claims. This doesn't mean that I think we should all go around declaring our genius to the world; it does mean that Oscar gave some very serious thought (as a student of Pater) to this question, and decided that he wanted both things, both levels to cohere in his life and his work: to be great "now or never" and "never now." His work acknowledges his age just enough to make him an unmistakable (if often lapsed) Victorian; yet he roots himself in Faust, in Greek tragedy, Platonic reflection, and the humanism of the Renaissance, to the extent that his ambition to be permanent and durable is also apparent. His larger-than-life persona was his way of bridging the gap between these two contradictory impulses; in his mind, it would be silly to settle for one thing, one level, when you can (if you are Oscar) have both. This won't necessarily lead us to a conclusive answer regarding what greatness is and what it isn't; what is shows us is that if the binary we are working from is of lasting relevance, it is not new and others have devised ways to synthesize it. This synthesis often happens on the level of self-presentation; as Joseph noted, my prescription for greatness did not touch on the formality of actual poetry. I feel that formal issues are contingent so much on individual sensibility that to make a "formal prescription" would be ridiculous.

However, it could be argued that if I have no formal prescription for greatness, then I have no prescription at all. Maybe greatness is in form, more than anywhere else. Who knows? Questions lead to more questions, and a half-completed synthesis can lead others to help form the dialectic that will outline, frame, and encase our age, when it is as "done" and enumerated as the Victorian Age has become. I, personally, am all for a new kind of investigation and a new mode of formal rigor. I know that my obsession with narrativity is becoming a kind of monomania, but so be it. Here is the formal prescription for me: re-insertion of narrative, along with the possibility of the re-insertion into post-avant of formal and rhetorical devices that have been abandoned; rhyme, simile, metaphor, extensive assonance and alliteration. In short, melopoeia. Pater makes the claim that all art aspires to the condition of music (because in music, form and matter cannot be separated, making it a kind of meta-language); well, perhaps now is the time for poetry to become musical again, and the Yeats intent on articulating sweet sounds together might turn out to be a pretty heavy dude, after all. This, while not falling into the traps that we associate with Quietude poetry: facile epiphanies, corny diction, lack of energy, dullness. This is not an easy balance to pull off, by any means; I would liken it to walking over a field covered in land-mines. But it dovetails with my prescription in the last post, of a poetics of responsibility: the imperative is to not waste anyone's time, and the engagement with a Spartan life-style would facilitate this (the opposite, ironically, of Oscar's grandiosity.) All these threads get tangled; it will take time to weave them into a tapestry that makes coherent, legible sense. But I want to thank you, Joseph, for bringing this up, because if we are able the nudge things the tiniest bit forward, then our work will not have been wasted. Perhaps, it is possible that if "greatness" is not an issue, it is impossible to achieve.