Hail: Gypsy Cat & Gypsy Bird (Prolific/US)LP – a review
first printed in Waste Paper, #23 – 1/1989
‘One must have a mind of winter…’
Wallace Stevens
*****
A work of unfathomable sorrow and bitterness, GC&GB is
a collection of songs that arise out of that moment that connects the cat and
bird as one pounces and one tenses for the flight that will either save it or
come too late.
It is the moment of encounter when fate spreads its claws
and the night widens like mouth armed with a million teeth, a universe waiting
to swallow any or all of us, and not a sound left, not a word, not a note –
only the sudden, engulfing loneliness and the terrifying precision with which
we begin to measure the sadness of our survival.
Susanne Lewis’ voice has a coldness – it is indeed ‘the
mind of winter’ – a harsh, brittle clarity that freezes out all sentimentality
and pathos, describing in its chill timbre and icy control the figures that
make up the world around us: the ones that we cannot escape and the ones that
escape us.
The writing has the fractured grace and broken syntax of
dreams lying at the edge of desire and fear, ‘a sleep of madness / (that) has
wings and a melody / cloak and daggering.’ Her effort is to ‘lead you / towards
your dreams / where everything comes / back again’: all the pain, longing and
desperation that seem to be the necessary outcome of the simple act of loving.
The music is dry, distant and brutally casual, an harmonics
of collapse and evasion that is never quite in tune with our expectations,
twisting the scale of sounds to fit the needs of what is being said rather than
the more conventional opposite.
Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake, musicians of long standing
here in Denver, have made a remarkable lp that fulfills in spades the scattered
brilliance of their earlier efforts as Corpses As Bedmates. GYPSY CAT &
GYPSY BIRD is, admittedly, a difficult work that exhausts the listener with its
cold visions of those entropies of the heart that seem to seep into all our
relationships just when we want them to be their most perfect. But it is this
very complexity that gives these wild and shaken words their great power in
describing so accurately the landscapes in which we act out our dramas of love
and loss.
Language is the Universal Solvent of human experience.
Dissolved in the medium of words, in the shifting balances of grammar, syntax
and lexicon, our immediate perceptions of the world become other than what they
were. The horizon of language is a topography shaped from History and its
plenitude of ducts, folds, fields, tears, gaps, fissures, plates, erosions and
sedimentations: all the existential geology that is there in place before us,
that provides the contours of what we can know and what we can say.
Language, all language, is a struggle among fictions: 'you
and 'I' are the ephemera of Bodies that inhabit a double existence that is at
once Public and Private, Object(ive) and Subject(ive), Outer and Inner. The
double(d) space -- which is a single space -- is a field of struggle, an
Occupied Zone in which Aggressor and Defender constantly shuttle back and
forth. Let me repeat: Language is a struggle among fictions: 'You' and 'I': the
'you' I assume or enforce to the degree of power I am capable of when I address
the 'Other': 'I': that structure I assume when I speak or write -- that
structure I deny 'you' -- for 'you' are my invention -- communication is
maintained by the Engines of Destruction -- every utterance assumes God: for
nothing less than a God could speak.
Reading, then, tends towards annihilation: the (R)eader is
dissolved in the flow of language: his Being is taken up as salt in a stream, a
weight or valance of absence or disappearance: 'You' are reading 'Me' and are
in the process of becoming 'Other'.
To counter this, (R)eading must be more than Defensive; it
must become Aggressive.
Every newspaper, every journal, every article, every book,
television show and news program, every ad or commercial, every song you hear
on radio or record, every letter from your mother, every article of clothing
you see in the stores or on a member of the opposite sex or in the mirror,
every movie and billboard presumes the right to define 'You'. But it is worse:
every sentence, every phrase, every word, every phoneme that you encounter is
the product, the decision, of another History -- alien to 'you'. A newspaper is
not a collection of various news items, op-ed comments, human interest relief
and helpful information. It is a structure of Being. Read carelessly and a
newspaper invades your consciousness, it enters like a stain into water, an
imperceptible shading that gradually fills you up with 'you': a received
consciousness that you learn to recognize as your(S)elf.
We exist as the Sedimentation of our Histories, private and
public, the effluvia, detritus and silt of thousands upon thousands of
encounters with the Other, the imperceptible and blind geology of the creature
we stand as in the dark and depth of our own lived experience: How do we become
more than (O)ther to our(S)elves?
******
On May 12th, 1987, Robert C. McFarlane, former
head of the National Security Council, observed in his opening statement to the
Select Congressional committees investigating possible Reagan Administration
abuses of power in conducting a secret campaign against the Nicaraguan
government that ‘In short, there was a powerful and, to man, persuasive case
that to lose in Nicaragua would invite the Soviets to step up their investment
in aggression significantly in other developing nations of the world. We had to
win this one.’
This is the language of Power. It is a strain of discourse
which tends towards an infinite extension, an infinite volubility that serves
to mask its essential emptiness. It is the abstracted language that constantly
seeks to displace the human agent into a vague and reified neutrality. It is a
language that is not so much ec-centric as it is de-centric or perhaps more
aptly, a-centric: it is without a center, it is virtually without a speaker for
it is a language that appropriates God or Authority as its Voice while
suspending the actual speaker from responsibility. The recent Iran-Contra
Hearings have provided abundant examples of this language with its infinite
extension of qualifying clauses, its tortured syntax and gnarled grammar, its
grim, determined maneuvers to separate subject from predicate in order to
distort the field of responsibility.
We hear this language every day of our lives: cool,
transparent, reasonable – clear and precise of sound, though not of meaning.
In his ‘Rules For The Direction Of The Mind’ (1627), Rene
Descartes stripped the Object of particularity and sought only those qualities
susceptible to absolute verification: extension, figure, motion. By considering
the world as only those things that we can (K)now, Descartes helped begin the
long Institutionalization of Reason. By opening a gap in language, by showing
how seemingly unverifiable many of our most basic perceptions and sensations of
the world are, Descartes made terrifyingly clear how important absolute
authority is to the continuity of our societies: language must harbor
Authority, it must be opaque with its own power but transparent with intent and
meaning. In short, it must tell us what we are but not have to shout to do so.
******
Power has another language, a language that erupts in the
cracks and breaks of the Administered Body, a language without Reason that
rises out of the dense, immaculate silence of the object. Its construction is
tenuous and shockingly frail, and its effectiveness depends so much on privacy
– that it is constantly threatened with its own erosion into pure noise or pure
silence. In our society, noise and silence are represented by the metaphor of
madness – too much of either and we are suddenly suspended from the everyday
world we inhabit with such complacency.
The language that traces the fault lines of Power partakes
of both Noise and Silence, for within its folds, madness is drained of its
coercive meanings just as Common Sense is revealed as a desperate blind faith
agreement between us all to not contradict each other. This other language of
Power is, of course, the language of poetry.
Poetry is a bad word to use today. Debased and trivialized,
it evokes images of elitism and ineffectuality. In a sense, poetry is slipping
into silence toward the kind of quiet and ineffectual madness you see on the
faces of the people who sit at downtown department store lunch counters for
hours on end, their lips and hands moving in constant agitation as they carry
on a conversation that even they are not privy to.
********
We must begin then with the point of view that language
belongs to the Other and that to use language is to be compromised on the very
ground of what we consider to be most our own: our Selves and their Histories.
How then can poetry, which is only language, say anything which is not already
a life? In the simplest of terms, it does so by recognizing that the very
materiality of its existence is fashioned out of borrowed lives: Poetry is a
chance for all of us to steal back what has always been ours.
To see how this is possible we will consider two poets with
strikingly different methodologies.
*******
Ai (10/21/1947 – 3/20/2010) is a black woman who grew up in the oldest Mexican
barrio in Tucson. Her mother is Black, German, Irish and Choctaw Indian: her
father Japanese/American. She has said that ‘The history of my family is itself
a history of American.’ And it is in the transfiguration of Histories, past and
present, into poetry by the recuperation of lives and events that Ai struggles
with language towards a vision of what is true to the desperate complexities of
existence.
Ai’s most recent book is SIN, published in 1986. It is
composed solely of dramatic monologues spoken by individuals at once historic
and imaginary, who become, in their narratives, the fissures through which
another language is heard.
When a politician speaks, he is creating a listener by
assuming an incantation and rhetoric that has fused into an ideology, an
administered language that smothers the individual listener in a blanket of
homogeneity. The cliches, stereotypes, figures of speech, appeals to emotion
and to received notions of morality and propriety are often an irresistible
tide that carries us with it without our even realizing the extent to which we
have set aside thinking and are letting a structure and history of words invade
our consciousness.
Ai opens SIN with two monologues about power that try to
show the difficulty of thinking outside the Myth. The two poems balance the
poles of the American Psyche: the first is by John Kennedy and the second by
Joe McCarthy.
In ‘Two Brothers’, Power is the corrosive flux that
dissolves the myth of Camelot, of the Best and the Brightest. In a surreal
tableaux, John comes back from the dead to speak to Bobby, handing him his own
brain and compelling him to eat it as in certain ancient rites. Ai is using the
poem to describe a family history bent on appropriating America to its own
needs and ambitions. The point here is not to throw mud: the revisionism of the
Kennedy Dynasty began while Jack was still in office: the point is to take our
‘understanding’ of the Kennedys, an ‘understanding’ that has been shaped,
directed, managed and administered by almost twenty-five years of dilution in
the currents of the American vernacular; to take that ‘understanding’ and
thrust it back into its irreducible set of circumstances, back into the
cauldron of national events that make the Kennedy assassinations so vital to
the American ethos of the past two decades.
It is not that Jack couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants
or that him family money was wrung out of illegal whiskey, or that he was
absurdly eager to test his (and our) manhood by engaging in ill-conceived
military adventurism; it is not that he cut a fine figure or wore a coat and a
haircut wee, or had a gift for the blarney and knack for phrases and gestures
or that he truly believed in America’s ability to lead the world into peace and
prosperity: it is all of these… and more. No amount of compression will allow
us to understand these men. Every attempt to do so is fatally flawed by either
nostalgia or gall. Every attempt to understand leads inexorably to its own
limit and the necessity of devising yet another structure of understanding.
It is not then that the attempt to understand is wrong but
that we must be wary of growing comfortable with that understanding. ‘History’,
we can say, leads to such and such results: thus, John Kennedy’s willingness to
commit to shoring up the Western occupation of SE Asia led to our involvement
in Vietnam. This is an understanding. But John Kennedy is not reducible to that
fact or action. Ai’s poem is an oscillation between realities, between
structures of understanding that refuse the comfort of easy answers whether
positive or negative.
That she follows this poem on an American Hero with one
spoken by the Devil Incarnate, Joe McCarthy, is no accident. The success of the
poem depends on a trick of balance: to recuperate Joe McCarthy into American
history without allowing us to simply ‘understand’ him. In other words, just as
the point was not to show the Kennedys as merely Gods with clay feet, Joe
McCarthy is not to be revealed as an evil aberration of the American Psyche.
The focus is once again the family with Joe mainly
addressing his brother Lou. It is a bitter, ravaging voice that shuffles
through the memories of a life given over to the absolute melding of private
obsessions and public destinies. It is though a voice far different than the
Kennedys – for there the voice comes from within the privileges of Power, a
voice that already occupies its space: it is full of itself and its tragedy is its
willingness to empty itself of all restraint and critical insight. McCarthy’s
voice comes from the outside, a lack searching out a fullness and its tragedy
is that it imposes a mask of the Self-Identical on the plurality of America: it
is a voice that says everything it speaks in True. Thus anything that cannot be
included in this single Voice is evil and must be excised. Joe converted all
his private terrors into Public Show and what did not conform to his voice, to
his understanding was necessarily wrong. The confusion of public and private
allowed, dictated, that he could not look inward or outward for other reasons
but had to condemn those who were alien to his belief. In the end his voice has
entered its own absolute solipsism: ‘I’m an American. / I shall not want. /
There’s nothing that doesn’t belong to me.’
It is clear from these last lines that if Ai is arguing a
plurality of ‘understandings’, she is nevertheless committed to a judgement on
these lives. There is little in these poems that might be construed as an
apology, for the intent to plunge these figures back into the concrete
realities of their experience is not meant to absolve their actions in a world
of actual events.
In the long poem, ‘Kristallnacht’, a French collaborator
during WWII, Paul Morales, sums up his life as a traitor, coward and bully –
his is one of the thousands of small lives that escape the gaze of History
though his actions and thoughts taken in the aggregate form the ground for
fascism and oppression. The poem describes Morales’ relation to his past in
such a way that we are made to understand the familial, indeed, Freudian, basis
for his future behavior; but this does not, cannot, clear his conscience or
mitigate his life.
Now in his seventies, Morales looks back from this dying to
a time in 1922 when he almost died in an orphanage and says that perhaps he
should have died then for he would have ‘died for nothing / instead of living
for it.’ Seventy years of bad faith stretch inexorably behind: no amends, no
understanding, no explanation or justification can alter the terrible finality
of this ‘nothing’: that the world and his own soul would have been better off
without Paul Morales.
Under Ai’s pen, Voice after Voice swarms up out of
darkness, a brief, intense organization of chaos, rage, terror and fear. We
come to see how our lives with all their hidden needs and forgotten traumas,
their denials, obsessions, displacements, all their torturous logics of
determinism, are not simply our own: they belong to us all and each of us is
the actual History of our time. Every man’s life reveals the orders of
knowledge and being, the structures of society, politics and culture that are
only the abstractions and generalizations of thousands upon thousands of lives
lived in darkness. Ai lights up these people with a fire from within, a
language simple and brutal and elegant, a language whose only necessity is the
absolute responsibility of every one of us for the lives we choose.
***********
Clark Coolidge’s poetry provides a dramatic contrast to
Ai’s. Playful, abstract, asymmetric, it is a poetry in which the fall of
language into words and phrases is scattered along the blank expanse of the
page like jackstraw heaps of spindly grammars and hairpin syntaxes. In these
poems, the reader confronts a hidden, casually fragmented density, a
sub-language whose very possibility reveals the inert and massive complacencies
of accepted and acceptable communication.
Our education system is committed to the notion of clear
and direct communication, to a writing and thinking that is transparent in its
ability to define and describe states of being and matters of reality: a
writing, in short, that implies (imposes) a determinable identity on the flux
of the world. In America, this process is most often a form of pragmatism that
masks an ontological terrorism: what is clear (if not direct) in the ideology
of ‘clear and direct’ expression is that the group that defines ‘clear and
direct’ will have a monopoly on identity in such a society. Here we once again
confront language in its materiality: it is the property of the Other and the
Other’s rules for its use will determine and delimit the manner in which it is
available to me for expressing my own struggle with reality.
None of us uses a language which is his/her own – our
thoughts appear clothed in the grammar of generations, a hat of idealism and
suit of cliché and shoes of naïve realism: these are the hand-me-downs
everything we say must wear. We cannot, we will never, appear naked: the best
we can do in this regard is stand at the schoolyard, as does Coolidge, in a
raincoat of the Willfully Perverse and flash an overly excited and naughty
semiology, a semantic exhibitionism that will hopefully reveal what is there
nestled beneath language’s more restrictive undergarments.
Coolidge’s goal is deceptively simple: ‘I want things / to
be things / I didn’t know / before I turned them / to storm.’ The emphasis
throughout the poetry is on the Agency of the Knower, a hesitant subjectivism
that seeks out its own limits on the constantly tested field of a received and
untranscendable language. When Coolidge writes ‘Perhaps it’s just that the
words have all been said but not by me,’ he is issuing both an acknowledgement
and a challenge in regards to his project as poet. Language is the Other’s, it
is always and irretrievably a social construct indelibly printed with the
thoughts, actions, desires of all that has gone into the making of the present.
What he risks in isolation, a final distortion of syntax and
lexicon that would tilt his writing so far off the axis of communication that
the only ruling metaphor of comprehension the reader could bring to this
encounter with Coolidge would be that of non-sense or madness. Coolidge, in a
poem aptly titled ‘A Fear’, notes that ‘Sometimes the words will not mean /
what they must mean to others to me. / Have I changed them so their / meaning
only I will know / and yet do not?’
The challenge to the reader is to learn not a new language
but a radically alternate one, a language enfolded in the body of the speaker:
‘…blood systems externalized as / a trace of writing.’
Lest we mistake this poetry for a romantic idealism that
would lead inevitably to solipsism and absolute subjectivity, Coolidge
constantly turns his words to the Object, to the environment and its
extraordinary plenitude and to the individuals who exist around him and
without whom he would not, could not, exist as a human being. Language is
social and every statement ‘I’ make reveals the history of the ‘I’’s reciprocal
relations with all the Others he/she has encountered. Coolidge notes this both
simp0ly: ‘I now know I am / what you left me’: and complexly: ‘Beyond late
where you are, beyond sign and straight and / the looks of tell. I tell you the
spin you are / of me I tell. That you are half me / that half never told… / To
live with your sign of me always the dare. / Come from me, come from me far.’
The power of this passage lies in its acceptance of the
Other’s territorialization of many Selves: mine, yours, all of us: I am not my
Self, but always an other. There is no fixed Being, we are broken, fractured,
unbordered. Its power is also the hope that rises out of despair: ‘Nothing is
taken care of, everything lies. / Everyone rise.’ Coolidge struggles with
communications as heterodoxy: ‘Love is a flaw in the material. A crisis / of
matters. A noun the connectives have / fled. I would like to give you /
fragments that tie.’
There is a hint here of philosophy’s impossible dream, that
epistemological nostalgia for the absolute In-Itself, the isolated, single,
unknowable object, the thing out there beyond our bodies that exists in total
indifference to the consciousness we only are as we are brought over by that
consciousness against the world. But this must remain a nostalgia, for the
actuality resides in the mutual contamination of Subject and Object: ‘The
Memory of Seeing, who can tell just how / tainted it is with invention. And the
/ uncontrollable solders of intention that tend to leak.’
For Coolidge, language becomes the mediation that
reconciles and recuperates the Dualities that haunt our lives: Subject and
Object, Knowledge and Experience, Being and Becoming.
It is through a mediation that is constantly dissolved in
its very flow towards the Other and as such is a volatile, unstable medium that
evaporates before our sense leaving only the sheerest residue of meaning and an
untranslatable shudder of chill along the ebb and flow of our bodies.
***********
The poetry of both Ai and Clark Coolidge is without
termination: all the words await their saying and we are compelled and
condemned to say them again and again. Each poet confronts a colonization in
the body of their work. For Ai, it is the Present’s appropriation of the Past,
the way in which the dominant discourses of our society invade, conquer and
colonize that History which we are the result of and thus dissolving an alien
experience in the corrosive solvent of our current ideologies.
Coolidge struggles with a well-mannered language, the
managed and manageable rhetorics imposed on the Speaker from without that
structure his/her ways of experiencing and interpreting both him/herself and
world s/he encounters in his/her day-to-day living.
Put plainly, their attempts at de-colonization are efforts
at a true habitation, an actual living in the world that recognizes, indeed,
necessitates, the unending dialectic of the One among the Many.
