1.
Today Ted posted a
picture of someone in a Big Bird costume sitting on a park bench in Central
Park, holding a package (or is it all of their worldly possessions?) in their
lap. I wrote in the comments of Ted’s post: “allegory.” Big Bird—symbol of childhood and public broadcasting—getting the fuck out of this hell dimension. Allegory
of the public sphere’s withdrawal.
For many years it felt
like the ground was slipping from under my feet—the erosion of civil liberties
under W. Bush, the destruction of society through neoliberalism, governance
through debt—until I realized there never was any ground. America was never
great. As I told my students yesterday, you cannot found a country on genocide
and slave labor and not expect for it to eventually self-destruct. Exceptionality has
always been constitutionality’s greatest myth.
The title of this book
holds many connotations. Withdrawn:
as in, a depressive or anti-social psychological state; an occultation of the
senses; a period of suspended use of a controlled substance; to exit, or to
pull away; to become isolated, alienated; to retreat; to take or bear away. So
finally, perhaps, begins the real withdrawal—from aesthetics into politics,
from a false sense of being grounded to pondering the lack of ground under our
feet—necessitated by an event that had not been so much unthinkable or
unimaginable as unactualized.
Yesterday I wanted to
write on Facebook (and my wanting to write on Facebook is very likely part of
the problem): It was everyone’s fault.
Not just for not stopping Trump, but for
not stopping Obama, and before him W. Bush, and before him Bill Clinton, and
before him Bush senior, and before him Reagan… and so on and so forth
through a chain of presidents since the nation’s founding. I wanted to write
also, and I write now: My poetry is a
failure. The books I have written are failures. This book is a failure, because
they have not made the necessary demands on our conscience. I wanted my books
to constitute a “commons.” I wanted them to “prefigure” a world we “would want.”
I wanted them to “punctuate clock time differently.” But as my friend Brian curses
in his book Face Down, implicating my
practice across a span of books and years and conversations, “Fuck these tiny holes." A strategy of “counter-distribution” was never enough. Bringing "life" from an online environment into a bound codex was never enough. Creating
the community to which I wished “to belong in my dreams” was not enough.
And yet, at the risk of
creating an alibi for myself, I believe that Withdrawn: a Discourse may trouble the way art (and poetry) is
typically conceived as “autonomous” from social life, if not politics itself. As the
epigraphs go:
My study began with Rimbaud and what I took to be Rimbaud’s flight
from l’être poète: a flight that took
shape, as I came to realize not with his famous silence, his departure for Africa, but in 1870 when he wrote his first poem.
Rimbaud left literature before he even got there.
—Kristin Ross
In the names away in blocks
with double names to interrupt
and gather
—Fred Moten
Written under the influence
of Kristin Ross’ The Emergence of Social
Space: Arthur Rimbaud and the Paris Commune and Fred Moten’s B Jenkins, the book attempts to create a
space where poetry can disappear through its occasion, its sociopolitical
contexts, and the nexus of relations that it actively constructs through
dedication, interlocution, and modes of address. To present the discourse in
lieu of the poems. For an exchange among proper names to be objectless. For the
poems qua objects to be occluded,
leaving what we say to each other, if not what we do, unreified. “Life is what
escapes,” Moten writes after Michel Foucault. That Withdrawn has yet to appear and perhaps never will would now seem a
perverse accomplishment of this ‘project’.
Yet, Not an Alternative’s
contribution to the book correctly warns that participatory art can itself
become reifying. Discourse can become a fetish without action in
socio-political space. Generously, Brian Holmes’ essay in the book posits that Withdrawn is an attempt to establish a “missing matrix of
mutual self-recognition” within “the rhythm of
punctuated outbursts that composes a not-so-secret history.” However he also admonishes that “[t]he obvious problem,
which climate change reveals, is that it is really getting a little too late to
continually return to living in the gaps between such explosions.” In other
words, the intensification of cycles
of crisis troubles the luxury of protracted reflection represented by my
attempt to posit a dreamy cohort—my team,
my band, my commune, my friends.
In his proleptic review
of Withdrawn included in Withdrawn: a Discourse, Ian Dreiblatt playfully
imagines me like St. Anthony retreating to the desert, absconded from Empire,
holding court among acolytes, pilgrims, and fellow exiles. Teaching most of all
has saved me from the fate of the recluse. Teaching and a tenuous sense of
community after the precarious birth of my daughter two years ago when it
became nearly impossible to be communal and public and generous in the ways I
was previously. We need to withdraw sometimes to ground ourselves. To have the
resources intellectually and imaginatively that can prepare us for the unactualized.
Nearly two months ago Dottie
and I had a cancer scare with our daughter. After performing an ultrasound and
an MRI doctors couldn’t discern whether a vascular tumor on my daughter’s left
arm was malignant. In the days following her surgery, I imagined what I would
do if they discovered cancer. I imagined losing her and what it would mean to
live in a world without my daughter. Should she die, I was determined to live
my life differently in her absence. My friend Rob correctly recognized the
possibility of her death opening a space for fantasy related to my capacity for
world-forming. She was not diagnosed with cancer—thank goodness—but a residue of those
fantasies remains. They are activated again by the situation we find ourselves
in. If the world is in fact lost what should we create in its place? If God has
withdrawn, an image so central to Jewish and Islamic antinomianism, what laws
should we observe? What will command and compel us?
Or, as Aime Cesaire
writes in his Cahier:
What can I do?
One must begin somewhere.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world
worth beginning:
The End of the world of course.
Perhaps
now that neoliberalism has revealed its dark underbelly we must finally do the
work that Cesaire implored us to do all along. To bring about the “End of the
world,” which is to say, of racist, misogynist, xenophobic, settlerist capital.
2.
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.
—Robert Creeley
Let us all survive, who need to OK?
And we wish each other luck!
—Amiri Baraka
One
of the central presumptions of Robert Creeley’s poem “America” which I question
is his use of the plural pronoun “we,” having recourse to “we” myself in many
of the poems of Withdrawn. To whom
does this refer? Whom is this “we” inclusive of? Who is “the People” invented
by America, presumably by the Constitution? Who are the people it “took”? It is
unfortunately not clear, and this lack of clarity is a problem. Amiri Baraka’s
particularity in “Who Will Survive America” is refreshing in this regard. For
it is only the “Black Man” who will survive in America. Not “Negroes,” not
“Crackers,” not “Christians,” not “Red Negroes.” The distinction is not merely
divisive. Rather, an Afro-Pessimist avant
la lettre, Baraka recognizes a central antagonism between “White” and
“Black” paradigms, and it is the former which, for both Wilderson and Baraka,
cannot survive. Whiteness must die, and we are now finally forced to kill it
once and for all, lest we all perish.
Who this “we” will be constituted
by is something I have been struggling with. Specifically, how and whether it
might include me. Both Withdrawn and its
companion book are thoroughly entangled with the problem of collectivity, and
specifically what it means for the poem to be a locus for collective enunciation,
mutuality, and exchange. But a “we” has limits, as I discovered the hard way
when I gave a reading last year at the home of friends in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
For writing through the “we” in relation to Black Lives Matter and in memory of
the many Black people who have been murdered by police I was taken to task by
audience members, none of whom, interestingly enough, were Black. A year later
I am haunted by the question of whether my art can claim solidarity with others
differentiated by their vulnerability to premature death.
Ultimately, I don’t know
what I would do without interlocutors, people to think and talk with, a “we” both
constituted in fantasy and reality. Withdrawn
and Withdrawn: a Discourse bear out
this compulsion. Art objects and texts I encounter often become guides—both in
the spiritual and geographic sense. They are orientating intellectually, morally,
and emotionally. Encounters with others often seem evental and catalyze
occasions for poetry. George Oppen writes that “other voices wake us or we
drown,” emending T.S. Eliot’s original and to an or. The folks gathered in
this book are ones who have woken me in different ways, at various stages of my
life. Having written with them in Withdrawn, through a sense of
identification and solidarity, I write to
them in Withdrawn: a Discourse, as a
means of dramatizing exchange. I realize that there is nothing very
extraordinary about this: we all write to each other, poets especially, and an
age of social media has made us more garrulous than ever. However through this
project I wanted to honor this writing to
and writing with as central aspects of whatever can be called ‘my
practice.’ The result is a metadiscourse:
a reflection, framing, or amplification of the act of discourse itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment