Tuesday, 30 June 2015

Stephane Mallarme's "Prose (for des Esseintes)" and the Poet as Mediator of the Visible and Invisible




by James Albert Barr

"Yes, on an isle the air had charged
 Not with visions but with sight,
 The flowers displayed themselves enlarged
 Without our ever mentioning it;

 And so immense, each burgeoning shape,
 It was habitually adorned
 In such clear outline that a gap
 Between it and the gardens formed."
                        - Stephane Mallarme: "Prose (for des Esseintes)"

During the last twenty years, I’ve read and reread Stephane Mallarme’s famously (or infamously) obscure poem “Prose (for des Esseintes)”. The fact that Mallarme titled his poem “Prose” is, certainly on the surface (an extremely important discrepancy behind the ultimate understanding of practically every Mallarme poem!), a rather odd, ambiguous and ironic title to give a poem. But as Henry Weinfield explains in his always illuminating commentary in his collected translations of Mallarme’s poems, Mallarme absolutely meant for the title to come off as very ironic, and yet, wittily appropriate as well. According to Weinfield’s elucidation, the word “prose” actually refers to a “hymn” which is sung during church Mass. A prosa, in fact, is a Latin hymn such as "Dies Irae" that is apparently sung between the readings of the Gospels. So “Prose” is thought to be a kind of hymn and/or ode to the poetic process itself. Weinfield actually brings up the issue of whether “Prose” is either a “hymn” or an “ode”, because the poem itself appears to ask, self-referentially, that very question about itself:

“ The question of whether “Prose” is a hymn, as its title ambivalently asserts, or whether it should not rather be regarded as an ode, is one that is worth considering because, in a sense, it is raised by the poem itself. Comparing the two genres, Paul Fry notes that ‘like the hymn, the ode…longs for participation in the divine, but…never participates communally, never willingly supplies the congregation with common prayer because it is bent on recovering a priestly role that is not pastoral but hermetic. While there could hardly be a more hermetic poem in any language than “Prose”, it may be that in this poem the hymn/ode dialectic has evolved yet another turn, and that the ode, having come into existence as a result of a disappearance of the possibility of establishing poetic communion in a congregational or public setting, had become a hymn once again – as if the self, driven into exile of its own solitude, had now disappeared into the otherness, not of God but of the Poem itself.”

The myriad implications suffusing through this telling paragraph are considerable! Firstly, the idea that the ode “longs for participation in the divine” but refuses to cater to the common flock out of a desire to “recover a priestly role that is not pastoral but hermetic” is quite a modern gesture, beyond the old world faith of traditional divinity and communion; in essence, it suggests a kind of secular mysticism, a secular divinity that is free, or at least alienated, from communion with God. And yet, ironically, after distancing itself from religion in the strict, traditional sense, it sublimates itself from mere ode to hymn to sing the praises of poetry’s divine power (i.e. of its own essence and being!) to evoke and, if ever so transitory and barely apprehensible, that which is behind the seemingly impenetrable veil of existence, of our all too human bounds of perception; using poetry to peak into the noumenal realm, that which lies beyond the mere phenomenal world of our basic senses and degree of daily perception. 

Since the spiritual crisis of the age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, which eventually gave us the Romantic period of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron in the early 19th century, all of whom were inspired to seek communion in a return (as exhorted by Rousseau) to the neo-innocence and ancient divinity of nature (for many, the source of their Muse), there was still, for the most part, a God of sorts, still hanging on to the collective conscious of most people living in those times. But, with capitalism, the urban city and the Industrial Revolution literally picking up steam by the mid-1800s, God’s hold all but completely loses its grip on the Western hemisphere by the 1880s, as officially expressed by Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra” and Meredith’s “army of unalterable law”, and confirming Blake’s daunting query of the “dark Satanic mills” substituting for his envisioned “New Jerusalem”. With the demythologizing of Lucifer/Satan in Meredith’s monumental “Lucifer in Starlight” in 1883, those “mills” were no longer rendered “Satanic”, but the inalienable representation of unbridled capital and free-enterprise in the modern world. Even Eliot incorporated Meredith’s “army of unalterable law” (in his own non-mythological idiom) in his short poem, “Cousin Nancy” (a much more casual and incidental tone of a poem than Meredith’s dramatic declaration) to further depict the new, burgeoning modern world of the 20th century.

It was in these importantly contextualized times of the second-half of the 19th century that Mallarme conducted himself as a truly modern poet. He had had his own spiritual crisis in the 1860s, a crisis that nearly did him in as a person, let alone an aspiring poet. It was, during the 1864-1866 period, when he proclaimed to his close friend and confidant, Henry Cazalis, that he was no longer "the Stephane Mallarme [he] once knew", in that Mallarme experienced a sort of Buddhist purification when he confronted the mere arbitrariness of language, which, in effect, for Mallarme himself, killed God about twenty years before Nietzsche announced it in 1882. The “word”, Mallarme distressingly discovered, in all actuality, was empty, without spirit, without divine substance, without any real power unto itself. Thus, as in John 1:1 in the New Testament, if “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, then God was truly non-existent, or rather, for the Promethean/Faustian man, was indeed now dead. 

And so it was with this new found understanding and insight into the nature, the artificial, and ultimately arbitrary, nature of language that Mallarme’s identity “disappeared into the otherness of the Poem itself”, in search of meaning and beauty in a new, Godless, mechanized, modern world and existence! In a sense, what Mallarme “performed” (because, as Shakespeare said, and Mallarme himself intimated in several verse and prose poems, the world is theatre, a stage for the inherited performance of what Rene Girard called “mimetic desire”) was a veritable transformation of his ontological and subjective, and even physical, self into an objective and epistemological vessel of sorts willingly used as a conduit for poetry to gradually reveal itself in as pure a state as possible, ideally.

To expand on that idea of the vessel, the body as “conduit” for “the music of the turning spheres”, as Owen Barfield beautifully put it in Poetic Diction, I turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of the “ontology of the flesh” as rendered in this passage I got from an essay/overview of Merleau-Ponty at the Plato Stanford Education website in 2005:

“The flesh is neither some sort of ethereal matter nor is it a life force that runs through everything. Rather it is a notion which is formed in order to express the intertwining of the sensate and the sensible, their intertwining and their reversibility. It is this notion of reversibility that most directly problemetizes the concept of intentionality, since rather than having the model of act and object, one has the image of a fold, and of the body as the place of this fold by which the sensible reveals itself…We see that this notion of intertwining does not only concern the relationship between the sensible and the sensate, between the body and world. It also orchestrates the relationship between the visible and the invisible. As Merleau-Ponty undercuts, or if one prefers deconstructs, the opposition between subject and object, he also wishes to do the same for the opposition between the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the ideal.”

The “sensate” would, of course, be that which is ultimately sensed, experienced, felt as opposed to that which can be sensed, its potentiality, but hasn’t, in the “sensible”. The cousin of the sensate/sensible dichotomy is the visible/invisible dichotomy. The body is connected with the former coupling and the mind is connected with the latter coupling. The body and mind DO NOT generate or create the substance or essence being encountered or sensed, felt, seen, be it directly or implicitly. They (the body and mind in physical and metaphysical conjunction) form the idea and image based on previously established categories that result in what Merleau-Ponty calls “the intertwining and reversibility” of the sensate and sensible, the visible and invisible from the p.o.v. of the sentient being inter-acting with said substance or essence. Apparently, the reversibility tends to cause trouble for the “concept of intentionality”. 

What is this intentionality? Well, no doubt, it refers to an aim or purpose, but I feel it also suggests “desire”. An aim or purpose requires, fundamentally, a desire to bring about a particular end. And if this is the case, which verily it is, I believe, then we are certainly in the vicinity of Girard’s “mimetic desire” theory. In this theory, there is a triad-relationship between subject, object and “model”. The model acts as the “mediator” for the subject that desires the object. In Rene Girard’s theory, he states that “desires” are actually borrowed, or better yet, appropriated from others. In other words, most desires, if not all, are not originally those who have them, but are attained because someone else had them first, hence our sense of purpose and aim to acquire the spoils of that which is desired. We, in a word, “mimic” the desires of others. The “model” is always needed to fuel the drive of the subject towards the object of desire, but then it is the model itself that evokes the desire which is ultimately placed onto the object, hence the model’s mediating role. And after the subject successfully attains that which they desired, the model, at least for that particular symbolic exchange, vanishes. This, of course, implies Fredric Jameson’s concept of “the vanishing mediator”.

The model, for instance, that acted as mediator between feudalism and capitalism in the 16th century was the Calvinist off-shoot of Protestantism, which, when capitalism began to develop through the “Protestant ethic” to generate profit through hard work in order to prove their devotion to God and improve their chances to get to Heaven, it eventually gave way to a religious faith-free, secular monetary enterprise. This was famously elucidated in Max Weber's crucial 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. When this happened, Protestantism disappeared, vanished from the symbolic exchange and reverted back to a private and marginalized, specifically religious, faith.

Now, finally getting back to Mallarme, I can definitely see another symbolic exchange between Mallarme (the subject) and poetry (the model) to acquire that which is desired, the object (pure beauty, truth, illumination, the world as it is behind the phenomenal curtain incarnate). There is, of course, through the act of poetic creation, an intention, aim, purpose, and thusly, desire to achieve the alchemical prize of the truth of existence and being, at least for the true poet, but this creative process nearly always involves a reversibility (and sometimes outright “writer’s block”!), and so this symbolic exchange recurs again and again, oscillating back and forth, resulting in the composing of poetry as a consolation for having, time and again, failed to fully grasp and attain the “unknown”, to “reverse the army of unalterable law”, if you will, as I indicated in my sonnet, “Owl in Darkest Blue”. It is, in the end, that unquantifiable feeling and sense that drives the inspired poet to compose his/her verses through the mind/body conduit. Wordsworth put it well when he wrote in “Tintern Abbey” over two hundred years ago:

“And I have felt/ A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/ And the round ocean, and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and the mind of man;/ A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things.”  

Stephane Mallarme’s notoriously obscurantist, but positively brilliant, and very much still relevant, poem “Prose (For des Esseintes)” was first published in La Revue Independante in January 1885. This was shortly after J.K. Huysmans’ “breviary of decadence” novel (as Arthur Symons put it), A Rebours (i.e. “Against Nature” or “Against the Grain”), was published the year before in 1884 to much controversy, because of its world-forsaking and aesthetically-insular posture and attitude. For many years, my understanding of the term decadence was somewhat off-key and inaccurate. I always thought it meant predominantly a sordid and ribald life-style consonant with, say, depravity or perversity, and though there is a certain degree of these ill-reputed attributes associated with decadence, especially from the perspective of a traditionalist or cultural conservative, the word and concept actually refers to a cultural period in decline when compared to the established or accepted quality and excellence of the prior age/period before it. 

When summarizing the so-called decadent period of French literature, and particularly of French poetry, “cultural decline” doesn’t exactly come rushing to mind. However though, in its right historical context, I suppose I can definitely see where such a judgment can arise from, considering the notion of the high-brow, “proper classic” that ascends to the literary canon. Still, so many of my favorite poets come from this cherished period - "cherished", that is, in a contextualised hindsight.

I find it quite interesting, and certainly ironic and amusing, that Huysmans himself (but also, I’m sure, conveying his character Jean des Esseintes’ opinion too, “naturally”) says in his first-person narrative in A Rebours, regarding the notion of decadence, seemingly while it was in progress no less, in the midst of des Esseintes’ rhapsodically aesthetic musings on the poetry of Mallarme, that:

“The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied in Mallarme in the most consummate and exquisite fashion.”

Huysmans (and therefore des Esseintes by direct association) may have cultivated a severe hatred and sense of alienation from his time and place, enough to regale his self with exquisitely highfalutin, dramatic phrases and with such esoterically descriptive bon mots of, yes, hyperbolic intensity and extreme, exclusive-only bias, but Mallarme, himself, was never this severely against society and culture, though he was definitely frustrated and felt isolated by most people, he had a too inclusive social attitude, as evidenced by his celebrated “Tuesday gatherings”, to exclude society outright, because it would not concede to his preferred vision and understanding of things. According to Symons’ description of Huysmans’ social outlook on the world, in his indispensible, Symbolist Movement in Literature: “The world has always appeared to him to be a profoundly uncomfortable, unpleasant, and ridiculous place: and it has been a necessity of his temperament to examine it minutely, with all the patience of disgust, and a necessity of his method to record it with an almost ecstatic hatred”. 

In other Huysmans novels such as: En Route, Marthe, En Menage and La-Bas, J.K. continued his literary evisceration of the world and society as he saw it. In La-Bas, for instance, Symons explains how Huysmans' pronounced misanthropy burrowed deep into his internal constitution:”In La-Bas we are in yet another stage of this strange pilgrim’s progress. The disgust which once manifested itself in the merely external revolt against the ugliness of streets, the imbecility of faces, has become more and more internalized, and the attraction of what is perverse in the unusual beauty of art has led, by some obscure route, to the perilous halfway house of a corrupt mysticism”.

After some 20-25 years of writing about his misanthropic litanies (under the apparent guise of “art for art’s sake”), cast towards a long-perceived and sickening state of things before him, Huysmans finally became worn down and wearied by all the hate and disgust he’d been carrying around deep inside of him for so long; he decided to surrender, ironically enough, given such a short span of time since the declaration that “God was dead”, to Christianity just before the turn of the century. I didn’t notice it before, surprisingly, - I mean, I have read Symons’ Symbolist Movement in Literature several times now – but Huysmans actually felt compelled to do what T.S. Eliot was also driven to do almost four decades later, out of emotional and mental necessity, and that was to join the Church, accept God into their respective lives and souls, seemingly after having reached the absolute nadir of their existences!

Admittedly, I do sympathize with Huysmans’ black-colored-glasses-view-of-things-and-people, even back then, compared to the state of the, now, digitally-mechanized world in the early 21st century, but, like the situation with Eliot too, seeking refuge in religion is NOT the answer, whatever ostensible relief it brings to one’s soul, mind and overall constitution, I tenably feel, especially being fairly privy to all that has gone down in the last fifty years, in particular; what with postmodernism, the arts, rampant technology, consumerism, virtuality, the media and our beleaguered language itself. I know I’ve spewed, incorrigibly, aspersions galore against society and culture, in general, in my journal through the constitutionally-embattled years, but it only really represented a “blowing off of steam” as I forged onward with my studies, writings and new discoveries/understandings of the world around me and the felt essence within all things, visible and invisible, sensate and sensible. 

The fact of the matter is that most people tend to come off as mindless sheep and blissfully unaware imbeciles, but they are mortal, fragile human beings, with thoughts (however limited) and feelings just like myself, and just like Huysmans and Eliot, when they were alive and taking in everything so enormously sensitively, as I do now. My guess is that Mallarme shared the same opinion and feelings as I do based on all that I have learned of him and gleaned from his amazing writings. Reading Mallarme, I have indeed detected critical views of people and society, and even condescension from time to time, but never any outright hatred and disgust.

And so with that understanding, in full discernment, I think I may have, at last, come to a realization concerning Mallarme’s apparent, ironic dedication of his monumental, and truly symbolic poem “Prose” to Huysmans’ fictionalized character des Esseintes (who was actually drawn from a few real-life 19th century Parisians, most notably the Comte de Montesquiou, whose G. Baldini portrait, in characteristically full dandy-style garb and pomp, graces the cover of my debilitating copy of A  Rebours/Against Nature). “Prose” opens with a traditionally Romantic trope called an “apostrophe”, and with very deliberately ironic fashion! The first word is appropriately, but with ironic cleverness and wit, exclaimed in a direct address to an abstract concept: “Hyperbole! Can you not rise/ In triumph from my memory,/ A modern magic spell devise/ As from an ironbound grammary:/ For I inaugurate through science/ The hymn of all hearts spiritual/ In the labor of my patience,/ Atlas, herbal, ritual”. I believe what Mallarme implied here in the opening of his poem, in relation to his dedicating it to des Esseintes, was to comment on, or respond to, A Rebours' protagonist in a rather critical manner, but done with brilliant subtly and sleight-of-hand wit. 

I feel Mallarme may have been commenting on des Esseintes’ (and therefore Huysmans’ by implication) exaggerated and extremely insular self-segregation in such a literal fashion; that perhaps the character hadn’t compartmentalized enough in order to remain aesthetically-devoted, not estranged from nature, and still interact with society. The idea, as suggested in “Prose” is to reach the “island of poetry”, apprehend as much beauty/illumination as possible, and make the “virtual trek” back to the real world and conditions until it’s suddenly deemed possible to return to the island for more poetic sustenance.

In the prosaic world, the so-called “real world”, the world of practicality and commerce, poetry is, of course, unimportant and predominantly marginalized, in a word, ignored. Because of this majority attitude and ultimate persona non grata mandate towards the art and pastime of writing, reading and reciting poetry, poets themselves are irrepressibly obliged to feel “embarrassed” by poetry, by being a poet (I know I can actually relate to this awkward position!) in the first place. Prose, of course, is speech and writing, as opposed to song and verse, which is poetry. If poetry is usually connected with rhapsodic expression, song, hymn, ode, rhyme and “stanzaic structure”, than prose is of the “prosaic persuasion”, of the commonplace, diurnal, everyday conditions of the tedious, working world; this means it’s also associated with “intellectual analysis”, which is traditionally not associated with poetry, but here in “Prose” Mallarme thinks it should be, hence the seeming irony of the title.

In Henry Weinfield’s commentary on “Prose” he provides an etymology of the word hyperbole and explains the ambivalent and paradoxical nature of invoking the concept in verse:

“The Greek word from which “hyperbole” is derived means “to throw beyond the mark”; and thus, the act of invoking Hyperbole is a profoundly ambivalent, not to say paradoxical, one; for at the same time that it calls up what from the standpoint of the prosaic world, the world that does not believe in poetry, is an unbridgeable gulf between Prose and Poetry, by the very act of calling, it manages to bridge that gulf. The metaphysical boundary separating the prosaic world from the realm of Poetry will be allegorized in ”Prose” as a symbolic journey to a magical island - the island, of course, representing Poetry, and the mainland, Prose.”

It’s important that old-world “magic” and new-world “science” be both included in the creative ritual of poetic invocation in “Prose”, because Mallarme here is implying the historical connection of all humanity and our ancestral ceremonial heritage. One of the key lines, I feel, in the first two quatrains of the poem is: “Atlas, herbal, ritual”. Atlas suggests the Greek Titan god who carried the world on his back, and the world-map, treasure map, or more specifically, land. There is the mainland of the prosaic world and the island, or smaller land, where poetry’s riches are gathered, such as the “irises”, suggested through the mention of “herbal”. The land, the herbal, or exquisite plant, and the ritual of invocation are combined to obtain poetic beauty, and/or illumination. The muse, or “sister”, as Mallarme states in the poem, is the envoy for the poet, the transitory or coy messenger, who delivers the essence of the poem with only a mere “smile” to which the poet must translate as closely as possible, and only through “cultivating his ancient skill” in order to comprehend her at all. 

This apparent “ancient skill” is crucial because I think it represents “historical consciousness” and the “evolution of human consciousness”, and also economy of our myths, that connects the true poet to the past ages and epochs of humanity and of existence, in general. An “envoy” is also, and quite appropriately here, a concluding short stanza of a poem; sure enough, at the near end, the penultimate quatrain in “Prose”, the “child resigns her ecstasy”, that is, the creative process of exchange between the “sister” and the poet on the “island of poetry”. But she assures an “Anastasius” (a Byzantine Greek word), or resurrection of this poetic act unless, of course, “Pulcheria” (from the Latin), or Death, rears its head, i.e. the “mother of Beauty”, the awareness of by which the poet is spurred to create poetry at all; and here representing the prosaic world of reality that can hide “the island” with “too large a lily flower”. Also, “envoy” comes from the French word envoye, meaning “one sent”, that is, a messenger being sent, but as a pun it also hints of the “scent of the iris flower/sister” that could be hidden by the prosaic/real world of the “lily flower":


"The child resigns her ecstasy,
 Already mastering the steps,
 And 'Anastasius!' says she,
 Born for eternal manuscripts,

 Lest at a tomb her ancestor

 In any clime should laugh to bear
 This sacred name: 'Pulcheria!'
 Hidden by the too large lily flower."
                      - Stephane Mallarme: "Prose (for des Esseintes)"


Spengler's Decline of the West and its Relation to Philip K. Dick's VALIS



Temporal Disturbances and Folds in the Space-Time Continuum, and DNA Memory


by James Albert Barr


For the last several years, I've been very much fixated on the profound notion of Stephane Mallarme's idea of "the fold", Proust's concept of memoire involontaire as depicted in his monumental, In Search of Lost Time, and Walter Benjamin's study of the French proto-modernist, Charles Baudelaire, and his flaneur experiences of the severely altering 19th century Paris, both the pre and post-Haussmann renovation periods. I've also been preoccupied with T.S. Eliot's admonition towards the concept of "historical consciousness", and Oswald Spengler's immensely unnerving implications so poetically suffusing all through his endlessly fascinating post-Great War book, The Decline of the West. But after having read Philip K. Dick's stunningly revelatory 1981 novel, VALIS, I was utterly inundated with striking connections with all the aforementioned references. And so I was immediately compelled to elaborate, to some degree, on these incredible correspondences (to use Baudelaire's apt term), initially in my personal journal, and here's the result of those connective thoughts.

While forging my way through Oswald Spengler’s monumental, early 20th century book, The Decline of the West, where in chapter 8, “Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: on the Form of the Soul”, I came across a quite provocative passage in the section titled, “Classical Behavior-Drama and Faustian Character-Drama” that pertains to the significant differences between the ancient Classical sense-of-self and the modern Faustian sense-of-self, and how Classical man led a more legitimate, or real, existence as part of a communal “plurality” and that one’s “social role”, that is persona, acted as a natural dictate to one’s place in society as an operating whole. The Greeks didn’t work with fractions, algebra, and irrational numbers; they were, in fact, inconceivable to the Classical, Greek mind! And there was also no conception of “zero”, for it would have been a thoroughly meaningless and abstract concept for, say, the Greek draughtsman. 

It is because the Faustian man’s mind is “differently constituted” that we moderns have indeed fractions, irrational numbers, non-Euclidean shapes and fractals, algebraic formulas and the zero! Spengler wrote earlier in his book about Classical man’s aversion for all things irrational that expresses their extreme misgivings and disorientation of the sort: “There is a singular and significant late-Greek legend, according to which the man who first published the hidden mystery of the irrational perished by shipwreck, ‘for the unspeakable and formless must be left hidden forever’”. 

I actually incorporated some of this passage in the fifth stanza of my Library of the Sandman poem that was trying to convey, or suggest, a similar scenario, but from a modern mind’s, still limited, perspective pertaining to unwritten texts that surpass the mind-set and fears of contemporary man, incapable of comprehending the concepts therein, hence their dream-world residence in Morpheus’ library until the day, if ever, those concepts are given a proper, realizable and textualized birth, and thus actually materialize in the waking-world.

How utterly suitable that the very Faustian Mallarme should, in his landmark poem, Un Coup De Des (i.e. “A Throw of the Dice”) feature, as its central symbol, a “shipwreck”, which is chock-full of “the hidden mystery of the irrational”, the unpredictable world of chance! Definitely a foreign concept to the Classical Greeks! In one of Mallarme’s central, “divisible” motifs/movements in “A Throw of the Dice”, the one in 12-point capital letters, one of ancient Greece’s worst nightmares goes thusly (from Henry Weinfield's english translations):

“EVEN WHEN LAUNCHED IN ETERNAL/ CIRCUMSTANCES/ FROM THE DEPTHS OF A SHIPWRECK/ THOUGH IT BE/ THE MASTER/ WERE IT TO EXIST/ WERE IT TO BEGIN AND WERE IT TO CEASE/ WERE IT TO BE NUMBERED/ WERE IT TO ILLUMINE/ NOTHING/ WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE/ BUT THE PLACE/ EXCEPT/ PERHAPS/ A CONSTELLATION”.

Other revelatory passages from this mind-blowing poem are in lower-case letters, such as:

“…the unique Number/ be another/ Spirit/ to cast it/ into the storm/ to fold back division and pass proudly on/ hesitates/ corpse by the arm/ separated from the secret it withholds…shipwreck this/ pertaining to man/ without a vessel/ no matter/ where vain/ from ancient time not to open up his hand/ clenched/ beyond the useless head/ legacy amid disappearance/ to someone/ ambiguous/ the ulterior immemorial demon…”.

If I wasn’t so completely astounded by the implications, and fractured, irrational syntax, in these remarkable passages from Mallarme’s transcendent poem, I’d say he was ostensibly transmitting, perhaps like an S.O.S., no less, a modern-day distress-signal issued, retroactively, towards the ancient past, while simultaneously illuminating the present and future world of infinite possibilities!

Moreover, I’ve also noticed that the word anamnesis was mentioned earlier in Decline of the West in yet another important passage I wrote down a few years ago during my initial forays into Spengler’s book. Well, Philip K. Dick also mentions this word in his remarkable 1981 novel, VALIS. Anamnesis means “the loss of forgetfulness”, a quite significant concept and rare- certainly rarely conscious – individual experience (via “Spiritus Mundi”, seemingly paradoxically, I suspect!) that intimates, like Horselover Fat did in VALIS, a kind of dimensional imbrication of the space/time continuum, or rather a non-quantifiably perceptible erasure of space and time altogether.
       
The key passage that I read from Spengler’s indispensible book goes thusly:

“It goes without saying that we, when we turn to look into the Classical life-feeling, must find there some basic element of ethical values that is antithetical to “character” in the same way as the statue is antithetical to the fugue (fugue is a musical piece in which the themes seem to answer each other; it also means, rather pertinently here, given my reference of the word anamnesis in connection with both Spengler’s book and Philip K. Dick’s novel, “VALIS”, loss of memory! – my note), Euclidean geometry to Analysis, and body to space. We find it in the Gesture. It is this that provides the necessary foundation for a spiritual static. The word that stands in the Classical vocabulary where “personality” stands in our own is [Greek term inserted here], persona – namely, role or mask. In late Greek or Roman speech it means the public aspect and mien of a man, which for Classical man is tantamount to the essence and kernel of him. An orator was described as speaking in the persona of a priest or a soldier. The slave was without persona – that is, he had no attitude or figure in the public life – but not [Greek term inserted, likely meaning “soulless”] – that is, he did have a soul. The idea that Destiny has assigned the role of king or general to a man was expressed by Romans in the words persona regis, imperatoris. The Apollonian cast of life is manifest enough here. What is indicated is not the personality (that is, an unfolding of inward possibilities in active striving), but a permanent and self-contained posture strictly adapted to a so-to-say plastic idea of being. The significance of Aristotle’s phrase [Greek phrase inserted here] – quite untranslatable and habitually translated with a Western connotation – is that it refers to men who are nothing when single and lonely and only count for anything when in a plurality, in agora or forum, where each reflects his neighbor and thus, only thus, acquires a genuine reality”.

Quite interestingly, as well, Spengler in the very next paragraph describes Faustian tragedy as “biographical” and Classical tragedy as “anecdotal”, meaning that the first “deals with the sense of a whole life, and the other with the content of a single moment”. It’s interesting because they seem kind of like an inverted contradiction when considering the plurality of communal, social life for the Classical man that is deemed as living and experiencing a full, “genuine reality”, as opposed to the apparent singularity of the Faustian man who seemingly counts for “nothing” and is therefore empty, because he tends more to the “single and lonely” life separate from the communal existence. 

The Faustian man’s existence, his “soul-image” as opposed to Classical man’s “life-feeling”, if you will, is isolated, divided and alone, where as his tragedy is “biographical” and whole, all inclusive with “maximum variability in the details”. But on the other hand we have the Classical notion of tragedy in man being episodic and anecdotal, that is, not all inclusive and thus divided from the “big picture” of his personal existence en masse, which is quite contrary to his wholly communal life and well established persona or role in society and the Culture.

What we basically have here is an historical reversal of fortunes between the Classical man and the Faustian man that, ironically, mirrors each other’s tragedy. That is, the one staring in the mirror sees his former or future self depending on the particular perspective of the figure in their historical context! - the one beholding  the reflection before the mirror, or the one being reflected back, in complete and utter oscillation, eternally recurring and echoing back and forth through the ages. Perhaps that is the strange phenomena that Horselover Fat/ Philip K. Dick experienced in VALIS! A temporal disturbance emanating from a seeming past-life caused by a dimensional-fold in the space/time continuum, and ultimately interfacing two historically and ontologically-connected, but subjectively-separate, lives, beings, entities, existences, identities through a suddenly disinhibited act of anamnesis. 

I may have had a similar kind of experience back in 1999 working at Tim Horton’s Morningside location one morning, during my baking days, while washing the muffin trays in the sink filled with hot water that somehow induced such a strange, disorienting, temporal disturbance episode, when I first dipped my hands into the hot water, "transporting me", of sorts, along the lines of what Proust brilliantly and delicately described in his In Search of Lost Time (the more appropriate and accurate English translation from its original French, rather than the more popularly known, “A Remembrance of Things Past”), which provided a few preternatural and transcendent, that is, disinhibited incidents involving the Marcel character, like the famous scene with the madeleine soaked in tea, that momentarily transported the character, when it hit his palette.

Reverting back to my probing of Spengler’s book and Dick’s novel, I reread a key chapter in VALIS and came across a very important passage that explains a kind of ancient memory data-base, the cumulative source of recollection that connects contemporary humanity with its old-world ancestors. As mentioned in my journal while quoting from Decline of the West and making a note of my own in the process, Philip K. Dick had referenced the term anamnesis in his 1981 novel, but he also cited the concept of “phylogenic memory” in said important passage:

“Phylogenic memory, memory of the species. Not my own memory, ontogenic memory. ‘Phylogeny is recapitulated in ontogeny’, as it is put. The individual contains the history of his entire race, back to its origins. Back to ancient Rome, to Minos at Crete, back to the stars. All I got down to, all I abreacted to, in sleep, was one generation. This is gene pool memory, the memory of the DNA. That explains Horselover Fat’s crucial experience, in which the symbol of the Christian fish disinhibited a personality from two thousand years in the past…because the symbol originated two thousand years in the past. Had he been shown an even older symbol he would have abreacted farther; after all, the conditions were perfect for it; he was coming off sodium penthathol, the ‘truth drug’.”

In the very next paragraph, Philip (as himself, but who is also Horselover Fat only he doesn’t know it consciously) states that Horselover Fat had another theory pertaining to all the strange, cosmically-connected episodes he (and therefore Philip as well) was experiencing, like the beam of pink light emanating from space that penetrated his brain and thus severely messed up his sense of reality, not to mention his sense of time:

“Fat has another theory. He thinks that the date is really 103 C.E. (or A.D. as I put it, damn Fat and his hip modernisms). We’re actually in apostolic times, but a layer of maya or what the Greeks called “dokos” obscures the landscape. This is a key concept with Fat: dokos, the layer of delusion or the merely seeming. The situation has to do with time, with whether time is real.”

I find this idea of dokos very fascinating in that the Greeks came up with it to explain the apparent illusion of the phenomenal world, an attitude that only became more expanded upon and complicated through the centuries by other post-Apollonian men, the Faustian, modern man. Plato’s notion of the “ideal realm of things” took precedence over the immediately perceived, natural surroundings, which eventually gave way to Christianity’s belief in a “Heaven”, the ideal realm of the soul in the afterlife created to soften the existential blow that is death and suffering. 

Horselover Fat (which is, with nominal significance, a variation on Philip K. Dick’s name: Philip means “horselover” in, I think, Latin, and Dick means “fat” in German) seems to be channeling several ancient races and belief systems all the while believing it to be just 103 C.E. /A.D., hence his declaring it “apostolic times”, the age of the apostles and the early dissemination of scripture. The initial time and space disruption happened in August 1974 according to Fat’s/Dick’s testimonial, and “their” life has wreaked havoc ever since, such as a broken marriage and the development of cancer, as well as a drug dependency. “The Empire never ended”, so Fat states in his journal which he titled, “Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura”.

What is this “Empire” that Fat speaks of? I suspect it could very well be the Symbolic Order itself or the Door of the Law or “the army of unalterable law”, but more obviously, given Fat’s belief that it is 103 C.E., it’s the Roman Empire; regardless, any “Empire” dictates reality. From Fat’s journal he states in his 41st entry that: “The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one”. This is a quite striking and revelatory statement, because it instantly evokes a seemingly ambiguous, almost incidental, but crucially important, scene in Martin Scorsese’s outstanding 2010 film, Shutter Island! After Leo Di Caprio’s character, Teddy Daniels, has his key encounter with the allegedly real “Rachel Solando” in the cave, he is picked up on the side of the road by the warden of Shutter Island’s Ashecliffe Penitentiary for the criminally insane, who drives by in a jeep. 

While driving back to the penitentiary, the warden asks Teddy if he enjoyed “God’s latest gift”, by which he means, and says, “the violence”; in this particular case the severe storm from the night before. The warden continues by saying that we wage war and destruction in “God’s honor”, that violence is in us, it is us, and that, contrary to Teddy’s tenuous claim that God gave us “moral order”, there really isn’t any moral order, certainly none as pure as the night storm that passed, and that he and Teddy “have known each other for centuries”! This line of dialogue really resonated with me when I first heard it; in fact it shook my insides, viscerally and mentally.

In order to maintain, at least, a semblance of order and peace, the Empire, the Symbolic Order, Ideological/Repressive State Apparatuses, the correctional Panopticon, institutes “civilization”. It is an organism, but a synthetic one with complex mechanisms of organ-ization and governance. Much like an individual creature, be it, or they, an animal, or sentient human being, the Empire has its own “survival instincts”. Teddy says in the cave to Rachel that “survival instincts are defense mechanisms”, after she initially explains how society (or in this specific microcosmic case the allegedly rational protocols of the Ashecliffe institution) declares who is or who isn’t insane, regardless of how rational and adjusted your claims to the contrary. 

If the Symbolic Order says “you’re insane and a danger to others, including yourself”, then you’re insane and a danger to others, including yourself, despite what the truth and reality may be otherwise. They are the “big Other” (whose extension is in the common and conformist population en masse) that determines your social status, be it a positive one or a negative one, so long as it DOES NOT compromise the structural integrity of the “system”. And in order to maintain the system, the Empire, the Symbolic Order, it asserts its own defense mechanisms, and has done so for millennia.  The only effective way of exposing the system’s true face and nature is to disguise an expression of it through art, literature, cinema, and especially poetry, in order to short-circuit its detectionary processes.

In Fat’s next journal entry he states: “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies”. I suppose this description could be analogous to the notion of being co-opted or absorbed into the system, like rock ‘n’ roll was, for instance. This entry also reminds me of the zeitgeist, 1999 movie The Matrix, and how Agent Smith and other “agents” of the Matrix could literally absorb or subsume a rebel like a virus (in this case a quite literal “computer virus”) back into the militantly monitored and policed system and gigantic data base. These are all very profound, and admittedly unnerving, connections that I’ve made among these disparate reference points.

I suspect that even if the system can indeed pick up on the system-exposing aspects of these books and movies, for instance, it’s likely not enough to concern them, so long as most people continue to fail to “see”, and thus understand, the message beneath the surface of the work. This recalls that great, but disturbing, line spoken by Lex Luthor in Frank Miller’s much-maligned The Dark Knight Strikes Again sequel from fourteen years ago: “Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, so long as nobody’s listening”. And, of course, Lex is undoubtedly a nefarious agent of the system, as in this case, he’s actually running “corporate America” by projecting, quite literally, a computer-generated hologram being claimed as the President of the United States!

Directly following, or rather chronologically preceding, the same profound trajectory as Philip K. Dick’s remarkable novel, and the notion of ancestral anamnesis (which was apparently coined by Plato) and phylogenic/ontogenic memory, Spengler wrote in an earlier chapter of Decline of the West:

“From the specific directedness is derived the specific prime symbol of extension, namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly limited, self-contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound three-dimensional space, for the Arabian the world as a cavern. And there-with an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this prime form of the world is innate insofar as it is an original possession of the soul of the Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired insofar that every individual soul re-enacts for itself that creative act and unfolds in early childhood the symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging butterfly unfolds its wings. The first comprehension of depth is an act of birth – the spiritual complement of the bodily. In it the Culture is borne-out of its mother-landscape, and the act is repeated by every one of its individual souls throughout its life-course. This is what Plato – connecting it with an early Hellenic belief – called anamnesis.

But the prime symbol does not actualize itself; it is operative through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression. It is inherent in the form of the state, the religious myths and cults, the ethical ideals, the forms of painting and music and poetry, the fundamental notions of each science – but it is not presented by these. Consequently, it is not presentable by words, for language and words are themselves derived symbols. Every individual symbol tells of it, but only to the inner feelings, not to the understanding. And when we say, as henceforth we shall say, that the prime symbol of the Classical soul is the material and individual body, that of the Western pure infinite space, it must always be with the reservation that concepts cannot represent the inconceivable, and thus at the most a significant feeling may be evoked by the SOUND OF WORDS."

This immensely pertinent passage provided me with one of my favorite sections of my poem, The Library of the Sandman: “Significant feeling in the restrictive frame/ May pass between the coarse words like a hermetic/ Cry, and communicate under sound within sound”. It also profoundly suggests to me the power of Mallarme’s poetry too and how the sound evoked in his incredible poems was just as important as the extracted meaning conveyed through his carefully and painstakingly chosen words themselves - the literal “reading/listening between the lines” to achieve illumination.




Thursday, 11 June 2015

21st Century Poetry: A Revenant of Russell Square and other Poems by J. Albert Barr





Almost two years ago I posted ten of my original poems. which featured, for instance, "The Library of the Sandman" and my four symbolism-heavy "bird sonnets" (you can still find these poems among my older posts by scrolling down and clicking on "older posts" or on My Archives to access them). The response wasn't exactly "mania-inducing" to say the least, but this is poetry we're talking about after all, and it's an art-form that, unfortunately, does not garner the audience and attention it once kind of had some time ago. But I'm of the throwback and stubborn sort, so I've decided to post some more of my own poems here at The Culture Fix for those still retaining a genuine inclination towards the poetically written word,...and all ADHD be damned, I say!  :-)



A REVENANT OF RUSSELL SQUARE

The rose and its scent are suspended in cyber frost,
And the fire warms nothing off the flickering screen;
Time is post-historic and the past has become the present
With a fluctuating face and a twisted reflection.
The children are older now in the coital ways
Of the marketing and the selling of perfect images;
These images that demand attention and respect,
Far removed from passages of growth and maturity:
Youth keeps refusing the wisdom of tomorrow's wrinkle,
Even when youth has been displaced by a younger demographic.
There is no light of heart to be heard in the laughter between
The prepubescent and the "new-forty crowd" taking shots at midnight,
But there is laughter nonetheless in and around the garden,
And by the trees that are of no effect to them as they inhale,
Motionless, the emotions that are lost on an eternal moment.

                                    The winter feels perennial,
Just as yesterday seemed certain in its sunny disposition,
But certainly cold before the bathers at the beach
And the customers in the express lane or aisle or pew.
The seasons are all preserved in the mainframe;
The clouds return the Sun's rays with dubious frequency,
As we harp on the loss of birds and bees flying between the knees.
Our own flight from the internal noise of ego has gone
Deeper below the threshold of conscience and out into the
Open air of shameless self-promotion and support;
There you can see and hear the froth of endless voices
Coagulate into a mass of membranes reduced to protozoic sense.
The dike is overflowing.
The slaughter is in the details,
Where the swans remain trapped in the ice, and are laughed at
Behind the blue-screen and the savage avatar.
The social rituals and redundancies are displayed with
The fragrance of an axe and the touch of an eel;
A taste that electrifies the palate of a cadaver,
Or the rapture of a seasoned critic.

                                       But there is no joke to savor,
No now worth building on and setting roots to still.
All is not well in the turbine of the city's flow
As the alienated are remote from such alienation
In a fourfold fashion deluded into thinking they can think
Outside of themselves and for the betterment of humankind;
The same humankind scuttling for the postern door of virtuality,
Letting in and letting out all reality in an unreal way.
The mental defenses of the collective who buy
Are assured by the commercials and trend-setters;
Those authorities that are known and unknown
Who manoeuver celebrities like pieces on a chessboard
And calibrate the pop-charts like the weather.
The beginning and the end of this disjointed time
Has no end to claim and begins on a constant loop
For the poor benefit of a beleaguered minute
And the rich impairment of old time rebooted.


THE CONSCIOUS TREE

In this dark, my answers remain elusive;
the question is a shadow.
The chill does not still beneath my heart,
and my rankled nerves squirm inside the cracking bark.
Indecipherable chatter echoes from afar, so far
across a lost intangible plain,
with the smell of dead time putrefying.
This is the cold moment of souls:
waiting, waiting, waiting,...wasting away.
Branches snap like a whip in the wind.
In this wood, my thought remains petrified,
and the root is always bleeding.


TWO SIDES OF INNOCENCE

As she brought forth the wind,
inhaling the grace that filled her lungs,
vistas would dance before her sky blue eyes;
these eyes that gleamed in wild delight, infused
with wonder as the sun, over the lush trees,
strew itself upon the rustling leaves.

While others, portioning memories onto a crooked plate,
in order to see them, vainly ask why this day should
match the days they did not capture in the past,
as they grope for endurance in the face of seeming
nothingness. Wretched and bitter, like a cold moon's
surrounding surface, it has worn them pale.

They can no longer see beyond the dying surface, grey
like ash - their inward skies empty of any
resurrecting birds. Hopes and dreams distilled in angst.

She would not fathom such anguish, such feelings of loss;
this glowing child immune to darkness and despair,
with a smile that could penetrate stones.


VERSO AND RECTO

In the play of the trace, I have the peer of the realm,
And I translate the moods of my blood within it.
And only when this thought runs rampant
Into the shadow of its black wall
Does darkness have a wide wing-span.

Vanishing into the stark white border,
Enclosing the dream, I enter the absence
Of the ideal world dependent on presence.
The wherewithal of being, truth, center, origin,
Cannot hold its vaunted claim of stability,
Trapped in language and forever sliding to and fro,
There is no escape from the perpetual vacillation.

Words are not flesh, and metaphysics cannot reign
While rendered subordinate in undecidability.
The letter p cannot be without c or d or e,
Nor any other within the arbitrary alphabet.
And can the Pharmakon cure maintain a scapegoat?
An omegabet in reverse? Its twin poison denied avowal!

The either/or of meaning is premised on interweaving
Between what is there and not there; a fundamental relation
Constituted on the basis of the trace between those elements
Inherently structured to upset the balance, pertaining to
The privileged voice of the intentional expressive and
The disharbouring leaf of the falling indicative.
This is the presence of the spoken weighed against
The absence of the written, and tracing the divisions
Of both has inflicted this
Unhealed paper-cut of the mind.
And so it is said, and/or writ?
The differance is, and remains open.


DEATH IN TRANSIT

Lifeless she loomed, though not clinically dead,
Staring with lassitude into the silent emptiness
Of her vimless world. You could feel time prematurely
Having its way with her careworn face, hanging
Submissively, oblivious to those occupying the same
Subway car, who, themselves, bled their own apathy.
Not even a trace of sadness could be detected
Within the moribund air choking yet another morning commute.

She, slouched catatonic, with desert eyes that
Could only weep salt, with gaunt, wrinkled hands
Just strong enough, it seemed, to applaud death,
Had blurred the point of her joyless destination.
It mattered little now, like her miasmal life.
Could nothing, but the cold metal box enclosing her,
Move the disabled soul of this sepulchral woman,
Like the boundless energy so teeming in her youth?


MR. COLLINGWOOD'S LIVING-ROOM REVERIES

The blood on that magazine cover isn't real
But the disturbance outside whets the appetite.
I'm a man of numbers trapped in an unwanted alphabet.
The topographic plains of these tanned walls confide
An alien silence buried inside the husk of dried seeds.

A video Tower of Babel avails itself for a death of time,
And on the mount sits a sordid commissioner of sorts.
He is situated between an applauding rabble of libertines,
And a cause for trouble's sake to placate some illusive mandate:
Outside and obscured by the mist lies a serpentine meal of itself.

I'm no wonder among partial quarks and quantum scenes,
A wayward lance from a dusty history book pierced my shadow.
O! Godspeed the sounds of my faux Art Deco disc player:
The sole redeemer and counterpoint to my battles with the lamp
That seems to always goad my left elbow into anatomical mutiny.

In theory, my tea can ponder the hermeneutics of cyberspace.
There's a Persian polo game on eternal pause inside a frame:
"Bold rider, never, never canst thou score - yet, do not grieve,
For grand Persepolis has been restored into virtual evermore."
The tea leaves say all ye need to know of a beauty beyond truth.

I hear war drums muffled beneath the truncated tusk of courage;
And a bank statement whispers, "I own you", from across the room.
The furniture has conspired to expropriate my favorite memories.
I am disturbed by these fancies that have coiled inside of me:
A certain reality for an indefinitely lost, indefinitely filed thing.


LOST IN NEXUS

City, your polluted non-soul pisses acid rain,
precipitated by those who keep you erect,
and enclose themselves within you,
as you digest, coldly, a daily morsel of their life-force,
and belch the industrial bile of what you're fed, subserviently,
to maintain your system of operation,
under the prime directive: to produce and consume,
buy and sell, discard and waste.

This is our self-constructed cage,
gilded with opportunity in the market place,
where dreams of luxury beat voraciously
in our pining hearts, because the signs say so!
And who's to question the ubiquitous adverts
insisting on one's attention to influence
a future intention?

Conditional response; subliminal control,
directing choice under the guise of freedom
and dictating the standards of pleasure,
which only hold a narrow margin in recessive minds,
deemed popular, acceptable, normal, and imperative
to capitalism - the modern religion.

Feeding rapaciously on the synthetic cornucopia
of mass produced "stuff", devoid of organic redemption;
the city's children, exploited cogs of the Great Wheel,
living a life, or so they believe, of individual decision,
under the proud banner of constitutional democracy,
continue, unaware, and mired in regulated ignorance.

The ruse, plied by the spectres of power,
that turns the world counter to the globe,
oinks its way to boundless profit, as the city gradually assimilates
the collective: not distinguishing pigs from sheep.


MORNING BLUE

I could wish this morning blue
less somber than a funeral march,
and more serene than a lapsed catholic.
But I persist to chew its persistence,
openly without regret and gladly within its measure:
a placid declaration of mutual resignation,
neither sorry nor willing to chase each other away,
despite a feverish soul unable to accept its evanescence,
and a subjective perception unsure of its own reflection.

Twittering bones of unseen fear abound, folding inwardly
and swaddled in darkness, obtaining a purer sense
of isolation, locked inside a silent scream.

The days flee, imperceptibly, as time incurs the indifference
of a single, solitary universe, no bigger than an average man.
This is pale and true;
this realization in black,
yet, conversely, as white too, and no less false
under logical scrutiny somewhere in the grey.
This is pleasure as much as is pain.

I should wish this morning blue forever,
whatever language of account dictates the day's numerous phases,
thus ending my course on one of those unspecified days,
usually unbidden and sudden,
and almost always never wished.