Magus Magnus
- Melting Truth…
On Truth and Poetry, epistemology in accordance with contemporary poetics
some thoughts in dribs and drabs, yet floods at this point, cascades, and crumbles, sheering off
sudden losing of a limb or letter
excitement and liberating surge of nonconformist, unconventional, anti-mainstream aesthe
having marked art and poetry since Dada , through surrealism, avant-gardes old and new, experimentalisms… tics
& from what came earlier, the Decadents, Pre-Raphaelites, and earlier Romantic
glorification of Les Poètes maudits Cursed souls, Free Spirits ism…
embrace the aesthetics of Modernism and on into Post-Modernism, and associated critiques o Enlightenment – structuralism and deconstruction – Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses into derangement of language…
for me a vibe at one with punk and dyi practice, and in the spirit of my pursuit of the Fr e
Sp rit
in history, ancient and modern alike…
from the Frankfurt school to the Black Mountain school, the beats, New York, San Francisco, my own San Diego in the ‘80s incubating L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E engagement post-Marcuse, post- Kathy Acker on campus… and then finding again in the oughts Language Poetry established and Postlangpo and what should we call the chaos and pop flux coming after
thus we come from and come out of confronting the material of language in poetry, on the ba of a confrontation with (hopefully through as sophisticated a poetics and philosophical analysis as
is
possible): the uses and abuses and embarrassments of Truth.
By the time I arrived at the residency, Truth was R U H
and now it’s U H
I’m trying to get this all cascade before the truth disappears completely…
old hat innovations tried and true artificial, letting the letters melt, but where’s the smear and sweat, shrink and hollows? – when all I can do is drop a letter or syllable or word or two. Lame. Need some better programming. The avant-garde is in code. Deepest reality reprogramming – formal innovation – is writing code.
Truth with a capital T hasn’t been to our taste. & now we have no feet for truth,
is the foundation left when the rest collapses
with Trump and the alt-right appropriating the aesthetics we took up in the spirit of liberation and using the wild avant-garde techniques to undermine any resistance to tyranny and untr es
uth. t
Trump and the alt-Right trump post-Modernism, Deconstruction, Frankfurt School, European relativism, and in terms of American poetry, Language and flarf.
Trump’s tweets use all the unfettered, defiant, anti-establishment tricks.
Flarf has nothing on Pepe the Frog. The alt-Right seems to have usurped avant-garde disco veri
within the aesthetics of trolling – mimicked now in the reckless manic high of Trump’s post-Tru mom nt.
A d squisition on irony is in order, but I don’t have the time to go as Kierkegaardian as I’d like.
It was all supposed to undercut pretensions. Or, if it weren’t a principle – ideology again Absolute – to undercut attempts at upholding “truth,” it was simply elite ridicule at earn
and novices’ attempts toward meaning. Making fun – and poetry and art should be in the free spirit of fun. Otherwise, boredom. & the big words ever carry the burden of oppressi
and history.
Poets have always known language doesn’t necessarily mean what it says, or seems to say – and worse, perhaps language can’t mean what it might vainly try to say, and so it’s best to dash it all into sound, scribble, and fragment…
& yet, irrepressibly, there is no escape from Meaning. To stick with the experimental aesthetics arrived at just so, I’ll quote Richard Foreman as I found myself often doing in pursuit of my own approach to poetics theatre, Poets Theater… Ontologic-Hysteric Theater playwright Richard Foreman, who said: “Understand—it always makes sense. Sense can’t be avoided. If it first seems non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves.”
That’s indeed how language-deranged poetry and writing communicate; even when the intent is to avoid any pinning down of meaning, as if to do so were a compromise – much is communicated. Much gets through, even if it is beyond subject or topic, and solely contextual, or social.
You go to a poetry reading and, hey, conveyance of meaning happened there – is conveyed to and through the crowd or company.
The exact way dog whistles work…
Meaning gets conveyed, maybe not unmistakably – but, mistakably, in ways one can evade, plausible deniability.
It’s almost fun and exhilarating about Russia these days – if it weren’t actually scary – how the aesthetic means of subverting Western liberal values are so exuberantly parallel to the European and American avant-garde. Hey, we had to love the pre-Revolutionary Russian futurists in trouser clouds anyways, and I’ve always been partial to Kharms, and Mandelstam’s poetic resistance to Stalin, and who can resist all the wonderful translations coming out these past twenty years – so for poetry in Russia, the breaking up of forms has long been homegrown. But now the use of such parallel tools, parallel utilization of post-Enlightenment instruments of emancipation constitute a usurpation of the right, deranging truth to uphold an anti-Democratic regime, and to export anti-Democratic methods.
I mean we have a sci-fi surrealist writer and poet as Putin’s right-hand man, V Surkov, a creative engineer of autocracy…. who believes in war with the West even as he owns its influence on him, knowing he doesn’t need America itself when he has as he says eternal access to his inspirations – Ginsburg, Pollack, Tupac.
I mean I’m exhilarated when reading his “Without Sky” (Surkov as ‘Natan Dubovitsky’) – I want to go to the war he’s talking about, or at least screen it
“Bewildering” or – be wild!
“The sky is falling…” or – Skyfall,
Living w/out sky
two dimensional &/or non-linear all against all
complex and sly
All I have are FaceBook film-poem posts in face of his “first non-linear war…all against all.” Tools of art liberation taken over by authoritarians. Philosophies of thought-liberators taken over by fanatical adversaries of liberalism, such as A. Dugin and hisnpostmodern geopolitics, his “Fourth Political Theory” – National Bolshevism (note that Nazi ring) – in advance of which he upholds his own Ceterum Censeo, “The American Empire must be destroyed.”
A fun resource here has been Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: the surreal heart of the new Russia. Of course, the title is a variation of Nietzsche’s quote – its translation thought to be in part derived from Dostoyevsky – of the Order of Assassin’s motto, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” & that brings me back, not exactly full circle, but to my youth and the poet Jim Carrol with his band project: because his voice filled my teenage brain with its glee, I can still hear the renegade lilt of how he pronounced “permitted.”
In my own search for a way past all this, I’ve turned/(re)turned to Laura (Riding) Jackson.
The real turn regarding truth and truth-turning from contemporary poetics was Laura Riding Jackson… she turned against poetry – gave up on what she had thought it promised her.
She’s telling, for this issue – because she engaged Modernism and all the advanced aesthetic inquiries of her poetry-writing time and place (pre-WWII US and England), yet maintained a traditional relationship to the task of poetry.
Her words, from her 1980 introduction to her collected works more than 40 years after she renounced writing poetry
Tradi mod
t onal r ern sensi
elat on t the art, b litie
It didn’t fall out the way I wanted it to. It never does.
The truth is uh
“…Poetry unqualifiedly loyal to the actuality of poetry as a tradition… …In becoming a poet in the century’s first quarter of literary modernism, I assumed the character of a modern in the freedom with which I, cheerfully, dispensed with the literary conventions of poetic idiom, and forged me a poetic diction out of natural standards of diction-excellence,” – here is her devotion to tradition – “shaped to the requirements of the special concerns of poetry.”
More on that: “As to what the special concerns of poetry are, the tradition provides no definitions. It presents itself as the definition of them, with the burden of proof put upon the poet of justifying the implicit meaning of the tradition as the union of highest human concerns within the bounds of poetic expression.” Her devotion to the tradition of the union of highest human concerns within the bounds of poetic expression, through modernist freedom of means.
“In my choosing the role of poet, I recognized the traditional allocation by poetry to itself of an area of experience of an immediate, absolute, life-purifying quality of spirituality, and I accepted poetry without reservation as having demarcated this area as potentially occupiable in distinct forms of consciousness, real functions of being, exactly congruous translation of the occupation of it into words. …I had not the least difficulty in uniting the traditional character of poetry as an active literature of spirituality with the dignities of modern intellectuality…”
“modern humanistic sophistication” mentioned as an attribute of the modernist practice
At any rate
Now you can still love poetry for its truth-telling, and you can still go to relativist experimentalism in honor of freedom (and shirking, if need be); yet here is the crucial turning point, identified by Laura Riding…
Not necessarily following her to give up poetry, but probably obligated after this to bring poetry closer to utterance – genuine utterance, authentic utterance… utterance, even if ugly, clunky, and guttural, above poetry… guts over poetry…
The truth is, uh…
The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language – title of a posthumous reconstruction of her leavings and intention with regard to the potentiality for human truthful utterance.
The editor John Nolan in his intro discusses some of the foundation of her outlook: that poe
imitation of truth-speaking, and without being capable of it, serves as a substitu
further away from the possibility of truth rather than closer. Truth-speaking itself is
practicable. in Nolan’s words, “The reason why truth-speaking is assumed to be not pra
beings have become reluctant to believe literally in their capability of truth-speak
potential of language.”
Laura Riding’s traditional/modern way of being a poet led to her disillusion
P.17, “As a poet I applied modern sensibilities to the appreciation of what was implicit in the traditional conception of poetry.” The traditional conception of poetry “embodies an ideal of eloquent expression in which language is pressed to fulfill a function generally but vaguely recognized in it, that of serving the instrumentality of truth. …authentically representative human utterance.”
“I think I was unique as a ‘modernist’ poet in my adherence to the traditional principle of poetry, which I later called its ‘creed.’ And import, “creed” distinct from “craft.”
For her, irreconcilably so
Poetry failed her, but she continued to pursue her ideal and belief in the capability of
Truth
-speaking,
and she found her own way to the source of such potentiality. & I think she’s on to something, as much as I understand it, as much as I’ve been able to follow her to where she goes… I think she has something more than anyone else, poet or philosopher alike. Her conceptualized, practiced way to truth through language…
The second half of her life’s work – the Life’s work of the second half of her life – involved the creation of an English dictionary, with her husband Schuyler B. Jackson, in pursuit of the claim (or truth) that words indeed do have non-relative meaning – that you can get a word and their definitions beyond the slippage of words defined by other words. Something independent holds. There are inherent meanings in words. It is up to us to adhere to them. A task, and a fundamental obligation, the search and study and facing the meaning of our words. Finding and being true to what’s there. & anyways, at any rate
“Words are all we ‘ve got” – Samuel Beckett (sometimes considered a misattribution)
We can stand by our words. We must stand by our words. From Ernest Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry…beloved by Ezra Pound… the ideogram for “truth” is a person standing by – and facing – their words.
With Laura Riding, let’s discover the definitions of words from themselves, from each word’s resident power, the meaning that resides in each word, attunement to every subtle distinction, nuance. Let me understand the difference and sameness between “human” and “humane.” What is self-evident in and by each word. The residing power in a word, the discovery of self-evidence through the word. The true power of words.
From there, take a word and stand it alone. Such as the word Truth. It stands, it stands tall, with its capital T. Dare to insist. Truth is the truth… is real, and nothing could be annihilating of being and presence than to say truth isn’t truth. Forget the taboo – it’s the departure from what sustains what is that constitutes its crime, whether of a Pontius Pilate or of Rudy Giuliani.
We can stand by our stand-alone words. We can stand by Truth.
- Truth itself Melting ICE
The truth is, uh.
Take a word and stand it alone. wordsandit alone
wordsand. We all stand on a sieve
I’m preparing an OpEd, inspired by the thought of this piece, on how – while we’ve watched Truth melt – we can imagine the truth itself melting ice, and indeed as an activist of late against obscene immigration policies of this administration, intending that the Truth melts ICE.
Thesis: Our immigration system and its policies have their very basis on the existential lie of dehumanization and criminalizing rhetoric. It has to deny the humanity of its victims. Fact is, though, each individual’s humanity is self-evident. To be expanded upon…
From Truth Melting Away, to the Truth itself Melts ICE
But to see the truth crumble so quickly before my eyes today… Now only an H is left. I choke out a “Ha!”
Yet, conceptually, I was able to know of truth beyond the letter melting ice, becoming spiritualized, released…
As from my Ceterum Censeo poem from last night’s kick-off event…
Art of the melt by repetition
of letting go of substance, solidity
Or is it transmutation? – bit by bit
Release of the rigid
Into Spirit
Still, it’s difficult to face the material, crumbled, foundation.
