"the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind"

For all my talk of poetry and philosophy and Capital, I am nonetheless still making my way slowly through Beckett's Letters. I'd meant to share an early passage having to do with two common, related themes: Beckett's assessment of his own writing (decidedly lacking) and his ideas on what constitutes worthy writing, or what writing should be. This is from a letter he wrote to his good friend Thomas McGreevy, in October 1932:

To know you like the poem cheers me up. Genuinely my impression was that it was of little worth because it did not represent a necessity. I mean that in some way it was 'facultatif' [optional - RC] and that I would have been no worse off for not having written it. Is that a very hairless way of thinking of poetry? Quoi qu'il en soit I find it impossible to abandon that view of the matter. Genuinely again my feeling is, more and more, that the greater part of my poetry, though it may be reasonably felicitous in its choice of terms, fails precisely because it is facultatif. Whereas the 3 or 4 I like, and that seem to have been drawn down against the really dirty weather of one of these fine days into the burrow of the 'private life', [...] do not and never did give me that impression of being construits. I cannot explain very well to myself what they have that distinguishes them from the others, but it is something arborescent or of the sky, not Wagner, not clouds on wheels; written above an abscess and not out of a cavity, a statement and a not a description of heat in the spirit to compensate for pus in the spirit. [...]

There is a kind of writing corresponding with acts of fraud & debauchery on the part of the writing-shed. The moan I hve more & more to make with mine is there - that it is nearly all trigged up, in terrain, faute d'orifice, heat of friction and not the spontaneous combustion of the spirit to compensate the pus & the pain that threaten its economy, fraudulent manoeuvres to make the cavity do what it can't do - the work of the abscess. [...] I suppose I'm a dirty low-church P. even in poetry, concerned with integrity in a surplice. I'm in mourning for the integrity of a pendu's emission of semen, what I find in Homer & Dante & Racine & sometimes Rimbaud, the integrity of the eyelids coming down before the brain knows of grit in the wind.

Forgive all this? Why is the spirit so pus-proof and the wind so avaricious of the grit?

One could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Beckett here holds to the Romantic view of art as one of lightning-struck inspiration, where the words simply pour out onto the page, as if unbidden. But it has more to do with the necessity of the writing. His early writing does give off the whiff of a writer trying rather too hard; the prose, while accomplished, is more laboured, the levers and pullys more visible, than in the work beginning with Watt. Molloy and Malone Dies and especially The Unnamable read like lightning, but they are not. Though they read much like what they pretend to be—first-person accounts, as if a diary or journal—considerable energy was expended to write and re-write these works, but once completed, they read as less constructed, as if the scaffolding had been removed.

So it Begins

It figures that the last post, primarily about needing to be a more patient reader, would begin and end with notes about blogging frequency. Inevitable around here, I suppose. Anyway, there were other factors leading into the decision to finally just read those things I've wanted to, or felt the need to, read and to be patient about it. Regarding poetry, Jonathan Mayhew recently posted a brief entry about his ongoing engagement with canonical high modernist poetry:

Now the problem is that in the contemporary university, cultural studies has largely displaced that canon, especially in Latin American studies--but also to some degree in the peninsular (Iberian peninsular, that is) realm. The typical argument in Latin American studies would have a very clear political "take away." I heard a colleague of mine at a candidate's job talk the other day suggest that any emphasis on literature as an aesthetic phenomenon would automatically alienate students, have them view literature as something alien to their own lives--as though their own lives had no aesthetic component at all.

So yes, I work on the boring old canonical stuff, leaving me holding the conservative end of the stick. I believe, though, that reading this stuff--really difficult modernist poetry--makes you frightfully intelligent. It really just uses all of your brain at the highest level of literacy imaginable. To really get this kind of poetry, you have to have a highly developed cultural, musical, visual, verbal, problem-solving, connection-making intelligence. But the only way to get that is to read it. In other words, nobody has it before approaching this kind of poetry.

I quote the first paragraph because I want to note the assumption some people have that the lives of certain others apparently have little to no "aesthetic component". But it is the second paragraph that is relevant here, for various reasons, both negative and positive. I believe Mayhew's observation to be essentially true. This belief has unfortunately had the effect of leading me to the further self-defeating belief that it has always already been too late for me to read difficult poetry with any degree of competence. I have blogged numerous times about this kind of thing, and probably will again; it remains something that bothers me, not just on a personal level. On the other hand, why not simply read poetry? Why worry so much? The same goes, more or less, with philosophy—endless deferrals, endless fretting, and so on. But still, why not just get on with it?

So, ok, on with it then. Instead of trying to squeeze in a page or three of some novel before drifting off to sleep at night, I have been reading poetry at bedside—I tried some Rimbaud, with some success, more Stevens, Dickinson, Kay Ryan. (I've found I really like Kay Ryan's poetry. Another contemporary poet I have in mind to try is Geoffrey Hill, who I expect to be a thornier read. I may have more to say about how these two poets have come to my attention and why I am drawn to them as possibilities.) (By the way, this does not mean that I'm abandoning novels. Far from it. But I've read a lot of them, after all, and so don't feel the need to read as many just now, or to keep up with it for the moment. Even so, as of this writing, I am about 200 pages into Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. Parts of it I love; others are actually rather annoying—frankly, just about any scene involving the titular father with his children is a serious chore to read.) As far as philosophy is concerned, I've written about my goals to read Plato and Aristotle, and I've written about Nietzsche, but possibly the philosopher I've mentioned most often here, again usually in a spirit of deferral, has been Heidegger. Perhaps one day I'll write something about why I'm drawn to Heidegger, but in any event, the actual reading has been rough-going, even as his philosophy remains somehow attractive. So I ordered History of the Concept of Time, recommended by Graham Harman as a good place to start with Heidegger, if Being and Time itself seems too opaque, as it has for me (and, indeed, leafing through it briefly upon delivery, the former does strike me as a more readable volume; for the record, I also ordered Harman's own Heidegger Explained). But I haven't dived into that just yet, because the real day-to-day project I've begun is Capital.

Capital, because of its hugeness and its incompleteness and the sheer massiveness of the commentary and other writing that draws from it and has been influenced by it, has, of course, loomed as a central text, but yet again always deferred. I've read several books that take Marxian approaches to capitalism, by David Harvey and by Ellen Meiksins Wood and by the Midnight Notes Collective, among others, some of which I have written about here; these books have been enormously helpful to me. But I have always known that in order to come to terms with Marx's own analysis, I needed to really be deliberate with the text itself, which, of course, requires time and patience. But it was a book I read earlier this year that really brought home to me my need to read Capital sooner rather than later and which reinforced the patience theme I've been talking about. I'm referring to Maria Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, which I have excerpted from and referred to a couple of times previously on the blog (it's also true that there are many discussions that seem to me to be lacking precisely because they don't sufficiently focus on the economic, but no doubt I can make that argument more directly if I myself am more familiar with the Marx in Capital, versus his other writing, or the legacy of cultural Marxism, which seems to have displaced his economic analysis in perceived importance to way too many). I think that Mies' book is an important book, so important that I decided I wanted to devote several blog posts to it. But when I sat down one evening to begin taking chapter-by-chapter notes I was confronted with my dual-problem. First, I had read the book too quickly. I had been so excited by it that I fairly tore through the text. I marked my copy in numerous places, of course, but I didn't take notes as I was reading. This has been a basic problem for me for years. I've never been a good note-taker, but it's even worse now, as my reading is largely done on my commuter train, where writing notes is physically difficult. And, on the patience theme, I've so protected this reading time and have had so many different books on my list, that I've simply read, over-relying on my memory and copious underlining to get me by and to retain what ought to be retained. My memory may be good, but it's not that good. And as I've explored with respect to writing, if you don't write an idea down, take note of it, odds are it will disappear. I discovered when I attempted to summarize the chapters in Mies' book that I would effectively have to read the book again in order to do so. (The same thing happened with a great David Graeber essay I have had in mind to use for another post I'm working on; I'll have to read it again too.) Since Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale is a feminist text, and as such is in part a feminist critique of Marx and Marxist analyses, I realized that the time had come to stop deferring and to just read Capital.

Here, then, is my plan: as I've been meaning to since first learning about it, I'm going to follow along with David Harvey's lecture series on Capital. So, I downloaded the first several lectures, and I began to read. I plan to read the chapter(s) under discussion, freely writing notes in the text itself, following up each chapter with some additional notes, then viewing the relevant lecture (these last two steps may be reversed as needed), not at all worrying if I have to re-read sections or re-view portions of lectures. I think it's gone fairly well so far. I'm through chapter 6, which means I've made it through the difficult first three chapters, the third being the one, Harvey says, where people often given up when they're going it alone. I was gratified to find I was able to read it without too much pain. (It may help, in this regard, that I read Harvey's Limits to Capital last year.) I'm not expecting to completely get Capital in this reading, or come through feeling like I've satisfied my need to understand capitalism or anything like that. I expect it to be a text I return to in the future as certain problems present themselves. In any event, Marx's own analysis aside, I'm interested in the ways in which we as readers are encouraged to treat everything as in flux, including understanding. In that way, also remembering Marshall Berman's argument that Capital is very much a modernist text, it is not unlike poetry and philosophy.

Have a little Patience

In a comment to my last post, new reader Andy W. offers some welcome kindness, while noting that he seems to have discovered the blog at a particularly slow moment in its existence. True enough. I have not been able to devote time to blogging lately, though there is indeed much on my mind, many pieces gestating.

And as far as being awake goes, that old struggle, being awake enough to read, to think, to write, this past month has been terrible for me. But the first week of this month was the worst. I looked out at the world through a sheet of gauze, with a dull, perpetual, sleeplessness-induced ache in the back of my head. I was just able to make my way, semi-coherently, through daily meetings at work as we continue to dig our way into an awful requirements document (are they not all awful? why do I have to read such non-writing?). But real reading was out of the question. Real writing (ha!) was equally out of the question, but in truth, my available time is such that I rarely devote much of it to writing anyway. (As far as the blog is concerned, half-begun sketches of posts abound in draft status, but this is nothing new.) No, the real problem that week was reading. I have been deeply frustrated in recent years whenever I have been too tired to read on my commute. Time lost forever, and there's only so much of it left.

But it occurred to me then how futile this frustration is. And it occurred to me that I have been, still, a deeply impatient reader. In the past I have described my period of despair, when I was an unfocused reader, seemingly interested in everything, casting a very wide net, getting nowhere. My reading, now, is much more directed, but direction doesn't imply discipline. Oh, sure, I have been disciplined in that I have taken on a book, and read it. I have given myself specific goals (Proust, for example), and met them. Taking on a particular book and reading it is fine, but by itself that doesn't mean I'm going to be able to think or to attend to that need to write.

It happens that the day before this awful week, as I was doing some housecleaning, I decided to listen not to music, as I normally would, but to an episode of "Entitled Opinions" having to do with Nietzsche that I'd downloaded many months before. "Entitled Opinions" is a show out of Stanford University hosted by Robert Harrison, generally concerned with philosophy, poetry, ideas. I'd heard about it through Stephen Mitchelmore and had previously listened to the two fascinating conversations with Andrew Mitchell about Heidegger, which had been particularly recommended by Stephen. The Nietzsche show is also a conversation with Andrew Mitchell and deals primarily with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Admittedly, amid the clamor of cleaning I wasn't able to listen as closely as I'd hoped, but I caught enough to be interested and to decide to try again to read Zarathustra, which I'd tried and failed to read before. The experience of listening to this show fresh in my mind, I decided to use my sleepy commute time in the following week to listen to other "Entitled Opinions" shows I'd downloaded. In particular, I listened to two enjoyable shows with Marjorie Perloff, the first a conversation about Ezra Pound, the second about Yeats, each leaving me much more likely to read the poet in question.

What emerged from the experience of listening to these three conversations, from hearing the poetry, from considering Perloff's recommendations and Mitchell's take on Nietzsche, was a deepening of my longstanding desire to really engage with both poetry and philosophy. What emerged from this week of utter exhaustion, in which I was unable to actually read much of anything, was a kind of epiphany in place of the usual frustration and impatience. I realized that if I'm ever to read the difficult, complicated works I've long been deferring, whether it be poetry, or philosophy, or specific works such as Marx's Capital, I need to go ahead and read them. I may as well read them now. I'm not, as the saying goes, getting any younger (I was 40 yesterday). But what really hit me was the crushingly obvious fact that I need to be more patient. There are still so many books that I want to read that I think I retained the tendency to plow through books, as though ticking them off of a giant list inside my head (and then, of course, dutifully adding them to the list on my sidebar here, as if that meant something). But it does me no good to read Capital or Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Being and Time or The Space of Literature if I don't get out of these books what I want to get out of them, if I retain little from them, if my engagement with the text is superficial. What would be the point? To say I've read them? No: I want to read such books for real reasons, reasons of my own, but real enough. My desire to read Capital is to help me understand capitalism, which itself is not just to add to my store of knowledge, but which matters to me in the project of living my own life. I will need to read it slowly, taking notes, writing. The same is true of philosophy. And with poetry, I feel the need to engage with the poetic form in some fashion, come to terms with it, as writing that is more focused, more attentive, more in play than so much prose. As a species of thought, a working through of language.

All of this requires patience, patience I have generally been sorely lacking. So, ironically, in response to a week in which I was largely unable to read, I am planning on, and have been, reading less, but, I hope, better. For one thing, this means no more forcing myself through a page or a chapter when my eyes want to close. I hope, too, that this patience will be reflected in my writing. In light of that, blogging will likely remain on the weekly or bi-weekly semi-schedule it's been on of late. Which isn't to say I won't immediately post something tomorrow. [I confess that the title to this post is a reference to the Guns N'Roses song. I can't decide whether I'm embarrassed to admit that. You're just lucky I didn't start whistling.]

On Baudelaire and modernity and ambivalence

In the June 8, 2009, issue of The Nation, Joshua Clover has a review (full review is for subscribers only, which I am not) of a new translation by Keith Waldrop of Baudelaire's collection of prose poems, Paris Spleen. In his review, Clover discusses the "contradiction that charges" the collection:

The individual is endlessly threatened by the gravity of the social whorl, by the maw of the masses and the tinsel seductions of the marketplace. And yet he is an individual only insofar as he is part of this new configuration, the very grounds for this new sort of person. He has no being beyond it.

Exploring this further, he writes:

For all his hate, it is the mass of people, each more unfortunate that the last, to whom he keeps returning. In "Solitude," perhaps the book's most paradoxical poem, he seems to renounce any rapprochement with the crowd. "The unfortunate inability to be alone," he bemoans, and "practically all our mishaps come from not staying in our room"--summoning the exhausted wisdom of La Bruyère and Pascal. By the end he has in his sights "all the fools searching for happiness in movement and in a prostitution I would call fraternalistic, if I wanted to speak in my century's uppity tone."

These last two words are an unconventional translation to "belle langue"... The common phrasing has long been "the beautiful language of my century"[...]. Waldrop's willingness to alienate the language, to make it dance again, cannot help but be striking to any reader of Baudelaire. It now suggests something of the poet's contempt for the honeyed talk of the bourgeoisie and its new cadre of captive intellectuals, and Waldrop gets this exactly right.

What slips away in this rendering, however, is the extent to which Baudelaire did wish to speak the beautiful language of his century, to wrest it from the salon and the Académie. Again and again he goes looking for it; the secret he knows is that it is to be found exactly "in movement and in a prostitution." The passage is the stroll of the flâneur, that jaundiced inspector of modernity, walking through the market but imagining himself not quite of it: the private citizen invented by public existence. This is the daily or nightly course for which Paris Spleen's lyrical movements and undulations find form.

It occurs to me that, if Clover appeared more often in The Nation, I might be persuaded to re-subscribe. (Of course, I'd be vastly more likely to re-subscribe if the quality of that rag's political analysis in any way resembled Clover's own, as known by me through his jane dark guise; see, for example, such recent entries on The New York Times and Tiananmen Square, on world-system hegemons, on the economic downturn and race, and so on.) Anyway, Clover's review reinforces my desire to read Baudelaire. I'm thinking of picking up The Flowers of Evil, along with Paris Spleen, as well as Benjamin's Baudelaire writings, handily published together now as The Writer of Modern Life (also mentioned in the review). Presumably the latter collection includes the relevant Benjamin I've already read, which reading put Baudelaire on my personal map in the first place.

I am intrigued by Clover's analysis, in the passages quoted above, of the different translations of the two words "belle langue" and, by implication, Baudelaire's conflicted relationship with modernity. I go back and forth on translation, worrying about choosing the best when multiple versions exist, worrying about getting the real experience, lamenting my monolingualism, and so on. Of late, my tendency is to not worry about it too much. The translation is simply that, and we do the best we can, and something of the original shines through. Here, though, I'm again struck by my loss. For it seems clear that what Baudelaire is saying is to be found at the intersection of the two versions (since, again, I am not likely to read him in the original).

We encounter few authors with zero preconceptions. With Baudelaire, my conception is of him as Benjamin's writer of modernity. One senses a writer struggling to give voice to the modern, to witness it, to see it as fully as possible. Perhaps, in the context of the problems of modernity, I have overplayed in my mind the extent to which he celebrates the modern, a celebration which might strike me as suspect. But, of course, as noted, I've not yet read him and my conception is, in fact, based on very little. So, given my ongoing concerns here, it will be seen that, as a reader, I am ripe for an interpretation of Baudelaire that highlights his "contempt for the honeyed talk of the bourgeoisie and its new cadre of captive intellectuals". Not so fast, Clover says. This contempt is "exactly right", but it misses something. It misses the love.

And I'm off and running, considering my own ambivalence about modernity, critiques of technological society, complaints about distraction. I am all too aware that, though I rail against the modern world, I am nonetheless of it, and that, in some respects, modernity enables my own opposition to it (for instance, I have a blog; I have a Twitter account, God help me). I'm reminded of problems I have had with Marshall Berman's conception of modernism, in which modern art is needed to allow us to become more suitably modern, to engage with the changes of modernity (for another take on Berman, see Aaron Bady's excellent post from last September on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, in which Aaron asks questions about who gets left out of that conception, whose work is needed to make modernity function). My preference has been to think of literary modernism less as the obsessive drive to "make it new" (which does indeed seem to always require that we be rushing ahead, like modern life, always rushing, always impatient, demanding we adapt, keep up, be up for the next challenge) than as an awareness that certain forms are now suspect, suspect because of what's been learned, or perhaps exposed, in this drive forward. It is not that modernism should help make us, readers, modernists, that is to say, adapted to modernity, in all its complexity, but instead that modernism reflects that, in the move towards modernity, old verities have themselves been rendered suspect, verities on which certain narrative forms relied. The distinction is perhaps fine; I can see that it's possible we can include both sorts in a broader umbrella of modernism (a dialectic?). Not in a desire for inclusiveness but to embody an ambivalence. And yet it seems to me that the version I prefer is a necessary corrective to the more widely held version, that it's more suited to our current predicament.

Ambivalence! Literary ambivalence is nothing in the face of ambivalence about modernity itself. If Baudelaire explored, with excitement and repulsion, the condition of modern life (how convincingly I say that: you'd think I'd read his work), what do we have to say after 150 years more of development, of decay, of deepening adaptation? Now we have no excuse but to know that, not only does our way of life depend on the current privations of millions caught living in the wrong part of the world (how unfortunate to live in a country with vast reserves of oil), but that that way of life is also built on centuries of murder and destruction. Knowing this, but also knowing how unprepared we are for that way of life to disappear, though knowing that disappear it must. Liking the comforts of modern, technologically-enabled life, indeed loving aspects of it, but knowing that the idea that all could share in such comforts has always been a pipedream (though, surely, hating the job needed to maintain it, hating especially the pointlessly long commute, hating the noise, hating the idiocy, hating the polity). The globe simply can't support it--and anyway, the resources have to be extracted from somebody, the labor has to be done somewhere, the waste has to go somewhere. There is no getting around the fact that people continue to die for it. Not so they can share in it, but so we can laze about in it, continuing to not do what needs doing, voting instead for "change" that is no kind of change at all.

Forcing into Existence

"Of the canonical Latin Americans of the 20th century--Vallejo, Neruda, Borges, Paz, Lezama--Paz is probably the weakest poet, the one who is most willful in forcing poems into existence that don't really need to exist." - Jonathan Mayhew (italics mine)

Noted: T.S. Eliot

From section V of East Coker, the second of the Four Quartets:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l' entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.