POWER'S OTHER LANGUAGE
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ai, Sin - Poems (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986)
Coolidge, Clark, Solution Passage - Poems 1978-1981 (Sun & Moon Press, 1986)
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Ai reading 'The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981'
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Clark Coolidge reading with jazz musicians
