The Perjury Which Denies or Destroys Reality

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 a 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

(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, and 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

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

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 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 regarded 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.