OL' CHANTY - Chanticleer Magazine Online
EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Two - or should I say, Issue Twenty-Three - a wee bit late, but better that than never.
My ‘Bible’, The Penguin Dictionary Of Symbols, says nothing at all about number twenty-three , but plenty concerning number two, so I suppose we’re stuck with that for the time being.
Two, it seems, is the number of division and duality. “…the symbol of confrontation, conflict and recoil and denotes either balance achieved or hidden threat. It is the figure which epitomises all ambivalence and split personality… the first to separate and separates most radically - creator and creature, black and white, male and female, matter and spirit and so on…” Perhaps I should add, apropos my own essay in this issue, Apollo and Dionysus, Ego and Id, and the Columns of Force and Form in the Cabalistic Tree of Life, which produces the Column of Equilibrium between them. You need such extremes to balance each other out. Poetry too generates a similar dynamic equilibrium between force (energy) and form. After all, the subject-matter of poetry is only a pretext for bringing a certain combination and order of words into being which results from this equilibrium - or “balance achieved” as it says in the quote.
However, do not be mislead by this duality. It is not the ‘duality’ of the party-political sphere, the ‘duality’ of Tweedledee versus Tweedledum, with Tweedleduh thrown in for good measure. The only equilibrium which can emerge from such a duality is that of absolute tedium. And of course it’s the same in the cultural sphere as well, which increasingly resembles it. I mean the choice between a Martin Amis and an Ian McEwan is not so different from that between Labour and Tory now, is it? The same tribal loyalties in defence of ‘our’ civilisation against the barbarian hordes at a time when said ‘civilisation’ is coming apart at the seams.
And so on to my usual ‘complaint’. In this issue there is an overwhelming preponderance of male writers again. This is not intentional. It has much more to do with the preponderance of male writers who send publishable work to me, and I don’t believe in discriminating on the basis of gender - race, sexuality or anything else for that matter. Nevertheless, women do form 50% of the world’s population and, generally speaking, write with a different voice to men. So, if I am keen to include women, it is because they provide a certain balance, or redress the imbalance of publishing so many men - including myself. So, if you know of women writers out there - or are one yourself - whose work you think is publishable, kindly send or suggest that they send some of it to Ol’ Chanty.
Finally, at the last minute, I received an intriguing piece of prose which at first I was unable to place in a category. Was it an essay? Or was it fiction? Eventually, in consultation with the author, Ian MacFadyen, I decided it should be classed as an essay. What I found so intriguing about it, apart from its ironic evocation of the avant-garde of the 60s, was its use of the language of Deconstruction to deconstruct and, in a way, pass a death-sentence on itself. I have always admired Derrida and the deconstructive project, but I also feel that once Academia got hold of his ideas, they simply went haywire and became an insuperable barrier to the intelligible discussion of all ideas. I remember the 70s and particularly the 80s and 90s as the heyday of Deconstruction and Post-Modernism, and this essay is a timely reminder of the paralysing madness of that period and its totally totalising detotalisation of totalising discourse - if you get my drift, and, if you don't, well the essay should give you some idea of what was involved.
Have a nice day.
CONTENTS
POEMS Donald Young
SHORT STORY Bonny Finberg
POEMS Idris Caffrey
POEM Gerald England
ESSAY Ian MacFadyen
POEM Geoff Stevens
POEMS David Cooke
QUOTE John Cage
ESSAY Richard Livermore
REVIEW Richard Livermore
POEMS - Donald Young
To My Aging Father
After Dylan Thomas
Father, go gentle into that good night,–
don’t rage against the dying light,
but let the sea-rain
wash your tears,
allow the gulls to scream
your sun will burn again.
Don’t whine that after loving
Dame Absurdity, your words
still forked no lightning.
Don’t gripe that always
trying to be good
your frail deeds never danced,
and singing the sun on its way,
you only added a sorrow-
ful light to its flames.
And even though near death
don’t rage against the sad height–
another dawn will raise you up.
I say– there’s more in the gift
of love than a ragged coat
to clothe despair
and father, with your fierce tears,
don’t curse, but bless me–
go gentle into that good night.
On Neruda’s Theme
A piece of earth,
he labored in the hell
of the blast furnace.
At night he had no time
to dream while he slept.
His son with his father’s help
got jobs, made dough
bought cars, built homes–
he said of his dad,
“We come from different worlds.”
The sons of such men
are legion–
they wear the golden plume,
they do nothing, they consume,
they’re worth any number of ants.
Will they turn out good?
What will they make of the world?
Neruda and I don’t know,
but the questions, he says,
will never die.
SHORT STORY - Bonny Finberg
BRANDY AND BEANS
Sunday night, August 15, 1959, at precisely ten o’clock, Rose Funkwater rubbed her eyes while the commercial break came on. Her languorous rubbing caused an unusually striking pattern of black and white diamonds and checks to spiral behind her eyelids. Next to her on the end table were a dinner plate, crusted with the leftovers of a franks ’n beans dinner, three empty beer cans and an ashtray filled with butts smoked down to the filters. An unopened can of beer sat atop the TV. The TV Guide lay open on the floor next to her feet. She’d just finished a family size box of Schneck’s Triple Chocolate Donuts and a liter of root beer into which a half bottle of vodka had been mixed. No one really knows what happened after that typical moment in Rose’s predictable life. Even if they brought Rose back from the dead, she probably couldn’t explain it herself.
Goldie Hancock rang the doorbell of Rose’s first floor apartment on Monday morning at around ten-fifteen, their usual time for coffee, cake and gossip. She remembered that it was a little earlier than usual because Goldie had an appointment to get her hair dyed for her granddaughter’s graduation from cosmetology school. When there was no answer, Goldie tried the door. She knew that Rose rarely went anywhere, and if she did go anywhere it was never before three in the afternoon since Goldie was her only friend and Rose’s son lived in Delaware in a trailer park. He’d never visited much over the years, and his visits had stopped completely ever since his car was repossessed.
When the door wouldn’t open, Goldie tried looking through the windows. She didn’t see Rose in the kitchen, so she walked around to the other side and peered into the living room. There she saw her old friend Rose seated in front of the TV, everything around her as it usually was, except for Rose herself, whose charred remains looked as if she’d been blown up from the inside, only her head and lower limbs intact, her face frozen into shocked reverence. The TV was still on.
When the police investigated they noticed some queer inconsistencies. The ceiling paint above her body had buckled and peeled in the heat and the pilot lights in the kitchen had been extinguished. Her parakeet and chihuahua were dead, both having suffocated from a lack of oxygen in the apartment. A Perry Como record, found on top of the Hi-Fi, was melted, and the beer can on top of the TV had exploded.
There was little coverage of this strange event other than the local television station. It attracted the attention of a few paranormal fanatics and some science-minded sceptics. Both cited reports of the same type of occurrences. There was the 17th century claim that a German man had self-ignited after having imbibed an inordinate amount of brandy. The paranormalists suggested it could be related to “Fire Spooks” as reported in Lucknow, India, when official government disaster relief was called in to deal with mysteriously induced “spirit fires.” The sceptics cited the posibility of the “candle effect.” They speculated that perhaps Rose had suffered a second or third degree burn on a small area of her body, sustaining shock, falling unconscious, her body fat slowly burning like an oil lamp. They said there may have been foul play, emphasizing that not only is the body mostly water, but that not much of it is readily set afire besides fat tissue and methane. Dr. Virgil Flackman of the Boston Sceptical Association was quoted as saying, “To get a chemical reaction in a human body which would lead to ignition would require some doing. If the deceased had recently eaten an enormous amount of hay that was infested with bacteria, enough heat might be generated to ignite the hay, but not much besides the gut and intestines would probably burn. Or, if the deceased had been eating the newspaper and drunk some oil, and was left to rot for a couple of weeks in a well-heated room, their gut might ignite.” He went on to explain, however, that the ignition point of human fat may be too low and that in order to get the fire going there would have to be an external source.
A Dr. Franz Grolsch, whose hobby was researching paranormal phenomena, did an experiment with a pig, based on the knowledge that the composition of pig fat is identical to that of humans. He wrapped a dead pig in a blanket, poured a small amount of gasoline on the blanket, and ignited it. Even the bones were destroyed after five hours of continuous burning. The damage to the pig was identical to that of Rose. There was a slight flurry of outrage from a small group of anti-vivisectionists.
These reports were picked up by the local paper. Goldie, having read them, speculated that perhaps Rosie, having eaten a prodigious amount of beans, became a tight container for a goodly amount of methane gas, which having festered in her stomach, was finally ignited by the alcoholic content of the vodka.
Goldie, being Rose’s only associate, and the last person to be in contact with her, became a minor celebrity in her own right. The local television station set up cameras at the front door of her apartment building and interviewed her on the steps.
Goldie told the reporter, “She had a long life. I remember one time, I guess it was her seventy-fifth birthday, Rosie says to me, she says, ‘I never been young in my life.’ I never really knew what she meant by that. She always thought maybe some day she’d be part of something important, you know, be on television or something. She lived a long time and it finally happened. It’s a shame she couldn’t know she’d be, you know, on television. It just goes to show, you never know.”
The reporter looked into the TV camera.
“Where are the answers?” He paused. “Better Science.”
* * *
POEMS - Idris Caffrey
Candle Light
I light a candle,
Fashion the dark
Into figures on the wall -
Buzzards gliding over pine trees,
A fox skulking across a field.
Shadows of memories,
Enduring against the city cold,
The blue sirens racing for a life
And I will hold them
Until my fingers close.
A Poem In The Park
Not for Excalibur
Was I drawn to the stone
But to the words
Hewn into the Welsh rock.
A monolith in the park
By the sea, blazing
A pathway through
The darkness of youth.
In this sunless
White-walled room,
I whisper verse quietly
So they can’t hear me -
“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
Words, they can’t have them,
I won’t let them go.
A Time Of Smiles
There are many ways
A person can change.
Sometimes slowly, as a season
Turns a river, or suddenly,
Like storm-clouds darken a sky.
The years pass
And I’m watching you closelt now,
Seeing your colours fade
As time takes away
Your dreams to the other side.
And out of my darkness
The sparks of memories
Grow like the smile
That never left your face.
Fire Juggler At Hereford
Three flames spin
In the chill of morning
And I stop to watch.
This is his life, and mine
On the other side of the street,
Just smouldering at a safe distance.
POEM - Gerald England
Musaphobia
I heard a new word today.
It has two meanings
apparently;
- quite distinct - I am assured.
Musaphobia: dislike of mice
or poetry.
I've often been asked
whether I were man
or mouse.
I can answer that now
for there is a likeness there -
the seeming insignificant
which none-the-less
can frighten the mighty ELEPHANT,
or make women
stand
on chairs
& lift
their skirts.
Yes the poem does have affinity with
the mouse.
ESSAY - Ian MacFadyen
Love Minus Zero, In Other Words
Now there’s a fine Collected Poems and symposiums in your honour, but I remember you way back then, when everything seemed possible - in life, in writing, the two inextricably entwined. You were so brilliant and so beautiful, plotting the systematic demolition of the Poetry Academy, first from the margins, and then from within - Down with Hughes! Viva Ashbery! Well, it all seemed so important in those days. You were the intrepid explorer of the outer limits of language, the doyenne of radical discontinuity and détournement, absolutely fearless, indomitable, and, despite your devoted admirers, quite alone - because beneath the style and verbal dazzle, you were unravelling in secret, becoming undone. There are no synonyms for suicide, yet your death, at the age of 25, would be described by one deconstructionist critic as your “entry into the critical hyperspace of radical difference and purely textual appropriation. . . a simultaneously pedagogical and idiopathic act of self-nullification by literary engenderment” – a fine example of the language machine in action, soul death at work in the discourse of an elite.
We were as young as Critical Theory itself, ardent disciples of the terminally cool French style, young guns who had no idea that those language games were really versions of Suicide Spin, played out for real. Well, you’ve been gone for three decades and more, and now your poems are analysed and categorised by critics and scholars, and there is a star in the literary firmament that bears your name, though its core burned out light years ago. What survives is so cultured, so paradoxical, so oblique – surely too erudite a text for a suicide note. I remember how you’d cut up your poems with scissors, moving the pieces around on the paper, seeing what meanings they might generate, and I’d think of the ouija board spelling out our unknowable fates letter by letter, the mystery of our being explained by a mundane, mechanical parlour game. Such pursuits are banal but addictive, and their prophecies are potentially deadly.
I remember those late nights collating and stapling our mimeographed samizdat magazine, our chapbooks and broadsides – tiny print runs, non-existent distribution, hand-made wabi productions of an underground non-economy, our coterie of contributors numerically identical with our readership. Membership of the inner sanctum of our little group would never rise above single figures, but each publication was imbued with talismanic heat and heretical desire, every poem a revolutionary decree and warning sent out from our Assassins’ Lair. Those were the years of the Great Internecine Poetry Wars - inexorable debate, drunken arguments, and then the inevitable reading of the role of honour and disgrace, the decorated and the fallen, who was in and who was out of the Poetry Pantheon, determined finally not by feeble democratic vote but by your own ultimate whim and diktat.
Your heroes presided over our discussions, the great ones, living and dead – Marvell, Donne, Eliot, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Reverdy, Merrill, O’Hara, Ashbery . . . The set list was exclusively male, but then you were never to be regarded as a female poet in any way, and believed the sexual signature inscribed in the poem was entirely self-created, the poet’s gender alchemically transmuted by the work. We’d read Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Anne Waldman, but you never showed the unconcealed delight and passion you felt for their male counterparts. Sylvia Plath - quite impossible to either embrace or ignore her, the sainthood and victim-hood inseparable and odious, fame conferred not by the extraordinary work but by the act which had terminated the life, so that every line became both prophecy and post mortem, the poem ritually, helplessly, intoned as in a funeral rite, every appraisal appropriated by the already monstrous hagiography. Yes, those great late poems were written in the last weeks of her life, but how you loathed and derided her morbidly fixated eulogisers - George Steiner claiming that “Sylvia Plath became a woman being transported to Aushwitz on the death-trains”, while Anne Sexton rhapsodised, “We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!” You were disgusted, outraged by the sheer presumption of it, the kitsch obscenity -“They’re obviously of a quite different species.” How strange that your own life should terminate as it did – the means known, but the reason a mystery, and so terribly young – becoming, in your turn, a case study for Freudians and the relentless iconolatry of ghouls . . .
You hated those great tragic women writers, martyrs of sex and biology, victims of the curse of gender, their lives leaking over, defiling the purity of words on the page - yours would not be theirs. Take Anne Sexton – “Actually, let’s not . . . ” - the original confessional mode of the Beats usurped as psychoanalytic cure, feminist therapy, and the 24-hour talking martini circuit. “Flaying herself alive in public, turning poetry into Pulitzer Prize-winning suicide notes . . .” You liked Elizabeth Bishop – her exactitude and her discretion, the surprise and integrity of language unsullied by the public confessional booth, the tantalisingly ‘unsaid’ in her deceptively transparent yet artfully-layered work, that “civilized magic” which escaped both the quotidian and the self-mythologizing. And yet her sensibility - those watercolour brushstrokes, those grace notes - lacked the radical will to overturn and demolish pre-existing poetic forms, which you held to be so essential . . . And so it would go on, into the early hours.
We read and argued our way through the Beats, Black Mountain, the Deep Image poets, the first and second generation New York Schools, the Bay Area group, Ethno-poetics, the first L-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets . . . How difficult it was to get hold of those limited edition photo-off-set, mimeo and Xerox magazines, the fragile manifestos of hipster coteries an ocean and a world away - Alcheringa, Journal For The Protection Of All Beings, Semina, This, Adventures In Poetry, The World, Angel Hair, Duende, United Artists, Hambone. . . And so many more, some of them one-issue fly-by-night missives, their creators disappearing into tenements on the Lower East Side, never to be heard of again . . . The very latest thing was almost certainly happening somewhere over there, right now, and this was nerve-wracking, a permanent torment. Despite our fiercely marginal existence, we were terrified of parochialism, and so were always trying to catch up, to establish our own radical practise, before a literary wave came and swept us away. We had always to be ahead of the game, though it was never a game for us, and we proved it by subjecting ourselves to exemplary show trials, accusations of bad faith, punitive measures, expulsions, suicide threats . . . Such were the exigencies of cult life, the incestuous melodrama of the avant-garde, when we were young and so very serious.
One day the Academy would suck it all up, select a couple of likely candidates for late fame and the Canon, relegating the rest to the odd doctoral thesis, the consolatory inclusion of a very short piece in some anthology or another, or worse, the terminal scatter of a few footnotes. But we were not to know that then – we were storming the citadel, convinced it would soon be ours for the taking. How I miss our naiveté and our passion, our commitment, our radiant and shabby marginal existence - inky fingers, cheap red wine, the thrill of it all. Copies of those entropic little mags are now yellowing, historical curios in some library archive, waiting for a truly gifted postgrad student in search of a niche career, a zealous novitiate to rehabilitate the reliquaries . . . It was all a world away from the century-old imprimatur of your present publisher – their legal department wrote me, “You may not quote from the work except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context - and far from the glow of your posthumous fame, though the “alienation effect” of the work remains the same, according to specialists in the history of avant-garde poetry who find your poems “still redolent of the revolutionary fervour of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.” Though how on earth would they know? Because it was all so different then, when poetry wasn’t our profession or our “area of special interest” - it was philosophy and essence, soul and being, life itself. “But it’s not as if we’re looking for converts, now, are we?” God knows, you certainly have those disciples now - it took thirty years, and you’d feel validated, I’m sure, but you wouldn’t like them or their critical exhumations one bit.
I remember that rented room, our attic headquarters reached by a rusty fire escape, where we gave our readings and printed the future of poetry. Love Minus Zero/No Limit on the mono record player – “She’s got everything she needs / She’s an artist / She don’t look back”. And it was all hopeless and quite wonderful, the way these things go - snow on the filthy pavements, the empty city in the heat . . . I was in love with you, I tried not to let it show – such feelings were anathema to the cool code and the post-modern mode, and you maintained a critical distance and formality in all your relationships, silently yet firmly eschewing the mixing up of recognition and affection, sex and any notion of love. Your favourite French theorist haughtily maintained that, “Love is a code without a fixed referent . . . a completely literary truism which life constantly disavows.” How we swallowed him then - how I pity him now. You’d greet talk of the “polymorphous perverse” or Ed Sanders’ sexist inanities and provocations in Fuck You magazine with indifference – it was just stuff for the kids. As you once put it, conclusively, as if it was too obvious and silly to merit further discussion, “Sex isn’t art, poetry isn’t intercourse.” Now I wonder whether the part you played or felt duty-bound to enact, the young woman so self-possessed and certain, who lead and guided us and taught us all, a woman in a male-dominated poetry world, didn’t suffer terribly, in silence. To recognise and protest against tyranny might have contaminated the linguistic purity of your work, self-dramatising and politicising and so adulterating it. No, you could not, you would not be seen to be wounded. The vital element in your poetry was always aesthetic distance, and so you removed yourself from the chaos and mess, the happenstance and inconsequence, and the oppression, and framed experience within formal limits and constraints, according to rules and injunctions set by you alone. And as in art, so in life. Maybe that was it, I just don’t know.
“This place is a tip, haven’t you ever heard of such a thing as a sweeping brush?” I took your orders because you were so evidently, unquestionably, the star of the show – poet as high priestess, utterly self-sufficient, autocratic, charismatic. You held us all together with your vision and your passion, but sometimes I had to wonder what you needed us for, and there were times when you behaved as if you couldn’t care less - it was all the most awful mess, totally beneath you, utterly worthless, and you’d turn away and erase us all with contemptuous, scornful waves of your cigarette hand. Someone would be sacked for ideological dissension, or cut adrift due to “textual incompatibility”, and it was as if they’d never existed . . . And then you’d vanish, leaving us bereft for days at a time, stranded, useless, in total chaos - only to walk back into the place, absolutely radiant, with the new Ted Berrigan or a copy of Caterpillar, the latest talismanic texts to be deciphered and dissected. “Well, I can see you lot have been incredibly busy . . .”
I remember your taste for the forgotten, the overlooked, the cast-aside– a broken toy monkey, an old Zippo lighter, the secret treasure of trash. I remember your perfume, L’Air du Temps, your antique clothes, your Montblanc fountain pen – a present from the father you hardly ever saw. I remember your Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes, and the lipstick traces you left on their golden tips. I remember your disquisitions on poetic form - Elegy, Rondeau, Ballad, Sonnet, Villanelle, Canzo . . . I remember you explaining metrical pattern and metonymy and internal rhyme and consonantal dissonance, everything you learned in order to master it completely before leaving it all behind. I remember you reading your own lines mixed with those of the great masters, like the voices of the dead issuing from the ether, a spooky collage, a textual séance. I remember your youth, beauty and knowledge, your style and dedication, your talent and allure, and something else besides - I mean that something quite ineffable which can never be described, which resists all explication, the mystery we can only call ‘destiny’, and let it go at that. There was never any doubt in my mind, nor in yours, I’m sure, that you were truly of poetry’s elect, only now we both know what you were truly elected for - life’s sad dumb-show, the great might-have-been . . . Not forgetting, of course, the consolation of immortality in art, that entirely abstract condition of non-being which I fear you so desired all along - it requires only miraculous talent and the complete obliteration of the self.
Poetry, you said, was not a personal diary, a record of events, it had nothing to do with reminiscence and the preservation of some illusory self. It wasn’t a reflection of the world, or one more thing added to the world. It wasn’t an autobiography that Frank O’Hara was writing in those immortal New York poems, he was catching the flying moments and the little bits of vanishing detail of a world in flux as they flashed and passed before and all around him – sensations captured and juxtaposed by the striking of the typewriter keys, creating “an entirely typographic meaning.” Our memories, you said, like the events that inspired them, were impalpable, ungraspable, and therefore quite impossible. It never happened the way you think it, you’d claim, it only happened because you think it – those memories are continually revised and reinvented, ergo, the poem cannot and should not try to memorialise the so-called ‘facts’ or the presumed ‘reality’ of life, it must only “transmit the process of transmutation by which our perceptions find form in the fictional remembrance of language itself” . . . And so on, the ouroboros of theory consuming itself around a central vanishing point.
“Memory is a disappearing perception of an experience which never took place.” And yet, you must have been wrong, you certainly were wrong, because I remember you so clearly, and those memories are both luminous and defined, not subject at all to time’s decay, absolutely resistant to the flux you insisted upon and so relished. How could I read your work without hearing your voice, seeing your face, thinking of you, the person you then were, or appeared to be? I remember, too, the rigour required for you to remove that problematic ‘self’ from ‘self-expression’ – erasing all those individual, personal, tender traits and qualities which time bestows and endows, the indelible traces of memory which constitute our very being, which you sought to entirely expunge. Now I think your belief that the past never existed, and that the present is over before it’s begun, must have made you ghostly in your own life – only those words appearing magically on a page, as in a developing fluid, held significance for you, while life was a meaningless passing show, the “insubstantial pageant” located only in masterpieces made of words. Otherwise . . . n’existe pas.
“Only the words remain” – and yes, in your own case, you were right, but now the irony is terrible, devastating. The ideal text had no author, the supposed creator was a fiction, a cipher escaping all biography and hagiography, and you’d speak of “indeterminacy” and “infinite regression” and “the limit point of meaning” - phrases from the prison house of language, a hall of mirrors. I’m addressing you now to protest too late at that fatal conceit, now that ‘you’ can only signify absolute non-existence, while once, personally speaking, - and whatever other way of speaking might there be, really? - it meant the beauty, the knowledge, the power and strangeness of your own tender living being, not the severe aesthetic triumph of your art.
Your critics and biographers are busy decoding your intimidating decoupage, claiming you as their own, and it’s all quite understandable, unforgivable, and un-stoppable. You made the poem its own self-referential critique, but they intend to crack your magical cryptograms and metaphysical word-diagrams, your hermetic spiral algorithms. You appropriated and parodied, usurped and reprogrammed, erasing yourself in the process, but now it seems you unwittingly provided a feast for those who would one day rediscover your work, and celebrate and appropriate you. You spun a web for them, of silken steel – but it turns out that you were the one who was destined to be trapped inside, and devoured.
When I heard the news all those years ago, I was shocked, disbelieving, and then had to wonder at my surprise, remembering those lines by Goethe that you’d once chosen as an epigraph to one of your mocking, imperturbable Anti-Sonnets - “One must live and love; life and love must end. / If only, oh Fates, you’d cut both these threads at once.” Those words you quoted so ironically are really quite unbearable to me now. It’s futile and natural to address the dead, as now I address that “central invisibility” which you pursued to its limit point, and described so eloquently – “I can always read you, but you will never read me.” One day there’ll be no one left alive who cares to read your words, despite their beauty and perfection, despite the immutable existence of your name in the marble index. Then the work and the life will be reunited in a final forgetfulness, un-consulted, un-mourned. Your books - those three slim volumes and the magisterial Collected Poems - will reside, as you’d always hoped, in the great literary mausoleum, and your place in the poetry hierarchy will be fixed forever. And there you will remain – inviolate, dreamless, quite beyond recall.
POEM - Geoff Stevens
The Classic Last Ride
With long black eyelashes
wiping all the old seductive messages
from windscreen-wide eyes
she kept her soul down on the accelerator
as the purring engine retuned to a roar
and ran headlong into him
left him crushed and mauled
on the curbside of their broken love affair
the sound of paramedic joyriders already in the air
as the kiss of impending death
turned to licorice on his lips.
He lay there a corpse of broken egos
the headlamps mounted on her Citreon’s rib-cage
the last thing to hit his mind.
while she stood smiling over once-intimate flesh
that was now a bag of bones.
They brought a red blanket over
and placed strategic traffic cones
POEMS - David Cooke
Conveyance
Making love in a house that now at last
We own, we ease a strangeness, move
Towards possession of that warmth we know:
The kindness of sheets, while around us
Packed in boxes lies the clutter of our lives.
In the morning and then for days
Decisions will crowd the hours, as your plants,
My books, the records, are absorbed by empty
Rooms, till the stealth of days astounds us,
And we find ourselves at home.
House For Sale
After André Frénaud
So many others have lived here
Before and woken up each morning
In love, to a happy routine of chores,
their lives efficient as they moved
Through each room, dusting,
Or carefully placing a vase on a sill;
Whenever they drew their water
Echoes swirled round in a well.
But whoever they were they’ve gone
And the ivy spreads, neglected,
Slowly obscuring the upstairs panes.
Yet still I sense their traces -
Here where tea leaves have left a stain
Or where I find their small repairs.
QUOTE - John Cage
"I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn't give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do."
ESSAY - Richard Livermore
AVID FOR DOLLARS
Oscar Wilde once said that there is only one thing worse than being spoken about and that is not being spoken about. Salvador Dalí must have known what he meant for he was perhaps the most talked about artist of the 20th. Century, which, of course, is what he had always intended. Wilde also said that there are two tragedies in life: the first is not getting what you want and the second is getting it. Dalí exemplifies this Wildean paradox perfectly, for he was not only the most talked about artist of the 20th. Century, he was also perhaps the most tragic.
But let’s set the record straight before we continue. At the height of his powers, especially during the great surrealist period of the Thirties, Dalí was probably the most extraordinary artist of his generation. Yet his life is a cautionary tale for all artists who are attempted to abandon the more arduous path of their deeper vocation as artists and sell out to the highest bidder. Andre Breton coined an anagram of the name Salvador Dalí, rechristening him Avida Dollars (“avid for dollars”). It was undoubtedly Dalí’s pursuit of material success which eventually led to his undoing as an artist and turned him down the sterile path of exploiting his own extraordinary talents rather than developing them to their fullest extent. If you compare a typical work of the Thirties with what came after, it is so often as if the enigmatic, stark and disturbing memorability of the earlier work has become merely cerebral and decorative. It has lost all fluidity, motion and risk and been replaced by the sterile representation of ideas - drawn often from science - and the most impressive technique of any modern painter in the execution of those ideas. Control had become the name of the game with Dalí. And this control was put in the service of exploitation. He became the prototype of all those artists who have identified their own artistic vocation entirely with the Art-Market, but he had had an imaginative vision and genius which they do not have, and it is this which makes his life a tragic one rather than simply tawdry. There is definitely something grand in his fall, though many, of course, would not describe his ‘success’ as a fall.
If we want to understand Dalí more completely, we could probably do a lot worse than turn to Lorca’s Ode To Salvador Dalí which draws attention to the Apollonian tendency in Dalí and his “longing for eternity with limits”. In this ode, Lorca says: “You call on the old light which stays on the brow / not descending to the mouth or the heart of man. / A light feared by the loving vines of Bacchus / and the chaotic force of curving water.” Lorca goes on later “I sing of your restless longing for the statue / your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.” Lorca here points up the contrast between the Apollonian and the Dionysian which is so important for understanding Dalí. The most telling lines in Lorca’s poem, however, are these, “But above all, I sing the dark and golden hours. / The light that blinds our eyes is not art. / Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.” The “crossed swords” are not simply phallic, they also express the idea of conflict or clash which lay at the heart of Dali’s frigidity. There is no doubt that Lorca had some kind of unconsummated homosexual relationship with Dalí, which the latter both welcomed and resisted because he feared its implications. He feared emotional and sexual entanglement. (He hated being touched.) and this fear was even part of his acquaintance with his muse-wife Gala, with whom he seems to have had a largely masturbatory and voyeuristic relationship. Later in his life, Dalí’s sexual interests were focused on transgendered boys become girls, such as Amanda Lear in the Sixties and Seventies. But this too was a largely voyeuristic and masturbatory affair, excluding intimate physical contact. (Meanwhile, Gala was off in pursuit of ‘real men’!)
I am not going to speculate on why Dalí related to people in this way. However, I would like to suggest that it was symptomatic of his whole personality and the way it affected his art. A much less generous and more hostile response to Dalí than Lorca’s was that of Clive Bell, the English artist and critic, who described Dalí’s surrealist period paintings as “vulgar trash intended to take in the would-be smart…” His brushwork, Bell went on was “neither nervous nor expressive, but merely tight.” I take Bell’s criticism with a pinch of salt. It exemplifies the superciliousness one finds in a lot of English criticism, but it is, all the same, not without insight, especially the statement concerning Dalí’s brushwork, which was always highly controlled, especially after his surrealist period. This attitude towards painting was manifest in his life as a whole and explains quite a lot about him - his avid pursuit of money and celebrity, his eventual turning away from surrealism and the left-wing or anarchist politics of his youth to embrace neo-classicism and fascism, which are all of a piece, I would suggest, with his need for distance from others and control over his life.
It all has its roots, I believe, in the Apollonian temperament which Lorca identified in his ode. Apollo is the god of light, music, the arts, sculpture, lyric poetry, healing and of course science and reason, the aristocratic god who keeps his distance from the more vital chthonic realm of life presided over by the much darker, ambiguous and tragic Dionysus. The Dionysian, including the androgynous, always fascinated Dalí, despite the distance he wanted to keep. This is what Camille Paglia says about Apollo and Dionysus in her book Sexual Personae. “Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification… Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic emotion transporting us into other people, other places, other times… Apollo is the hard, cold separatism of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism, heedless indiscriminateness of idea and practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism, frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects… Apollo is tyrant, Dionysus vandal. Plutarch says ‘Apollo is the One denying the Many and abjuring multiplicity…’ The Apollonian is aristocratic, monarchist and reaction. Volatile, mobile, Dionysus is hoi polloi… Apollo freezes, Dionysus dissolves. Apollo says “Stop!”, Dionysus says “Move!”. Apollo binds together and battens down against the storms of nature.” Nearly all the qualities Paglia identifies with Apollo can be seen in Dalí - especially after his great Surrealist period. Dalí was one of the purest cases of an artist possessed by Apollo and attempting to ward off the threatening incursions of the Dionysian impulse both from outside and within. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he called his obsessions “Paranoiac-Critical”. Freud said the ego was intrinsically paranoid— he also saw paranoia as some kind of defence-mechanism against homosexuality, which, of course, Dalí was at pains to keep at bay— and Dalí, who saw himself as the “Saviour of Modern Art”, had more than enough ego to go with his paranoia. It should also be said that Apollo, the god of individuation and, I suppose you could say, self-contained ego, was, judging by the fate of Marsyas, paranoid too. (He couldn’t brook any challenge to his superiority.) Freud described the process of individuation in these terms: “Where Id is, there Ego shall be.” Which could be translated as “Where Dionysus is, there Apollo shall be”. This process, of course, does not make the Ego any less paranoid, because the Id can never be fully subdued, and therefore the Ego must be always on its guard against the Id’s uncontrollable incursions, which the Ego can never predict.
Like Id and Ego, however, Apollo and Dionysus are not just opposite but also complementary elements in our nature which need to be dynamically integrated. In Cabalistic terms, Apollo belongs to the Column of Form and Dionysus to the Column of Force, both of which are needed to balance the other and produce between them the Column of Equilibrium. While Dalí was in the orbit of the more Dionysian and chthonic Lorca and later Andre Breton and the Surrealists, he appeared to have found this Column of Equilibrium within himself and was able to produce some of the most iconic and disturbing work of the 20th. Century. But as soon as he cut himself adrift from all that, he seemed to lose his compass. He sided with Franco in the Civil War, he turned back to the Church, he turned away from Surrealism and began to espouse Neo-Classicism and, of course, he started to market himself and his work big time. Like fascism and neo-classicism, the money one makes from marketing oneself and one’s products is another Apollonian way of acquiring and keeping control.
You might ask what’s wrong with artists marketing themselves or their work. After all, we all have to scratch out a living. The answer lies in the fact that marketing oneself means turning oneself into a recognisable product. It means continuing to produce the same images and motifs over and over again, because they are now your ‘hallmark’ and therefore expected. (Soft watches is one example.) It means that you can no longer be unpredictable - except in a predictable way - and are no longer allowed to turn your back on what you have produced in the past and develop, because what you have produced in the past has become more or less the trademark by which people identify you and your ‘product’. Art, properly speaking, is the only way artists can save themselves from their demons - which, of course, emerge from the Dionysian Id - and one needs to be free to deal with those demons in all their changeable manifestations in order to dynamically integrate them through one’s art. Simply recycling the artistic results of past struggles with one’s demons is not enough. Nor is it enough to produce cerebral, decorative work, such as the Hallucinageneous Bullfighter, Atomic Leda or Galatea of the Spheres, however technically accomplished it might be. (As for paintings like Christ of St. John of the Cross, The Ecumenical Council, The Virgin of Guadaloup and The Dream of Columbus, and all those other works which have a very palpable Catholic, imperialist or fascist design on us, their very technical perfection simply sends a shudder through me!) I believe it is fair to say that once Dalí ’s images begin to firm up and become less inchoate, they become less interesting. They are not emerging from his unconscious any more, but as a result of conscious control. One need only look at the difference between the iconic The Persistence of Memory (1931) and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1952-54), which lacks the fluid simplicity of conception of the earlier work. It is as if it has become overburdened with ideas which are not germane to it. What is so wonderful about the work of the Thirties such as Paranoiac Face, Bleeding Roses, Cannibalism in Autumn and Meditation on a Harp is their fluidity and suggestiveness, as if he is allowing the ideas to emerge with the painting itself, rather than imposing the ideas onto the work in accordance with his own dictates.
It could, of course, be that while plumbing the disturbing depths of himself in the Surrealist works of the Thirties, Dalí ’s paranoid anxieties and defences became so aroused that he said to himself “Stop! No more! This way leads only to madness!” (His eccentricities may have been a safety-valve once he'd turned his back on his madness.) In other words, Apollo took charge, and Dionysus was sent back again to the unconscious underworld to join the rest of his demons. In one of the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus - not the Catholic Jesus, of course - is reputed to have said, “If you bring out what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring out what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” Dalí turned his back on what was within him so that he could acquire more control over what was outside him, which, in turn, was to result in his becoming less and less of an artist and more and more of an ‘artiste’ - akin to a showbiz personality for whom celebrity and money was all that finally mattered. In other words, he became alienated within the prison of his own external personae and masks and that for an artist of Dalí ’s calibre and critical acumen, an artist who, for all his defensive theorising, could not help but know deep down that his work had lost the vital spark it had had in the 30s, must be a tragedy, whether he publicly acknowledged it or not.
REVIEW
Drive By (Shards & Poems) by John Bennett ($15. 00)
ISBN 978-1-929878-09-3
Lummox Press POB 5301 - San Pedro, CA 90733-5301
www.lummoxpress.com
John Bennett is one of those very rare writers whom it is virtually impossible to categorise. It is almost as if he has single-handedly created the genre in which his own work should be placed. This means, of course, that it is at a distinct critical disadvantage, because there is nothing critics and reviewers love more than to be able to place works in recognisable categories, give them labels and waffle on about how this writer reminds them of that. This is how they give the impression that they are knowledgeable while shrinking from the challenge of talking about writing on its own particular merits. Ever since I first encountered Bennett’s work, I have been fascinated by it. What is its secret? Why does it make for such compulsive reading? There is a telling succinctness about it which never fails to hit its mark, but it is by no means minimalist, since it is constantly breaking out in all directions at once, picking up a surprising thread here and then dropping it for another one there without ever losing a stitch. No other American writer seems to bring America to life in quite the way he does. In fact, his work is steeped in American life, but it is also so antithetical that it must make for really uncomfortable reading for those Americans who are still suckered by the American Dream. In this, of course, he is in a great tradition - from Bukowski to Burroughs - which doesn’t stop him being out on his own and completely unique. Indeed, he is one of the great outsiders in American literature today and, because of that, completely unrecognised. At the age of 70, he cleans windows and cannot afford to retire.
The genre which Bennett has single-handedly created he calls “The Shard” - or should I say “shards”, since there are so many of them. Shards can be broken down further into prose-shards and poem-shards. My own personal preference is for the prose-shards because they allow him more room for manoeuvre and enable him to come up with more of his gems, as in Original Sin, which begins: “It’s as if we’re born angels and those who came before us put a pillow over our faces after they’ve tucked us into bed and hold it there until our tiny feet stop kicking. When they lift the pillow again, we’re one of them, our eyes vacant.” The shard, Stay the Course, about Gertrude the Turk (who is really a Greek poetess) is hilarious for its take on contemporary America and its various hypocrisies and monstrosities - including Guantanamo - which is at the same time highly exaggerated and true. One of Bennett’s great strengths is his ability to pick up on certain aspects of American life and blow them up to a point where they reveal themselves in all their absurdity. But it is not done purely for satirical purposes. Underlying much of what he writes is a sense of the tragic as well, as if he was writing about a civilisation which was going right down the tubes and could do nothing about it. There is something of this tragic vision in the following shard, which I have taken the liberty of quoting in full. It is called The Bust.
“They dragged him out by his heels before dawn and slapped him into a wall. They read him his rights and then clubbed him senseless. They tossed him into a paddy and raced off thru the night
The neighbours stood on their lawns in their jammies and watched the whole thing go down. They looked at each other across the green grass, nodded and then looked away. They went slow as molasses back into their houses, back to bed and their bright dreamless sleep.
They woke up the next morning and stepped into the shower. Some sang, some hummed, some slumped under the torrent until the water ran cold. They all sat down to breakfast. They all ate the same thing--white toast with one butter pad, black coffee and a small piece of fruit. Then they stepped out of the door in their outfits and backed out of the driveway.
Somewhere in the gridlock, they turn on their radios. A familiar voice is waiting for them. “Good morning!” it says, and they smile. “Did we sleep well?” They nod. “Did we dream?” They nod again. Yes they did, they dreamed the same dream, a man screaming and kicking was carted off by the police. They woke up safe in their beds. Grateful and well-rested, they got up and commenced.
They’re feeling good now, ready for work. The radio bursts out in song and they all sing along, even the ones who slumped in the shower.
Someone is taking very good care of them. Someone is making sure they’re not harmed. Their only fear is that they might become the man in the dream. But this shouldn’t happen if they keep up the good work. They avert their eyes from the rear-view mirror and drive on down the freeway.”
A piece like this, without any frills, told in almost a deadpan way, distils so much of the truth about two of the most important elements which hold the American Dream together - violence on the one hand and self-deception on the other. It captures perfectly the tragic refusal to face reality which lies at the heart of that Dream.
Of course, there is much more to Bennett than just ‘social criticism’. What he writes about really is Life with a capital L. In one shard for instance he speaks of a meeting with a group of Gypsies in a Brussels bar, which finishes up with them all going off together to where the Gypsies lived, drinking wine, playing and singing Flamenco and Dylan, and smoking dope into the night. The shard ends: “This is the human spirit that the less you understand it, the more you persecute it, the more it eats your guts out. It will be there when the oil runs out.” In other shards he simply goes off into flights of his own as in The Major Tom Fiasco, in which he writes: “The more unknowns get tossed into the salad, the more vehement they become. “You can’t handle reality.” They scream. // I can’t handle screaming. I let out some tether and float off into space.”
John Bennett’s writing works so well for me, a) because it is so extremely readable and b) because there is absolutely no bullshit about it. He can be funny, whimsical and allow himself to be carried away by flights of fancy into wonderfully absurd realms, but it is always in the service of teasing out the truth of his subject. And the paradoxical thing is that as long as there are writers like Bennett around, America cannot be quite the basket-case that it so often appears on the surface - and indeed seems to be in Bennett’s own writing. There are many writers - and indeed people - in America, who have extremely negative feelings about ‘America’ and everything that it stands for. That’s what gives these writers the edge over their British counterparts in my opinion, whose view of their own society seems so flat in comparison. John Bennett is one of these writers. He is one of the mirrors ‘America’ needs to stop deceiving itself and as long as such mirrors exist there is hope.
Richard Livermore