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Way To Go

2/26/2019

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WAY TO GO


 
In 1965, when I was 21, a 25 yr. old American I had met  showed me a copy of a book he had brought from America with him when he came to this country. It was called Our Lady Of The Flowers and the author was one, Jean Genet, a name I had never heard of till then. On the front cover, there was the Brassaï photo of Genet as he was in 1947, in which he looked like a rather sensitive pugilist with short cropped hair and flat broken nose. His thin arms were thrust into his trouser-pockets. He wore a slightly rumpled shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up, and a thick belt held up his trousers. His head looked enormous, with sunken expressive eyes and a full sensuous mouth. It has always been my favourite photo of Genet, and here it was fronting a book I’d never heard of by an author I knew nothing about. That photo itself persuaded me that this was a writer I wanted to read. “Skip the introduction by Sartre.” my new American friend advised me. So I went straight into Genet and have never looked back. In fact, I became obsessed with his writing and devoured all of his novels and, later, his poetry and plays. More than any other writer, more even than Proust, who I fell in love with a little bit later, he became some kind of icon for me. Indeed, if there was one writer I wanted to be, it was Genet. This obsession was with the man as well as the writing and it led me into reading several biographies, including Sartre’s monumental ‘existential psycho-analysis’, Saint Genet - Actor and Martyr, as well as the two very pedestrian English biographies which appeared in the 1960s. The fascination, if not the obsession, has stayed with me ever since; more recently, it induced me to read Edmund White’s much more definitive and exhaustive biography, Genet, which was the first to do real justice to Genet’s life and literary output. The great strength of White’s biography lies in its obvious sympathy with its subject, a sympathy which no doubt stems from the fact that he shares Genet’s sexual proclivities. However, there was no real attempt to enter Genet from the inside and really empathise with him. It was, in other words, a conventional ‘objective’ biography and one that needed to be supplemented by the far riskier ‘subjective’ approach of the poet. And it is such an approach which lies at the heart of Jeremy Reed’s biography entitled jean genet: born to lose - an illustrated critical history.
            Unlike White’s, Reed’s strategy is definitely inward. He not only attempts to present Genet from the inside, as it were, he clearly identifies with his subject and renders him passionately. In other words, he risks the investment of himself in his subject and it is this fact which makes jean genet: born to lose such an exceptional and singular work. There are of course, dangers in this approach, not least of which is that one is not always sure where Jeremy Reed ends and Jean Genet begins, but at least Reed has taken the risk and that outweighs, in my opinion, any negatives that might accrue from such an approach.
            Reed presents Genet thematically rather than chronologically. Such a method of presentation is certainly much more conducive to the approach he adopts than the ‘objective’ method of other biographers. The 28 short chapters have titles like two punks: rimbaud and genet, jaques guerin: the man who owned proust’s bedroom, a woman’s story: violette leduc and jean genet, drugs, genet’s photographs and death. Anything in fact which allows Reed to get an imaginative handle on his subject and render him from within. It is, in my opinion, a highly effective approach to Genet and allows Reed to present aspects of Genet which would be absent in a more conventional approach. What comes across in the most forceful way is the manner in which Reed’s own inner poetics is used to illuminate Genet’s inner poetics. This, as I’ve said, has its dangers, but it does give the book as a whole a consistency and aesthetic unity which a more ‘objective’ approach would have lacked. What Reed brings out very vividly is the extent to which the alienating brutality of Genet’s childhood and adolescence spent in reformatories such as Mettray drove him into himself in ways that made daydreaming become “his focal point”. Reed goes on: “Writing is neither a substitute for life, nor a therapy aimed at rehabilitation, but a pursuit in which inner and outer realities find reconciliation through imagination. What Genet filtered through his unconscious at Mettray became in time the reality of his fiction. To imagine is to suffer, and Genet’s courage in confronting his past was the precise quality which made him a poet.”
            Despite Reed’s passionate identification with his subject, his study does not gloss over the less salubrious aspects of Genet’s behaviour and writing, although it is refreshingly free from any taint of moralising or political correctness. It is always better, after all, to give writers who lived in a different age to ourselves, the benefit of the doubt concerning their particular outlooks. One of the things which most appealed to me about Genet when I first read him, was his very direct and unselfconscious treatment of homosexuality. Nowadays, with the advantage of post-feminist hindsight, it is easy to see that he expressed many attitudes - such as misogyny - which, when I first read him, I tended to take at face-value. Reed himself brings out the internalised homophobia that was always close to the surface in him and which was perhaps the source of his decline as a writer from the truly transgressive works of the 40s to the more anodyne political works of the 50s and 60s. I am in complete agreement with Reed in seeing in Genet’s later work a falling off of his creativity. This goes no less for Prisoner of Love than for plays like The Blacks and The Screens. (I still think The Balcony, however, is a play of extraordinary insight.) In his later work, the source of his original inspiration began to dry up. I do not believe that an identification with particular political causes can even begin to make up for that loss. In fact, I regard it as some kind of diversion, a way of not confronting the real issue of his own sexuality, especially after his links to his criminal past had become severed and criminals no longer became the subject of his writing. Had not Genet carried with him the baggage of internalised homophobia, Eros would have set him free to develop as a writer rather than wither. This internalised homophobia is partly why he fell in love with straight rather than gay men - in other words, as Reed says, he chose emotionally sterile bonds to ones which were not. But, of course, this pattern was set very early on in his life, so there was probably not very much he could do about it, even if he had wished. His internalised homophobia was undeniably connected to his identification with his earlier life in reformatories and among the (homophobic) criminal fraternities of his youth which he had strongly identified with. So in a sense, in being homophobic, you could say that he was still being true to himself and his past. We should not, after all, see everything in terms of an abstract post-gay liberationist or feminist political perspective, because that would entail the loss of imaginative focus which Reed has brought to his portrayal of Genet.
            As I have said, the approach has its dangers. To give one example, when Reed mentioned Cocteau’s refusal of the dedication of Funeral Rites out of fear for his own reputation and having his name linked to Genet’s “pro-Hitlerian sympathies with Aryan youth”, I couldn’t help thinking that these sympathies were more aesthetic and erotic than political, which the term “pro-Hitlerian” suggests. (Genet’s actual fantasised portrayal of Hitler in Funeral Rites would have hardly endeared him to the Nazi Party hierarchy I suspect!) His aim, in other words, was purely transgressive. He had a hatred of France - and probably quite rightly, given the way it had treated him. That would be reason enough to identify with an enemy - any enemy. And as a criminal whose whole Eros was soaked in the underworld he came of age in he probably identified with the purely criminal aspects of Nazi Germany as well, though whether that made him an ideological Nazi is another question entirely. Nor should we overlook the equation between homosexuality and betrayal in the relationship between Riton, the traitor, and Eric, the German soldier in the novel. Genet was very keen on that theme. Many 50s and 60s British spies for Russia - Burgess, Maclean and Vassall especially - were homosexual. After all, considering the post-war treatment of Alan Turing, who might be seen as something of a saviour for Britain during the 2nd. World War, there was not much incentive for gays not to betray their country. Also, not to be forgotten in this context is the fact that in The Thief’s Journal Genet said that he could not fulfil himself as a criminal in Nazi Germany because the whole country was dedicated to crime. It was the poetic and erotic element of criminality and transgression, along with the idea of betrayal, which appealed to Genet in Funeral Rites, not, I suspect, Nazism as an abstract political philosophy.
            Another aspect of Genet which deserves more attention - though this is no reflection on jean genet: born to lose - is the fact that he hailed from a Catholic country and his writing is saturated with Catholic imagery. I think it is only completely intelligible in that context. The same is also true of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, of course. I don’t think that a writer from a Protestant background would be quite so concerned with rituals such as the Mass and Holy Communion, which seem to have fascinated Genet. I mention this because I think it is as important in the overall critical equation as Genet’s androgyny and the transvestism of character’s like Divine in Our Lady of the Flowers. Genet’s peculiar kind of sainthood, seems to me to be an inverted Catholic sainthood, and it is one aspect of Genet which someone from a Protestant background such as myself would not find so easy to identify with. Then there’s the question of Genet’s pre-occupation with Evil. This also seems to me as religiously inspired as Baudelaire’s was in his Flowers Of Evil. Nietzsche, who wanted to go beyond these categories of Good and Evil, was the son of a Lutherian pastor and perhaps for that reason was able to shake free of these concepts. In Catholicism, the eschatology of Good and Evil, sin and redemption, seems much more intrinsic than in Protestantism, because it is much more institutional, permeating the religious and secular culture that Genet grew up in much more completely. Sartre, I believe, came from a Protestant background, which perhaps explains his pre-occupation with freedom and the idea of choosing one’s path in life-- echoes of the Protestant Kierkegaard?-- not to mention his bizarre Kantian belief that in choosing one’s path in life, ethically speaking, one chooses for everyone else. (Kant’s background was also a Protestant one.) Protestantism depends much more on the idea of individual conscience and choice, and is not so heavily invested in Good and Evil as metaphysical forces. I recall, when I was younger, and Genet’s work was first being discussed here, that he was invariably referred to as The Poet of Evil by his critics, but I could never quite relate to those concepts, and that was perhaps because I was not raised in a Catholic environment and had therefore never absorbed them. That, of course, didn’t prevent me responding to the power of his writing. After all, we still respond to the power of Homer without believing in the religious concepts which inform so much of his work. This is not a criticism of jean genet: born to lose, since Reed has his own individual focus to which a discussion of these particular questions would not have been relevant. However, I do believe Catholicism is an important variable in the overall critical equation of Genet and this is often lost sight of. (I recall a friend of mine saying, after he'd read some Genet, that Genet would return to the Church at the end of his life. But I think Genet, like Rimbaud, was far too intelligent for that.)
            All this aside, jean genet: born to lose is a unique biography based on an approach which risks a great deal, but is carried off with extraordinary panache. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the approach to lesser writers, but Reed pulls it off fantastically well. It provokes thoughts and feelings about its subject in ways that few biographies do.
 

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CHASING INFINITY

2/8/2019

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CHASING INFINITY
                                                                                    
If there is one thing our basically empirical culture does not do well, it is the concept of Infinity. Mention it and you’ll probably encounter quite a few raised eyebrows. It is, after all, largely associated with religion – or at least with the idea of an infinite God. But it seems to me that the idea of God is something we human beings have given shape to, while the infinite is without any shape or form whatsoever. In other words, our collective imagination has domesticated the concept of infinity through its picture of God – the Loving Father, The Compassionate and Merciful Allah, the Vengeful Jahweh, or my own Divine Joker. Infinity itself has never been given a space of its own to expand in without being yoked to someone’s idea of an ‘infinite God’.
          I have suggested elsewhere that the number 5 – or any number you can name – implies a series that stretches from zero to infinity as its background. Yet that infinity is an impossibility, a paradox – a point which Kant made in the Antonomies section of his Critique Of Pure Reason. What is paradoxical about it is that from any empirical perspective, infinity cannot exist, because, however far you take your series of numbers, you can always go further and never reach the end and complete it. Empirical thought loves things with limits, and with infinity you encounter something without limits. On the other hand, Logic demands that infinity must exist for precisely that reason. Cannot and Must are therefore in conflict. What is scandalous about Infinity is that it constitutes an absence of closure – a negation, if you like, of everything finite and familiar. It does to thought, therefore, what Pi – or any irrational number - does to an algorithmic equation.  In other words, it is the dark shadow of everything finite, like some kind of trace it will never get rid of.  Imagine being shadowed by that which negates you by surpassing you towards an always receding horizon. It is bound to make you feel somewhat superfluous.
          But so far, we have only dealt with the Infinite as a mathematical concept, which is purely skeletal and lifeless as far as it goes. Surely, there must be more to the concept than this, something which gives flesh to it and also breathes life into it, filling it out, connecting it to ourselves as living beings and the whole of the cosmos of which we are a part – if by the term “cosmos” we imply something more than the physical universe(s) that scientists study. (I say nothing of String-Theory, Brane-Theory, ten, eleven or more dimensions, or the infinite number of parallel universes which split into two or come into being whenever decisions are made involving an either/or choice.)
          It is on this level of putting flesh onto our mathematical skeleton of infinity that we might be tempted to bring back the hypothetical notion of “God”. I have no objection to this, as long as it is the “God” of Spinoza (or the Spanish Sufi, Ibn al Arabi) – that is to say the “God” which equates with everything else that is normally considered not to be “God”. Spinoza put it this way. “God” and the universe – or, in our case, the cosmos – are one and the same, and they logically must be, because an infinite “God” could not co-exist with anything else. If a separate infinite “God” existed, the universe itself would be pushed out of existence – unless, of course, the universe was an integral part of that infinite “God” – another mode of ‘his’ being as it were. A very logical chap was Spinoza, not really cut out to believe in the mumbo-jumbo most religious people believe in – in fact he said as much himself,    “Religion is organized superstition. It is based on the fears of naive ordinary people in the face of unpredictable nature, and clever power-hungry leader-types use those fears to control people.” – and this fact  has made him persona non grata to priests and rabbis ever since. (He was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Synagogue.)
          It is through “God”, by way of Spinoza, that we might come back to the idea of more a rounded infinity permeating every finite part of itself, myself included, along with the pen I hold in my hand. It makes sense to me to think of everything as part of a continuum which absorbs everything else. What I have never found convincing  in the natural and physical sciences is the way everything seems to be neatly divided from everything else – dogs from cats, atoms from other atoms, plants from animals, rocks from water, water from air,  me from you and ultimately what people tend to call ‘mind’ from something else they tend to call ‘matter’ and place them all in discrete categories, thereby putting them into neat little boxes. The only relations such discrete things can have with each other in such a cosmos could be ‘interactions’ with other discrete things – that is to say relations that come from outside. This paradigm appears to be breaking down in Quantum Mechanics with ideas like Quantum Entanglement, but it is still very entrenched elsewhere in science.
          But back to infinity. I am far from believing in any kind of God. Would ‘God’ not also be another discrete entity, separate from everything else?  The point that it is important to establish is that if “the infinite permeates every finite part of itself,” the finite and the infinite must be of the same basic nature with the same characteristics. The only difference is that one has been raised to an infinite power, while the other’s powers are finite. We are assuming, of course, that the cosmos was not created by a creator ‘God’ who pre-existed ‘his’ creation and continues to exist outside of it, having framed its laws and set its co-ordinates to ‘his’ satisfaction and then, to quote Antonin Artaud, “gets the fuck out and leaves the cops to keep an eye on things.”
          We cannot, of course, reduce even the finite parts of this infinite whole to our own perspective. What we might perceive and what actually is can never be identical. We see through a glass darkly as it were. The thing-in-itself, to borrow from Kant, is inaccessible to us. Nevertheless, I believe that we can infer from the fact that the infinite permeates everything finite that the cosmos in both its finite and infinite modes remains the same cosmos and shares the same nature – one in a finite mode and the other in an infinite mode. Reality is everywhere the same, in other words, and this everywhere extends beyond finite horizons.
          If this is true, everything in the cosmos – including whatever it is that underlies our own consciousness – is shared by everything else. All ‘matter’ in other words has a ‘mental’ or ‘proto-mental’ dimension. The difference is only one of degree, not kind. For example, what organises matter on an atomic plane is of the same nature as what organises matter in the human brain, giving rise to human consciousness. Atoms are simple, though they may well be complex compared to the sub-atomic particles of which they are composed. The human brain, on the other hand, is much more complex – as befits the tasks it has to perform and functions it has to fulfil. However, brains and atoms share in the same underlying nature, and embody the same impulse towards self-organisation. And that is probably true throughout the whole infinite cosmos and not just our finite section of it. The whole of being, therefore, is, to use Sartrean-Hegelian terms, in some way being-for-itself when viewed from within and only being-in-itself when it is viewed from the outside.
          Hegel distinguished between Good Infinity and Bad Infinity. Good Infinity was apparently circular, doubling back on itself, while Bad Infinity was linear and just went on and on and on forever – as a kind of interminable extension of the finite. I am not sure, but in suggesting that the infinite permeates every finite part of itself, I basically agree  with Hegel's Good Infinity rather than his Bad Infinity, and that’s certainly a turn up for the books because I never thought I’d ever agree with Hegel on anything.
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    Richard Livermore is a poet, who also edits Ol' Chanty. 

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