6.

Jake

Identity means different things depending on what the moment calls for, but my take on it is pretty similar to your statement here. Olson, sure, whether in his letters, Maximus or other poems, is obviously multiple. I like the word fluid better than multiple because identity changes spontaneously, it arises, its moment is more like water.

"Tumescent" yeah, well we all get a bit swollen from time to time.

In our recent conversation posted on the Coversari blog Jack Foley refers to ego/identity as an ideology. That seems to be true, especially in western civilization. The development of the ego is wrapped up in Platonic idealization, phonetic literacy, and monotheism. It is part of a neurotic closure of the mind that we associate with things like success, heroism, fidelity, and responsibility. Capitalism and manifest destiny, and so forth would be difficult to sell to someone who wasn't shaped, driven, toward a singular notion of self. The concept of one self, an "I", creates selfishness. If you remove selfishness from the culture you alter its structure completely. This selfishness is the result of profound ignorance – not simply the ignorance of not knowing something – but the ignorance of being blind to the rest of the world in favor of a single aspect of it. It means to literally ignore the world in favor of self. If I convince myself that I am on the path to greatness then I can dismiss the rest of the world and develop into the hero I believe I can be. Fame is one way this manifests. Unfortunately, our idea of fame is not the same as the Homeric which means something closer to a good reputation. By the ideals of the romantic artist a good reputation could be ruinous. You have to be a scoundrel that nonetheless makes great art. Because of your art your abuse of friends and others close to you is forgiven. If you can succeed in convincing people that you are brilliant then you can literally get away with murder, especially if you are "brilliant" enough to become wealthy. On the other hand, if you just get up and go to work every day like every one else, or worse, you don't work at anything, not even "art", then your sins will be held against you.

To get at what I mean by failure of language I might have to take the long way around, but I'll try to be concise. Language probably originates in two ways, the desire to communicate and the desire to name. And you need to name things in order to communicate with language. (By language I mean words. Obviously, our species and many others have other kinds of language.) In order for words to be effective we have to decide that a word means something specific. Similarly with written language from hieroglyphs to alphabets we have to decide that a given symbol means something specific. Language then is a representational device. So far so good. The problem begins when we know the world by means of language instead of direct experience. That is, if I read about an animal, or about the human animal and base my ideas about the world on what I read then what I know is only representation. (I know I'm running over well worn ground here but I think it bears repeating.) Once literacy became the primary means of education and the primary means of knowing it began to superimpose itself on our experience of the world. Eventually we define the world based on what we have read rather than experiencing the world without names and categories and symbols. This makes us very susceptible. If we believe the word more than we believe the world then whoever controls the word controls our perception of the world. By the time we get to the end of the first century A.D. or thereabouts a Christian writer can write "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God." (There's the whole debate about what logos means, but we'll assume for now that the writer meant what we mean when we say 'word'.) Rationally, this doesn't make sense. No one begins with a word. No animal, vegetable, mineral, star or planet begins with a word. It's an interesting evolution. In Genesis God creates the world by speaking words, but by the time of the Gospel of John the word is God. I think they're both wrong though they both read beautifully. These are very attractive ideas. However, the universe, this planet and all its forms were here long before anyone ever conceived of something like a word. But we know what we know primarily by reading words or by hearing them. This is representational knowledge, not actual knowledge, unless we are talking about knowledge of words, in which case word in the abstract is the point. When we behave toward the world based on this representational knowledge we behave out of the abstract not out of the real. Consider how difficult it would be to convince people to kill one another if they trusted direct knowledge of one another more than what they had read or heard about one another. As long as you are a stranger, isolated from my direct experience, if I know you only as a concept and that concept has been shaped by whoever controls the words, then you are not very substantial.

Language is very useful in a technical way, as a tool. But tools are something we manufacture. If we allow ourselves to be defined by our tools, or distinguished from the rest of the world as the animal that makes tools then there is a disconnect and the world becomes more distant than the tools we use. The more complex our tools become the more alien the world becomes until we are so isolated from it in our minds that we fear it and seek to control it with our tools. Of course with this alienation we also isolate ourselves from ourselves so that the aspects of ourselves that remain unknown – drives, like sex and hunger become a threat as well. A kind of madness establishes itself.

From the time we begin to be educated until that education completely defines who we are, both to ourselves and to the world, we go through a process, by way of language systems, of isolation. What we know, we know as isolated individuals. So language fails in the sense that it establishes this isolation. As a tool it succeeds grandly, but tools are only a singular aspect of the world. We are in reality subject to the world, not the other way around. We cannot control something, or someone, by naming it. The world is beyond the control of any single feature of it.

With poetry we can undo this conventional tool aspect of language by returning it to the world. Sound poetry is one way to do this. It returns poetry to pure sound and liberates it from naming and any intention of control. Almost all my poetry begins with sounds that settle into words. For this reason those words do not contain meaning the way we have been taught. They may be channels for meaning, they may release meaning, but they are not attempting to tell the audience something definite. They are closer to music than they are to abstract literacy as a tool. Poetry of this kind is more ludic, it is like playing music, emphasis on play.

Butch

You mention that with poetry we can undo the tool aspect of language. We had earlier been discussing the idea of ‘concrete mind' and the use of poetry to dismantle that collective perspective.

I'm not quite getting what you mean by concrete mind. My understanding of it seems to be exactly opposite.

I guess concrete for me has to do with a perspective that takes objects, whatever is around you and can be sensed, and gives them weight, meaning as befitting their use in an immediate environment. Hand:tool but also, on a (necessary) level Lascaux:spirit tool.

Didn't monotheism take us away from this? Took our spiritual focus away from a spiritually imbued concretism and turned it into a rift? Casting spirit out of the immediate and into a Heaven, a transcendence that was to be grasped at but never grasped? 2500 year old psychosis: taking an intrinsic human function, spirit, and making it a carrot on a stick?

Or is it concrete:literalism that you are getting at? Monotheism casting such a powerful uniformity (along with its bedmate capitalism) across cultures that its mythos has become too literal in the collective minds of the West?

Jake

I suppose what I meant was mindset, or the idea that the world always behaves in a specific way. So it is any kind of literalism, even a materialistic literalism, i.e. replacing religion with evolution and being just as dogmatic about it as literalist religions.

I think monotheism is concrete in the sense that it disallows anything else. It is hardened against multiple gods, multiple interpretations and so on.

Mind is not really concrete, but if we restrict our thinking, our whole experience, to these hardened systems then we create a concrete shell, a concrete mind around what mind may actually be in all its fluidity. The idea was to destroy these hard, restrictive systems and open up to whatever the world and mind may be. The primary target for this destruction was/is always myself, to keep breaking free of my own tendency to settle on one interpretation of reality. This was more a problem 20 years ago than it is now. I suppose one improves with practice.

The current global politics figures into this as well. An obvious case is neo-conservative idealism, but any politics that tends toward totalitarian control is a concrete that should be dissolved. China, the Taliban, all over the world.

Butch

I think I'm taking my idea on conrete mind and monotheism from a specific historical track within the development of Christianity itself. Here are the barebones: Joseph Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space :

“However--- and here is where the West begins--- a radical and enormously influential ethical protest against the uncritical submission to the will in nature that is implicit in this finally mystical world vision broke forth in Iran, some time in the second or first millennium B.C., in the dualistic religious view of Zarathustra (known to the Greeks as Zoroaster). The dates of this earliest known prophet of an absolute distinction between good and evil—in contrast to the cosmological, mystical insight--- are in dispute. ….. In either case, the god of light and truth and justice, whose gospel he preached, Ahura Mazda, was the god professed by the Persian King of kings, Darius I….. during whose reign the first moves were taken to return the Jews to Jerusalem; and that Zoroastrian patterns of thought and verbal stereotypes were absorbed into Pharasiac as well as into Essene Judaism, there is today no question. ….. (It) fused, however, with the Jewish tribal notion of themselves as the one and only people of God. (These) “Sons of Light” ….. are to attack and overcome ….. with help from the great hand of God.”

Jake

Monotheism certainly. But I think the problem may be much older than that and may reside in the beginnings of what we call civilization, which is the beginnings of cities. As long as the community is very loosely bound, either as nomadic hunters-gatherers or settled agriculture, things tend to remain fairly fluid. One has to remain open to the drift of the herd, changes in the weather. There are patterns, but the patterns vary and there are apparently random chaotic interventions like drought, plague and other natural disasters that keep one open toward the unexpected and unknown. Once people settled in cities a very definite order was required. Class systems, castes, specialization, administrative hierarchies of power would be necessary to keep the city running. Monotheism was a further development, a refinement toward absolutism.

Butch

So my view of the concrete has to do with the historical act of making Western religion a concrete mythos, against the nature of myth itself. Abstract art, Dada, all the rest— attacking that result, these concrete minds. In effect hacking away at a thing frozen in time to the detriment of all still living, who are not even aware they still have a part in the engagement and creation of a mythic life.

Jake

Yes. They are the beginning of the erosion of the old lies and power structures. What is happening with the current union politics, religion, and capitalism is a backlash, a reassertion of those so-called values. But regardless of how dominant it may become it's too late to return to obviously oppressive systems - even under the Taliban people continued to circulate information freely. They just had to reroute it underground. The neo-cons have tried to label anything they disagree with as unpatriotic. Their surveillance system is just Hoover's old system of tracking the opposition. Power of this kind becomes so concentrated on its enemies that it misses anything that falls outside their limited range. The world eats away at it until it crumbles. Reality does not reside in solid states, or closed systems.

Butch

A slightly different track: I see Surrealism say, say a painting like “The Elephant Celebes” (Ernst), to be a concretization of what was previously not, the psyche and its images, even if it is an idiosyncratic concretization. Also instances of this type outside of art. Kekule dreaming of a snake eating its own tail. Seeing in this Uroboros a carbon ring structure for benzene.

Jake

I love Ernst. I think The Elephant Celebes and similar paintings are appearances of a concretization, but Ernst dismissed them as soon as he created them. He understood and celebrated the erosion of static conditions. Kekule, if he was a good scientist, would also greet the death of his model. Science is always provisional. When it isn't it ceases to be science and becomes a replacement for religion or some other orthodoxy. The scientific establishment is only useful as a means to challenge any new theory to make sure it is thorough. Most theories don't hold up, sometimes because of popular bias, sometimes because the scientific community isn't ready, and sometimes because they don't, at least not yet, correspond to any experience of reality. String theory or some adaptation of it may or may not be the next major step in lensing the physical universe, but it has to find some correlative beyond itself in order to be useful.

Butch

I read this book Zero once that said Pythagoras was murdered by a rival math cult because he had a neurotic fear of beans. Farting and fire and all that. When they attacked his students he ran but he refused to cross a beanfield in his way. So they caught up and gutted him. That story has stuck with me. Probably the whole sacred math hero doing something stupid because of his fear of the profane.

Jake

That's a good story and as likely true as not. Our knowledge of the pre-Socratics is so sketchy we'll probably never separate fact from legend. The numerical systems associated with Pythagoras were probably originated by him or a student. Heraclitus is a personal favorite, but he's even more difficult to trace than Pythagoras.

 

 

back to issue three

 

 

[ page 6 of 6 ]