EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue Sixteen of Ol' Chanty. My apologies for the lateness of the issue. We seem to have skipped a couple of months, but I have felt the need for a rest and also to get some perspective on things.
You will be pleased to know that my 'Bible' - The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols has an entry for number sixteen - not very long, but it's there. "As the square of four, this number is indicative of the attainment of physical power. As such it possesses a dangerous moral significance through exaggerated pride and unbridled lust for power, Jacob Boehme uses this number to denote the ABYSS, in contradistinction to Nirvana.
"If, on the other hand, sixteen is regarded as twice EIGHT, it becomes 'the multiplication of cycles of change and rebirth for the individual' (ALLN p. 364), or else the duplication of the eighth sefirah of the Kabbalah - "Hod, glory, splendour' (FRCH p. 158), a situation just as uncomfortable." Which all goes to show that you cannot win in this world.
You can't win an argument on the Internet either, as I've discovered whenever I've tried. Indeed, I sometimes wonder why mere exchanges of opinion manage to get so personal and heated at times. What emotional investments are involved and why the huge animus? As a lover of the work of Francis Bacon, I have been, to put it very mildly, taken to task for not taking the 'popular' view in the controversy surrounding the sale of his Triptych: Three Studies of Lucien Freud for £90 million which has been raging in some of the comment-sections of the posher papers in Britain of late. First there's the 'aesthetic' question, which tends to go like this: Francis Bacon was a mountebank who knew nothing about painting and just daubed his way to fame and fortune. Furthermore, his work only has value because it has been promoted by pseuds - such as myself. For having the gall to say that I loved Francis Bacon's work because of the absolute individuality and uniqueness which makes his work stand out from that of any other painter, I have been roundly condemned as a twunt" (A synthesis of "twat" and "cunt" - really inventive and witty! "Pranny" is another 'gem', but I'm sure you can work that one out for yourself.) and various other epithets by someone who described Bacon's painting as "ugly" & "shyte". When challenged as to why he thought what he thought, all he could do was abuse me further as a "pseudo-intellectual" for defending Bacon's work. ("Pseudo-intellectual", of course, is the clincher - the point at which such people begin to feel justified in saying: "When I hear the world culture, I go for my pistol.") The sad fact is that you can't go anywhere on the internet these days without running into these trolls, whose level of language and debate would make Pan Troglodyte look like a genius. And the thing is, of course, their certainty, their absolute conviction that they have right on their side. Inquisitions and fascistic movements are built on such certainties and all these people need to start one up again is another 'charismatic' leader with delusions of grandeur. The potential is certainly out there.
Then there's the question of money. Let me be honest. Since I love the work of Francis Bacon, if I was a billionaire I would happily pay £90 million to give one of his paintings a home. These things are relative, after all, and what might seem like a lot of money to you and me might be chicken-feed to somebody else. After all, what better thing could I spend my money on than something I love? I would be rich and the rich are the rich precisely because they have money to burn. Furthermore, they are obligated to no-one and can spend their money just as they wish. Nor does it make any sense to expect them to do anything else.
The point is not to blame the rich for behaving like the rich. As far as that goes, they should be treated as just another zoological species whose members can't help but behave as they do. Much like lions and crocodiles in fact. Besides, to become obsessed with what the rich do with their money betrays an underlying envy which only shows that underneath you would just love to be in their place. The point is not to indulge ourselves in all this pointless 'moral outrage' about what the rich do with their money, but to liberate ourselves as the 99% whose possibilities are seriously circumscribed by the 1% who rule and exploit us. In other words, to get the rich off our backs by taking our fates into our own hands and moving on to the next level of evolution. That requires imagination which, as far as I can see, is the one commodity lacking in those who have been on their high horses of late about whether a painting by Francis Bacon is worth all the money that someone has paid for it. My one regret about the whole affair is that I may no longer be able to view that painting again. But, in people's rush to judgement, that point has hardly even been raised.
Finally, against the advice of one former commentator, I have decided to go back to a larger typeface for the prose-pieces in this issue. I think it is easier to read. I always find it a strain having to read too many small words in a line - line after line. I also prefer a light coloured typeface against a dark background, because I think there is less glare and less of a strain on the eyes. Apart from that, I hope you enjoy the issue.
CONTENTS
Poems - Alex Migliore
Essay - Ian MacFadyen
Poem - Karen Margolis
Quote - William Burroughs
Poem - Frederick Pollack
Poems - Helen Addy
Quote - John Bennett
Poem - Paul Murphy
Essay - Richard Livermore
Poems - Louise Landes Levi
Reviews - Richard Livermore and Paul Murphy
Poems - Richard Le Boeuf
POEMS- Alex Migliore
Nutrition
I am still enough alive to want
to intensify the moment
only
today before all this
before any of
all this let us first
lie back into
our own intimate idioms.
You see how my love
how only my love
could burn so much milk for me
could stir so specifically
the insides and outs of me.
Ignorance
Truth, as
it were,
im-
perceptible,
the fastest and
the slowest.
Like the
length
of a long time,
some
struggle
divided,
your
touch
a museum.
The Cat
If you cannot
want peace,
rather then
that which
is not loved
so simply,
but worn like skin
or weather
you cannot help
but be in.
Reclusion
How then,
to be sure of it,
to touch what,
wanted, has
since appeared?
What have I to do
with this mountain?
And what, if not
found within
the posture itself,
must I make
of my idleness?
To hear the wind,
through
the undone roof,
as methodically
it rapes
the swallow’s nest
this you call idleness,
you who have taught
us not to touch
except in intimacy,
let us do and not
ask what to do next.
Sleeplessness
As time thickens,
the heart, felt,
feels it, but also that
where we are, seldom
we are again,
as for each way there
is another where
this night curled into
the opposite, there,
my love, a breathing thing,
behind her the forest,
where I might had I not
woken be walking,
the foot, a dry leaf,
no more than they are,
and my love, a muttering
thing, whom I have
woken to hold on to me.
Good Faith
For a moment
she comes, closer,
to tell it, that,
to our going on,
to the nut crow
couldn’t crack,
sounds will bear
witness as energy
ESSAY
BORGES, COHEN AND THE ZAHIR IN TETUAN
By Ian MacFadyen
An extract from Ian MacFadyen’s unpublished book on the poet, photographer and film-maker Ira Cohen.
“The man who lives in the land of the Muezzin.”
- Jorge Luis Borges on Ira Cohen
Ira venerated Borges and was fascinated by his stories, his literary and historical erudition and occult learning. Ira called Borges’ poetic and philosophical mysteries, “magical written diagrams”, and he identified with the Borges who put esotericism at the service of art, and appreciated the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, Mayaana Buddhism, Sikhism, Cagliostro, and the Alchemists. In his introduction to his Moroccan book Minbad Sinbad, Ira noted that “in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges I once read that the exit from the underworld was not far from Tangier.” At this point in the original typescript of Minbad Sinbad, Ira added, by hand, in ink, the phrase “in Tetuan”. I realised that he was referring to Borges’ great story ‘The Zahir’ in which the shape-shifting phenomenon, the Zahir of the title, is located “in the Tetuan ghetto”, where it has reincarnated as “the bottom of a well.” This ghetto, Ira told me later, can only have been the Jewish quarter, the mellah, which was influenced by Spanish Jewish immigration to the city and by Andalucian culture, and so became known by the Spanish word juderia. At one time, there were so many Jewish inhabitants of this ghetto, Ira said, that it was actually called ‘Jerusalem’ – and so that ghetto well in Tetuan corresponds to the Well of Souls in Jerusalem, thought to be located on the site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. It’s a cave beneath the Foundation Stone under the Dome of the Rock and the place where the Ark of the Covenant is thought to rest, which contained the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, though no-one has ever seen that secret chamber. That “exit from the underworld in Tetuan” was linked for Ira with the pre-Islamic belief that the sounds resonating from the Well of Souls were the voices of the dead and the echoes of the subterranean Rivers of Paradise running through the caverns “measureless to man”, which Ira called “the holy psychic underworld” – it was the spirit realm which summoned him throughout his life and which he sought to make manifest in his art. Its counterpart was the Akashic realm above the earth, and both Underworld and Heaven are explored through the rippling Mylar mirrors of Ira’s film The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda. In his poetry, too, Ira transcribed those voices from the well, and the voices from the aether, which he heard calling to him, promising love and prophesying doom - Ira was the son of deaf and mute parents, and his poetic vocation was to transcribe and to give voice to those crying out to be heard. . . In the works of Borges, Ira found a fellow lover of Dante’s Paradiso and Inferno, as well as a poet fascinated by the eternal labyrinths of mirrors, seeking the alien reflection of the self - the shadow, the Ka, the animus, the doppelganger. Like Borges he sought illumination through hermetic texts and codes, magical and metaphysical disquisitions and exegeses in continual self-generating transformation. He shared Borges’ love of the library as a palace of sanctuary and adventure, dream and revelation, the library leading the pilgrim reader, the acolyte artist, through a lifetime of reading, through love and creation to divine revelation - through lamp-lit labyrinths to the far side of the world’s mirror and to that final, fated encounter with the Other, embracing the loss of self in long-desired oblivion.
Borges’ Zahir is a fascinating object which cannot be forgotten, a memory which cannot be erased, and it assumes many different forms in different places through time – it is at different points in history an astrolabe, a compass, a jail cell painted with images of tigers by a Muslim fakir, a golden mask, a veil embroidered with stones, a coin worth twenty centavos and scratched with the initials NT and the numeral 2 . . . Whatever form it takes, it tantalises and tortures whoever encounters it. Borges’ story fascinated Ira, and we discussed it many times in London and on the phone between London and New York. In a sense he became himself (as did I, and so many others) a victim of this particular incarnation of the Zahir - the Zahir as written text casting its spell upon lured, doomed readers, a real Tantalus tale, and an impenetrable veil. Ira thought the solution to the problem of the unforgettable, tormenting Zahir was suggested by Borges when he wrote, “Zahir in Arabic means ‘notorious’, ‘visible’; in this sense it is one of the ninety-nine names of God, and the people (in Muslim territories) use it to signify ‘beings or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drives one mad.’” And later, Borges notes: “In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or the ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that path.” Ira said that this turned the unforgettable, painful obsession with the Zahir into the search for the “zikr” – a word recited or chanted inwardly to the point where language escapes fixed signification, the point of utter forgetfulness and transcendence of self and memory. In this way, the zikr would obliterate the Zahir, in whatever form it took, whatever name it was known by. Ira encountered the zikr when he met the Jilala Brotherhood in Morocco and he would connect this with his experience of the temple mantras of India and Nepal, while the zikr was described by Ira’s friend Brion Gysin in his novel The Process - “Basilides in his Game reduced all the Names proposed by the Gnostics to one single rolling, cacophonic, cyclical word which he thought might well prove to be a Key to the heavens: Kaulakaulakaulakaulakau. . .” It was one possible method, Ira said, of achieving Burroughs and Gysin’s desire to “Rub Out the Word”, to silence and abolish the obsessive “Voice Inside” of self-referential consciousness, and abolish Maya, or Illusion. The zikr is the cyclical incantation of the infinite, the transcendence of the limitation of words, the shattering of the belief that words incarnate as well as signify some kind of immutable world. Ira connected Borges’ immortal fable with Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind experiments – in their radically different ways, they were attempts to “Erase the Word”, to penetrate the mystic veil and escape the tormenting, endless rebirth of the Zahir, the literally self-begetting linguistic programme of belief and illusion.
Ira recognized and addressed the rending of the veil in his poetry, as in his poem ‘Retractable Claw’ – “How then can I hide behind this veil / of Poetry / for he knows what may be hidden / by the white ash & / that which will be revealed by / the black. . .” And there were other occasions in his poems when he had paused, glimpsing something beyond his own words, however inspired those words, a divine radiance beyond the fixity of language – “If it were all on stone, then would we be any / closer to the source, / there in the center of the sacred enclosure?” (‘Celestial Ambush’) The quotidian world, like the spirit realm, was curtained, and Ira would raise the curtain, as in ‘The Stauffenberg Cycle’ – “We spoke of a curtain rising / knowing it bore the word Hysteria / in place of History. . .” While in ‘Samadi’ he wants to rend the veil hiding death - “Burn the veil of the Poona skull. . .” But in the swirling surface illusions of his Mylar photographs and in his poems, especially those addressed to the beauty of women, Ira was fated to weave and protect the erotic and divine Veil of the Mysteries. He could not, like Gysin and Burroughs, physically cut-up the sacred texts, the divine words of The Song Of Solomon or Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. . . He would have found that absolutely unbearable. Instead, he created his own version of the scissor or Stanley blade cut-up, a cardboard template cut with rectangular slots which he moved over a printed text, dowsing for connections while, significantly, leaving the original uncut, unmarked, intact. Ira always thought of himself as, above all, a poet and he understood his work as a spiritual vocation, something profound and sacred which had been entrusted to him – he enjoyed hearing Brion Gysin read his permutated cut-up, ‘NO POETS DON’T OWN WORDS’, but the sentiment expressed in that work was quite alien to him. Gysin recognized Ira’s profound veneration of the Word and he would tease and test him about it, on one occasion pushing Ira to the limit – or maybe it was the other way around. Gysin deliberately, physically erased parts of an interview recording which Ira was making with him, for the magazine Heavy Metal, winding the tape back and forth and erasing at random. Ira was mortified at the disappeance of all that great material, all those wonderful words, but when he protested, Gysin exclaimed, “When I say ‘Erase the Word’, I mean erase the fucking word!”
Borges’ story was an attempted exorcism of suffering, transposing loss into a metaphysical puzzle about belief and illusion, a philosophical enigma which the writer invents in order to displace the agony of unrequited love. But if the Zahir in the story is tracked through all its quotidian and fabulous incarnations, the story is more than a record of an obsession - it is itself one more incarnation of the Zahir. The tale did not, could not free its author, its first reader, who would remain forever under its spell, like so many who would encounter it and become spellbound in their turn. . . Indeed, was Borges ever the author, the creator of ‘The Zahir’, or merely the medium for one more of its terrible appearances? ‘The Zahir’ is a written spirit trap, a word fascinator, a divine literary raptor, a linguistic moebius strip, through which the Zahir snares its devoted readers, its literary believers. It is the definitive, inescapable, sinister Borgesian labyrinth which transmutes perpetually through its readers, making them its victims, mortal members of the fraternity of perpetual loss. It is a viral fable, writing as contamination, myth and miasma in the Burroughsian sense – a textual transmitter of illusion, the demonic, shape-shifting Zahir replicating its very own Name through a thousand psyches.
Borges cites a definition of the Zahir from a verse interpolated in Attar’s Asrar Nama (Book Of Things Unknown) – “The Zahir is the shadow of the Rose, and the Rending of the Veil.” The Zahir blocks the light of the true mystic Rose of Love, it taunts and hypnotizes while it conceals the divine behind an elegy to a doomed romance – it is a text which must be torn asunder, a curtain of words between the reader and the transcendent experience which it hides, a beautiful veil which must be destroyed. If the Zahir becomes a veil embroidered with stones in Borges’ tale, it is also, and always, a veil embroidered with stories. But I don’t think Ira could accept the idea of the rending of the veil of poetry, despite his understanding of the Borges story and despite those moments in his own poetry when he expresses a desire to tear it away, to see through or behind it. Likewise, he could appreciate the linguistic demolitions of Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind project, the brilliant pyrotechnics of their writing of attack, and their pursuit of what Foucault called “limit experiences”, but he couldn’t follow them. Borges called Ira, “The man who lives in the land of the Muezzin”, and there is a key here to Ira’s essence – the poetic, mystical recitation, and the oral/textual call-and-response, of the Divine Word. For Ira, the transmission of esoteric learning and poetic feeling through written texts was an inviolate duty. He would preserve the Veil of the Word, he would be the Guardian of the Psychic Holy of Holies, the Keeper of the Sacred Mysteries – he could not do, or be, otherwise. He recognized and feared the dangers and limits of language, the castigation and abolition of the inexpressible - the Law is always written, and so it is true, and must be obeyed, while the unsaid, the unwritten, by definition, is always potentially criminal, heretical. Ira knew this, but his life was a life of books as well as a life of world travel and adventures, and he saw himself as a scribe among generations of scribes, reading and writing, annotating and creating, adding to the revelation and healing preserved in books. “Blitzkreig the Citadel of Enlightenment!” proclaimed Gysin and Burroughs. But the thought of a burning library made Ira close his eyes and shudder - it even, for a long moment, silenced him.
Every writer realises the difficulties and then the impossibility of expressing certain thoughts and feelings. How could Ira speak or write the raptures and revelations he’d experienced in Nepal, or with the Jilala in Morocco, or at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, or simply walking down Duke Ellington Boulevard? Well, he tried, and often, against the odds, the miraculous inspired testament came through onto the page – true feeling and thought immortalised. Once, when I interviewed Ira, I said, “Georges Perec wanted to master every discourse and style, and write the entire world.” Ira replied, “No one could write about this hour and this room and get it all down, it would take a lifetime, more than a lifetime. . . You say ‘the sky is blue’, and that seems like it’s not enough, because it’s really lots of blues, so many blues, it’s blues without limit, but you could say that it’s ‘a red feather sky’, meaning it’s like the colour of that stone which is one kind of lapis lazuli, and so you say that bit of the sky is ‘a red feather lapis lazuli blue’, or it’s ‘a surpar blue’, or it’s ‘blue like the heart of a flame in Afghanistan at noon’, which is pretty good, or ‘a red feather blue, blue as a bone in Afghanistan at noon’, or whatever you like, but then there’s all those blues you can see in the sky, but how can you write all those shades and tones of blue and write pages and pages of descriptions and evocations of all these blues, it’s impossible. . . So you write ‘the blue sky’ or ‘the bluest of skies’ or ‘the indigo blue midnight sky’ and you have to make it so the poem tells you exactly what kind of blue, so the reader or the listener knows exactly the kind of blue that all those different blues made the sky, at exactly that one time, and what it really felt like. . . And then you think you’ve really caught it and got it down, but when you read it back you see that you haven’t captured it at all, that unique moment, you thought you’d caught it, but it’s escaped you. . . Or you’ve got all these words, these evocations, blah blah blah, and it might even be wonderful, it might be terrific, people might think it’s really great, it’s beautiful, you know, but then you know that the sky you saw, that once-upon-a-time true blue sky, that magic blue sky, that incredible electric blue sky, deep down you know you didn’t get it, you just couldn’t do it, and now that blue sky is gone forever.” And yet, at the same time, I remember how Ira beamed and radiated with pleasure one day when he was lamenting the loss of some poems he’d written and left in a Xerox shop, and I quoted the Zohar: “No, words do not fall into the void.”
- Jorge Luis Borges on Ira Cohen
Ira venerated Borges and was fascinated by his stories, his literary and historical erudition and occult learning. Ira called Borges’ poetic and philosophical mysteries, “magical written diagrams”, and he identified with the Borges who put esotericism at the service of art, and appreciated the Upanishads, the Diamond Sutra, Mayaana Buddhism, Sikhism, Cagliostro, and the Alchemists. In his introduction to his Moroccan book Minbad Sinbad, Ira noted that “in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges I once read that the exit from the underworld was not far from Tangier.” At this point in the original typescript of Minbad Sinbad, Ira added, by hand, in ink, the phrase “in Tetuan”. I realised that he was referring to Borges’ great story ‘The Zahir’ in which the shape-shifting phenomenon, the Zahir of the title, is located “in the Tetuan ghetto”, where it has reincarnated as “the bottom of a well.” This ghetto, Ira told me later, can only have been the Jewish quarter, the mellah, which was influenced by Spanish Jewish immigration to the city and by Andalucian culture, and so became known by the Spanish word juderia. At one time, there were so many Jewish inhabitants of this ghetto, Ira said, that it was actually called ‘Jerusalem’ – and so that ghetto well in Tetuan corresponds to the Well of Souls in Jerusalem, thought to be located on the site known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount. It’s a cave beneath the Foundation Stone under the Dome of the Rock and the place where the Ark of the Covenant is thought to rest, which contained the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, though no-one has ever seen that secret chamber. That “exit from the underworld in Tetuan” was linked for Ira with the pre-Islamic belief that the sounds resonating from the Well of Souls were the voices of the dead and the echoes of the subterranean Rivers of Paradise running through the caverns “measureless to man”, which Ira called “the holy psychic underworld” – it was the spirit realm which summoned him throughout his life and which he sought to make manifest in his art. Its counterpart was the Akashic realm above the earth, and both Underworld and Heaven are explored through the rippling Mylar mirrors of Ira’s film The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda. In his poetry, too, Ira transcribed those voices from the well, and the voices from the aether, which he heard calling to him, promising love and prophesying doom - Ira was the son of deaf and mute parents, and his poetic vocation was to transcribe and to give voice to those crying out to be heard. . . In the works of Borges, Ira found a fellow lover of Dante’s Paradiso and Inferno, as well as a poet fascinated by the eternal labyrinths of mirrors, seeking the alien reflection of the self - the shadow, the Ka, the animus, the doppelganger. Like Borges he sought illumination through hermetic texts and codes, magical and metaphysical disquisitions and exegeses in continual self-generating transformation. He shared Borges’ love of the library as a palace of sanctuary and adventure, dream and revelation, the library leading the pilgrim reader, the acolyte artist, through a lifetime of reading, through love and creation to divine revelation - through lamp-lit labyrinths to the far side of the world’s mirror and to that final, fated encounter with the Other, embracing the loss of self in long-desired oblivion.
Borges’ Zahir is a fascinating object which cannot be forgotten, a memory which cannot be erased, and it assumes many different forms in different places through time – it is at different points in history an astrolabe, a compass, a jail cell painted with images of tigers by a Muslim fakir, a golden mask, a veil embroidered with stones, a coin worth twenty centavos and scratched with the initials NT and the numeral 2 . . . Whatever form it takes, it tantalises and tortures whoever encounters it. Borges’ story fascinated Ira, and we discussed it many times in London and on the phone between London and New York. In a sense he became himself (as did I, and so many others) a victim of this particular incarnation of the Zahir - the Zahir as written text casting its spell upon lured, doomed readers, a real Tantalus tale, and an impenetrable veil. Ira thought the solution to the problem of the unforgettable, tormenting Zahir was suggested by Borges when he wrote, “Zahir in Arabic means ‘notorious’, ‘visible’; in this sense it is one of the ninety-nine names of God, and the people (in Muslim territories) use it to signify ‘beings or things which possess the terrible property of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drives one mad.’” And later, Borges notes: “In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or the ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that path.” Ira said that this turned the unforgettable, painful obsession with the Zahir into the search for the “zikr” – a word recited or chanted inwardly to the point where language escapes fixed signification, the point of utter forgetfulness and transcendence of self and memory. In this way, the zikr would obliterate the Zahir, in whatever form it took, whatever name it was known by. Ira encountered the zikr when he met the Jilala Brotherhood in Morocco and he would connect this with his experience of the temple mantras of India and Nepal, while the zikr was described by Ira’s friend Brion Gysin in his novel The Process - “Basilides in his Game reduced all the Names proposed by the Gnostics to one single rolling, cacophonic, cyclical word which he thought might well prove to be a Key to the heavens: Kaulakaulakaulakaulakau. . .” It was one possible method, Ira said, of achieving Burroughs and Gysin’s desire to “Rub Out the Word”, to silence and abolish the obsessive “Voice Inside” of self-referential consciousness, and abolish Maya, or Illusion. The zikr is the cyclical incantation of the infinite, the transcendence of the limitation of words, the shattering of the belief that words incarnate as well as signify some kind of immutable world. Ira connected Borges’ immortal fable with Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind experiments – in their radically different ways, they were attempts to “Erase the Word”, to penetrate the mystic veil and escape the tormenting, endless rebirth of the Zahir, the literally self-begetting linguistic programme of belief and illusion.
Ira recognized and addressed the rending of the veil in his poetry, as in his poem ‘Retractable Claw’ – “How then can I hide behind this veil / of Poetry / for he knows what may be hidden / by the white ash & / that which will be revealed by / the black. . .” And there were other occasions in his poems when he had paused, glimpsing something beyond his own words, however inspired those words, a divine radiance beyond the fixity of language – “If it were all on stone, then would we be any / closer to the source, / there in the center of the sacred enclosure?” (‘Celestial Ambush’) The quotidian world, like the spirit realm, was curtained, and Ira would raise the curtain, as in ‘The Stauffenberg Cycle’ – “We spoke of a curtain rising / knowing it bore the word Hysteria / in place of History. . .” While in ‘Samadi’ he wants to rend the veil hiding death - “Burn the veil of the Poona skull. . .” But in the swirling surface illusions of his Mylar photographs and in his poems, especially those addressed to the beauty of women, Ira was fated to weave and protect the erotic and divine Veil of the Mysteries. He could not, like Gysin and Burroughs, physically cut-up the sacred texts, the divine words of The Song Of Solomon or Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. . . He would have found that absolutely unbearable. Instead, he created his own version of the scissor or Stanley blade cut-up, a cardboard template cut with rectangular slots which he moved over a printed text, dowsing for connections while, significantly, leaving the original uncut, unmarked, intact. Ira always thought of himself as, above all, a poet and he understood his work as a spiritual vocation, something profound and sacred which had been entrusted to him – he enjoyed hearing Brion Gysin read his permutated cut-up, ‘NO POETS DON’T OWN WORDS’, but the sentiment expressed in that work was quite alien to him. Gysin recognized Ira’s profound veneration of the Word and he would tease and test him about it, on one occasion pushing Ira to the limit – or maybe it was the other way around. Gysin deliberately, physically erased parts of an interview recording which Ira was making with him, for the magazine Heavy Metal, winding the tape back and forth and erasing at random. Ira was mortified at the disappeance of all that great material, all those wonderful words, but when he protested, Gysin exclaimed, “When I say ‘Erase the Word’, I mean erase the fucking word!”
Borges’ story was an attempted exorcism of suffering, transposing loss into a metaphysical puzzle about belief and illusion, a philosophical enigma which the writer invents in order to displace the agony of unrequited love. But if the Zahir in the story is tracked through all its quotidian and fabulous incarnations, the story is more than a record of an obsession - it is itself one more incarnation of the Zahir. The tale did not, could not free its author, its first reader, who would remain forever under its spell, like so many who would encounter it and become spellbound in their turn. . . Indeed, was Borges ever the author, the creator of ‘The Zahir’, or merely the medium for one more of its terrible appearances? ‘The Zahir’ is a written spirit trap, a word fascinator, a divine literary raptor, a linguistic moebius strip, through which the Zahir snares its devoted readers, its literary believers. It is the definitive, inescapable, sinister Borgesian labyrinth which transmutes perpetually through its readers, making them its victims, mortal members of the fraternity of perpetual loss. It is a viral fable, writing as contamination, myth and miasma in the Burroughsian sense – a textual transmitter of illusion, the demonic, shape-shifting Zahir replicating its very own Name through a thousand psyches.
Borges cites a definition of the Zahir from a verse interpolated in Attar’s Asrar Nama (Book Of Things Unknown) – “The Zahir is the shadow of the Rose, and the Rending of the Veil.” The Zahir blocks the light of the true mystic Rose of Love, it taunts and hypnotizes while it conceals the divine behind an elegy to a doomed romance – it is a text which must be torn asunder, a curtain of words between the reader and the transcendent experience which it hides, a beautiful veil which must be destroyed. If the Zahir becomes a veil embroidered with stones in Borges’ tale, it is also, and always, a veil embroidered with stories. But I don’t think Ira could accept the idea of the rending of the veil of poetry, despite his understanding of the Borges story and despite those moments in his own poetry when he expresses a desire to tear it away, to see through or behind it. Likewise, he could appreciate the linguistic demolitions of Gysin and Burroughs’ Third Mind project, the brilliant pyrotechnics of their writing of attack, and their pursuit of what Foucault called “limit experiences”, but he couldn’t follow them. Borges called Ira, “The man who lives in the land of the Muezzin”, and there is a key here to Ira’s essence – the poetic, mystical recitation, and the oral/textual call-and-response, of the Divine Word. For Ira, the transmission of esoteric learning and poetic feeling through written texts was an inviolate duty. He would preserve the Veil of the Word, he would be the Guardian of the Psychic Holy of Holies, the Keeper of the Sacred Mysteries – he could not do, or be, otherwise. He recognized and feared the dangers and limits of language, the castigation and abolition of the inexpressible - the Law is always written, and so it is true, and must be obeyed, while the unsaid, the unwritten, by definition, is always potentially criminal, heretical. Ira knew this, but his life was a life of books as well as a life of world travel and adventures, and he saw himself as a scribe among generations of scribes, reading and writing, annotating and creating, adding to the revelation and healing preserved in books. “Blitzkreig the Citadel of Enlightenment!” proclaimed Gysin and Burroughs. But the thought of a burning library made Ira close his eyes and shudder - it even, for a long moment, silenced him.
Every writer realises the difficulties and then the impossibility of expressing certain thoughts and feelings. How could Ira speak or write the raptures and revelations he’d experienced in Nepal, or with the Jilala in Morocco, or at the Golden Temple of Amritsar, or simply walking down Duke Ellington Boulevard? Well, he tried, and often, against the odds, the miraculous inspired testament came through onto the page – true feeling and thought immortalised. Once, when I interviewed Ira, I said, “Georges Perec wanted to master every discourse and style, and write the entire world.” Ira replied, “No one could write about this hour and this room and get it all down, it would take a lifetime, more than a lifetime. . . You say ‘the sky is blue’, and that seems like it’s not enough, because it’s really lots of blues, so many blues, it’s blues without limit, but you could say that it’s ‘a red feather sky’, meaning it’s like the colour of that stone which is one kind of lapis lazuli, and so you say that bit of the sky is ‘a red feather lapis lazuli blue’, or it’s ‘a surpar blue’, or it’s ‘blue like the heart of a flame in Afghanistan at noon’, which is pretty good, or ‘a red feather blue, blue as a bone in Afghanistan at noon’, or whatever you like, but then there’s all those blues you can see in the sky, but how can you write all those shades and tones of blue and write pages and pages of descriptions and evocations of all these blues, it’s impossible. . . So you write ‘the blue sky’ or ‘the bluest of skies’ or ‘the indigo blue midnight sky’ and you have to make it so the poem tells you exactly what kind of blue, so the reader or the listener knows exactly the kind of blue that all those different blues made the sky, at exactly that one time, and what it really felt like. . . And then you think you’ve really caught it and got it down, but when you read it back you see that you haven’t captured it at all, that unique moment, you thought you’d caught it, but it’s escaped you. . . Or you’ve got all these words, these evocations, blah blah blah, and it might even be wonderful, it might be terrific, people might think it’s really great, it’s beautiful, you know, but then you know that the sky you saw, that once-upon-a-time true blue sky, that magic blue sky, that incredible electric blue sky, deep down you know you didn’t get it, you just couldn’t do it, and now that blue sky is gone forever.” And yet, at the same time, I remember how Ira beamed and radiated with pleasure one day when he was lamenting the loss of some poems he’d written and left in a Xerox shop, and I quoted the Zohar: “No, words do not fall into the void.”
POEM - Karen Margolis
So much for history
With all due respect
for the wisdom of the young
who have already claimed the future
I do admit age brings obsession
with relativity. Knowledge
is not always progress
Thanks, I want to reclaim my own past
before surrendering it
to the new generation of interpreters
who surely know better
It all happened before they were born
and everybody knows eyewitnesses
can’t be trusted. They’re only people.
They only know their own feelings.
So much for history.
Waiting for nobody
QUOTE - William Burroughs
"I harbour a deep distrust of scientists. Give me a worldly cultured priest any day and twice on Sunday... and not some timorous old beastie, cowering in the eternal lavatory of a dead universe."
POEM - Frederick Pollack
Is This A Dagger
Sleepless, a king walks
his smoky torchlit halls.
May pause at any door,
nod at snores,
frown at words and sighs
beyond, dither at silence,
lose himself in a mere
vertical drowse.
Could enter and demand
company, expect
obsequiousness, disloyalty.
Won’t; the only traitor
is his body.
Elsewhere, peasants grunt
at dreams, sentries stare
into fire, prisoners
dissolve chains with tears.
All give what they can.
If only sleep or dawn
would come, or (he remembers)
Christ, alternative to both.
If only a foolish
sword would appear
at the end of the hall! But the guards,
armored and visored
at the ends of the hall, are his,
gleam and are still.
If I looked, would I find (he wonders)
an eye within the steel?
POEMS - Helen Addy
Ruler
A blade of light,
my transparent body
cannot measure love,
no heart bigger than another.
Held tightly, I tattoo
palms with numbers,
let the lovers count
themselves lucky.
Jangle
Like the jangle of long marriage,
a couple clatter dishes in a cafe,
their faces folded and put away.
The man’s knee jolts the table,
spilling the woman’s tea.
Her skirt darkening,
she corrects her cup,
the unabsorbed
pooling on the floor.
A waitress comes with a cloth,
asks about injury or burns.
They do not answer,
their ears tuned
to the ring of teaspoons,
the knife’s sharpened song.
7am
The rain not darkening their heads,
the white-haired cross the road
with carrier bags and dogs,
the streets quiet as cathedrals.
Spiked chimneys insult
the flattened hedgehog,
his body a bristle doormat
on the unwelcoming road.
Like broken rainbows,
yellow lines crumble
around corners,
coins lost in the gutter.
The trees silence the downpour,
their branches like umbrella spokes,
leaves blown inside out,
their veins netting the light.
QUOTE - John Bennett
"Beauty is
the refinement
of agony."
POEM - Paul Murphy
Bertold Brecht Before The House Of UnAmerican Activities
In my nearby canal an unseemly mess:
The death of a soap star. Her torso is
all that remains. There's her picture
on the poster in my little local shop.
Naturally a pornographer has confessed.
Brecht stooped mightily over the Landwehr
Canal, Berlin. There was some more odium
to resolve. The toothbrush moustache
of quantum mechanical knowledge
Had rid Germany of decent clean beer.
Now his navy is cleaning up
The seven seas. I am in clover.
Bertolt Brecht is in California.
He wants to confess but stops. How did
He sever her head, hurl the fat torso
Into the rat infested black water?
Why did he gaze back with such
a plaintive quizzical look?
Bertolt Brecht! Are you listening?
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing!
The Reichstag lists to one side
on history's even keel. It has heard
you are ruined. Bertolt Brecht
are you ruined, are you ruined?
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing!
So much for history
With all due respect
for the wisdom of the young
who have already claimed the future
I do admit age brings obsession
with relativity. Knowledge
is not always progress
Thanks, I want to reclaim my own past
before surrendering it
to the new generation of interpreters
who surely know better
It all happened before they were born
and everybody knows eyewitnesses
can’t be trusted. They’re only people.
They only know their own feelings.
So much for history.
Waiting for nobody
QUOTE - William Burroughs
"I harbour a deep distrust of scientists. Give me a worldly cultured priest any day and twice on Sunday... and not some timorous old beastie, cowering in the eternal lavatory of a dead universe."
POEM - Frederick Pollack
Is This A Dagger
Sleepless, a king walks
his smoky torchlit halls.
May pause at any door,
nod at snores,
frown at words and sighs
beyond, dither at silence,
lose himself in a mere
vertical drowse.
Could enter and demand
company, expect
obsequiousness, disloyalty.
Won’t; the only traitor
is his body.
Elsewhere, peasants grunt
at dreams, sentries stare
into fire, prisoners
dissolve chains with tears.
All give what they can.
If only sleep or dawn
would come, or (he remembers)
Christ, alternative to both.
If only a foolish
sword would appear
at the end of the hall! But the guards,
armored and visored
at the ends of the hall, are his,
gleam and are still.
If I looked, would I find (he wonders)
an eye within the steel?
POEMS - Helen Addy
Ruler
A blade of light,
my transparent body
cannot measure love,
no heart bigger than another.
Held tightly, I tattoo
palms with numbers,
let the lovers count
themselves lucky.
Jangle
Like the jangle of long marriage,
a couple clatter dishes in a cafe,
their faces folded and put away.
The man’s knee jolts the table,
spilling the woman’s tea.
Her skirt darkening,
she corrects her cup,
the unabsorbed
pooling on the floor.
A waitress comes with a cloth,
asks about injury or burns.
They do not answer,
their ears tuned
to the ring of teaspoons,
the knife’s sharpened song.
7am
The rain not darkening their heads,
the white-haired cross the road
with carrier bags and dogs,
the streets quiet as cathedrals.
Spiked chimneys insult
the flattened hedgehog,
his body a bristle doormat
on the unwelcoming road.
Like broken rainbows,
yellow lines crumble
around corners,
coins lost in the gutter.
The trees silence the downpour,
their branches like umbrella spokes,
leaves blown inside out,
their veins netting the light.
QUOTE - John Bennett
"Beauty is
the refinement
of agony."
POEM - Paul Murphy
Bertold Brecht Before The House Of UnAmerican Activities
In my nearby canal an unseemly mess:
The death of a soap star. Her torso is
all that remains. There's her picture
on the poster in my little local shop.
Naturally a pornographer has confessed.
Brecht stooped mightily over the Landwehr
Canal, Berlin. There was some more odium
to resolve. The toothbrush moustache
of quantum mechanical knowledge
Had rid Germany of decent clean beer.
Now his navy is cleaning up
The seven seas. I am in clover.
Bertolt Brecht is in California.
He wants to confess but stops. How did
He sever her head, hurl the fat torso
Into the rat infested black water?
Why did he gaze back with such
a plaintive quizzical look?
Bertolt Brecht! Are you listening?
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing!
The Reichstag lists to one side
on history's even keel. It has heard
you are ruined. Bertolt Brecht
are you ruined, are you ruined?
Pay attention! You are in danger of failing!
ESSAY
THE WOBBLY EMPIRE OF REASON
Richard Livermore
I should have always known, that sooner or later, I would come back to reading Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason - which I have now done after almost a fifty year absence - perhaps if only to see if I understood it the first time around as well as I thought I had. The answer to that question is that I think I may have understood some of its salient points, if not the whole. Kant's prose, after all, is pretty impenetrable. It was my first sortie into philosophy and at the time I flattered myself that I was well on my way to being a budding philosopher who could unravel the secrets of the Cosmos and - like some kind of latter day John Dee - exercise power over them. (I was, after all, encountering words like a priori, noumena, a posteriori, prolegomena, antinomy and amphiboly for the very first time and that should have counted for something in the casting of spells.) Now I know better. The second time around I found myself still being fascinated by Kant's breakdown of the synthetic process of cognition in the first part of the Critique in The Transcendental Aesthetic - which, funnily enough, is not about art or poetry or literature, but the relationship between such phenomena as sensibility, intuition, understanding, perception, apperception (self-consciousness) and so on; reason was to be dealt with later on in the book. I am not sure I fully grasp all the points Kant wants to convey, but I hope I have understood something of relevance - at least in relation to its implications for poetry, which I will deal with briefly at the end of the essay.
Kant breaks cognition down into what, for the want of something better, I will call faculties. (He doesn't use the term much himself.) Sensibility is the faculty which covers impressions from outside and inside the organism conveyed through the senses, whether these be external or internal - and by internal impressions he means feelings, thoughts, emotions, sensations and so on. Intuition, as far as I can gather, is what processes and orders all these impressions vis-a-vis the concepts and categories of the understanding. Understanding supplies the universalising templates through which we make sense of the sense-impressions. In intuition, a dynamic interplay between sense-impressions and the understanding - and, one assumes, imagination and memory - is always taking place. Thus, this barking, hairy, growling phenomenon entering my audio-visual field at the moment is registered in terms of the concept "dog" - although, of course, the concept "dog", as Spinoza said, cannot bark; it just provides the category into which to fit a barking phenomenon. Kant broke down cognition in this way because, as he put it, sense-impressions without understanding are blind; while understanding without sense-impressions have no content. Intuition is what stands at the juncture of these two faculties, mediating between them. Without the categories and concepts of the understanding to guide it, all intuition would encounter would be a buzzing, blooming confusion, but without the senses, intuition would have no world to make sense of. Intuition mediates between the two by 'representing' the former in terms of the latter - the barking, growling, hairy creature before me in terms of the concept "dog".
Before we go further, something needs to be said about Kant's use of the word transcendental in the context of The Critique. Kant was originally a Rationalist, like Leibnitz, but his encounter with the British Empiricist school, especially with Hume, had delivered quite a shock to his Rationalist complacency and forced him to deal with the world of experience. This meant abandoning the Rationalist position and embracing aspects of Empiricism - though with one crucial difference. Empiricism is unable to tell us how we organise what we receive from the senses in order to turn our two plus two into four. For Kant, the process of making sense of what comes from our inner and outer senses required more than the raw material provided by the senses. Something synthetic was going on above and beyond the empirical, something he called transcendental - not to be confused with transcendent. Representation, imagination, memory and understanding all take us beyond the merely empirical and imply the addition of a synthesising faculty capable of putting all the bare essentials together and organising it into some kind of whole. Of course such an idea makes nonsense of the realist idea that how we experience and conceive the world is no more than a reflection of the world as it is. This organising potential of thought has what he calls a transcendental dimension - which is why the book is divided into two parts called The Transcendental Aesthetic and The Transcendental Logic. Take the case of cause and effect as an example. David Hume had said that we only couple these two phenomena from habit and custom. There is no necessary connection between them beyond experience. Kant answered by saying that, like our ideas about space or time, which constitute the necessary condition of there being objects in space and events in time in the first place, the notion of cause and effect was an a priori condition of the way we think about events which occur in the world - i.e., as effects which lead back to their causes. Whether or not that would have satisfied David Hume, of course, is another matter. However, Kant does add something to the debate, namely the addition of a purely intelligible - transcendental - element in the overall equation which takes us beyond Hume's empiricism. We are more or less certain that the sun will rise tomorrow not just because it has risen every day up to now, but because we can say more or less why it will do so and can't do anything else. The whole notion of causality thus constitutes the transcendental ground upon which we are able think about events happening in the first place. One analogy might be a foreground in a picture having a necessary background. It doesn't completely refute Hume, but it does relate our expectation of the sun's rising to our wider background knowledge of the way the universe works, which entails a transcendental perspective outside our direct experience. It was for this reason that Kant claimed that he had made a breakthrough in the realm of thought which was similar to that made by Copernicus in the realm of astronomy. We could almost call the empirical standpoint the immanent or immediate standpoint and the transcendental standpoint the mediated or intelligible standpoint, brought to us not directly by experience, but by the intervention of thought. Furthermore, according to Kant, we cannot arrive at the transcendental point of view simply by adding up all the instances of the empirical, since that would involve calculating these instances to infinity. The transcendental point of view, however, contains the possibility of them all and, by doing so, moves us beyond the purely empirical.
So far so good. We have dealt with sensation (both inner and outer), intuition and the understanding, and the synthetic elements involved in The Transcendental Aesthetic. We now have to examine Kant's treatment of reason, which, after all, is what The Critique of Pure Reason is a critique of. This is where we must leave The Transcendental Aesthetic and arrive at the much longer and more complicated part of the book Kant calls The Transcendental Logic, since reason involves all the higher level logical forms of cognition which are independent of Intuition. It is obviously higher up in Kant's cognitive hierarchy than the other faculties I have mentioned, including understanding. However, reason does not have a creative role to play in how we conceive things. All it can do is help us organise our conceptions. To put it in the words of Sebastian Gardner "The legitimate use of reason is, according to Kant, regulative as opposed to constitutive: employment of concepts to constitute objects is the exclusive prerogative the the understanding, but reason is entitled to employ its ideas to direct or regulate the understanding." In other words, reason can only relate other, already constituted, forms of knowledge to one another in ever more abstract ways. It is perhaps no accident that the term, reason, appears cognate with terms like regular, regulation, regulative, rational, ration, ratio, rule, realm, reign, rein, rigor, rigorous, rigid, right, regimented, erect, direct, correct, rectify, rectitude and so on. I may be wrong, but all these words would probably turn out to have the same Indo-European roots if you followed them all the way back. Kant's purpose is to draw a strict line around reason and say what it is and is not good for. In other words, he wants to make its rule constitutional rather than absolute - which is basically what the Rationalists before him did, who believed that reason was of itself sufficient to account for our knowledge of the world.
Kant's intention is that of putting a fence around reason and denying it a creative place in his scheme of things. He does, however, make one huge exception - morality. (The existence of 'The Moral Law Within", by the way, is how Kant brings God back into the picture, after banishing him once and for all to the less certain realms of the unknowable thing-in-itself.) All reason can do in relation to the world of phenomena is provide us with rules and procedures through which to organise our thoughts beyond the concepts of the understanding. However, according to Kant, we can still create a moral order by the use of reason alone because, for Kant, morality, which apparently is all about rules and procedures, is itself the province of reason. I find this very dubious. If reason by itself is, in Kant's own language, simply a regulative, not constitutive, faculty, considered in itself it is very sterile and therefore can only produce a very sterile kind of morality - which the Categorical Imperative ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.") of his later Critique Of Practical Reason would turn out to be. (Don't act exclusively on your desires if you are gay, in other words, because if everybody did so, there'd be no future generations - which, of course is an absurd imperative because everybody tends to be different.) For me, the source of moral behaviour does not lie in our reason, but in our imagination, that is to say, in our ability to imagine the effect of our behaviour on others, the pain it might cause, the happiness it might produce and so on and so forth. In other words, morality is intuitive, not, as Kant believed, rational, and the imperatives it generates are not removed from our immediate responses to the world and relocated in some abstract rational domain. It presupposes responses to the world which put us in tune with other people and animals, which is the last thing Kant's Categorical Imperative does
And if we deny Reason a constitutive role in morality, what creative potential does it actually have? As far as I can see, none at all. It has, as Kant says, a purely regulative function, providing the rules and procedures we need to get our more abstract ideas in some kind of order. That's not a small role - after all, its use in demolishing all sorts of certainties is not to be sniffed at - but it is not an executive or legislative one, even in the realm of morality. It is a helpmeet, nothing more. From an evolutionary perspective, reason probably emerged as we needed to find regular patterns in the world which would enable us to predict events in our environments and learn to control them. This would eventually require a degree of abstract thinking and the critical ability to weigh the pros and cons of competing ideas in logical ways. So reason had a humble, but necessary, part to play in our evolution. However, later it would come to assume much more grandiose proportions. This, of course, is why Kant is considered a major philosopher of the Enlightenment. He failed to tame reason sufficiently - though that was his purpose - and determine its true place in the scheme of things, which is the subordinate one of helping us get our ideas in some kind of order. Kant's objective in the Critique was to draw a line around reason and limit its application - especially in the direction of metaphysics. And he ended up exaggerating its significance so that he could use it to legislate in the field of morality. It won't do. He should have stuck to his original project and we wouldn't have been stuck with his damned Categorical Imperative.
Yet for all that, Kant is on the right track in wanting to draw a line around reason and say what it can and cannot do. Reason cannot, for example, represent reality. Reality, both as it comes from outside and within - the reality of the self, for example - is unknowable because, according to Kant, we can never move beyond the realm of appearances. I find this liberating - especially in relation to Hegel's later efforts to prove that the Real is Rational and the Rational is Real, and his use of the Dialectic to establish this 'fact'. The truth is that the Dialectic cannot escape the prison of the mind. It may help us sharpen our critical tools and influence our actions or Praxis, but it is one thing to elaborate grand dialectical schemes rooted in the faculty of reason, quite another to relate such schemes to outside reality and make them stick. As Louis MacNeice wrote, "World is crazier and more of it than you think." Kant's refusal to perform Hegel's kind of intellectual gymnastics - except, of course, where it suited him - is what I find most encouraging in him. Unlike Hegel with his Spirit, Schopenhauer with his blind Will, Nietzsche with his Will-To-Power and many others, he leaves the question open as to what reality might be behind its series of masks.
Before we finish completely, I would like to say a few more words about this "unknowable thing-in-itself" which is so central to Kant's philosophy. According to Kant, for knowledge to exist, you needed subjects and objects; in short, you needed a subject-object field in which knowledge was at the objective pole of that field. But the objective pole is conditioned by and cannot exist independently of the subjective pole; we only have knowledge of objects constituted by subjects. Such objects are not things-in-themselves free of our subject-object field of perception. Therefore, what is outside that field is unknowable. No matter how you dress it up, we can never get beyond appearances or phenomena. This doesn't mean that Kant agreed with the good Bishop Berkeley who said dogmatically that appearances were all that existed and there was nothing behind them. Nor was he saying, like Hume, the eternal sceptic, that you could never be certain that anything existed behind appearances. Kant's argument in favour of something existing outside of this subject-object field of phenomena is that, if this subject-object field exists, something else must exist corresponding to it as its transcendental ground, which is a bit like saying that if you are reading this essay on the the internet, the internet itself must exist; or perhaps it's like saying that the existence of the number five implicitly presupposes the existence of the infinite series of numbers of which that number is a member. You can't see the internet, or count that infinite series of numbers, but somehow they must be there in the background for the two phenomena to occur. In Kantian language, the internet is the transcendental ground of your being able to read this essay, just as the infinite series of numbers is the transcendental ground of the empirical finite number five within it.
One implication of Kant's transcendental approach for modern science is that our universe cannot be the only one and that, for it to exist at all, an infinity of other universes would also have to exist as its transcendental ground; furthermore, that would explain why it is not just a fluke that, in our universe, the Cosmological Constant is so finely tuned that beings like us were eventually able to emerge. In fact, one could almost say that such a universe had to emerge and we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs for almost an eternity waiting for it to do so. The gods do play dice, but the dice are loaded and the game is rigged because, there being an infinity of universes, sooner or later one had to emerge with its Cosmological Constant set exactly as it is in our own and that just happens to be the one we inhabit. (OMG, all those monkeys randomly typing the complete works of Shakespeare!) Kant did not, of course, live in the right century to discuss this possibility, but I am sure that if he had, he would have come to the same conclusion. It was, after all, by a similar process of reasoning that he deduced that a world of things-in-themselves - or perhaps just one thing-in-itself - is the transcendental ground or horizon of all the phenomena we perceive in this world, although we cannot know what that other world or thing-itself might consist of. This is the important thing about Kant, as far as I am concerned: not that we can know THAT something exists, but that we cannot know WHAT exists behind the world of appearances and cannot predicate anything of it - not even whether or not it has spatio-temporal or causal properties, since these are properties of our own phenomenal world. It leaves all our options open, in other words.
I think that, for poets, this is a liberating idea, in the way that Keats' Negative Capability - "that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" - is also a liberating idea, because it allows them the free space to project their own uniquely individual vision onto this unknowable thing-in-itself - in the knowledge that it is ultimately not reason which is decisive, but imagination and intuition. It may also save them the futile effort of pursuing intellectual will-o-the-wisps. Art engages the sensuous intuitive faculty above any of the others. It might, of course, employ ideas and concepts, but they are there for it, not it for them. Reason has only a subservient (critical) role to play in artistic creation, just as it has in life and, as long as this is recognised, it might still serve a useful - if secondary - function.
Kant breaks cognition down into what, for the want of something better, I will call faculties. (He doesn't use the term much himself.) Sensibility is the faculty which covers impressions from outside and inside the organism conveyed through the senses, whether these be external or internal - and by internal impressions he means feelings, thoughts, emotions, sensations and so on. Intuition, as far as I can gather, is what processes and orders all these impressions vis-a-vis the concepts and categories of the understanding. Understanding supplies the universalising templates through which we make sense of the sense-impressions. In intuition, a dynamic interplay between sense-impressions and the understanding - and, one assumes, imagination and memory - is always taking place. Thus, this barking, hairy, growling phenomenon entering my audio-visual field at the moment is registered in terms of the concept "dog" - although, of course, the concept "dog", as Spinoza said, cannot bark; it just provides the category into which to fit a barking phenomenon. Kant broke down cognition in this way because, as he put it, sense-impressions without understanding are blind; while understanding without sense-impressions have no content. Intuition is what stands at the juncture of these two faculties, mediating between them. Without the categories and concepts of the understanding to guide it, all intuition would encounter would be a buzzing, blooming confusion, but without the senses, intuition would have no world to make sense of. Intuition mediates between the two by 'representing' the former in terms of the latter - the barking, growling, hairy creature before me in terms of the concept "dog".
Before we go further, something needs to be said about Kant's use of the word transcendental in the context of The Critique. Kant was originally a Rationalist, like Leibnitz, but his encounter with the British Empiricist school, especially with Hume, had delivered quite a shock to his Rationalist complacency and forced him to deal with the world of experience. This meant abandoning the Rationalist position and embracing aspects of Empiricism - though with one crucial difference. Empiricism is unable to tell us how we organise what we receive from the senses in order to turn our two plus two into four. For Kant, the process of making sense of what comes from our inner and outer senses required more than the raw material provided by the senses. Something synthetic was going on above and beyond the empirical, something he called transcendental - not to be confused with transcendent. Representation, imagination, memory and understanding all take us beyond the merely empirical and imply the addition of a synthesising faculty capable of putting all the bare essentials together and organising it into some kind of whole. Of course such an idea makes nonsense of the realist idea that how we experience and conceive the world is no more than a reflection of the world as it is. This organising potential of thought has what he calls a transcendental dimension - which is why the book is divided into two parts called The Transcendental Aesthetic and The Transcendental Logic. Take the case of cause and effect as an example. David Hume had said that we only couple these two phenomena from habit and custom. There is no necessary connection between them beyond experience. Kant answered by saying that, like our ideas about space or time, which constitute the necessary condition of there being objects in space and events in time in the first place, the notion of cause and effect was an a priori condition of the way we think about events which occur in the world - i.e., as effects which lead back to their causes. Whether or not that would have satisfied David Hume, of course, is another matter. However, Kant does add something to the debate, namely the addition of a purely intelligible - transcendental - element in the overall equation which takes us beyond Hume's empiricism. We are more or less certain that the sun will rise tomorrow not just because it has risen every day up to now, but because we can say more or less why it will do so and can't do anything else. The whole notion of causality thus constitutes the transcendental ground upon which we are able think about events happening in the first place. One analogy might be a foreground in a picture having a necessary background. It doesn't completely refute Hume, but it does relate our expectation of the sun's rising to our wider background knowledge of the way the universe works, which entails a transcendental perspective outside our direct experience. It was for this reason that Kant claimed that he had made a breakthrough in the realm of thought which was similar to that made by Copernicus in the realm of astronomy. We could almost call the empirical standpoint the immanent or immediate standpoint and the transcendental standpoint the mediated or intelligible standpoint, brought to us not directly by experience, but by the intervention of thought. Furthermore, according to Kant, we cannot arrive at the transcendental point of view simply by adding up all the instances of the empirical, since that would involve calculating these instances to infinity. The transcendental point of view, however, contains the possibility of them all and, by doing so, moves us beyond the purely empirical.
So far so good. We have dealt with sensation (both inner and outer), intuition and the understanding, and the synthetic elements involved in The Transcendental Aesthetic. We now have to examine Kant's treatment of reason, which, after all, is what The Critique of Pure Reason is a critique of. This is where we must leave The Transcendental Aesthetic and arrive at the much longer and more complicated part of the book Kant calls The Transcendental Logic, since reason involves all the higher level logical forms of cognition which are independent of Intuition. It is obviously higher up in Kant's cognitive hierarchy than the other faculties I have mentioned, including understanding. However, reason does not have a creative role to play in how we conceive things. All it can do is help us organise our conceptions. To put it in the words of Sebastian Gardner "The legitimate use of reason is, according to Kant, regulative as opposed to constitutive: employment of concepts to constitute objects is the exclusive prerogative the the understanding, but reason is entitled to employ its ideas to direct or regulate the understanding." In other words, reason can only relate other, already constituted, forms of knowledge to one another in ever more abstract ways. It is perhaps no accident that the term, reason, appears cognate with terms like regular, regulation, regulative, rational, ration, ratio, rule, realm, reign, rein, rigor, rigorous, rigid, right, regimented, erect, direct, correct, rectify, rectitude and so on. I may be wrong, but all these words would probably turn out to have the same Indo-European roots if you followed them all the way back. Kant's purpose is to draw a strict line around reason and say what it is and is not good for. In other words, he wants to make its rule constitutional rather than absolute - which is basically what the Rationalists before him did, who believed that reason was of itself sufficient to account for our knowledge of the world.
Kant's intention is that of putting a fence around reason and denying it a creative place in his scheme of things. He does, however, make one huge exception - morality. (The existence of 'The Moral Law Within", by the way, is how Kant brings God back into the picture, after banishing him once and for all to the less certain realms of the unknowable thing-in-itself.) All reason can do in relation to the world of phenomena is provide us with rules and procedures through which to organise our thoughts beyond the concepts of the understanding. However, according to Kant, we can still create a moral order by the use of reason alone because, for Kant, morality, which apparently is all about rules and procedures, is itself the province of reason. I find this very dubious. If reason by itself is, in Kant's own language, simply a regulative, not constitutive, faculty, considered in itself it is very sterile and therefore can only produce a very sterile kind of morality - which the Categorical Imperative ("Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.") of his later Critique Of Practical Reason would turn out to be. (Don't act exclusively on your desires if you are gay, in other words, because if everybody did so, there'd be no future generations - which, of course is an absurd imperative because everybody tends to be different.) For me, the source of moral behaviour does not lie in our reason, but in our imagination, that is to say, in our ability to imagine the effect of our behaviour on others, the pain it might cause, the happiness it might produce and so on and so forth. In other words, morality is intuitive, not, as Kant believed, rational, and the imperatives it generates are not removed from our immediate responses to the world and relocated in some abstract rational domain. It presupposes responses to the world which put us in tune with other people and animals, which is the last thing Kant's Categorical Imperative does
And if we deny Reason a constitutive role in morality, what creative potential does it actually have? As far as I can see, none at all. It has, as Kant says, a purely regulative function, providing the rules and procedures we need to get our more abstract ideas in some kind of order. That's not a small role - after all, its use in demolishing all sorts of certainties is not to be sniffed at - but it is not an executive or legislative one, even in the realm of morality. It is a helpmeet, nothing more. From an evolutionary perspective, reason probably emerged as we needed to find regular patterns in the world which would enable us to predict events in our environments and learn to control them. This would eventually require a degree of abstract thinking and the critical ability to weigh the pros and cons of competing ideas in logical ways. So reason had a humble, but necessary, part to play in our evolution. However, later it would come to assume much more grandiose proportions. This, of course, is why Kant is considered a major philosopher of the Enlightenment. He failed to tame reason sufficiently - though that was his purpose - and determine its true place in the scheme of things, which is the subordinate one of helping us get our ideas in some kind of order. Kant's objective in the Critique was to draw a line around reason and limit its application - especially in the direction of metaphysics. And he ended up exaggerating its significance so that he could use it to legislate in the field of morality. It won't do. He should have stuck to his original project and we wouldn't have been stuck with his damned Categorical Imperative.
Yet for all that, Kant is on the right track in wanting to draw a line around reason and say what it can and cannot do. Reason cannot, for example, represent reality. Reality, both as it comes from outside and within - the reality of the self, for example - is unknowable because, according to Kant, we can never move beyond the realm of appearances. I find this liberating - especially in relation to Hegel's later efforts to prove that the Real is Rational and the Rational is Real, and his use of the Dialectic to establish this 'fact'. The truth is that the Dialectic cannot escape the prison of the mind. It may help us sharpen our critical tools and influence our actions or Praxis, but it is one thing to elaborate grand dialectical schemes rooted in the faculty of reason, quite another to relate such schemes to outside reality and make them stick. As Louis MacNeice wrote, "World is crazier and more of it than you think." Kant's refusal to perform Hegel's kind of intellectual gymnastics - except, of course, where it suited him - is what I find most encouraging in him. Unlike Hegel with his Spirit, Schopenhauer with his blind Will, Nietzsche with his Will-To-Power and many others, he leaves the question open as to what reality might be behind its series of masks.
Before we finish completely, I would like to say a few more words about this "unknowable thing-in-itself" which is so central to Kant's philosophy. According to Kant, for knowledge to exist, you needed subjects and objects; in short, you needed a subject-object field in which knowledge was at the objective pole of that field. But the objective pole is conditioned by and cannot exist independently of the subjective pole; we only have knowledge of objects constituted by subjects. Such objects are not things-in-themselves free of our subject-object field of perception. Therefore, what is outside that field is unknowable. No matter how you dress it up, we can never get beyond appearances or phenomena. This doesn't mean that Kant agreed with the good Bishop Berkeley who said dogmatically that appearances were all that existed and there was nothing behind them. Nor was he saying, like Hume, the eternal sceptic, that you could never be certain that anything existed behind appearances. Kant's argument in favour of something existing outside of this subject-object field of phenomena is that, if this subject-object field exists, something else must exist corresponding to it as its transcendental ground, which is a bit like saying that if you are reading this essay on the the internet, the internet itself must exist; or perhaps it's like saying that the existence of the number five implicitly presupposes the existence of the infinite series of numbers of which that number is a member. You can't see the internet, or count that infinite series of numbers, but somehow they must be there in the background for the two phenomena to occur. In Kantian language, the internet is the transcendental ground of your being able to read this essay, just as the infinite series of numbers is the transcendental ground of the empirical finite number five within it.
One implication of Kant's transcendental approach for modern science is that our universe cannot be the only one and that, for it to exist at all, an infinity of other universes would also have to exist as its transcendental ground; furthermore, that would explain why it is not just a fluke that, in our universe, the Cosmological Constant is so finely tuned that beings like us were eventually able to emerge. In fact, one could almost say that such a universe had to emerge and we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs for almost an eternity waiting for it to do so. The gods do play dice, but the dice are loaded and the game is rigged because, there being an infinity of universes, sooner or later one had to emerge with its Cosmological Constant set exactly as it is in our own and that just happens to be the one we inhabit. (OMG, all those monkeys randomly typing the complete works of Shakespeare!) Kant did not, of course, live in the right century to discuss this possibility, but I am sure that if he had, he would have come to the same conclusion. It was, after all, by a similar process of reasoning that he deduced that a world of things-in-themselves - or perhaps just one thing-in-itself - is the transcendental ground or horizon of all the phenomena we perceive in this world, although we cannot know what that other world or thing-itself might consist of. This is the important thing about Kant, as far as I am concerned: not that we can know THAT something exists, but that we cannot know WHAT exists behind the world of appearances and cannot predicate anything of it - not even whether or not it has spatio-temporal or causal properties, since these are properties of our own phenomenal world. It leaves all our options open, in other words.
I think that, for poets, this is a liberating idea, in the way that Keats' Negative Capability - "that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" - is also a liberating idea, because it allows them the free space to project their own uniquely individual vision onto this unknowable thing-in-itself - in the knowledge that it is ultimately not reason which is decisive, but imagination and intuition. It may also save them the futile effort of pursuing intellectual will-o-the-wisps. Art engages the sensuous intuitive faculty above any of the others. It might, of course, employ ideas and concepts, but they are there for it, not it for them. Reason has only a subservient (critical) role to play in artistic creation, just as it has in life and, as long as this is recognised, it might still serve a useful - if secondary - function.
POEMS - Louise Landes Levi
Mystic - mist/ the mountain,
Cry: night & star/ my numerology
transcends time/ as the redness/
&
no
man
goes
there
*
Black
Woman - shields
of
Mercy, climb/ the
Mountain, Redden, the leaves
No one ascends - in the winds, these
Voices made
the
music.
*
Redress/ redemption,
My Kingdom Come. Cum. I
Unite: Fire & Water, Hap-
less, sigh, Sweeper’s
Cry,
New, Jerusalem
*
(after Blake
for LU/ la =
Song Ma = ma ma, Lu
La Lu, You are gone
or
are you ? LU/ La
Ma
A
for Lou Reed
LR was a meditator last years of his life, in Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
He may not have learned, however, that LU - in Tib. is the name
of a very beautiful & poetic free-form song style. Lama, in Tb.
= mother. It is believed the son light meets the
mother light at the moment of death.
*
4
feathers
found,
in
the
morning/
mourning –
Sweep, the wind/
Murmur/
Song,
I
Hear
Density, Luminosity
A
Walk,
Into
the
(transparent)
town,
4
feathers
found,
in
morning/
mourning.
REVIEW
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN BANGKOK
Eddie Woods
Inkblot Publications
ISBN 0 934301 719
156pp
Distributed by aftermathbooks.com
Available from
aftermath books, 42 forest street, providence, rhode island, 02906, USA
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS IN BANGKOK
Eddie Woods
Inkblot Publications
ISBN 0 934301 719
156pp
Distributed by aftermathbooks.com
Available from
aftermath books, 42 forest street, providence, rhode island, 02906, USA
What I look for in any kind of autobiographical book is - a) that it is written well, b) that the experiences narrated in it have a ring of authenticity about them and c) that it is readable and entertaining. Of course, it helps if the subject-matter interests you as well, but that must be taken as read. On all four counts, Eddie Woods' memoir of the time he spent in Thailand and its environs in the 70s, Tennessee Williams in Bangkok, passes with flying colours. One of the great things about Woods' writing - especially about sex - is that it is invariably vivid. This is especially true of Woods' account of his relations with the transgendered men - or 'lady-boys' - in the book. The big love of his life at the time was a cross-dressing Singaporean Chinese rent-boy called Kim, living with whom he describes in very intimate terms. The fact that Woods is a good, crisp and humorous writer helps him convey all that he needs to about this relationship without in any way boring the reader.
Tennessee Williams in Bangkok is mainly - but not exclusively - about Eddie Woods' relationship with Tennessee Williams during the periods the latter spent in Bangkok. Eddie Woods first met Tennessee Williams (aka Thomas Lanier Williams) during the early 70s, while on assignment with the Thai English language paper, Bangkok Post. A lot of his account is gossipy, as you'd expect, with the criss-crossing of names such as Gore Vidal, Yukio Mishima, William Burroughs, Harold Norse, Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin and others. But this is not simply name-dropping, as all these figures are woven into the text - sometimes in insightful ways. Some of the book's interest for me lay in what is revealed about Williams' - and Woods' - sexual proclivities and their contrasting attitudes towards them. Both Woods and Williams could be described as "gay" - though Woods would be more aptly described as bi-sexual. Nevertheless, they represent very divergent versions of what it might mean to be "gay". You don't have to go very far into the book to realise that homosexuality is not simply one thing and that there are many homosexualities - or bisexualities for that matter - a fact which may be confusing to some people, who like the question of what people are cut, dried and neatly pre-packaged. Williams' tastes ran to 'butch' men, while Woods' veered off towards the androgynous Katoy, or 'lady-boy' type, for which Bangkok is famous. (A troupe called The Lady Boys of Bangkok have been performing at the Edinburgh Festival for so long now that they have become almost part of the furniture!) As Woods says, there are just not the same hang-ups in Thailand about sexual orientation as there have been in the west.
At one point, the political implications of Woods' and Williams' contrasting preferences are vividly brought out when Woods discusses what Williams later wrote in his Memoirs. "For him, Gay Lib was a serious crusade in which 'camp mannerisms' had no place. He viewed extreme forms of swish and camp as products of self-mockery." Woods strongly disagrees with Williams here, arguing that some men are simply like that. I must confess to being in agreement with Woods on this point. Some people ARE simply like that, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. A 'butch dyke' is simply that; she is not trying to live up to her image of a man - or indeed anyone's image of anything at all. Likewise, the 'camp queen'. Differences of this kind seem to emerge naturally, and it really doesn't matter what your political - or indeed religious - convictions are, because it won't make a blind bit of difference. Woods also discusses a parallel situation involving tensions between the theatre-groups, Gay Sweatshop and Blue Lips, aka The Brixton Fairies in London while he lived there during the later 70s. Philosophically, he sided with the latter, despite the respect he obviously had for the former. As I see it, Woods' predilection for 'lady-boys' should elicit no more comment than Williams' preferences for big butch men. After all, as he is quite happy to tell us, such propensities in Woods in no way precludes the apparently paradoxical fact that he liked to be fucked by his 'lady-boy' lovers and at one point in the book even describes himself as a male lesbian. People might mock at this, but all I can say is "Why not?". Nothing is written in any of these matters. Difference is the name of the game, after all, not an identity-politics which, in the end, becomes a kind of Procrustean bed for people to lie on. One of the things I liked about this book was the vividness with which Woods brings matters like this to life, especially in the context of the relationship he strikes up with Tennessee Williams. They never, by the way, ended up sleeping together. Woods wasn't butch enough for Williams, and Williams (or Tom, as he was known by his friends), though camp enough, was not really Eddie's type.
Woods doesn't just deal with Williams' sexual appetites, however; the creative impasse Williams felt he had reached, especially since the death of his lover some years earlier and his subsequent alcoholism is also well brought out. Woods got close enough to Williams for the latter to reveal that he had lost his sense of direction, creatively speaking. This was in part due to personal factors, but also to the kind of work the public expected him to continue writing. Williams was moving in a more experimental direction, which wasn't appreciated by his public and Woods deals with this creative dilemma in a very insightful way. It is, after all, a dilemma that most artists of integrity face once they reach a certain stage of development at which they are not content to rest on their laurels. As a result, Woods' account goes a long way towards humanising the myth of 'Tennessee Williams' which may exist in the mind of his public.
Woods is one of those people who has obviously kicked around quite a lot in his life, and this comes across vividly. "Been there, done that" could almost be the book's leitmotif. It's partly what gives it its flavour. His time as a journalist in Bangkok and elsewhere, for instance, put him in touch with many leading political figures in Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore in the 70s - not all of them very savoury characters - and what he has to say about them can be very revealing. One particular incident in which Woods had to hightail it out of Thailand to avoid arrest for a certain journalistic indiscretion he committed during the dictatorship years of Prapas Charusathien and Thanom Kittikachorn in the early 70s is especially memorable because it is so well described - almost down to the last palpitation of panic. It is one of the great virtues of this book that Woods can take you into his own feelings about whatever it is he is relating in a way that you seem to be there with him and can identify with what he is going through.
The main autobiographical part of the book and its Epilogue in which Woods relates how the book came to be written, is followed by a short 3-scene play called One Audience In Search Of A Character, which was first published on the front page of Bangkok Post's Sunday Magazine on October the 18th. 1970. The text is complemented by photographs which were taken at the time of many of the characters who crop up in the book.
The final impression left by Tennessee Williams In Bangkok is that of a natural story-teller relishing telling the tale he has to tell and bringing his characters and situations to life in a way that is highly infectious.
Richard Livermore
Tennessee Williams in Bangkok can be purchased directly from Aftermath Books (recommended for folks in the USA) by sending an email to:
orders@aftermathbooks.com In which case the price is $15 postpaid.
While if you are elsewhere on the planet, go to either
Amazon US.
Amazon UK
or any of several other Amazons (Germany, Italy, France, Spain, etc),
or AbeBooks
ESSAY/REVIEW
Paul Murphy
The Avante Garde of Fin de Siecle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon and their contemporaries: at the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, Venice, Italy
Paul Murphy
The Avante Garde of Fin de Siecle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon and their contemporaries: at the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, Venice, Italy
This exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim modern art gallery, Venice, charts the evolution of French painting at the end of the 19th century. The Impressionist movement was beginning to become the kind of tired art monopoly that it had once rebelled against. France had been defeated in the war of 1870 by the Prussians and Germany had thus been unified. In the fin de siecle France was to be rocked by the Dreyfus scandal but also by a political ferment including Bohemians and conservatives, radicals and anti-republicans, anarchists and supporters of the status quo. Artists began to either retreat from the political turmoil around them into a purely aesthetic movement or fervently embrace predominantly left wing alternatives. The period was summarised by five separate, disparate groups: the Nabis, the Fauvists, the Pointillists, the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists.
The retreat from reality was manifested by a renewed interest in the esoteric, exotic, remote and oriental: medieval manuscripts, fascination with art from Japan and the adoption of Symbolism which was really a consequence of a critical failure of religion to provide adequate means of expression for the crisis of modernity that artists began to face. Europe was now the dominant power in the world and its superiority rested upon the Gatling gun, the Lee Enfield rifle, barbed wire, mines, steam-powered battleships. This was entirely different from the world of Napoleon, for instance, for his army in Egypt had been similarly equipped to its Mameluke counterparts in the Battle of the Pyramids sixty or so years earlier. The world after 1870 was entirely different from the world of the past and represented the domination of Europe over the rest of the globe. The era of European colonialism was a time when French artists, for instance, began to depict the life of far flung places in some kind of idealised, idyllic transposition contrasted with encroaching industrialisation, commercialisation and urbanisation in Europe. The best example of this is in the work of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) who travelled to Tahiti to depict the life of the south sea islanders. This seems a spontaneous rebellion against the choking conformity of French life, in fact it was a well orchestrated and planned attempt to exploit the paradise that Tahiti seemed in terms of art depictions that might sell well back in the auction houses of Paris. But Gauguin, for all his insincerity and greedy, exploitative investment in colonialism influenced the artists who succeeded the Impressionists especially when they began to challenge orthodoxies such as perspective and the Impressionists goal of creating art of a more personal, immediate and relevant kind that had become in turn an art monopoly that began to resist and resent change.
The leader of the Pointillists, George Seurat (1959-1891), was probably reacting against various new technical developments which included photography and had evolved an innovative colour theory based on the ideas of Newton and Helmholtz. This was to become the pointillist technique whereby optical effects are created by the eye itself as it views separated dots of colour rather than by brushwork alone. Seurat's work is not represented (somewhat disappointingly but nor are works by Paul Gaugin or Vincent Van Gogh) in this exhibition but the work of his successor as leader of the movement, Paul Signac (1863-1935), is. In fact many wonderful, atmospheric paintings by Signac who was a committed Anarchist-Communist are presented including depictions of his home at St Tropez and also locations along the Mediterranean coast such as Venice and Antibes. Signac had been a friend of Van Gogh, having painted with him at Asnieres sur Seine and visiting the artist at his house in Arles. The painting of Signac forms the centrepiece of this exhibition alongside works by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a Symbolist artist who seems to have depicted internalised objects which elicit a fascination with the extremity and conflicting tendencies of science and religion that summarised the late Victorian era. His source material is from the Revelation of St John hinting at apocalyptic doom to come?
The exhibition was conventionally curated, for instance the title seemed to be quite academic and a bit stuffy, but might have been helped by some general text in each room rather than individual card texts for each painting and the usual audio guide (not given away). A summary like this with titles such as 'Impressionist influences' or 'The Rise of the Symbolists might have helped the visitor. The card text was sometimes either too simplistic or insufficiently explained and a bit complex. I had to ask one of the extremely helpful interns about the term 'cropping' because it was linked to 'flattened perspective' but left unexplained and eerily hanging like a ruined arch on the card text. In short cropping is the editing of an image to depict it as part of a point of view rather than the object itself. So instead of merely painting a boat in plan view the cropped image presents the artist in the boot and looking out. The image is therefore no longer about the thing but about the viewer. This is a direct reaction to the rise of photography. Painters had to keep one step ahead of photographers by going places where cameras could not go for at this time cameras were big and cumbersome. Also artists were tending to move the horizon line to the very top of the image heralding the beginning of abstract art. Perspective was no longer seen to be the holy cow it had once been, indeed it was on the way out. Generally a more dynamic and engaging style would have helped the exhibition to engage the viewer rather than leaving him or her a bit over-awed. For instance, some of the experiments of the groups depicted produced works of art which are, to say the least, rather bad or at the very best, a matter of taste.
The other part of the museum is devoted largely to Peggy Guggenheim's massive collection of modern art. In many ways it rivals collections like the Tate Modern the difference being that the Guggenheim collection is a personal response to 20th century art whereas the Tate's collection was bought with public funds and reflects a less eclectic approach and one based on more art historical principles and views of what is and what isn't part of the canon. Its clear that Peggy Guggenheim, the art-collector, was friends with Picasso and Jackson Pollock that she built the collection with loving care and was also photographed by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s when both were poor and struggling in Montmartre. The collection is a personal view of modern art and modernism generally in an unforgettable location right beside the Grand Canal in Venice, possibly the most unique place in the world to situate such a museum. Its a fitting tribute to the geniuses and movements that Peggy Guggenheim supported.
Paul Murphy, Venice, October 2013
POEMS - Richard Le Boeuf
World
Wipe away the world
from your brain, from all the folds
and crevasses there;
it prevents you squeezing out
through the cracks
and escaping into the air.
Whale
A tail descending
into the ocean, unknowingly
waving goodbye
- the way gods do when it's time
to depart and beckon us
follow or die.
The retreat from reality was manifested by a renewed interest in the esoteric, exotic, remote and oriental: medieval manuscripts, fascination with art from Japan and the adoption of Symbolism which was really a consequence of a critical failure of religion to provide adequate means of expression for the crisis of modernity that artists began to face. Europe was now the dominant power in the world and its superiority rested upon the Gatling gun, the Lee Enfield rifle, barbed wire, mines, steam-powered battleships. This was entirely different from the world of Napoleon, for instance, for his army in Egypt had been similarly equipped to its Mameluke counterparts in the Battle of the Pyramids sixty or so years earlier. The world after 1870 was entirely different from the world of the past and represented the domination of Europe over the rest of the globe. The era of European colonialism was a time when French artists, for instance, began to depict the life of far flung places in some kind of idealised, idyllic transposition contrasted with encroaching industrialisation, commercialisation and urbanisation in Europe. The best example of this is in the work of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) who travelled to Tahiti to depict the life of the south sea islanders. This seems a spontaneous rebellion against the choking conformity of French life, in fact it was a well orchestrated and planned attempt to exploit the paradise that Tahiti seemed in terms of art depictions that might sell well back in the auction houses of Paris. But Gauguin, for all his insincerity and greedy, exploitative investment in colonialism influenced the artists who succeeded the Impressionists especially when they began to challenge orthodoxies such as perspective and the Impressionists goal of creating art of a more personal, immediate and relevant kind that had become in turn an art monopoly that began to resist and resent change.
The leader of the Pointillists, George Seurat (1959-1891), was probably reacting against various new technical developments which included photography and had evolved an innovative colour theory based on the ideas of Newton and Helmholtz. This was to become the pointillist technique whereby optical effects are created by the eye itself as it views separated dots of colour rather than by brushwork alone. Seurat's work is not represented (somewhat disappointingly but nor are works by Paul Gaugin or Vincent Van Gogh) in this exhibition but the work of his successor as leader of the movement, Paul Signac (1863-1935), is. In fact many wonderful, atmospheric paintings by Signac who was a committed Anarchist-Communist are presented including depictions of his home at St Tropez and also locations along the Mediterranean coast such as Venice and Antibes. Signac had been a friend of Van Gogh, having painted with him at Asnieres sur Seine and visiting the artist at his house in Arles. The painting of Signac forms the centrepiece of this exhibition alongside works by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a Symbolist artist who seems to have depicted internalised objects which elicit a fascination with the extremity and conflicting tendencies of science and religion that summarised the late Victorian era. His source material is from the Revelation of St John hinting at apocalyptic doom to come?
The exhibition was conventionally curated, for instance the title seemed to be quite academic and a bit stuffy, but might have been helped by some general text in each room rather than individual card texts for each painting and the usual audio guide (not given away). A summary like this with titles such as 'Impressionist influences' or 'The Rise of the Symbolists might have helped the visitor. The card text was sometimes either too simplistic or insufficiently explained and a bit complex. I had to ask one of the extremely helpful interns about the term 'cropping' because it was linked to 'flattened perspective' but left unexplained and eerily hanging like a ruined arch on the card text. In short cropping is the editing of an image to depict it as part of a point of view rather than the object itself. So instead of merely painting a boat in plan view the cropped image presents the artist in the boot and looking out. The image is therefore no longer about the thing but about the viewer. This is a direct reaction to the rise of photography. Painters had to keep one step ahead of photographers by going places where cameras could not go for at this time cameras were big and cumbersome. Also artists were tending to move the horizon line to the very top of the image heralding the beginning of abstract art. Perspective was no longer seen to be the holy cow it had once been, indeed it was on the way out. Generally a more dynamic and engaging style would have helped the exhibition to engage the viewer rather than leaving him or her a bit over-awed. For instance, some of the experiments of the groups depicted produced works of art which are, to say the least, rather bad or at the very best, a matter of taste.
The other part of the museum is devoted largely to Peggy Guggenheim's massive collection of modern art. In many ways it rivals collections like the Tate Modern the difference being that the Guggenheim collection is a personal response to 20th century art whereas the Tate's collection was bought with public funds and reflects a less eclectic approach and one based on more art historical principles and views of what is and what isn't part of the canon. Its clear that Peggy Guggenheim, the art-collector, was friends with Picasso and Jackson Pollock that she built the collection with loving care and was also photographed by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s when both were poor and struggling in Montmartre. The collection is a personal view of modern art and modernism generally in an unforgettable location right beside the Grand Canal in Venice, possibly the most unique place in the world to situate such a museum. Its a fitting tribute to the geniuses and movements that Peggy Guggenheim supported.
Paul Murphy, Venice, October 2013
POEMS - Richard Le Boeuf
World
Wipe away the world
from your brain, from all the folds
and crevasses there;
it prevents you squeezing out
through the cracks
and escaping into the air.
Whale
A tail descending
into the ocean, unknowingly
waving goodbye
- the way gods do when it's time
to depart and beckon us
follow or die.
