poetry is disaster

The Perjury Which Denies or Destroys Reality

2009-08-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

The Death of Virgil
by Hermann Broch

493 p
1976; Pantheon Books
ISBN 0-8446-1742-3

‘what goal is it that you seek?’

This is the question Caesar Augustus puts to his dying friend, the poet, Virgil. This goal— which is the justification for Virgil’s desire to burn his epic poem the Aeneid, an act which Augustus not only does not comprehend, but regards as criminal, is the focus of a confrontation between an emperor and a dying poet, and is the heart of Hermann Broch’s epic prose-poem, and masterwork, The Death of Virgil.

Concerned about a rumour that the dying Virgil desires to burn his poem, the Aeneid, Augustus pays him a visit during which he wishes to take possession of the poem, in the name of the Roman people, to preserve what is and has been. In addition, he wishes to understand why Virgil intends to burn his masterpiece. To understand the position of Virgil, to situate the goal of Virgil’s striving in relation to the civic duty to which Augustus relegates it one must adopt conception of art that is opposed to truth, in such a way that art will always be insufficient when its goal is truth. In such a schema, one can imagine three classes of insufficiency, or failure, regarding a work of art:

i) successful failure describes the situation where the goal of a work of art is successfully attained, but the work that remains is insufficient to express this;
ii) common failure describes the situation where the goal of a work of art is not attained, and the work of art that remains is insufficient to express the unattainable goal;
iii) absolute failure is a form of technical success where the goal of a work of art is attained and the work of art that remains is sufficient to express this goal.

Successful failure and common failure are the domains of sincere artists, which is to say, they are largey uninhabited. Conversely, absolute failure is a comfortable and popular retreat; it is regarded as success, and often seems like a success as long as one does not regard such a work, which is wholly concerned with practical goals, in relation to a work that manifests successful failure. For those who cannot bear the unattainable, they will seek shelter with ‘the divinity of beauty, which is only a sham-beauty’. For Virgil, the predictable striving of the ‘death-herd of concurrent identities’ will never find themselves on the other side of a poem because they refuse to admit such a thing exists. The temptation to stop at what is attainable will forever separate the technician, the decorator, from the sincere artist. In answer to the question, ‘what goal is it that you seek?’, Virgil, pointing to the poem, his poem, which is the only goal Augustus can understand, proclaims, not that, ‘it is in my way’. And so, Virgil wishes to destroy his poem.

‘He who praised a verse as such, without troubling about the reality of its meaning, confused the thing created with the thing which creates, became consciously or unconsciously guilty of the perjury which denies or destroys reality’.

poem: n; 49. The poem, at its best, reveals to you how far you have fallen... how far you still must travel... for most, perhaps all, this is the most unbearable necessary knowledge. (A Personal Dictionary)

This is of course a vision of pure art, or pure poetry, and such a conception is almost always dismissed for its impracticability. But impracticability is no argument against its truth.

incoherency: n; It is in those moments when all becomes clear, when inexplicables converge into a seemingly common purpose, that a writer, a thinker, betrays the ability and the will to honestly and coherently engage the insoluble incoherencies of being alive. (A Personal Dictionary)

   The status of a work of art is the subject of the argument between Augustus and Virgil. For Augustus, the resultant work is the goal, ‘one can judge [only] what remains’, all else is of no consequence, and to strive for such a thing is an abdication of one’s duty. And duty is precisely the limit of the Augustan approach to a work of art. He cannot and will not go further. However, as is often forgotten, as is often denied, "in the world one cannot create by obedience alone" (N. Berdyaev).

   For Augustus, the artist brings form from formlessness, as exemplified in a sculpture. However, for Virgil, this ideal is precisely the problem. If the ideal of a sculpture is accepted, one would have to continue, via the so-called finished figure, sculpting it until nothing remains. In other words, the figure is a means to achieve this total sculpture, or nothingness. For Virgil, the works that remain, all the results of artistic production, ‘where the beautiful is substituted for truth’, are problematic. They obscure what is not evident; the finished veils the unfinished. Furthermore, in the universe of finished works (including works in progress) we become prejudiced in the midst of so much being and assume that there is nothing more. And so, bound to duties that grudgingly tolerate us, we habituate ourselves, ‘the speech-robbed non-solidarity of unrelated beings’, within an empire of cruel temporality dedicated to the unrelenting industrial glorifications of evil endlessness. For Augustus, such an empire can only be crowned with glory; for Virgil, ‘a world full of deeds yet empty of perception’, is one that must be traversed.

   Virgil (or, Broch’s Virgil) is a committed adherent to the aforementioned successful failure. He experiences, and pursues, the ‘not quite here but yet at hand’. The poem can lead to truth, but it cannot arrive. His torment is the torment of all those who seek the moment when ‘the universe, [is] dissolved and acquitted in the word’.

insufficiency: n; 1. Even if a poem, or the compulsion towards poetry, is an intellectual apex, it nevertheless always reveals the insufficiency of our minds in the presence of those forces and experiences which provoked the poetic response. 2. The fact that most people are incapable of bearing true freedom and are so resolute in their ability to withstand the temptation of freedom does not mean they should be deprived of the opportunity experiencing their insufficiency. 3. All that we do, no matter how well, or how thoroughly, is insufficient. And so, we must go further.(A Personal Dictionary)

And so, to the question ‘what goal is it that you seek?’, Virgil does have an answer— one whose unacceptability to Augustus is a measure of its sincerity— ‘to understand death’. It is that second immensity, that truth that stands only on the far shore, which is his goal, and which is the proper goal of all art. And to reach this shore, to be able to perceive the truth that reigns there, the vessel can only be sacrifice. The poem can herald the truth, but it cannot survive it.

‘To include all life within yourself and to be excluded from all life’— such is the poet’s glory, and such is the extent of his sacrifice.

In the end, Augustus leaves in possession of the Aeneid. Successful in saving the manuscript from the flames, his victory was not a result of superior arguments, nor due to the weariness of a dying opponent. For Virgil, to consign his creation to the flames, or to deliver it to a people who will never understand the goal for which he was willing to perform such a sacrifice, is to consign it to equivalent obscurities. ‘Creation is more than form, creation is resolution’— and it is such a resolution which art attempts to communicate, and which, almost always and everywhere, it fails to do... almost.

incommunicability: n; The essential truth that every writer discovers is something that most writers refuse to accept. And of all writers it is only a poet who is most likely to grant this truth the respect it deserves, as it is also only a poet who will be able to live with and work with it. This truth, to those who do not wish to acknowledge it, or who wish to run away from it, is a threat— the most important aspect of a person, of a life, resides in its incommunicability. (A Personal Dictionary)

The Unbearable Truth

2008-07-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

(some thoughts on the pathology of writer's block)

   To claim writer’s block is to admit to not being a writer, while at the same time pretending to be one.

   The phenomenon of writer’s block has always been a mystery to me, something that would be at home in a museum of oddities along with the Loch Ness monster, Sasquatch, Mesmerism… Every pronouncement of writer’s block has never elicited more than skepticism from me. As a science undergraduate I took some electives in a department of Creative Writing. It was there that I first encountered the claims of writer’s block. In fact I faced examples of its manifestations before I encountered any examples of creative writing— the so-called fiction instructor had been suffering from it for many years, and the only thing he had written was a list of things that one could not write about (and which he solemnly handed out to the class). Imagine a chemistry professor stating to the class that he had chemistry-block... his resignation would follow soon after. Of course there were some students who were also stricken. As I listened to them describing the particularities of their ailment I considered that if only they wrote down what they were saying, they would be cured. Then again, who wants to be a doctor prosecuted by a cook before a jury of children who are fonder of sweets than they are of bitter medicine (Socrates).
   I should add that for my entire adult life I have written every day. This is not hyperbole. Every day, in sickness and in health, something literate has been attended to, edited, amended, erased, continued… And it is for this reason and this reason only, that I feel justified in calling myself a writer.

writer: n; 19. For any writer there is only one truth, and it is the most difficult truth to remain faithful to— a writer must write what is their’s to write. Sometimes profound, lifelong silences might be required in order to approach just such a unique creative possibility. And along with silence there are the false starts, the labyrinths, the traps, and the seemingly endless forests of failure and banality that anticipate every courageous exploration. It is therefore understandable why most would rather write specifically for the sake of writing, if only to avoid, with every word, the responsibilities and the fidelity owed to the truth they cannot bear.(A Personal Dictionary)

   To be a writer is to write. It is that simple. And so it follows that if one does not write, one is not a writer. There is no such thing as builder’s block for an architect, or experiment block for a scientist. There are certainly frustrations, just as there may be conditions that make the realization of one’s work impossible. Nevertheless, in such examples one would still do all one could expecting that perhaps one day the restrictive conditions might change. To cease the activities required of an architect or an experimental scientist is to cease being such a thing. The same holds for being a writer. There are many aspects to being a writer beyond putting a pen to paper. To claim that all such activities are blocked is to cease being a writer. Moreover, to insist that one’s malady is so debilitating that it affects one’s ability to even conceive of any written activity is so obviously hysterical that to comment on it can only lend it validity. But I am commenting on it, if only to indicate its complete lack of validity.

   Again— to claim writer’s block is to admit to not being a writer, while at the same time pretending to be one. To be sure, this phenomenon is evidence of some sort of debility— but one that has more to do with delusional thinking than with writing.

   If one is a writer, there is no excuse for not writing, except of course if one is exhausted, physically and mentally from writing. But this is precisely what is not claimed by the stricken. When one remembers a true poet like Osip Mandelstam, who composed poems in his head because the presence of written records of his activity was for him, in Stalinist Russia, a death sentence, it is evident that for a writer, there is truly no excuse for not writing. The excuses such as I am too busy, or I have nothing to write about deserve no comment. There is always something to write— a letter, even a letter to someone who does not exist, or a response to something one has read, editing of old work, the composition of a list of titles of books one would like to write (including a brief synopsis), a manifesto, a refusal speech for an award one will never win, a suicide note… the universe of possible writing is indeed infinite. To claim writer’s block is to demonstrate one’s unwillingness to enter, or participate in such a universe. It is also to forget that there is no other universe.
   In the end, to write is to live. The stereotype of the writer, who exists sheltered from life and the living, is an argument from incredulity. The committed writer could not be more engaged with the world of the living. And this is why it is a rare thing to be a writer.

writing: n; 12. That generative residue, that which persists and which in the end is represented by the words and the book it has left behind is identical with the subject who, in the end, is represented by the moments and by the life he has left behind. (A Personal Dictionary)

If to suffer from writer’s block means only that one does not write, such an ailment affects the majority of humanity. Yet, it is only a small minority of these sufferers who claim that they actually are writers and that, if it was not for their illness, they would have no shortage of evidence to justify their claim. One has to ask why they desire to proclaim such a thing. They are no different from the mass of humanity that does not write. There is nothing shameful in this. At the same time, apart from a lack of self-knowledge and some innocuous dishonesty, there is nothing malicious about claiming to be a writer when one is not. After all, some people claim to be the living incarnation of Christ, or St. Peter, and we understand the true nature of their debility— and it is not salvation-block.

There is always the possibility that the one who claims to be suffering from writer’s block is consenting to the discomforts of delusional thinking in order to save themselves from the perceived horror, and the true suffering, that would ensue should they allow themselves to admit an unbearable truth.

write: v; 9. What we do not write for those do exist, we write for those who do not exist. (A Personal Dictionary)

Absence

2008-05-11T02:07:00.000-07:00

Remnants of Auschwitz (the Witness and the Archive)
by Giorgio Agamben

175 p
1999; MIT Press
ISBN 1-890951-17-X

Giorgio Agamben is one of those strange species of writers and thinkers— the one who can write truly great books (The End of the Poem) as well as truly horrible books (Infancy and History). The difference in the two resides not in the subject matter but in the style of writing, which is to say the presence or absence of clarity. And the style of writing is of course always indicative of the cohesion and integrity of thinking. It would not be excessive to suggest that the more lucid the writing, the more committed the thinker, and hence his thinking, towards his subject. Agambem’s book Remnants of Auschwitz is, thankfully, closer to the first category. However, the book also has a subtitle (the Witness and the Archive) and it is just such superfluity which betrays a bad conscience— a need to say more because the necessary has not been said.

incoherency: n; It is in those moments when all becomes clear, when inexplicables converge into a seemingly common purpose that a writer, a thinker, betrays the ability and the will to honestly and coherently engage the insoluble incoherencies of being alive.(A Personal Dictionary)

The courage it takes to write and to think a truly difficult and intractable subject should not be forgotten. Yet, there is always something unsettling about thinkers who go into such absolute darknesses and yet remain paradoxically lucid. When one is truly in the abyss, even if only in one’s thoughts, one cannot purposefully avoid things. And it is just such a deliberate act of avoidance in Agambem’s Remnants of Auschwitz which concerns me here.

I wish to elaborate on this absence, not because I wish to ignore the merits of the book, of which there are many, but because I find such a lacuna curious… and possibly fatal. It should be said that I actually checked that pages were not missing from my copy of the book, wishing that perhaps the problem originated at the printers, or at the bindery. But no, the omission is Giorgio’s, and perhaps not only his.

hatred: n; 3. The fact that prisoners in Auschwitz referred to those fellow prisoners who had crossed the threshold of humanity and were merely walking corpses as Muslims, is evidence that hatred is one of the last things to be killed in a man, if not the final thing. (A Personal Dictionary)

“The untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name. In the jargon of the camp, it is der Muselmann, literally ‘the Muslim’ ”. And so Agamben introduces the subject for the second chapter of his book.

   The horrific reality of such beings is further elaborated with a description from Primo Levi, “their life is short but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand”. Read out of context, this moving passage by Levi could read as something taken from a totalitarian anthropology textbook.

   One “hesitates to call them living”, but apparently there was no hesitation in calling them Muslims. Interestingly they were not called babies, or mothers, or kittens, or rabbis, or lovers… Quoting Wolfgang Sofsky, Agamben informs us that this class of beings were not called Muselmanner in all the camps: “at Dachau they were ‘cretins’, in Stutthof ‘cripples’, in Mauthausen ‘swimmers’, in Neuengamme ‘camels’, in Buchenwald ‘tired sheiks’ ”. With the exception of Mauthausen, the semantic field is obvious— so obvious, a comment would be the least one could expect. Specifically, the fact that during the destruction of European Jewry those in some of the camps who were the closest to annihilation were referred to as Muslims, and given the present geopolitical reality and the ongoing Jewish – Arab conflict (Agamben’s book was published in 1999) one would think such a situation might warrant a response. It does not take much to imagine that for those able to identify the non-human with Muslim, the colonization of Palestine, a country populated by such so-called non-humans (or cockroaches, as Golda Meir referred to the native Palestinians) would offer no serious moral difficulties. But, apparently such a consideration is beside the point. Or perhaps it is “a difficulty inherent in the very concept of a semantics of enunciation”— oh yes, that must be it. Furthermore, given that sometimes Agamben goes to great lengths and assumes often awkward positions to extend his arguments (invoking the existential crisis of Keats in his exegesis of the shame of survivors, for example), it seems unlikely that he would miss such an obvious historical resonance. But here is precisely where Agamben nimbly maneuvers himself in the dark, deftly avoiding the obvious.

   It is as though this particular darkness has been well visited, and that others have marked the way of passage. The subject is not treacherous at all, but habitual.

   If one reads and allows this absence to resound what follows can only become oppressively ironic. Statements arise as if only to achieve self-mockery. “What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the language in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak.” Indeed! And then again, Agamben seems oblivious to the even more ferocious irony when he writes, “it is certain that, with a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews” (but as Muselmanner, or Muslims).

   By failing to address the obvious, all other intellectual acts appear as evasions of this very failure.

   As the book progresses, in fact after the second chapter that deals with der Muselmann, Agamben clearly loses his way. His darkness becomes illuminated by the banal fluorescence of academic pseudo-ontologies and their accompanying jargon. It is as if he realized what was at stake in the second chapter, but turned away, and decided to write another book, the book of the subtitle, the book that was not necessary.

intention: n; 6. Our so-called good intentions are the most effective means of keeping us from effecting good. (A Personal Dictionary)

   Reading the testimonies of the figurative Muselmanner that conclude Agamben’s book— that is, reading the accounts of those who survived the hell of being Muslim—I cannot avoid, amidst the moving evocations, the feeling of absurdity.

   I imagine, on the drug-ravaged streets of Vancouver, those recent arrivals to the population of the annihilated referring to those lifeless forms creeping towards their death as Jews— it is that kind of absurdity I am referring to, and which Agamben, unfortunately failed to notice… or so I hope.

   I will end my commentary with the lines that Agamben uses to end his book, which are those of a camp-song sung at Auschwitz (as recounted by a surviving Muselmann, Bronislaw Goscinki):

What’s worse than a Muselmann?
Does he even have the right to live?
Isn’t he there to be stepped on, struck, beaten?
He wanders through the camp like a stray dog.
Everyone chases him away, but in the crematorium is his deliverance.
The camp infirmary does away with him!

perdition: n; “A world speaks its way to perdition” – Max Spalter.

Internal Exiles

2007-10-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Captive Mind
by Czeslaw Milosz

251 p
1953; Vintage Books
ISBN 0-394-74724-0

   "All about him, in the city streets, he sees the frightening shadows of internal exiles, irreconcilable, non-participating, eroded by hatred."

   As my internal exile has at last broken through the barriers of appearance and laid claim to the everyday, I am taking advantage of the penetrating mirror, the gift of lucidity, which Czeslaw Milosz has proffered in his book The Captive Mind.

   His examination of the responses of creative individuals to the terrors of European totalitarian society is diagnostic for the creative individual of any age. This is not an argument for relativism— some epochs must withstand inhumanities that others may never have to experience. Yet, for the creative life there must always be forces that are inimical to it and which are detemined to undermine the world of possibilities which such a life presumes. It is for this reason that The Captive Mind speaks of an eternal, embattled, present.

   There comes a moment in every creative life when a choice must be made, or rather, when a concession is demanded. There comes a moment when one is required to judge oneself and to act decisively upon that judgment. Such moments are unmistakable— time does not only stop, it grows sick and trembles. Such moments are also often fatal, creatively speaking. This is because it is always at such moments that the internal exile takes his first, irreversible step, and where, amidst the imagined fanfare of pragmatism and common sense the specific creative challenges for which a certain mind is ideally suited are denied validity and subsequently betrayed for an ease that will always be illusory.

   If one possesses an ability and does not make appropriate use of it, this ability becomes an obstruction. So it is with the mind, and so it is with people who, in certain societies, do not fall into line, do not perform an adequate gleichshaltung. Such obstructions must be removed. Internal exile is how an individual disposes of himself. The cost of remaining within society, in such a manner, are always more than one can afford. These reasons for remaining, some of which are valid, some of which are not, run from a valorization of the authority who tyrannizes them to a love of those closest to them and a refusal to leave them behind. Reasons aside, the point is that the internal exile achieves what it often takes an inquisition to achieve…
I think
therefore
I must not think

   If internal exile is not the beginning of the end, it is how the end courts us, seduces us, assures us that it is our end.

   The phenomenon of internal exile is the not solely the symptom of creative individuals, or specifically of intellectuals and writers. However, it is the writer who, as one charged with the task of subjective expression, is most able to verbalize and therefore to manifest the breach and duplicity which characterize the struggles of internal exile.

   For the writer, any questions of writing must be a question of living. For any poet, a question of writing reaches deeper than the human moment. A question such as the limits of lyricism is a challenge to being itself. It sounds grandiose to state it in such a way but such a thing far from being simply an aesthetic curiosity. There is a formula for writing: why write = why live. The justifications for either activity must be in complete agreement. It is a law of equivalence.

There are certitudes a man can never get over. And that is a strength, a blessing.

   Over the years I have asked myself the following question: If no one could read except you, what would you write? My answer has not always been the same. Or rather, the correct answer, my true answer, is always the same but it is shouted down by pseudo-solutions, complacencies and conciliations. Yes, the true answer remains:
I will write to the best of my abilities.
I will write for the ear that has been severed.
I will write.
I will...

   It is not an exaggeration to decribe my entire adult life, and much of my adolescent life, as a full-time creative occupation. There has not been a day that I have not created something, a day that I have not written or developed an idea, a day that I have not been faithful to that part of myself that creates. Long ago I remember making a pact with myself, telling myself that whenever and wherever I had an idea or an urge to write, whenever I had a creative inspiration of any kind, I would attend to it, immediately. I can honestly say that I have never broken that trust. The result of such fidelity is a respect and an honest appraisal of creativity. And this, of course, is insufficient. There are also objective conditions which must exist, a realtionship to others and to one’s society, and a sense of place for one’s creative efforts to ensure that one's creative activity does not turn irretrievably inward. Incessant activity that is groundless finds its foundation in a subjective abyss. Lavish interior castles are erected as impossibilities from which the world can be ragarded as a fable that one has learned by heart but which one no longer believes in.

   As Milosz reminds me “The objective conditions necessary to the realization of a work of art, as we know, is a highly complex phenomenon, involving one’s public, the possibility of contact with it, the general atmosphere, and above all freedom from involuntary subjective control.”

   Writing is not to be found in the processions of obedience; writing can only be witnessed, if at all, fleeing obedience… for its life.

   And though it is certainly true that “what can be said openly is often much less interesting than the emotional magic of defending one’s private sanctuary” there is a way to speak and to write and to think which is not a descent but an ascent, which is not a retreat but a way forward. The tension that characterizes such a situation is explicit in lyricism. The lyric poet embodies the subjective rift, the constant struggle between the consistencies of hermeticism and the contradictions of comprehensibility.
   The world is always there, making its demands. And then there comes an event, a crisis, in which its demands becomes commands, and it becomes an authority against which all subjective importunities can only prostrate themselves. As Henri Alleg said, describing his experience as a victim of French atrocities in Algeria, “in this enormous prison, where each cell houses a quantity of suffering, it is almost indecent to speak of oneself.”

Almost...

   This may be exactly the moment when the subjective must speak, when the voice of an individual is needed, when the thought, the dream of a single person is the only thing that can divine a path through a collective nightmare.

   I have always believed, as Milosz also expresses, that for things that matter, “every form of literature could be applied to them except fiction”.

   A poet will always have work. The trouble is finding an employer.

   It may be that the overwhelming majority of internal exiles are poets. It may be that the overwhelming majority of poets are internal exiles. I sense it has always been this way.

   The poet writes as an attempt to alleviate the ruinous effects of the future, which as a poet must be borne and endured amidst the uncomprehending presence of others. As I said, the poet will always have work.

   Yet, if all an artist feels “is loathing at the discrepancy between what he would wish the world to be and what it is in reality, then he is incapable of standing still and beholding”.

   It is crucial that for every “disappointed lover of the world who longs for harmony and purity, discipline and faith”, that they force their disappointment to journey much further, past the ease of collective insanities. Salvation is not a condition that occurs here on Earth. To promise such a thing, or to attempt to manifest it is the sure path to mass graves and to destruction at a scale that no creative act can ever adequately redress.

word: n; 4. We all have the words we deserve. And our words cannot help but carry into the world whatever treasures, whatever rot, that constitutes our minds. (A Personal Dictionary)

“Whoever truly creates is alone”-

this statement is a shibboleth...

and with it one can
continue.

Romanian Roots

2007-03-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

Mirce Eliade: The Romanian Roots (1907-1945)
by Mac Linscott Ricketts

1460 p; 2 vols.
1988; Columbia University Press
ISBN 0-88033-145-3

   The necessary book, the crucial book, will always find us.

   Sometimes the path of reading winds through distant countries. Sometimes a necessary book that has stalked you for years will finally encounter you on a street called Rue Princesse. That is, if one is fortunate. I was.

   One morning I wrote the following:

synthesis: n; For those blessed with an ability for intellectual synthesis, it is also a curse. The greater the lateral thinking the narrower the path available for thinking— at its extreme the way is no more than a thread stretched across an abyss. Such a way can be successfully travelled, but the thinker must possess balance, grace, and an almost inhuman lightness of being. (A Personal Dictionary)

Later that day I was in The Village Voice bookstore in Paris buying a book by Norman Manea as a gift for someone. M., who works at the store, commented on the book and this led to a conversation about Romanian writers, including E.M. Cioran, whom he knew. The conversation expanded to include Romanians in general, peculiarities of their behavior, my father (who was born in Romania, and the fact that I only seemed to buy books from Romanian authors from him. Eventually he suggested a something that I must read. I knew the book he was referring to as it had been on my list for many years: Romanian Roots, the 2 volume biography of Mirce Eliade by Ricketts.

“To derive maximum spiritual benefit from our reading, we need a guide that will tell us in what order to read books, and at what season.” – Mirce Eliade.

   Sometimes, thankfully, buying a book is about more than just buying a book.

   If there is one writer who embodies synthesis it is Mirce Eliade. And even though he is not one of my favourite writers, I recognize his indefatigable will and his yearning for synthesis which is constantly grappling with an expansive intelligence. Moreover, that Eliade had an encyclopaedic mind is an understatement and I admire not only his achievement but what his striving entails: creativity as opposed to destruction, mindfulness as opposed to mindlessness, presence as opposed to oblivion, culture as opposed to war. Yet, there is something more problematic about Eliade that concerns me, that engages me… that unsettles me. Romanian roots, thinking, writing, living, being— his and mine— such is the extent of my involvement.

   And as in any book that is necessary one’s current obsessions and persistent exasperations rise from the pages and begin to assemble into something comprehensible. From the pages of Romanian Roots it was all that was unresolved in my conception of the relationship between thinking and being, between the intellect and morality, that began to assume a meaningful order.

   I consider it an indication of maturity when I recognize that those writers or thinkers I admire may be much more unsavoury than I would like to imagine.

   I have become convinced that it can be a brief a journey from a reader or a thinker to a fascist. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it is because the act of thinking freely not only leads one to a place where such thinking is annulled, but familiarizes us with such a place. Whatever the etiology, I am no longer surprised to find extreme and often horrific conceptions present in those whose thinking I admire, just I am no longer appalled to discover extreme and often horrific acts committed by those whose living I admire.

   It was not always like this of course. In the beginning I assumed that in order to act well one only needed to think (or the converse: to be evil or maleficent one must be ignorant). In other words, I adhered to the standard formula of enlightenment: the more one knows, the more one thinks, the better one will be. That terror and misery follow upon such an assumption is the sorry lesson of history. The formula is in evident need of revision. But this is not to abandon the relationship between thinking and being— it is an even greater error to consider thinking and being as autonomous endeavours. And so, where does thinking go wrong? How does the ability to think lead one to accept living amidst moral ruins? Is thinking, and more specifically, the ability to think freely, necessarily open to the inhuman? Eliade was certainly well acquainted with the treacherous terrain that one encounters as a consequence of free thinking. Early on in his writing Eliade was quite content to make an idol out of Romania and the Romanian people. When Eliade writes, “what originality is for an individual, nationality is for a people” he wrongly asserts that the collectivity called a nation exists and acts just as an individual does. It is often forgotten that it is a great leap from the notion of an individual personality to that of collective personality. Moral appraisals of personal conduct become impossible and absurd when the conduct is attributed to a collectivity. The contortions one’s ethical being must assume in order to even consider the so-called behaviour of a collective agency are functionally equivalent to permissive gestures. And this Eliade discovered well enough. Predictably, the dream of a pure and vigorous proto-Romanian found resonance with the ultra-nationalist, and anti-Semitic Iron Guard of Corneliu Codreanu. But the intellectual does not intend such application of his thinking, or so the refrain of intellectual detachment goes. But this is exactly my dilemma— is the intention irrelevant, is it an epiphenomenon that serves only to appease the one who is uncomfortable with the vivacity of their own thoughts? It is not enough claim a privileged position for the activities of the intellect. The idea that recedes, that excuses itself from experience in order to organize that experience is an idea that must be led from its lair.

   That a thinker or writer must ensure that only good uses are made of their thoughts or writing will ensure that nothing is thought or written. The point at issue is not what happens to a thought, but what comes after. Eliade wrote, “I only want to express a mind that thinks and feels as it pleases and not as it ‘ought’ to think and feel”. Ought comes after, always. It is the failure to definitively respond to a perceived improper use of one’s thinking or writing that characterizes a moral failure. In this sense, at least in his youth, Eliade was not above reproach.

   I am reminded of something Berdyaev wrote:

“The major evils and the principal sufferings of life are due not so much to the baseness and wickedness of individual people, but rather to the base and wicked ideas which take possession of their minds, to social prejudices, beliefs which have become vague and cloudy, which have degenerated into a mere inheritance from the environment in which they arose.”

   The thinker and the writer must be committed to recognizing and treating such pathologies. Writing can be a moral imperative— and the opposite of wronging.

   Eliade was a firm believer in the primacy of the spiritual. Consistent with this he believed that “to espouse a political ideology is to abdicate responsibility to himself”. Yet, he stated that “the majority of ‘spiritual’ currents of our century are political in essence”. The confusion here is not simply intellectual. It is a moral confusion. We all share it. Ideals of convenience such as intellectual detachment only encourage the confusion to elaborate its knots.

   It is best not to forget that when the intellect is involved, naiveté often precedes catastrophe.

*

   For Eliade, if all life points to the primacy of the spiritual there is attendant with this conviction a strong predilection for mysticism— and this is where any difficulties I have with Eliade and his thinking begin. Specifically, I have trouble accepting the mystical gambit: there is another world.

world: n; 3. There is no other world; there is only this world. Any other world, if it exists, must be entirely unknown to us and of no consequence. This is because we are the world and wherever we go and into whatever realms we venture, even if only in knowledge, we bring the world with us. To know is to know of the world. And we can know nothing else. The unknowable, the truly transcendent, has no relation to us. Every so-called alternate reality is an act of bad faith— reality is indivisible and though we may qualify it however we want, in doing so we earn its mockery. (A Personal Dictionary)

The dissatisfaction with this world and the yearning for another is understandable— it may even be a sign of intelligence. However, the longing for such alternate possibilities of being usually lead away from what is and from what can be thought, resulting in a habit of thinking which is not thinking at all but mysticism. There is something distasteful, even reprehensible, about taking the mystical detour in this day and age. It seems that one should just know better and that if one must flee in such a way one should never seek to evangelize one’s retreat. The fortunate case is when a mystic believes this other world is uninhabitable. Such a world will then not be a world at all but a consistent and stable renunciation of the world of which they are a part. True renunciation of this world will make no effort to redeem it, only to survive it. There can be no problem of socially ruinous consequences stemming from such a conception since such mystics are always solitary beings. The problems begin when a mystic believes the other world is inhabitable. And the problems become unbearable should a mystic ever experience any meaningful political or social power. The promise of living in what cannot be is the mystic’s unique offering. It is here where heavens, hells, and all conceivable utopias proliferate. And the trouble with any utopia, with every heaven and every hell, is access. Some will be admitted and some will not. And so there must be rules regarding who goes where. It could be argued that we are fortunate that there are some among us who happen to know what these rules are and will act as our guides. Unfortunately the rules often seem contradictory, irrational, arbitrary. It is much simpler to bypass all the technical vocabulary and spiritual bureaucracy and to generalize: some will be the chosen people and the rest will be excluded. This is much easier for everyone to understand.

The mystical tendencies in Eliade’s thinking, just like the mystical tendencies in anyone’s thinking, are indications of those places where thinking has ceased. And discovering where the thought of another loses its way is not a futile activity— we are all lost in precisely the same manner.

detour: n; There is no inner world, just as there is no outer world— there is only the world. We think that simply by closing our eyes, or our mouths, we have established ourselves as something separate— a world apart. However, any close examination of our anatomy, our physiology, is enough to convince us that we are convolutions of nature, a detour that the world has taken. Complexity and inexplicability are not sufficient arguments for dualism. And though we can call this continuity of the world into question by closing our eyes, or our mouths, it is by opening our eyes, or our mouths, that the true extent of the detour the world has taken becomes evident. (A Personal Dictionary)

*

   Along with mysticism and utopianism there is one final element in this problematic trinity which manifests itself in Eliade’s thought: nationalism

   Perhaps my objections to nationalism are a consequence of living in a country where waving a flag seems absurd, even distasteful; or, perhaps my objections are due to my living above a country where waving a flag is more than distasteful, it is oppressive. Nevertheless, any nationalism which is not a negation and which is not expressed in the form of not-this is unimaginable to me. I like to think that such fantasies are frivolous but often they are nefarious. To be proud of one’s country is, in the end, to be proud of something that does not exist. To die for it, or to live for it, is do die or live for an ideal, a phantasm. Yet, because this is what we spend most of our lives doing does not make it commendable. It should be remembered that often when we live or die for an ideal, for what does not exist, we do so at the expense of what does exist.

   To attribute a meaningful and messianic difference to one’s objectified fantasy as compared to the fantasy of another would be laughable if the consequences were not so brutal.

   The xenophobic and chauvinistic argument that underlies nationalism has a fatal inconsistency— the so-called culture which is to be preserved, or even saved, is the same culture that has been overrun and overwhelmed. To preserve such a thing one should expect the same results, that is, to be challenged and overrun by the same forces. If someone were consistent in their nationalistic reasoning they would call for the institution of a radically new culture, one which would not respond negatively or succumb to perceived threats to its vitality. But this is never done. Every so-called man of the future is always a man from the past. There is always a model, a proto-being who existed in a Golden Age. The fact that I understand every desire to return to a Golden Age, whether it is childhood or a primeval forest, as revealing precisely the direction one should not go is what differentiates my thinking from that of Eliade. In this sense I am not Romanian. Yet, I am not about to raise my flag and claim that Canada is responsible for my anti-utopian tendencies— I would not consider my outlook typical of the breed.

   To his credit Eliade moved from the simplistic attribution of an animus to a people to the more abstract position of hypothesizing that there is an intelligible structure which animates a culture. It was in this field that his later work on myth and religion would flourish. Yet, there remains in his thinking a tension between whether it is the abstract people who are bearers of such structures or whether such structures are created and people are then able to live within them.

   The possible existence of such a structure holds some fascination for me. To further abstract such a structure and call it a home leads me to wonder whether there might be some proper place for each of us, a true home to which we might return, or which we might discover for the first time. A true home within which we will be recognized and will be able to recognize others as being of the same kind. A home that will have little to do with ethnicity or inherited beliefs, but a place existing at a more fundamental existential level.

   Is there such a thing as a cultural trait? Is there something which defines and therefore separates one from another? If there is an organic relationship between a historical period and the disease which dominates it (e.g. hysteria), is there also an organic relationship between a culture and the ideas which animate it?

   I have always wondered why it is that some of my favourite writers are Romanian, if there was not something in their lives, some wind that blew in through their windows… a wind which also disturbed the sleep, or comforted the dreams, of my ancestors.

   Eliade (and others) have suggested that if there is such a thing as a Romanian soul it can be found by passing through the word dor. This is a word for which there is no English homologue; it refers to a nostalgia or longing, not for something in particular, not for an object, but for an existential condition: I am not where I should be and I know it, I feel it. I know this word. Dor expresses a melancholia founded upon a general dissatisfaction with what is, with the here and the now of man’s predicament, his alienation from the sacred, his spiritual longing, and the necessity of his profane pursuits. Yes, I know this word— it has never been foreign to me. I have read it and recognized it in those writers which led me here: Celan, Cioran, Fondane, Manea. And if, as Eliade believed, “it is impossible to convert anyone to a belief that is foreign to them”, my recognition of such a thing is a recognition of what I myself possess.

   Yet, it is this dor, this dissatisfaction with a current state of affairs which seems such a suitable precondition for reactionary thinking, nationalism, and so on, which is also that specific cultural trait which enables us to live in this world in a human way, demanding that things which are unbearable be remedied and things which are indefensible be abandoned. And to refer to such a trait as Romanian, or Brazilian, or Malaysian, etc., is to misunderstand its nature. That I, a Canadian with tenuous Romanian roots can recognize what is alive in the thoughts of so many Romanian writers is evidence not of descent from a common progenitor or of membership in some exclusive community. Instead it speaks to the possibility of collapsing distance and time, of transcending local restraints and one’s adherence to collective objectifications.

   It means that human possibility is not a prescription but an effort.

clarity: n; 2. There is a very good reason why it is difficult to find examples of writing that is clear— clarity must be lived. (A Personal Dictionary)

There is no satisfying way to end what amounts to introductory remarks about a life that was lived and written and thought as exhaustively as could be imagined. Instead I will consider all that I have written here as contribution to a foreword to the labyrinthine literary legacy bequeathed by Eliade.

...remembering that in spite of everything

“every person retains some capacity to love, some capacity for spiritual growth, and so long as that is nourished, he remains alive”– Mirce Eliade.

and yes,
we all have the words we deserve.

An Unresolved Conversation

2007-01-21T23:30:00.000-08:00

Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger :
An Unresolved Conversation (1951-1970)
by James K. Lyon

249 p
2006; Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN 0-8018-8302-4

   In his introduction to Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation (1951-1970) James Lyon states, “What some may also consider a limitation of this study is the question— which I do not answer to my satisfaction and probably not to that of many readers— of what drew Celan to someone who in many ways was his polar opposite. I have not so much refused to answer this question as I have concluded that it probably cannot be answered”.

   And so, I will propose an answer. In fact, I have had the answer. It was only this book that was missing.

   And it is a book filled with treasures, unexpected treasures. The subject of the relationship between Celan and Heidegger has had to bear many instances of criticism that proceeded from often dubious personal biases. Here, Lyon’s analysis issues not from some historical, cultural, or aesthetic critique but primarily from the (available) correspondence and the detailed notes and marginal comments Celan made during his reading of Heidegger’s works. It is refreshing to find someone who is not uncomfortable with what is, while also maintaining an admirable sense of when to refrain from allowing their arguments to proceed from what should be, or what should have been. (I should also mention that I also find it irresistible to discover what my favorite writers have read, and to read how they read).

   I am going to pass over the details of my own decisive encounter with Celan, just as I will bypass the history of my often treacherous entanglements with Heidegger. Let me only say that Heidegger taught me the immanent critique of all being— the basis for the understanding that every creative activity will always seek to overcome itself. And as for Celan— all the weight of experience, of being-in-the-world where language has betrayed, where the language has been an accomplice in all that is terrible, where language can only be held with the greatest scepticism— this is the weight that the poem must bear. A poem is then an effort, an almost impossible, futile effort. Such a burden is too much for any poem to bear and so during the poem's emergence there is a buckling and then inevitably, a collapse. What remains is what we (as readers) encounter as the poem. What remains is what is resistant in language. Such poems as these are poems of foundation.

   I have always thought that Celan’s poetics was the best fit for Heidegger’s thinking. And I always thought that Heidegger also knew this; yet, for reasons that may be repugnant, or innocent, he used Holderlin, George, and Trakl as his exemplars.

   Simply put: For Heidegger the Jewish poet both radically complicated and decisively informed (his, German) thinking and Being; for Celan, the German thinking and Being both radically complicated and decisively informed (his, Jewish) poetics.

   More specifically: The problematic involvement of Celan and Heidegger was ontological in nature. Heidegger, being a thinker and not a poet, recognized the poetic world that Celan inhabited. He approached it in thought but could get no closer than that. He forgot, or did not know, or did not want to believe that the final, decisive steps must always be more than merely-thought… they must be lived. Celan, being a poet, recognized in Heidegger one who was approaching his world in thought. He understood that in Heidegger was the possibility of encountering one who spoke the same language. The problem was that for Celan, one’s poetic being was prior to one’s thinking, as it was to one’s actions. One’s thoughts, one’s life, must necessarily follow from one’s poetic orientation. As difficult as this might be to achieve it was still the only possible ontology. And so, for Celan, it was bewildering and enraging that Heidegger could think his position but could not live it, could not be it.

   Life is a complicated undertaking. And no more so than when a poet is thinking, or when a thinker journeys into poetry. When two such people meet, even if they are thoroughly acquainted with each other’s work, it will not be surprising if they encounter each other as strangers— and this only because they cannot help but greet each other with their burdens of generative confusions and exasperated certainties. Speaking a language so similar, or speaking from a language so similar, they can hear only echoes. For each it is as though there is no one else speaking. For each it is as though an encounter never took place.

   At times I feel it may be fortunate to remain a stranger to those who are the most influential and captivating. Regret is often an inflection of relief. Sometimes distance, even that of decades, or of cultures, is a gift that enables a conversation to not only persist, but to find a resolution.

Celan: n; 2. His resistance is the resistance of having everything to say and only language with which to say it.
(A Personal Dictionary)

And so... this is an answer.

Not the answer, but a response.

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

2007-01-04T18:55:00.000-08:00

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
by Hans Blumenberg

677 p
translated by Robert M. Wallace
1983; MIT Press
ISBN 0262021846

   This book sat, slouched, reclined, and finally slept on the shelf above my desk for over six years. I made a start at it once but immediately realized that I was incapable of engaging it. There were requirements that I did not possess. My papers were not in order. Not knowing what I was lacking I returned the book to its purgatory and read Blumenberg’s much more modest Shipwreck With Spectator. Years passed and my literary wandering continued until I reached Hans Vaihinger and The Philosophy of What If ? From this I was delivered into The History of Materialism by F.A. Lange. Suddenly, that presence on the shelf above my desk, instead of mocking me, seemed to welcome me. I was ready.
   And so I set out into The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Its demands are not slight. It is not a book that can be picked up and then abandoned. To participate in Blumenberg’s expansive view of history, and to accompany his arguments rather than try to catch up to them, one must dedicate one’s time. Silence helps. Being in a foreign country by yourself for a month is also useful.

   The proposal that modernity, and its attendant idea of progress, are the secularization of eschatology is what Blumenberg denies. His arguments issue from his detailed analyses of the intellectual and theological history that begins with the Greeks and continues through the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance. Much philosophy of history seems too clean. Dreams are clean; life is a bloody and imperfect spectacle. In reading Blumenberg’s account of spiritual and intellectual history I understood that the intellectual exhaustion that besets certain individuals is symptomatic of a spiritual exhaustion of their corresponding culture. As well, his conception of history, so deceptively simple, is undeniably fertile. As Blumenberg argues, the continuity of history is a “continuity of problems rather than of solutions, of questions rather than of answers”. Moreover, once a certain question is posed “it becomes unavoidable”. It is precisely such possibilities of being, such survivors of questions, which I recognize as companions.

epoch: n; In the history of ideas, in the accounts of the intellectual battles and the corresponding successes and failures, what is not recounted is that within any epoch there are those who have thought through, partially or fully, the contradictions which characterize and haunt their age. In an individual the end of an epoch can be reached and the subsequent transcendence of their particular age may be, if not achieved, then at least attempted. A process that may take a culture hundreds of years can be achieved within the intellectual development of a single person. And yet, it is as though only the small, hesitant steps can be followed. For a culture the giant strides that lead irreversibly elsewhere are not enticing. Understanding, at the level of a culture, is less a matter of arriving somewhere than it is a question of maintaining cohesion. It would seem that the less understanding the better, as though understanding itself has a dissipative effect, as though any epochal conception is culturally ruinous. (A Personal Dictionary)

The question is not important for the answer which may succeed it, but for the possibility that will survive it.

I will leave it at that.

Follow the words

2007-01-03T17:02:00.000-08:00

A book is a fever that should be followed… because it wants to be followed.

book: n; 4. When we read a book the book also reads us. And often, with nothing but platitudes and banalities before it, it is the book which closes us and sets us aside.
(A Personal Dictionary)

   A writer who does not read has never written anything.

   I read. I have always read. It may not be hyperbole to suggest that in books reside everything that I seek and everything that seeks me.

   I follow words into often miraculous places yet I am always surprised to find little evidence that others have made a similar journey.

   And so, perhaps I should make some noise, attract some attention. Perhaps I should alert people, or at least remind them, that here there may be something of interest…

   Perhaps.

   I discover books almost entirely through reading other books: the recommendation or denunciation by an author I love; a chance mention of an author who resembles one I admire; the possible futures to be explored in an extensive bibliography; the identification of similar concerns in the publisher’s catalogue listings, etc. Suggestions from friends usually go unheeded. Book leads to book— that is how it has always been.

   And so, in these pages some of my literary wandering will reveal itself. Neither advertisement nor critique, I will merely send some words forth from my reading. And rather than fill my days attempting to detail everything I read I will focus on those places where I have found few signs of others.

   The fragments that can be found here will be of no value to the non-reader. They are for those who read, for those who live with their language and follow its course through the thinking of others so that they may think their own way through the life that confounds and enchants, enrages and encourages, everyone who cares to approach it.

   What follows are not reviews or exhaustive accounts, but glimpses of one who has wandered, of one who has been and now is elsewhere.

   You might call these efforts paths.

   Then again, they may be love letters.