Postmodern Anxieties in an Age of Confidence

“In asmuch as the soul is present there is power not confident but agent.”

—R.W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Sometimes characters from fiction can get such a grip on your imagination that their fate beyond the fictional circumstance of their origin continues to occupy your thinking long after you’ve finished the book. They become bearers of significance, archetypal actors in your imagination. I have been fascinated for a long time, for instance, with the fate of the sole survivor of the apocalyptic end of the whale ship, Pequod. Destroyed by the white whale that its captain and crew sought to destroy, the Pequod sank into the sea with its entire company, save one—Ishmael. Through fate or fluke, or some combination of both, he was thrown from his boat, a boat he wasn’t supposed to be in, outside the field of the whale’s destruction, and was last seen floating on Queequeg’s coffin which popped up in the centre of the Dark Omphalos, the button-like black bubble at the axis of the slowly wheeling circle that was the last sign of the Pequod. As it swallowed the lives of the crew, it ejected a coffin that saved Ishmael’s life. Arguably, that uncanny marriage of death and life is a sign of the reason he survived when everyone else perished. It embodies the knowledge he gained in his quest to understand the whale, a quest that led him through multiple modes of measure, from rulers to tastebuds, from squeezing sperm to writing, from science to poetry, past the notion of the exclusivity of truth and into a vision of the endless accretion and transformation of knowledge that can never be “complete.” In the process he demonstrated a mode of being, an identifying stance that is fluid, porous, inclusive, and fundamentally erotic in that it merges with the objects of its attention rather than trying to isolate, enclose, and dominate them, as Ahab does. What’s at stake are modes of knowing the world that are inextricably implicated in modes being in the world.

Reporting from an unspecified future, Ishmael describes how he was saved by the wandering Rachel, looking, as he puts it, for her lost children. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. There is no further history. At least no explicit history, though surely Melville thought about it. You have to wonder at the workings of his mind after he returned from his naval adventures to prim, proper Beacon Hill in Boston. He married into upper class Boston Brahmin propriety, wedding the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, an old family friend. He settled into a literary life that began with a flurry of fame and notoriety and ended in ignominious rejection and critical disdain. Beacon Hill was the penultimate stop in a process of the radical transformation of identity. From the Marquesas where he hints he partook in the sexual openness of the Island culture, and possibly ate human flesh (he did), to Tahiti where he was locked up in the public stocks, to the hold of a US Navy frigate where he witnessed the brutality of the officers above deck and the amorous encounters among the sailors in the bunks below deck, he entered the Calvinist redoubt of Boston in 1850.

His adventures and ordeals transformed Melville and his understanding of the nature of identity and the moral and philosophical structures of belief that flow from it. Ishmael’s protean, fluid self and its erotic relation to knowledge and the world became a consistent concern in his novels from Mardi to The Confidence Man. The narrator of Melville’s White-Jacket may throw off his white jacket in order to make the return to Boston, but I’ll bet Melville never threw his off. Nor, I’d like to suggest, did Ishmael, and further, that he made a stunning return to Melville’s imagination in the fluid multiple identities of the Confidence Man, now seasoned, cynical, and out to reveal the deep hypocrisy and metaphysical stupidity of USAmerican culture.

The Confidence Man was Melville’s last novel, written after the crushing disappointment of the critical and commercial failure of Moby-Dick. There’s no other novel like it in 19th century USAmerican writing. A dark farewell to the literary life, a brilliant, devastating dissection of 19th century American confidence, it is an anti-novel that consists of a series of conversations on philosophical. moral, ethical, and practical issues that take place on a paddle wheeler sailing on the Mississippi River. One half of the conversation is always carried on by some manifestation of the Confidence Man who appears in multiple forms including the gentleman with the weed in his hat, the Charity Agent, the Black Rapids Coal Company agent, the herb doctor, the agent of the Philosophical Intelligence Office, Black Guinea, Charlie Noble, Frank Goodman, and the Cosmopolitan, who appears in one scene simultaneously with another avatar, a child beggar. There are also suggestions that he may be a manifestation of Satan, the Prince of Lies. But then again, maybe not. The physics of his transformations and his metaphysical status are irrelevant. Even in his resemblance to Ishmael, the Confidence Man is an archetypal figure—a shapeshifter and a Trickster—in an archetypal setting—a Mississippi paddle wheeler. The laws of the physical universe are irrelevant, especially as Melville uses his character to undermine the rules of modern, realist fiction with their central emphasis on representing the social individual.

Melville learned some crucial lessons in his 5 years at sea. Most importantly, he came to understand that the world of Calvinist certainty in a morally ordered world decreed by divine sanction had no more validity than the Marquesan islander’s certainty that he gained his enemy’s strength by eating his dead body. Jehovah, it turned out, was neither more nor less real than Queequeg’s Yojo. The confidence their followers placed in them and the worlds they defined and ordered was the antithesis of thought, the negation of soul (according to Emerson). It was not only delusional, it hypocritically masked an actual world untainted by any moral considerations at all, a world of unmitigated greed, mistrust, stupidity, gullibility, and insane violence which Melville captures in his chapter on the metaphysics of Indian hating.

It assaulted a constituting array of USAmerican modernity’s epistemological certainties. These include, but are not limited to, the integrity of individual identity, realism as the representation of truth, history as progress, the beneficence of philanthropy, and the biggest whopper of all, reason as the defining quality of the human. Peeling back the confident, hypocritical layers of Christian ideology that mask USAmerican cupidity and violence The Confidence Man in both form and content locates itself outside the ethos and authorized structures of meaning of 19th century U.S. modernity. That ethos had everything to do with confidence in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. Emerson’s sense of confidence as stasis figures here. And the question becomes what exactly is the Confidence Man after? Money, of course, is always at stake since an obsession with money defines the soul of USAmerica, notwithstanding occasional formal nods to “liberty” and “freedom.” Sometimes the stakes are only two bits, but it’s the principle that matters. The Confidence Man is just as happy to con a mark out of a volume of Tacitus or a distrustful attitude.

The con works like this: the Confidence Man figures out what his mark most desires. He then uses that against the mark by offering to fulfill that desire if only the mark will trust him. Greed is the usual hook—extravagant profits for minimal investment or a bridge in Brooklyn for sale at an unbelievable price. Mostly Melville’s Confidence Man sells trust, and his pitch is based on his understanding that what his marks want is certainty. Once he gains trust, he takes the very thing he promised. And it’s not necessarily money.

As the man with the weed points out to the naive minister, the little money at stake in Black Guinea’s appeal would not be worth the effort of a conman so Black Guinea must be an honest beggar. At that point, a grumpy man with a wooden leg enters the conversation, having previously denounced Black Guinea as a scam artist.  “You two green-horns,” he says. “Money, you think, is the sole motive in pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?” He makes a crucial point. Why did the devil con Eve? To introduce knowledge that would negate Paradise, in that case the knowledge of good and evil. Melville’s Confidence Man also introduces knowledge, the knowledge of the end of modernity’s certainties and a vision of USAmerica not as city on a hill but as a boatload of greed, avarice, racism, and violence. It is a world after the modern, the world witnessed from the perspective of postmodernity’s uncertainties.

Postmodern is a troubled word these days. When I first heard it in 1968 no one had yet imagined it with an ism tied to its tail. The meaning was straight forward. It named a moment of emergent historical transformation. I was reading the poet Charles Olson with Robin Blaser at the time. In a letter to Robert Creeley in 1951, Olson famously wrote, “The first half of the twentieth century was the marshaling yard on which the modern was turned to what we have, the post-modern, or post-West.” This was one of, if not the, earliest uses of the word after Alfred Toynbee introduced it in A Study in History. Following Toynbee’s use, Olson proposed “postmodern” as a way of thinking history as epochs characterized by identifiable shifting epistemic fields and the structures of meaning and institutional formations that flow from them. One epoch gives way to another based on what Olson called “hinges” rather than the modern notion of “progress.” As Olson used it, postmodern named a moment in time when the most recent epoch, our epoch, which we call modernity, showed signs of destabilizing and transitioning in the same ways European cultures in the 14th century had destabilized and transitioned over hundreds of years into the formation we call modernity. The West is another way of referring to that formation. Postmodern was the marker of a recognition of the emergence of a transitional historical moment in the West, a hinge.

That understanding changed rapidly in the late 1970s. The word took seed and spread far and wide in the Academy, where it became postmodernism and provided a gold rush of topics for PhD theses, journal publications, and myriad books which sought to define it, pin it down, and explain and develop its significance in relation to multiple fields and disciplines that included the arts and literature, philosophy, architecture, feminism, science, cinema, TV, even postmodernism and lifestyles which identifies certain trends in consumption as evidence of postmodernism. When the ism gets tied to postmodern’s tail considerations of emergent history are replaced with arguments about a loosely defined style and eventually a Program. It’s a significant moment that through linguistic legerdemain turns a provocative, fruitful proposition about Time and history that can help us see, investigate, and navigate historical changes into a commodified aesthetic mode, and binds it to predetermined conventions.

The postmodernism-ists translated historical attention into genre conventions. Ihab Hasan led the charge in categorizing the conventions in a very long list, shared by many others in whole or part, that includes elusive meaning, ironic self-awareness, death of the author, broken narrative frames, rejection of unmediated objectivity, the contingency of knowledge, the collapse of a master narrative, etc. Treated as conventions these radical modal stances can then be dismissed as no longer relevant to a new generation whose sensibilities have been determined by new tech, what one philosophical wag called the shift from watching to clicking. This kind of fashion history ignores or is ignorant of the larger historical view that the address to postmodernity opens. In the thinking of the postmodern, the so-called tropes of postmodernism are abstractions of actual identifiable disturbances in modernity’s epistemic field. They are not conventions. Nor are they a program. They are recognitions opening to investigation.

The forces that drove the postmodernism-ist frenzy fizzled out in the 90s.  In 2006, Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism’s front-line defender against the Marxists, announced its demise in “Postmodern Afterthoughts”. As a defender of postmodernism she had insisted on a distinction between a historical discourse and a cultural discourse. In “Postmodern Afterthoughts” she abandoned that distinction and no longer referred to it in historical terms. It became a corpus of dated theoretical concerns and tropes that had been rendered defunct by “new theories [such] as queer, postcolonial, and feminism,” i.e. sociology ejected history from the marketplace. The general consensus of academic voices demoted postmodernism to a period style that, like all period styles, reached the end of its allure and was abandoned by the au courant, dead and buried, at least until a new generational market came along and discovered its nostalgia value.

But no one anticipated a Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse.

A number of conservative writers either missed the news of postmodernism’s demise or decided to voodoo the thing back to life so they could have a box into which they could dump everything they hated about so-called “woke” culture—which they attribute to postmodernism—and blame it for the end of the world. Ideologues like Jordan Peterson, Lydia Pluckrose and Stephen Hicks have chased it down an alley with the ism clanging behind it. They have turned some Frankenstein’s monster assemblage of ideas they call “postmodernism” into the ultimate anti-American boogeyman, a far reaching MARXIST plot by sleazy MARXIST bewildering MARXIST Euro-philosophers to destroy wholesome USAmerican confidence in Progress, Truth (singular), and Justice for all (white) people.

About the time the former practitioners and explicators of postmodernism were moving on to new fields of academic endeavour “[such] as queer, postcolonial, and feminism,” conservatives discovered postmodernism as an evil plague destroying America by sowing chaos through moral relativism and weird pronouns, and sneaking in Marxism in what Pluckrose calls bewildering texts. Admitting you are bewildered by the material you are attempting to explain is probably not a good way to set out, but nothing that follows has much to do with any actual European thinking it proposes to expose. Rather than engage in a critical examination of actual texts, they come up with a set of misrepresentations and distortions to which they attach the ultimate depraved evil (according to Jordan Peterson), i.e. Marxism, throw in some unpopular identity politics and threats of  “cancellation” by a miniscule totalitarian left, and presto chango, you have transformed an esoteric idea about history into the Godzilla of Western cultural destruction, a Viral Idea Plague that perniciously infects people and gives them “bad” ideas, even though they are “not aware of the doctrine that has them in its grip” (Peterson again). Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers but inside the alien pods are little homunculi of bald, bespectacled glaring French intellectuals plotting the destruction not just of USAmerican democracy, but as Pluckrose and Hicks propose, of “modernity” itself. To plot the destruction of modernity is no mean feat given that for over 500 years the assembly of ideas and institutions that travel under that name have ruled the roost in the West and are deeply embedded in our fundamental modes of thinking and our habits of being. In fact, that is what “the West” is. So, it seems rather extreme to think that a handful of academics (French ones at that) with bewildering ideas could “bring it down” in a few short years. In fact, they have turned postmodernism into a villain in a Marvel universe movie in which they are the superheroes fighting to return USAmericans to the harmonious state of the 1950s.

Charles Olson wrote in the late 50’s and 60’s, as enormous, roiling, creative energies breached boundaries and birthed new forms. They were fuel for a counterculture that rejected the post-WWII USAmerican regime of complacent consensus and a polite culture that barely masked its relentless racist violence and aggressive international commercial/military expansion. For Olson, Toynbee’s insight resonated with his own sense of a postmodern opening evident in the increasing loss of legitimacy of Humanism’s ego-centric legacy and the Enlightenment’s giddy proclamations about universal Reason as the Human dominant. That’s not to say that reason (lower case) isn’t a marvelous human capacity, only that it does not define our relationships to each other and the world. Two World Wars—actually one with two chapters—tarnished modernity’s promise, to say the least. The repeated brutal slaughter of various civilized, enlightened nations by various other civilized, enlightened nations using technology developed by science, Reason’s precious child, seemed at odds with the notion of humans as creatures ennobled and governed by that Reason.

The bureaucratic industrialization of genocide, the systematic mass murder of 6 million Jews and 6 million Others, in the name of “purity” using the science and technology central to modernity’s utopian vision of itself, raised serious questions in some minds about the neutrality and the objectivity of science, the universal value of technology, and the nature of whatever is called the Human. Add in the growth of the surveillance state and its penetration into every aspect of people’s lives. And the environmental crisis bred by modernity’s voracious hungers. And modernity seems to have reached a limit.  I doubt it is possible to renew the original spirit of modernity, but if it is, it won’t be through nostalgia for the fictional world of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver.

Trump’s con, and the program of the autocratic powers using him, is based on an understanding that a lot of people, after having their lives collapse in the wake of globalization, are angry, frightened, and hungry for certainty. The image of that certainty is a nostalgic vision of the pristine modern America of the post-WWII Pax Americana economic boom when a flood of money elevated large numbers of the “proletariat” into something called the “middle-class”, and whiteness ruled the roost almost unchallenged. But the middle-class turned out to be an hallucination that by the late 60s had begun to evaporate. The flood of money dried up as big capital shifted production overseas to less expensive labour markets leaving no middle behind. At the same time, the civil rights movement picked up steam, putting America’s racist history and it’s continuing racist brutalities on the front page of every newspaper in the world. USAmericans yearned for a return to the untroubled wealth and power that they felt was their right, guaranteed by USAmerican exceptionalism.

The bedrock of political modernity is a secular state, the rule of law, and the commitment to majority rule. All of these principles are now under attack not by bespectacled French intellectuals but by Trump, by large swaths of the USAmerican people who yearn for a “return to greatness”, and by Trump’s agents, including the same individuals who blame “postmodernism” for “destroying modernity” and liberal values. They are attacking political freedom, a free press dedicated to objectively reporting news, academic freedom and independence, due process, free speech, and even habeas corpus, perhaps the most basic of modern, democratic rights, what William Blackstone called “The Great Writ of Liberty,” enshrined in English Common Law in the Magna Carta. These institutions are the constituents of modernity as we know it. They define it.

Trump offers a return to an earlier simplified “greatness” in exchange for people’s trust that he will use the power they give him to reclaim that historical moment. In fact, he wants to reclaim a different historical moment, one in which political power is concentrated in an authoritarian “monarch/President” whose will is law, who doles out pardons in exchange for loyalty, and to whom the world pays literal tribute, like 400 million-dollar airplanes and million-dollar contributions to royal bitcoin scams. In the name of defending a renewed modernism, Trump brings a postmodern feudal revival.

Perhaps the most dismal and symptomatic assault is the systematic undermining of the concept of “truth” by the Narcissist and Chief and those who find a sense of meaning in his endless fantasying. While the theorists of the Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse complain loudly and incessantly about post-modernist “relativism” destroying the civilization of The West by denying there is a Truth (and the West is It), their pre-modern movement and its orange leader have invented something called “alternate facts” which are mythologems of his endless phantasies.  It’s not that he lies. That would imply he knows there’s a truth to lie about. He lives within a bubble in which everything he thinks is “true” because he thinks it, just as if he was an absolute monarch. The concept of “truth” (small “t”) has been systematically corrupted to the point it has become meaningless. No fact checking or truth monitoring can dent the “golden dome” of his underdeveloped psyche and the willing submission of his acolyte followers, including the so-called philosophers, who gush confidence at whatever he says, no matter how absurd, outrageous, or patently untrue. In that sense, they and their orange boss are the agents of the undoing of modernity anticipated by the thinking of postmodernity. They exemplify the unraveling of modernity.

Multiple senses of confidence circulate here. For the purveyors of the Postmodernism Zombie Apocalypse, confidence, as Emerson has it as mental stasis, is the name of their game. Their vision of a return to a time of past glory reeks of confidence in Emerson’s sense. So does their specious claim to understand and dismiss the complex relational idea of knowledge engaged in by those thinkers address to postmodernity as it manifests in the disruption of the modern epistemic field. Melville invokes a further sense of the word where the Confidence Man—who as I mentioned earlier looks a lot like an older, more cynical Ishmael, back on land testing his hard-won sense of identity—explores the snake pit of American contradictions.

Melville shows us multiple modes of USAmerican confidence including blind, uncritical trust in authority, a delusional belief in certainty, and a willful blindness to the legacy of slavery and the horrendous crimes and cruelties that followed in the wake of USAmerica’s 19th century bloody expansion across the continent and around the world. The final chapter of the novel involves an encounter between the Cosmopolitan, a child beggar, and a “comely man” Melville describes “a well-to-do farmer, happily dismissed, after a thrifty life of activity, from the fields to the fireside” who is reading a Bible. In the archetypal world of the Fidèle, there is no more quintessential image of an ideal Jeffersonian American, the foundation of democracy. Melville goes on, however, to uncover a darker side to fabled American innocence, describing the farmer as “ . . . one of those who, at three score and ten, are as fresh-hearted as at fifteen; one of those to whom seclusion gives a boon more blessed than knowledge, and at last sends them heaven untainted by the world because ignorant of it . . ..” Ignorant of history and confident in their own exceptional virtue, USAmericans deny their own history, and, as we see now, will even go so far as to criminalize the revelation of the truth.

Raising the cosmological stakes, the final scene unfolds in the light of a solar lamp which projects a shadow image of “a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo.” The editors of the Norton edition of The Confidence Man contextualize the imagery with a quote from Revelations 9.13 where John hears details of the coming of the apocalypse from an angel who speaks in “a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God.” The farmer gets a bit tangled up in his contradictions, first telling the Cosmopolitan that “to distrust the creature, is a kind of distrusting of the Creator”, then falling for a scam that uses his fear of being robbed as the hook. The farmer is confronted by a child beggar who convinces him that his money is at risk of being stolen by an army of thieves including burglars, pickpockets, and counterfeiters. In an escalating pitch the boy sells the farmer a “door lock”, a money belt, and a “counterfeit detector”. 

Finally, in an ultimate act of humiliation, as the farmer searches for a life preserver while expressing his distrust of the boat’s safety, the Cosmopolitan hands him a commode, which the farmer accepts. As the scene closes and the novel comes to an end, the Cosmopolitan blows out the last (solar) lamp and leads the old man, who holds his money belt in one hand and the commode/life preserver under his other arm, into the dark, confident of his security.  Something more may follow from this masquerade, Melville says prophetically.

Perhaps the historical disruptions we are witness to are temporary and modernity’s institutions will survive this apparent destabilization and outright assault and return to a pre-existing confident order. I wouldn’t take odds on it, but, hey, you never know. But, regardless of alternate facts, it’s true that no system lasts forever. And there is no reason to assume that the forms of life of USAmerican modernity are any more eternally durable than the forms of life of Imperial Rome or Poverty Point. The value of the thinking of the postmodern has been its opening of the mind to signs of change, to glimpses of unprecedented developments and options, to acute historical sensitivity to Time’s generative mystery. It opens our ability to see beyond what’s given. Whether that’s enough to withstand the hucksters of the age of Confidence remains to be seen. Time, as they say, will tell.

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With gratitude to André Spears for his immaculate critical intelligence and generosity.

Poeisis, Poetics, and Morality

It is probably impossible to separate poetry, and art generally, from questions of morality, no matter how hard you try. And people have tried, for a very long time. When Oscar Wilde, at the end of the 19th century, famously stated “there is no such thing as moral or immoral books. Books are well written or badly written,” he staked out a post-Pater aesthetic territory that attempted to redefine the parameters of most of the thinking about the question that preceded him. It’s one of three possible relations that Tzvetan Todorov argues have held true over 2000 years of arguments: 1) poetry should be in the service of moral principles that exist beyond it; 2) poetry, art, should define morality, since beauty is the highest form of human activity; and 3) poetry and morality are autonomous from one another, and never the twain etc. Wilde weighed in after a very long time of art and morality being wed in a restrictive bond, with art cinctured by moral codes. Starting with Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the city and continuing pretty much until the late 19th century, that first relation dominated thinking in the West. Wilde makes the case that the two categories—Art/Beauty and Morality/the Good—are mutually exclusive. But Todorov goes on to argue that even though they are autonomous, Beauty and the Good are connected by three inescapable links—the immoral but necessary cruelty of the artist, the beauty poetry contributes to the world, and the increase of intelligibility it adds. Even at its most disconnected, art, it seems, is still connected to a moral discourse.

Poetry always speaks from the world, or just speaks the world (not to be confused with The World), formed in its originating energies, even as it resonates with its source in eternity. Drenched in the sense of the world, poetry utters the wild logos of our condition here at the end of some time we know that is also the beginning of some time we don’t yet know, or only have an inkling of. And in that speaking, that ordering/uttering of the tumult of the world, poetry necessarily touches on realities that are subject to moral judgement, though your understanding of what that means will depend on how you think morality, or in philosophy’s lingo, the Good, which flows from your imagination of the world. Wilde’s words invoke the frightening spectre of a world in which extraneous moral codes determine what art can and can’t do, regardless of the world it finds itself in and that speaks through it, a thought that is antithetical to modernity’s sense of art’s mission. And the agents of those codes, the censors, are never far away, animated by some frenzied idea of enforced obedience. I am old enough to remember when every film in North America had to be approved by an official Censorship Board, when D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were banned, and when all married couples on TV slept in twin beds.

But censorship is never old news. In so far as there is always a Party of Return, the thinking of further will always meet resistance, and censorship is one of the main tools for attempting to hold time back, subject to a purified imagination of an untroubled past of real, recoverable value. In 2021 in the United States a record number of attempts were made to censor books in libraries, mostly by right-wing religious groups opposed, for instance, to immoral (realistic) representations of sexuality, or historical narratives that acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the development of USAmerican culture. But the political/religious right is not alone in this outbreak of censoriousness. A whole new totalitarian movement haunts the post-Wall left, dedicated to imposing a moralistic view of gender, race, and sexuality in the determination of acceptable art and language. Should you disagree with, or even question, their position, you will likely find yourself blackballed in some hellish social media madness for not toeing the ideological line.

But questions about morality and art are never simple, never limited to black and white, and as with many issues, much of the complexity (and confusion) arises from differing definitions of the same word, in this case what’s meant by “morality.” In the most general sense, it is the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, the acknowledgement and acceptance of The Good. But depending on how you understand “knowledge,” not to mention “right” and “wrong,” the sense can shift radically. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, moral law is literally writ in stone, an immutable code bestowed on humans directly from God. Emerson challenged that idea of morality. He recognized the loss of a foundational ground on which to establish it. “Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand,” he wrote, as science, technology, and business rapidly ate away at the authority of religion and the spiritual knowledge that founded moral knowledge in the 19th century. Emerson proposed instead that morality is relational and arises in the necessity, the necessary struggle, to make ourselves intelligible to those we are addressed to, and in that sense to be committed to a further, better self. Stanley Cavell calls this moral perfectionism, where the perfection is not an achievement but a commitment to a process.

In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck is the embodiment of Emerson’s self-reliance. He faces a dilemma that arises from the moralist code written in stone, as well as various legal statutes, that states categorically, Thou shalt not steal. According to the law of the United States, since Huck’s friend, accomplice, and occasional saviour, Jim, is an escaped slave, he literally “belongs” to Miss Polly. The code holds Huck morally obligated to return her stolen property, and since he is struggling to be a moral person, that’s what he decides to do. But when he starts to think about it, when he looks in Jim’s face and recalls the times Jim has helped him, and saved him, and comforted him, Huck sees a friend, and that friendship is implicated in a moral sense of loyalty, love, and the recognition of a certain debt. Which will prevail? A code that demands Huck return his friend to a condition of slavery without consideration of the people and their actual relationship? Or Huck’s knowledge of Jim and his obligation to his friend, his commitment to a world of actual relation? Morality for Emerson is a deep experience of right and wrong that arises out of a relation between people. Moralism is not morality. It is founded on a code, an immutable set of laws etched in stone, utterly divorced from any human interaction. Grounded in a deep structural binarism, it divides the world into mutually exclusive categories, beginning with good and evil.

Think of it as a Compulsive Paralytic Binary Syndrome (CPBS). Because morality necessarily involves considerations of The Good, it also invokes The Bad, and then, if you are not careful, you will find yourself propelled into a perpetual state of terminal Binary-ism where the world divides endlessly into opposites—good/bad, moral/immoral, masculine/feminine—that proliferate, fractal-like, into every aspect of your thinking of the world—white/black, strong/weak, male/female, mind/heart, reason/imagination, feeling/thinking—each component an exclusive purity. William Blake pictured it as a man and woman tied together back-to-back—a marriage of perpetual isolations, of impossible (sexual) union. He called it a state of Generation.

Emerson confronted it in his reckoning as a minister with the emptiness of church rituals, and especially the ritual of The Last Supper where people mouthed Christian words in church but made no place for them in their workaday lives. It was form bereft of content. Once you separate the ritual act from the content of the act in the most sacred of gestures, the world becomes emptied, unoriginal, a place in which the thinking of truth loses orientation along with a point of origin that guarantees the honesty and virtue of the acts that arise from it or out of it. When general equivalence determines the World, exchange value overwhelms all other modes of value, especially thinking connected to spiritual values that mediate between the human and the divine. Degraded, those values—virtue, honesty, valor, integrity—eventually lose meaning. Morality, the moral life, becomes an empty form, much like the ritual of The Last Supper that motivated Emerson’s exit from a religious vocation.

Authentic is a word relevant to this thinking, though it is currently out of favour, even slightly scandalous, in sociological circles, especially in so far as it is associated with the troubled thinking of subject or self. That address, following Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, defines authentic as the idea that an autonomous subject is in accord with it’s innermost, “true feelings.” Since in those circles subjective autonomy is seen as an ideological construct, authenticity, according to the Adorno view, is nothing more than a delusion, an ideological manipulation, designed to facilitate the operation of a free market economy.

But what if instead of thinking “self” as an abstract subject deluded by ideology, you think it as a relational worlded authoritative finitude with the potential to make grow, to create, to author and authorize. This is close to Emerson’s sense of authenticity, out of the Greek root, authentes, self-doer. In that mode of thinking, authenticity is not about the identity of an abstraction called a “subject” with another abstraction called its “inner feelings.” Authenticity is not about identity at all. On the contrary, it is about difference, the commitment to a further self. It is a measure of the self’s ability to authorize its own address to the furtherness of the world—as Emerson (and Cavell) would say, to make itself intelligible. Then the authenticity of a poem has to do not with the nature of some subject’s “voice,” but with the struggle manifested within the language to make the world’s furtherness intelligible. Arguably, to do that is a moral gesture.

As Todorov pointed out, however, morality is sneaky and given half a chance, it will find a way to insinuate itself in some form even into otherwise seemingly anti-moralist stances. Art gets its comeuppance in a lot of different ways, even in discourses that claim to reject moralism. Judging work morally objectionable and banning or burning it is only the most obvious mode of attack. Moralism also sneaks in through assumptions about value that seem “natural.” Take the opposition between “virtuous sentiment” and the “virtue of intellectual imagination,” two mutually opposed modes of “poetics” recently proposed as part of a critique of the “moralism” of popular poetry that positions itself in line with social justice issues and identity politics. The distinction between these mutually exclusive modes of composition is apparently just technical with no moral judgment involved. But ironically, as part of a larger argument against “moral poetry” it ends up making its own moral judgement. In this anti-moralist aesthetic, “virtuous sentiment” is moralist in its outlook, which produces inferior poetry, while (the virtue of) “intellectual imagination,” free of morality, is paradoxically moral in its amoral stance which produces superior poetry. The conclusion is one ought to write poetry of imaginative intellect.

The options here are old and narrow, notwithstanding the updated vocabulary and clever word play. Something called “virtue” plays a role in both categories, though somewhat sneakily. Virtuous is an adjective, virtue a noun, and as the grammatical function shifts in the opposition, so does meaning. In days of yore, virtue meant something different than it does now. In the 13th century, virtue was the quality of a first-class Knight and had to do with strength, even manliness, which makes sense given that the Indo-European root of the word, *wi-ro, means man.  By the end of the 14th century, however, what constituted “moral qualities” had begun to shift as the last remnants of Feudalism and courtly culture faded away and the new market order replaced them with its own values. First, religious values replaced courtly values, and virtuousness came to signify the possession of excellent moral qualities as defined by religious authorities, especially chastity. And in so far as chastity became more and more a state imposed on females, you could say it became “feminized.” Its focus was on controlling women’s sexuality, including the notorious belts. There were never chastity belts for men. Even today, while someone might speak of a virtuous woman, it’s unlikely they would describe a man that way. Chastity is a tool of the patriarchy to control female sexuality.

For the Euro American radical intelligentsia who embraced intoxication and sexuality in the 19th century as a tonic for the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of bourgeois culture, “virtue” was a sign of duplicity and shallowness as they witnessed “upstanding” citizens claim to be virtuous by day, while indulging in drunkenness and lechery, and killing the occasional streetwalker, at night. Robert Louis Stevenson nailed it in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That sense of duplicity remains, while the issue has shifted. Whereas 75 years ago it had to do with sexual purity and abstinence from intoxicants, these days it more often refers to political positions involving identity, race and gender, i.e., what is called “virtue signalling,” a negative label for a self-righteous social media behaviour, which, it seems to me, is the sense that informs the negativity of the phrase, “virtuous sentiment.” On the other hand, and this is definitely an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand moment, as a noun in the phrase, the virtue of imaginative intellect, it signifies something very different, harkening back to the original sense of valour, something noble, even . . . manly.

Once the binary division is established (the virtuous sentiment vs. the virtue of intellect), moral value (good versus bad) immediately slips in to locate one half of the division as The Good. It introduces a valuation of two opposed modes of human knowledge, say “sentiment” and “intellect” (or to use an old literary recognition, heart and head, or even behind that, feminine and masculine) finding one wanting in relation to the other, at least as far as poetics are concerned, and poetics are a big deal these days, arguably bigger even than poetry. Partly that’s because poetics sounds kind of scientific, which is good if you want to be taken seriously by people who like measurable, scientific sounding stuff. It’s the ics at the end. ICS. It’s hard and precise, like mathematics, semiotics, axiomatics, probiotics, or athletics. You know something is there when you hear that. It’s serious.

The focus on what’s called poetics is relatively recent. It started around 1960 with Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry. Given the oppositional nature of his anthology, Allen knew he was in for some critical turbulence, that the Authorized Poetic Authorities would dismiss the poetry in his anthology as unworthy of serious attention because of its rejection of preconceived form and traditional conventions, and its embrace of improvisational techniques congruent with a shift in world view. In an era when the Poetry Professoriate made its living analysing how many kinds of ambiguity it could discern in a lyric poem, when the metaphor for poetic excellence was a “well-wrought urn,” and poets were expected to fit their “content” into some “form” that pre-existed it as proof of their expertise, the poetry Allen gathered was labelled “uncooked” at best, and at worst mere prose broken into lines—unworthy of serious consideration as poetry, in any case.

Allen sought to head that off some of that noise by including a section by poets on their modes of composition. In a final section of his anthology called “Statements on Poetics,” Allen located the poetry in relation to serious thinking that arose from and with the poetry about the nature of composition. It was meant as a support for the poetry. Most of the contributions are short excerpts from poets’ journals or previously written statements where they thought through and articulated the process of their work. The one exception was Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” a major statement about poetic composition and cosmology that became a rallying point in the poetry wars that followed.

First published in Poetry New York in October 1955, and then as a pamphlet by Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Totem Press in 1959, “Projective Verse” fused Olson’s thinking about poetry, philosophy, cosmology, mathematics, geometry and history into a wild exploration of our postmodern condition and poetry’s entanglement in it. He begins by displacing the “human” from the centre of the poem’s attention to allow in the world and prepare the ground for his emerging vision of the absolute immanence of the divine in the specificities of the mundane, “secular” world. His notion of the “projective” energy of the poem resonated with the same spirit that animated the improvisational work of contemporary jazz musicians. In an intellectual arena dominated by intricate analyses of formal elements, Olson’s essay dropped like a bomb—a stink bomb, maybe, but a bomb, nevertheless.

While Olson posed his open field poetics against the poetics of what he called “closed verse,” he did so to clarify poetry’s response to the profound historical changes we are caught up in. He did not locate it in a moral framework of right versus wrong, nor in a linguistic crisis of referential versus non-referential, but in an historical framework of temporal process (nowpast). And in a necessary cosmology. He did not attempt to make a moral judgement, because he had no theory to measure truth against, no wrong to his right, only a stance which he enacted in his work because of his recognition of the profound difference of our historical moment from what preceded it. All the work he had put into getting to the place where he could write the projective had gone into an actual spiritual ordeal and transformation rather than the development of a theory.

Olson’s trip to Yucatan in 1950 was central to the struggle as he sought a deep relation to meaning specific to the actual space of “America” and outside the box of European modernity. Look, he said, this is where we are now. This is how Time is moving, this is the turbulence we are all swept along in, this is what it means to our relations. What forces are in play? What can poetry do to measure that? In this cosmological process, poets need to transform, to become the transforming voice of that transformation, that process of emergence. Olson’s friend and companion, Robert Duncan, underwent a similar process of spiritual ordeal in quest for a “poetics,” though in his case the ordeal involved undertaking the epic work that became The H.D. Book. For both poets, achieving a “poetics” involved an actual struggle, and a change, a transformation that led to a new stance or mode of being. Poetry flowed from that. Poetics, from that perspective, is not a “theory” but a transformative struggle alive in every word.

Following Allen’s introduction of poetics as support for poetry, it soon became an independent focus of energy and attention. Poetics really came to its own in the mid-70s with the ascendence in the U.S. of what’s called generally Language Poetry. As has often been pointed out, Language Poetry was an ambiguous descriptor covering many different writers and modes of writing. But some things they arguably shared, among them a rejection of “representationalism,” a sociological critique of the traditional lyric “I”, and an attention to the thickness of language. Not unlike Richard Nixon’s contemporaneous suspension of the gold standard in 1971, the theorizers of Language poetry sought to divorce language from a referential ground that anchored it. Quickly colonizing a literary territory called avant-garde, Language Poetry thrived by taking up Olson’s practice of poetry based on scholarship, while substituting Adorno and Saussure for Homer and Melville, and sociology for mythology. They found theoretical support in the European intellectual address to language and developed a theory of poetic signification they buttressed with reference to contemporary post-structuralist and linguistic critics such as George Lakoff.

In so far as poetics became more and more closely identified with theory, which can be studied and learned in classrooms, it opened itself to bursts of moralist judgement. Theory operates within a world of competing ideas that explain phenomena, and based on that explanation propose further practice: one ought to write poetry of imaginative intellect rather than poetry of virtuous sentiment. Unlike a spiritual ordeal that yields a stance in-formed by knowledge, theory yields an idea that competes with other ideas. The rejection of theories of the autonomous subject in control of representational language (meaning as the identity of word and object) gives rise to theories of a socially constructed self informed by ideology and of language as self-referential (meaning solely as a result of difference within the system). Hence the “virtue of imaginative intellect.” Ignore for a minute the way “virtue” in this formation not so subtly signals entrance to a moral zone. It’s implied that imaginative intellect is free of “self” contamination (as in self-expression and sentiment) where self is understood as created and manipulated by ideology and expressed in feelings. It is an exclusionary category.

By joining imagination and intellect, two pure, abstracted modes of mind, it implicitly rules out the impure “not-mind” of Western thinking: emotion, also known as heart, and in a “degraded” form, as sentiment(ality), or, in Adorno-speak, true feelings, which are seen as ideologically conditioned modes of a socially constructed self. It proposes a correct way of composing poetry, one that is free of the unconscious domination of ideology’s formation and manipulation of desire. Then, given the categorical imperative to write poetry of imaginative intellect, the value of the individual poem is lost to an abstraction that automatically excludes as unfit any work that doesn’t belong to the category. The specificity of judgement—the work of this poem or that poem—is lost to moralist categories such as “virtuous sentiment,” a morally degraded mode of writing implicitly identified with the “feminine” (heart, feeling, sentiment). I doubt that the author of this critical binary had any such sexist point in mind, but such is the power of the Compulsory Paralytic Binary Syndrome to sweep us into moralist lockdowns.

The issue is poeisis, or the relation to poeisis, the event of the making of the poem. Poeisis, from whence our word “poetry,” etymologically “to make,” names the process of the emergence of form/meaning. The question is, as a poet, what is your relation to that process? In a way, when it comes to poetry (which, given its name, has a special relation to poeisis) the difference between poeisis and poetics echoes Aristotle’s distinction between poeisis and praxis but reversed. For Aristotle, if poeisis is “to make,” its goal is oriented toward something beyond itself—a pot, a ship, a painting—unlike praxis which for Aristotle is action undertaken strictly for itself, for the value implicit in it—returning money you found, helping someone who fell get up. But the world has changed a bit, and poetry in early 21st century North America no longer bears the cultural value it did for Aristotle. Given the minor status of poetry in our culture of gene

Some poets, it’s true, find ways to use poetry for personal advancement: a limited kind of fame, prize money, status positions, departmental promotions, even, occasionally if they are lucky, sex. But for every one of those Players, a thousand other poets write neither for gold nor glory but simply because they must, even in the currently degraded world of poetry competitions and low-level prizes. They write because they know on some level poetry matters. Poetry calls them into its orders of language and attention. Some do it spontaneously and sporadically out of a deep impulse. Others do it studiously and regularly responding to the centuries of poetry that preceded them. Some write from deep feelings of anger over injustice or the ever-astonishing joy of love. Some write out of intellectual excitement. Some write in a scholarly frenzy. Some write for fun. Some are possessed. Some do it badly. Some do it exquisitely. Some bore you. Some excite you. Some teach you. The difference has to do with the nature of their poetearmind, the way the poet’s sounding of the poem thinks. That’s poetry—thinkingsounding.

The issue, then, is not this theory or that theory, this poetics or that poetics, virtuous sentiment or the virtue of imaginative intellect. Poetics has a goal in mind. It’s relation to poeisis is disciplinary, the production of a specific mode of composition. That can produce interesting poetry given the poetearmind of the writer, a necessity even for imaginative intellectuals. It also produces a lot of dreck given the rarity of the poetearmind. The kinds of composition I am thinking of here engage poeisis as an ordeal, an action, a struggle to achieve unprecedented truths in language events, say even, authentic language events, specific events that have no goal beyond their own transformative articulation.

I read somewhere that I have now forgotten that poeisis, to make, was first an action that transforms and continues the world. That makes sense to me. Morality enters in so far as the maker, through a spiritual ordeal, comes in touch with actual energies that she transforms or translates into language. It is not a question of technical production. Nor is it a question of linguistic theory. It is not even a question of creation in some Romantic sense. Poetry gives voice to thought reconciled with matter, time, spirit, locating person in their actual world. The poet’s soul is tuned to frequencies most people are unaware of, and her job is to transform those energies into language that remains true to them. This is where morality haunts poetry. Because there is no greater good than the virtue of truth.

The Interstices of Poetry Wars

for Jack Spicer

“Poetry lives in the interstices, not in the structures.”

—Robert Duncan

We inherit the somewhat contentious phrase, Poetry War, from intellectual conflicts that arose in the wake of the publication of The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. The new, post-war, post-modern energies that Donald Allen brought together ran into the wall of a conservative, formalist Establishment, and a poetry war broke out on multiple fronts, giving rise to among other things an alternative poetry culture of resistance, resourcefulness, and Emersonian self-reliance within living networks of mutual support.  Elsewhere I have argued that the war itself actually began in the aborted duel between Ezra Pound and Lascelles Abercrombie (figuratively speaking), and continued through the travails of the Objectivists before erupting into the self-proclaimed poetry wars of the 60’s and early 70s. More recently, the term applies to now notorious event that occurred nearly 40 years ago in San Francisco during the screening of a film on Louis Zukofsky when Duncan got into a confrontation with Barrett Watten. Patrick Dunagan reminds me that other fronts in the poetry war were also active at that moment and points to Duncan’s conflict with Denise Levertov, and the now near mythic events at Naropa immortalized in Tom Clark’s Poetry Wars. Robert Duncan was very much a part of these conflicts, and was central to the San Francisco event. And while some people, I know, have expressed ennui and irritation at the continued attention to the confrontation between him and Watten, which they apparently consider too old or lacking substance to be of interest, I think it remains central to an understanding of our situation and the situation of poetry today.

It began in 1978 when, after the screening of a film on Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan walked on stage during a presentation by Barrett Watten and took the microphone from him, symbolically asserting the continued precedence of the New American Poetry over what he saw as the re-emergence of the New Criticism’s formalism in the work of what came to be known as Language Poetry. This name (brand) came to stand for a diverse range of poetries responding to what is called the “linguistic turn” of the 70s and 80s, many of which did not share the same commitments to the formalism central to this discussion, and hence is meaningless in one sense. Nevertheless, the name became part of a marketing campaign by critics like Marjorie Perloff and linked to the identity of a number of poets, propelling them into the center of critical attention at that moment. Duncan had spent much of his artistic life battling one dominant, institutionalized formalism, and having won, he was in no mood to see it rise again from the ashes in the form of neo-Marxist materialism.

The war erupted into the open 6 years later when David Levi Strauss wrote an introduction to a showing of the Zukofsky film along with a film on Duncan. After detailing the history of the films, Levi Strauss related a story of the confrontation between Duncan and Watten in 1978 that outraged Watten’s cohort who, led by Ron Silliman, responded in kind. The barrage of letters to Poetry Flash, a Bay Area poetry news tabloid, that followed became the top poetry news story of 1978. Poetry Flash upped the stakes by inviting a contribution from linguistics professor George Lakoff, whose writing provided a theoretical support for Language poetry. That provoked poet Tom Clark, who responded with a piece called “Stalin as Linguist,” which, to say the least, further inflamed the debate.

At that moment the poetic energy unleashed by the New American Poetry split into a self-declared avant-garde who ran with the oppositional energy of the NAP but grounded it on sociology and philosophical materialism; and an unorganized rump circulating around the poetics of Duncan/Olson/Creely/Ginsberg grounded in Kali energy, the incommensurable creativedevouring plenitude of the world, and poetry’s articulating entanglement with its morphogenesis and its potential for transformative gnosis. I am using gnosis here in a non-specialized sense of knowledge that exceeds the bounds of “reason,” which Charles Olson going to the roots significantly located in the work of the ear (knowledge as gna) rather than the eye (knowledge as vid).

At the very beginning of his essay “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife, “ written 10 years before the incident at the Zukofsky film screening, Duncan stated: “I find myself a prejudiced member of a very small community of belief in strife with other poets about what the poem is.”  It was a moment in the poetry wars when the established, university based poets of the New Critical movement dismissed and shut out the poets of the NAP, and Duncan was a self-admitted combatant in the poetry war that followed. The stake, as he articulated it, was a determination of what the poem is, and what the poem is, he goes on, is a World Order, as it is also of an order of all poetries. The poetry war, the strife as he calls it, develops because of “incompatible ideas of what world and order are.”

In a late clean-up operation, the forces levelling the world through the cultural economy of general equivalence and universal commodification—what I call The Doom Program—successfully reoccupied poetry’s upper social orders in the US and integrated them into its institutional structure. The difference between worlds and orders here circulates around this occupation of poetry which integrated it into economies of use. Let me be absolutely clear about one thing. The war is not about this kind of poetry or that kind of poetry, and certainly not about anyone who ever got a teaching gig, or won some prize money because someone recognized their terrific work. The war is about resistance to the displacement of becoming-with(in)-poetry by being-over-poetry, a change that quantifies it, turns it into a product that, if it meets certain understood standards and regulations, can be exchanged for a variety of rewards. Nor is it about some us vs. them scenario. This occupation of poetry touches us all, entangles us all. It is a struggle each of us must confront in our own lives as poets.

Duncan, who saw it coming early on, understood the challenge it presented to his sense of poetry’s work. You could even argue that he occupied the center of a moment of mythic origin, a moment of conflict between orders that gives rise to an origin, a new ordering or relation of orderings. Duncan sensed the significance of the moment that night in San Francisco, and came prepared. As David Bromige relates, “. . . Robert appeared in his full, Romantic poet regalia, the Spanish cape, the Spanish hat. . . . It was for effect. But it was also the effect on him too. He had his manna when he was in that garb. He could fight off evil magic.” Duncan walks on stage to fight evil magic, takes the mic from the yielding hands of a stunned Barrett Watten, and sets in motion—or materializes—a conflict that continues to play itself out 40 years later.

But of course that wasn’t the first time, although every time is also always the first time. It’s a wave in a pattern that echoes in time. It marks a moment in recent literary history even as it reveals within its folds layer on layer of homologous events, a morphological nest, a palimpsest, a form of event that resonates out of Nothing to reveal itself in Ovid’s erotic, metamorphic challenge to Virgil’s structural empire of words, or the challenge implicit in the Pearl Poet’s rugged alliterations to the colonizing iambic pentameter from the south. Not to mention the poetry wars between the Provencal and the Dolce Stil Novo poets, and the entrenched Latin verse they wrote against. Or Whitman’s barbaric yawp aimed in part at the genteel poets of Cambridge Mass. Or Emily Dickinson’s rhythmically broken psalms directed at the chorus of sanctimonious voices pouring from the church down the street. You may be squeamish about the word war, but the conflict is undeniable and universal. It is the energy of renewal.

At the time of our mythic origin conflict in 1978, the issue was declared (by Duncan) to be fun versus tedium: “I just want to get some sense of fun in this,” he says of his interruption. But that fun rests on an entire world order that rejects formalism and the quantification of poetry, whatever name it goes by. Watten proposed to split Zukofsky “down the middle” separating considerations of the poem from his life and reading the work as a thing, arguing that Zukofsky’s “structuring devices” were mathematical and that he, Watten, was attempting to get the words to interact with themselves. “Structuring devices” is Watten’s name for his materialist displacement of myth which arguably was the secret agenda of his presentation. Echoing New Criticism’s dismissal of biography in the pursuit of a quantified text, he asks Duncan, “How are words your life?” To which Duncan responds, what we are reading is life, not math—it has something to say. And he proceeds to call into attention the swarms of meaning that circulate in Zukofsky’s poems, dancing through them, drawing out the allusive, illusive worlds they weave from sound and mind. He offered this as alternative to Watten’s analysis of phonemic progression and graphed curves. In that sense, the issue was not about personalities, not about Duncan and Watten. Or it was only Duncan and Watten in so far as they were the bearers of worlds and orders that were and are incompatible.

As Stan Persky once told me, poetry is a unique linguistic mode of knowledge, a mode that dwells, as Duncan says, in the interstices. The knowledge that poetry bears, the thinking that it opens, its transformative gnosis, ruptures the given separations, activating bodymind, opening it into disOrders of meaning within and beyond the habitual orders that hold us in the clutches of the Doom Program’s isolating structured categories. Writing of Hölderlin, Jean-Luc Nancy locates the exactitude of the poem’s calculation in “touching” of the transmitting body, so that the voice of the poem “is not phonation alone: it is the transmitting body, the body open to the outside as the transmitter of its ‘inside,’ which is only given in the transmission. . . . The point of contact, the touching-of-the-opposite, is the opportune exactitude of the calculation that delivers sense or that delivers up to sense, by suspending the uninterrupted course of sense.”  William Carlos Williams puts it somewhat differently to the same end: “for everything/and nothing/are synonymous/when//energy in vacuo/has the power/of confusion//which only to/have done nothing/can make/perfect.” Confuse, suspend, to have done nothing, render inoperative— you could call it, as is popular in some circles who like scientific sounding words, defamiliarization, but only if defamiliarization is understood as the shaking of the Sistrum, that magical act Plutarch describes in Isis and Osiris: “The sistrum also makes it clear that all things in existence need to be shaken, or rattled about, and never to cease from motion but, as it were, to be waked up and agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid.” It’s what George Quasha calls poetry’s healing principle. One minute you are walking into a lecture hall with 300 other students. The next you are swept up into the mysterium of the tremendum by the glaze of rain water on a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens.

The poetry wars exist and are important. They force us to pay attention, to think of the struggle to keep alive and active the knowledge of the interstitial space of poetry’s dwelling within the poet. The poetry war at this moment involves a fight for a space for an un-commodified relationship with its transformational gnosis. Duncan was absolutely clear and unequivocal—the poetry war begins within the poet and the stake is the world. It is projective, to use the word of his friend: “In the struggle to undo all the particular claims to order in Poetry, the critical battles, the movements that ruled for a period, setting up laws and definitions to establish what is in order and what is out of order, and then are replaced by other movements . . . —these battles carry into the public field the inner battles of the individual poet’s soul.”

For Duncan, the heart of the war involved keeping at work “contending forces and convictions” so as not to lose sight of the world’s divine mongrel excess, its prodigious antagonisms, contra-dictions, and differences, to avoid, as Emerson said, binding your “eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attach[ing] [yourself] to some one of these communities of opinion,” as most men do. “This conformity,” he goes on, “makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.” 

According to Duncan, keeping the war alive is the poet’s calling, the very essence of the poet’s vision. But if the poet projects the poetry war as the manifestation of her understanding of her responsibility to what Duncan calls What Is, a further fold lurks in the plies—the commitment to discord and disorder within the work itself as crucial to the poet’s responsibility to keep language true to the emergent world, to remain open to the myriad vibrations at the foundation of morphogenesis. Only that way can you meet the poem halfway, allow it its freedom to introduce you to what you hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t known about, permit it to lead you through  the transformative gnosis which occurs in relation to the exact calculation’s suspension of the uninterrupted course of sense and the in-voca-tion of the tremendum.

According to Duncan, the poetry war is archetypal and projective. And it’s important because in a profound existential sense, poetry matters. Poetry war, discord, disorder, general pain-in-the-assness, preserve and activate potential resistance to the epochal tidal pull toward the reduction of all value into some specific weight of imaginary metal in its myriad forms, Moloch’s final victory. Poetry war agitates the knowledge of what a poem does beyond some mechanical measure having to do with curing social ills or doing away with injustice, as if those issues could only be addressed in one way, on one plane, from one direction. There can be no justice without beauty, any more than there can be beauty without justice. And that work takes place on many different planes. While occasionally under certain conditions, poetry can have a specific material effect, as it did in the U.S. in the 60s, or the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s, mostly we have no idea what it does or where it does it. We can say definitively that it’s presence alone makes the world different. And better. Try to imagine a world without the Bhagavad Gita, Popol Vuh, The Book of Psalms, Enuma Elish, or  the Kalavala, without the Iliad, Beowulf, The Pearl, the Sundiata Epic, The Canterbury Tales, without Dante’s Commedia, without Rumi, without Shakespeare’s or Wyatt’s or Sidney’s sonnets, without Donne . . ..

At a recent meeting of a group of young writers, mostly former students, someone raised the age old complaint, why do we bother, no one reads poetry. To which, as everyone else nodded in jaded agreement, a new member of the group demurred—everybody has a favourite poem, he said. And he’s right. Poetry occupies our worlds in ways we forget about or don’t recognize, lingering in corners of the mind maintaining unperceived channels of sense. Poetry wars are crucial to keeping in mind that point of contact where the opportune exactitude of the calculation occurs in the suspension of the uninterrupted course of sense, shaking the sistrum, reminding us of our further responsibility.

Apocalypses Now

The Apocalypse, a long standing event of ongoing fascination, is going through some significant changes. A ubiquitous entertainment presence over the last few years, the Apocalypse has come a long way from the God fueled hallucinatory prose of John of Patmos with its Dragons, Lakes of Fire, Great Harlot and Scarlet Beast. For one thing, at some point in the last 200 years, the End lost its God and had to rely on microbes and/or extra-terrestrials for its eschatological punch. That’s a game changer. God occasionally still makes an appearance as an offstage character intervening in battles between winged super heroes with angels’ names, Paradise Lost retold by Stan Lee, but mostly The End has done away with him. Blame it on secular humanism or science or corrupting consumerism, but the fact is, God just can’t sell corn flakes the way that zombies do.

Zombies have been the #1 agent of Apocalypse for a while now, having displaced vampires who had become far too infected with angsty adolescent sexual fantasy to threaten civilization with more than an aching groin. Young adult fiction undid Bram Stoker’s subversive, erotic critique of Christian moralism, turning it into a prolonged teen romance. Zombies were the cure for that. You couldn’t get much further from well-dressed sexy young bloodsuckers negotiating the subtle complexities of high school social politics than the Undead.

There are plenty of reasons for that. First of all, zombies don’t screw. They are really dead even though they are undead. And even if they did screw, which dead people don’t do, no one, not even other zombies, would want to screw them because they are ugly, rotting, suppurating pieces of stumbling meat. Secondly, they would rather eat your brains than suck your blood, so the whole sublimated sucking thing is out. Thirdly, they don’t dress well, being garbed in the tattered remnant of whatever they died wearing which no doubt smells even worse than it looks.

Read the rest at Dooney's Café

Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?

The invocation of integrity in the mouths of perennially duplicitous officials and politicians has contributed significantly to a general, at best mistrust, at worst downright disbelief, about the continuing relevance of the word in our daily lives. The revelation of outright government duplicity—the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate—has only intensified general mistrust and a deep feeling of the loss of any (perhaps illusory) sense of integrity, other than in reference to marketing communications and brand integrity. As a concept applicable to current USAmerican public life, integrity has become meaningless, a view widely shared, as was evident in the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis. We live in the midst of the disarray, if not breakdown, of modernity’s array of meanings and its components, components that also include democracy and equality, and that extend to the institutions based on them.

I found myself thinking about this in relation to my response to a television show called Yellowstone. I did not begin to watch it until its fourth season when I heard it was the most-watched show on television. Not knowing anything about it (other than it starred Kevin Costner), I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Almost immediately, I was swept up in a roller coaster of feelings that started with excitement at the action. I was stunned by the embrace of deep moral ambiguity. I grew fascinated with the characters and my reaction to them (especially Beth and Rip, and Jimmy). I admired the treatment of animals and the humans’ relation to them. I was impressed by the representation of Indigenous people and their struggles, and I increasingly recognized an intellectual dimension to the narrative that spoke to a long USAmerican conversation about the origin and meaning of the idea of America. Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.

These issues swirled around the world of Yellowstone in provocative ways, including controversies over its lack of recognition by the authorized bestowers of prestige prizes, and especially in relation to another show, Succession. Succession is the universally admired HBO streaming series about the travails of an ultra-wealthy family in New York that owns a right-wing media company (based “loosely” on the Murdochs). The similarities between the shows are remarkable. Both premiered in June 2018 and wrapped up in 2023 (though Yellowstone has gone on to provide the source for at least six other Yellowstone related shows). Both dramatize what’s been referred to as the “bad behavior of the super-rich”. Both feature an aging single, patriarch with four children—three boys and a girl—all of whom have been psychologically brutalized and emotionally wrecked by the manipulations of said patriarch in his obsessive drive to maintain control over his empire. Both are concerned with the question of who will succeed the patriarch. I could go on. Many before me have. A Google search will turn up titles like “Yellowstone' Is 'Succession' Set in the Modern Wild West,” “The endless similarities between Succession and Yellowstone,” and straight to the point, “Are ‘Succession’ and ‘Yellowstone’ Actually the Same Show?”

For all the superficial similarities, however, the answer is, no, they are not the same, not at all. Succession is a witty (you might say viciously witty) brilliantly written takedown of the ultra wealthy and USAmerica’s media/political culture. It’s satire. As satire, it distorts and emphasizes all the most ourageous and objectionable features of the characters in order to subject them to ridicule. Every character in Succession is horrible. Even the most intensely partisan fans admit that. There’s not one you’d choose to sit down and share a beer or martini with. At points it’s almost painful to watch them repeat the same stupid, destructive, impotent behaviour over and over. Or watch them walk into yet another trap set by Logan, the sadistic patriarch, who continually manipulates them, even after he dies, to keep them divided, weak, and under his control. Watching Succession gives you a sense of moral superiority. I also felt contempt, if that counts as an emotion. Maybe a bit of shame and pity.

Yellowstone is deeply and exuberantly emotional on multiple levels. This is one of the reasons professional critics have damned it as a melodrama and opposed that to the serious satire of Succession. Melodrama is disparaged in sophisticated art circles as an aesthetically degraded generic form that relies for its affects on sensational events, stock characters, and over-the-top emotional manipulation. The fact that melodrama is identified with tears (as in tearjerker) implicitly associates it with the world of “women” and leaves it vulnerable to misogynistic preconceptions that condition its reception. In other words, it’s not serious drama. Serious drama is founded on sensitive, insightful, subtle character studies. Succession offers that in its portraits of the Roys and their relations to power. It engages you as a critical observer who is amused by the foibles of the uber rich and the fatal decadence of capitalism and admires the brilliance of the writing. Yellowstone immediately sucks you into the emotional turmoil of a world of actual value under continual threat, in other words, melodrama, but melodrama as a mode of thought.

The significance of melodrama has been under serious reconsideration for a while. Feminists have detailed the ways it concentrates on and encodes female perspectives and desires. Peter Brooks proposed that melodrama’s excess is a compensatory mode addressed to a world characterized by the loss of a transcendent basis for determining good and evil. In a world in which the death of the sacred, the loss of a transcendent guarantor, abolished the possibility of a grounded morality and meaning, melodrama responded, he argued with excess as compensation. Nevertheless, it continues to occupy, as E. Ann Kaplan notes, “the bottom rung of a generic hierarchy not only with drama (it comes below tragedy, comedy, poetic and epic drama) but across genres (i.e. it comes below poetry, tragedy, comedy, the novel and other prose fictions).”

In spite of all this theoretical re-evaluation, professional critics seem not to have heard the news. Far and away the most prevalent word that appears in the negative comparisons of Yellowstone to Succession is melodrama. But while the sophisticated may dismiss it as unworthy of serious attention, it turns out that improbable, exaggerated plots involving the inevitable triumph of virtue—after some narrow escapes from the railroad tracks—over really villainous moustache twisting, black hat-wearing bad guys, along with a rotating array of beloved familiar characters, is just what the doctor ordered for a lot of ordinary people. Imported into England from France in the 18th century, melodrama was the single most popular form of entertainment in England for much of the 19th century, primarily among workers and artisans, also known at the time as the “lower classes.”

Which no doubt explains at least some of the critics’ animus. It’s mere pop culture, the pap of the masses, as opposed to “real culture”. What gets missed in this restricted view is the way the melodrama in Yellowstone is woven through with a thoughtful address to an old conversation about America that began with John Winthrop’s City on a Hill spiel on board the Arabella almost 400 years ago. The issues at stake—the meaning of America, the significance of the wilderness, human relation to other earthly creatures, the legacy of the violence of the invasion, the significance and treatment of Indigenous people—roil beneath the surface and locate it in an intellectual exchange that runs through the history of USAmerica. It includes John Winthrop’s defining address on the wilderness as the absence of Law, Daniel Boone’s propaganda for his real estate ventures, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, William Faulkner, Howard Hawks’ Red River, almost any film by Frank Capra, they are all part of that extensive, rich conversation. And it speaks directly to the world of Succession and its silence when it comes to offering a remedy to the corruption it satirizes.

Beyond the rejection of melodrama, people have speculated that the official silence in the face of Yellowstone’s popularity has to do with a bi-coastal allergy to “red state” culture (to use an Americanism for conservative, homophobic, maybe reactionary, probably fascist), which some people associate with a lot of men (and occasional women) with guns, unapologetic violence, many white men with chiseled features, and a rowdy celebration of the hard working, hard living culture of cowboy life. In Yellowstone, Cowboy is an ontological state that approaches angelic perfection— honest to a fault, reliable, loyal, a good partner to animals, always ready to protect the weak and fight for justice, and occasionally just fight for the hell of it, all wrapped up in something called integrity—the absolute opposite of everyone in Succession.

It's more than a bit ironic, then, that (blue state) Succession is focused entirely on powerful white men (and the occasional powerful white woman), and that political discussion is limited to debates among the powerful white people about how to hang onto power. The satirical edge introduces an implicit political perspective, but there is no attention to current debates. Yellowstone, for all the accusations of right-wing bias, engages contemporary issues around race, gender, and ecology. They are not central to the show’s thinking, but they are acknowledged. While Taylor Sheridan, Yellowstone’s creator and showrunner, denies any ideological orientation and the show clearly does not adhere to current political moralistic constraints, the writers bend over backward to fill in spots of potential critical attention regarding gender and race with appropriate signals. A black cowboy joins a couple of others in the bunkhouse in season 3—very briefly. He gets the hell out when he realizes what a loony bunch of psychopathic white people he has hooked up with. Racism, check. The barrel racing cowgirls out macho the cowboys, both on horseback and in the bunkhouse bunks. And then there’s Beth. Sexism, check. And as many have pointed out, the recognition and treatment of Indigenous people and their contemporary lives is complex, muscular, and positive, notwithstanding controversies over the ethnicity of Kelsey Asbille. And there’s the intense, ongoing ecological message at the heart of Yellowstone. You can wave around words like “token” all you want, but the Yellowstone writers should get points for all of those gestures, even if they are side bars to the central fact that this is a drama about the last stand of white, patriarchal colonialism against its own inevitable self-destruction. The effort at least acknowledges an actual world of racial and sexual complexity.

It's too easy to use “culture war” to explain these differences. The widespread popularity of Yellowstone across the Grand Canyon of United States political division indicates some deeper attraction than culture war politics. Commentators repeatedly point to other aspects of the show to explain its popularity: Beth’s nudity—well, really, anything about Beth who, as my friend points out, embodies the uncontrollable feminine, Shakti/Kali, the destroyer and creator, the dispenser of justice (“You are the trailer park. I am the tornado,” Beth tells the financier, Roarke Morris)—but, yeah, her nudity; the cowboy lifestyle; the gorgeous photography of the mountains; freedom from moralist restrictions. All true but lacking an explanation of the emotional power of the show. And the real power is emotional. At least it was for me. It touched me. It affected me with an intensity that startled me and settled into my gut with a dark, gorgeous sense of loss that’s beyond the loss of any particular thing. Which brings me back to integrity.  

When I suggested to some of my favourite critics that the underlying emotional power of Yellowstone rose from a response to its portrayal of integrity, I drew heavy flack. What integrity? one shot back, indicating a general cynicism about the current state of the world that precludes using the word integrity at all. And they may very well be right. Integrity, in that sense, applied to human beings living in a complex world is quite probably meaningless, or at least meaningful only in limited, specific situations. Who doesn’t lie from time to time? Who hasn’t stolen something? A minute? A book? A kiss? Who could possibly claim to be absolutely undivided? Or incorruptible and unimpaired? We are human, after all, which is to say, finite and imperfect. But it seems to me that does not rule out integrity’s importance in defining a sense of human potential.

I find both the corporate and dictionary definitions of integrity lacking a sense of its profound, existential dimension. Integrity is not simply a question of honesty, as your employer might want you to think. And the dictionary definition, with its notion of integral unity, also falls flat. Why can’t someone be divided in their thinking and feeling, but still have what I think of as integrity, maybe even because of the divided thinking? A philosopher will distinguish different kinds of integrity including self-integration, identity, self-constitution, moral intent, etc. For my purposes those are derivative. As Ten Bears tells Josey Wales in The Outlaw Josey Wales, “It's sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.” This sense of physical materiality is important. When I think of integrity, what it means, my first thought is diamond—the singular presence of inextricably entangled stone-and-light whose crystalline perfection and orientation make it the hardest substance we know. That’s integrity. It’s a wholeness beyond the question of unity or remainder. Human integrity is a transactional process, a stance-in-relation, that has to do with the relationship between a person and each of their words, and to those around them with whom they share a being-in-common through those words. Do you stand by your word, no matter what threat or risk that brings? Are you a person of your word, or, more simply, is your word good?

At the bloody end of Yellowstone’s second season as the Duttons race to rescue Tate, Kayce’s and Monica’s kidnapped son, and wreak vengeance on the kidnappers, Kayce confronts Teal Beck, one of the powerful corrupt developers who kidnapped Tate in order to force Dutton to sell the Land. Beck is sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper when Kayce finds him. He begs Kayce not to kill him on the toilet, and Kayce responds, “I promised my wife I’d kill you. All a man’s got is his word.” And he shoots him. Although not without some irony in this case, that is the ethos of Yellowstone, the foundation of its moral universe. Integrity in every other sense flows from that basic transactional relation.

Full disclosure—I am an old white guy who as a kid watched a whole lot of White Hat versus Black Hat westerns on TV Saturday morning at my grandmother’s house. In the 50s the new TV networks were desperate for content and the films of the 30s and 40s were perfect Saturday morning fare, including hundreds of B westerns. I was inundated with the Cowboy myth. The “Old West”, the story has it, was a world that existed, if not beyond, at least at the edge of the Law. In that world, all a person had to go on in dealing with others was her word. It really mattered. The social world—think Yellowstone bunkhouse—is held together by the integrity of its members and the affection for each other that grows out of that. Or so the myth goes. In the Old West no external power guaranteed order. No state, no force existed other than integrity to hold people together in settler communities where solidarity was a necessity. That and the willingness and commitment to defend it from the violence directed against it by those who wanted to take it or take it back. In that sense, integrity is the state of being priceless, a state whose value is that it has no equivalent and cannot be exchanged.

You couldn’t imagine a world more different from the world of Succession. In Succession speech acts are composed solely to manipulate and mislead in the pursuit of personal power. No one’s word is good. It represents the negation of integrity. The final season focused on the deal between Waystar and Lukas Matsson’s GoJo. It began with Waystar proposing to buy GoJo and, after a dizzying series of manipulations, reversals, and betrayals, ends up with GoJo buying Waystar. In the process Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, the three siblings, at first agree to work together to save Waystar for the family. But Roman immediately betrays his sibs to his Dad. Kendall and Roman betray Shiv, going behind her back to “save the company”. Shiv betrays Roman and Kendall to Matsson. And Matsson betrays Shiv, to whom he has promised the CEO role, to Tom, who she has called her meat-puppet, based on her belief she will be made CEO. It is a kaleidoscopic free for all of lies and deceptions deployed to acquire personal power. That world enters Yellowstone in the persons of various developers from California and New York—and even Montana—who plan to commodify the Land, cover it with gaudy attractions, and sell it to people in The City who want to spend some quality time in Nature, preferably with good coffee, a comfy hotel suite, and a Michelin starred restaurant nearby. They are not welcomed.

There’s a complex way in which this thinking of integrity is tied up with the Land. I am using the term “Land” to designate the deep archaic reality of the physical place in all its living complexity and plenitude. It is not a setting. It is not a landscape. It is the main player in the unfolding (melo)drama of Yellowstone. The Land is America’s primal source of meaning, the embodiment of untouched wilderness, a world beyond predatory human uses and exploitation. The Land is the exemplar and source of integrity. It is the remnant of the sacred in a modern world where the sacred has been killed by science and buried by capitalism. Untouched by the greasy fingers of commerce, it stands for the very soul of an original America, and an origin beyond America. This is a particular original America, one rooted in European colonization. USAmerican Blacks have their own origin stories that have to do with captivity, enslavement, and murder rather than discovery and freedom. And American Indigenous people’s origin stories do not celebrate the “discovery of America.” Each has its own legitimacy in the stories of this place. This is one aspect of the plusibus factor that the unum factor tries to deny and destroy. America is a place with multiple origins. To be part of Yellowstone’s origian story is to acknowledge and come into relation with the Land, to enter and become part of its ancient energies and mysteries. This won’t happen while sitting at a café table sipping an $8 super-double-shot-macchiato-whatever, admiring the beauty of Nature in the distance, and answering emails on your phone between scrolling through Instagram and posting a photo of the mountains to Facebook. Those who stand by it and for it, as John Dutton does, are informed by that soul. He is an avatar of the Land.

Don’t confuse the Land with Nature. Nature is a romantic invention which occurs in the wake of the loss of contact with the Land. Nature was invented by city people along with parks. Nature is the first step toward Natural Resources. Nature is what the Japanese tourists in the second season of Yellowstone come to photograph. The Land is what kills them in the form of a large Grizzly bear. Nature is what Dan Jenkins, the west coast developer in the first 2 seasons, wants to package and sell to tourists. The Land is what kills him, too (with an assist from Beth), through the struggle to control it. The Land is primal and undefinable, and the struggle over it unleashes primal, undefinable energies. The Land is sacred. It can’t be “owned”. It endures and outlasts all those who think they possess it. Human laws, even the thought of a general legality, disappear in that space, though some try to impose legalist thinking on it. The result is usually brutal. Dan Jenkins’ last words as he bleeds out under the magnificent Montana sky, having been fatally shot in a struggle over the Land: “I have a right to be here. I have rights. This is America.” The irony is almost painful. Yup, it’s America, alright, though not the one he thinks he is in, which very well may be Yellowstone’s point. One of them, anyway. It puts the issue of violence front and center.

Yellowstone is saturated with violence. One of the most frequent reasons I have heard for not watching the show is too much violence. While I understand the resistance to the commercialization of violence, violence as commodity and violence as essential topic for consideration are two very different things. In 1925, D.H. Lawrence famously proposed that “all the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” That sense of violence is woven through and through the USAmerican soul, from the very first genocide against the Pequods, to the extraordinary, inhuman violence needed to maintain slavery, to the bloodthirsty slaughter of the Buffalo which made room for the Cowboy and his herd of cattle, to the vicious, lawless violence of the romanticized West, to the bestial brutality of residential schools . . . where do you stop? January 6? The threats against the lives of election workers? Attempted assassination of politicians? If you value integrity, there’s no way to address USAmerica without addressing violence.

In Yellowstone violence affects every relationship among the humans, as well as human relationships to the Land and its creatures. The question is whether the violence is melodramatic, gratuitous even, and therefore simply part of a commercial spectacle, or integral to the conversation about the nature and history of America, especially that Ur-American-world-previous-to-the-Law-mythos. On a superficial level it doesn’t seem too complicated. As Indigenous characters never tire of pointing out to various white settlers who complain about encroachment by Left Coast developers, the Land was seized from them through unconstrained, unrelenting violence, so why should the white boys think they are any different. It’s simply about possession and who has the wherewithal to take it and hold it. John Dutton tells Rip: “You know the first Duttons to settle this valley, fighting was all they knew. It’s how they got here, how they kept the land once they did.” It’s a point he makes a number of times.

But the the fight for possession is not the only explanation of violence. Cara Dutton has another darker vision of it. In the opening sequence of 1923, the second Yellowstone prequel after 1883, a grunting, terrified, man who has been wounded, staggers, stumbles, and crawls in panic through the woods to escape pursuit. When his pursuer finally appears out of the forest, it’s a little old white-haired grandma aiming a double-barreled shotgun. After she blows him away—before he can blow her away—she utters an agonized scream, and in a voiceover, says: “Violence has always haunted this family. It followed us from the Scottish Highlands, the slums of Dublin. It ravished us upon the coffin ships of Ireland. . . . And it followed us here, lurking beneath the pines and in the rivers.” More terrifying than the violence over possession, this implies a metaphysical curse in line with D.H. Lawrence’s blunt assessment. Whatever its origin, violence remains an inescapable fact. But a much more complex fact than is acknowledged.

American violence is one of the primary topics Yellowstone investigates or explores in its quest to discover America, but having said that, I have to admit that the more I think about “violence”, the more uncertain I get about what it means. I know Yellowstone is saturated with it and I can point to extreme moments of it, but I get a bit dizzy when trying to understand its modes and limits, what implicitly determines something as violent and something else as not violent. Or even more confusing, is there such a thing as good violence as opposed to bad violence?  Many USAmericans, for instance, might find it more than a little disconcerting that you can be charged with assault for spanking your child in Canada. One person’s discipline is another person’s violence. Is there a “line”? And if so, where is it?

That question haunts Yellowstone. Violence obviously involves force. But force takes many forms. And what about force ritualized into meaningful behavioural gestures? Even if it causes some pain, it may not be considered violence by the participants. Is La Danse Apache violent? Not if you see it as an artful representation of violent gestures that mean no physical harm and do not attempt to apply actual violent force. Observers who lack knowledge of the cultural context, however, may see it otherwise. They might also see the spanking as an act of child abuse.

Violence is central to all the classic mythic visions of USAmerican founding, no doubt because the foundation was genocide. Founding seems always to be complicit with violence, starting with Romulus and Remus. In USAmerica, that violence marked the continuing expansion of the Anglo invasion as it displaced previous European colonizers as well as Indigenous populations in its relentless drive across the continent. In Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), Thomas Dunson  leaves a wagon train to settle land in what later became Texas. When two Mexicans ride up and announce that the land he is raising cattle on belongs to someone named Diego who lives 400 miles away, Dunson shoots one dead, and sends the other back to tell Diego the land belongs to Dunson now. No one in USAmerica is innocent of the implications of that violence.

Violence in Succession is singularly vicious and always at least semi-polite, but unidimensional. It exists only in the field of competition for personal power. Masked with the pretense of civility, it is no less brutal for all that, the violence sublimated into verbal attacks, passive aggression, psychological terror, and endless knives in the back. It’s citified violence. The one physical encounter takes place in the final episode between Tom and Greg, almost as an oversight, as if there had to be at least one example of physical violence in the story of USAmerica. In a bathroom confrontation over Greg leaking the news of Tom’s ascension, verbal anger explodes and builds to a pitch where Tom slaps Greg and Greg slaps him back. It’s a slap fight! There’s a bit of a tussle, some wrestling and then Tom leaves. Significantly it’s pure slapstick, indicative of a world in which heroic physical violence is reduced to a joke. It’s a world whose sophistication seems to transcend violence, but which in fact is thoroughly imbued with it though it’s never acknowledged. Perhaps because it is so integral to everything, it has become background noise where it hums away without arousing attention. The key is that it is not physical, and if it is physical, it’s hilarious, not heroic.

Wherever the violence in Yellowstone is coming from, it’s everywhere. It affects/infects every relationship and inflects every situation, from the opening “Cowboy vs. Indian” battle over purloined cows in which Dutton’s oldest son and Monica’s brother are killed, to Jamie Dutton’s patricidal rage, to the self-destructive, internalized colonial violence (suicide) among the Indigenous people, to John Dutton’s careful calculations, to Beth and Summer’s boundary establishing slug fest, to the Cowboys’ recreational bar brawls, to the shocking militia attack on the Duttons at the end of season 3, to the revelation of the infamous Train Station. And that ain’t the half of it.

Some people have argued that the violence is simply red meat for a red state fan base, but this is far too simplistic a view to account for the complexity of the representation of violence. Early on (1:2) Kayce and Monica are driving by a trailer cum meth lab in the desert when it explodes. They stop and find a critically burned man with no chance of survival writhing in pain. Realizing he will die painfully before any medical help can arrive, they shoot him in the head to save him from further suffering. This violence is at least defensible, though the moral stakes are high. Still arguably it’s justifiable violence since the motive is to relieve suffering, not forcefully impose will.

But a few minutes later Rip murders the Medical Examiner in cold blood in order to protect Kayce from being identified as the killer of Jeremiah Bitsui during the cattle raid. He kills him and actually makes him participate in setting up his own execution. It’s shocking in its mechanical thoroughness. Horrific. I pegged Rip for a homicidal maniac, a toxic killer, and was prepared to hate him at this point. I was soon stunned to find myself admiring a further revelation of his character, trying desperately to explain how he could be both despicable and admirable, like some physicist trying to figure out how an electron can be both a particle and a wave. Impossible. But it is. So not impossible. Maybe expansively human beyond what’s comfortable. If this is melodrama, it’s melodrama with a rich sense of moral ambiguity.

A similar situation occurs later (1:3) when Kayce and his son, Tate, pass a parked van in the desert and Kayce pulls over to investigate. The van contains two white men who have kidnapped and raped a young Indigenous woman. When Kayce eventually frees the girl from her bindings, her first words are, Did you kill them? Good, she says simply to his assent. You’d have to be pretty insensitive not to agree with her, not to think, Good, becoming complicit in Kayce’s retributive violence. Meanwhile, images of Tate as he violently fights off a large rattlesnake that has violently attacked him (violence is everywhere, it screams at you—forget the fact that rattlesnakes are not violent and don’t go out of their way to attack people) are juxtaposed against images of Kayce chasing down a gross, panicked, fat rapist in his sagging stained skivvies waving a gun.

It is a perfect kaleidoscope of images that invoke the full range of shifting emotional responses to violence—fear, rage, confusion, triumph, relief—even pride. When Tate shows the large dead snake to his father, Kayce asks if it bit him and Tate responds, “I beat him to it.” Good, Kayce says, a sentiment the viewer is inclined to share in the event of an actual rattle snake attack. But if you find moral justification for Kayce’s (and Tate’s) violence, and I doubt there are many who can’t, or won’t at least admit the difference, the following episode, which introduces The Train Station, throws not just a bucket but a whole barrel of ice water on that. Far and away the most shocking violence in Yellowstone has to do with The Train Station, a euphemism for a distant isolated ravine across the State line where Dutton disposes of the bodies of his dead enemies.

An explanation is required here regarding the Human Resources policy at Yellowstone Ranch. The ranch hands consist of two kinds of cowboy: your ordinary cowboy who comes and goes, and the ex-convicts who form an inner circle for whom Yellowstone is literally a lifetime commitment because they aren’t allowed to leave. They are all branded on their chests with the Yellowstone brand, the same one that goes on the cows. “Those guys just work here,” Rip tells Jimmy about the ordinary cowboys, “you’ll see a thousand of ’em come and go. But not us. We die here. This is your family.” Jimmy has just been whomped by a bully. The bully quits after Rips beats him silly, and Rip directs Lloyd, his lead hand, to take him to the Train Station. At the end of a pickup ride across the border into Wyoming, Lloyd shoots him and tosses his body over the cliff. Welcome to the Train Station.

Yellowstone seems purposely to position different modes of violent event against and with each other, creating complicated conflicting emotional responses. Moments of righteous violence which most ordinary viewers would identify with and likely think justified are contrasted with moments of brutal, cold-blooded violence that are horrifying and repulsive. And everything in between. All mixed up. On a regular, ordinary day arriving at school for work, Monica sees and attempts to stop a fight between two teenage boys. She gets accidentally slugged in the face, smashes her head on the concrete when she falls, and ends up with a critical, life-threatening injury.

Violence is everywhere on every scale. A range of contrasting events results in many contrasting emotional responses that constantly challenge the viewer to acknowledge the (arbitrary) moral lines he/she draws in relation to violence and the operative definitions that shape their reactions. You may abhor “violence”, but how do you feel about it when it’s directed at the guy trying to rape Monica? Are you going to deny you felt just a tad of relief when the bullet hit him and he fell off of her? Is there such a thing as acceptable violence, and if so, where do you draw the line? It might even be possible to invoke the question of integrity at this point, at least as far as the viewer’s response is concerned. From whatever direction you come at it, violence is integral to the world of Yellowstone as it always has been to USAmerica. It makes no difference whether it is required to protect the Land or is a primordial human reality co-eval with the Land. It has to be acknowledged and accepted as an integral, multi-faceted constituent of the world of actual value in order to be dealt with. 

That world is what’s at stake as modernity in the form of The City continually attempts to extend its creeping commodification into Yellowstone. Modernity is the site of the fundamental mutilation of the ideasense of value. Modernity’s engine runs on the separation of value from fact, Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of the bifurcation of nature, the divorce of primary and secondary qualities in scientific discourse, the divorce of subject and object in philosophy, is also at the root of European colonial conquest. Separating value from fact leaves value at the mercy of the unverifiable “subjective” and leaves the fact defenseless before the valueless subject. That, combined with the infiltration of materialism from science throughout the larger culture, leaves value relegated to the measurable, i.e. the monetary. While the struggle over value—metaphysical, sacred value versus monetary value—is grist for melodrama, it is also at the heart of the many critiques of modernity that have fueled anti-modern sentiments since its inception.

The mutilation of value has consequences. If, as Charles Taylor has argued, what’s at stake is the extension or contraction of mind as a universal constituent of the world, the mutilation of value creates an opposition between “human” which possesses mind and value, and everything that doesn’t, which is everything else. “Animal” is consigned to the mindless and any attempt to think beyond that is dismissed as anthropomorphizing. But to truly enter the “human,” to realize its full potential, requires coming into a relationship with that which has been excluded from it, specifically animals, the fellow creatures excised by modernity’s scientific definition of human. To witness the essential animal in the human and the knowing being in the animal is to become more fully human. It is a mode of connection with Others, a being beyond self, as Donna Haraway points to in The Companionate Species Manifesto “. . . how to see who the dogs are and hear what they are telling us, not in bloodless abstractions, but in one-on-one relationships, in otherness-in-connection.” Knowing animals, working with them daily, densifies and decentralizes both forms of life, opening the other than human within the human and the other than animal within the animal. Animals resists the mutilation of value in a relation that is beyond use even in its usefulness, because of a natural integrity. That’s the cowboy life according to Yellowstone.

The City lacks animals. Or more specifically, lacks animals as partners in work. Many animals make the City their home, but the relation between them and their fellow human inhabitants is usually antagonistic, at least on the part of the humans. Uncontrolled animals are considered vermin—rats, mice, racoons, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, all of which make the modern City home. But the connection in Haraway’s otherness-in-connection is limited to extermination. There are no animals in Succession except for the occasional lap dog, those tiny beings created by humans for an easy form of anthropomorphized companionship without much demand on the human, other than the purchase of cute sweaters and booties. The brilliance of Succession’s satire relies on the complete self-absorption of the Human in the world of mutilated value it has created. The bifurcation of value from fact echoes in the bifurcation of human and animal.

In Yellowstone. the lives of humans and animals are thoroughly intertwined, enmeshed in each other. Cowboys, who as I previously noted, have an ontological status in Yellowstone approaching angelic, are inextricably entangled with animals. Take the cow out of cowboy and what’s left? They work with them. They live with them. Each and every day humans and animals (both domesticated and wild) confront each other in multiple modes and roles from play to work to violent antagonism. Humans and animals deal with each other constantly. They live together. They work together. They play together. They help each other. And, importantly, without a trace of sentimentality, which is doubly significant given the importance of sentiment to melodrama. Cowboys meet animals as equals who are different. As equals they are treated with the same respect Cowboys show each other. As different they are part of a working relationship in which both parties trust the intelligence of the being that is their partner and rely on them in the work they do together. And both are larger beings for it.

Frequently the animal other provides a transformational relation to the human. Jimmy Hurdstrom is a degenerate tweaker, the grandson of an old friend of Dutton’s who Dutton agrees to hire for his ranch in order to straighten him out. Jimmy has a lot of problems, the worst being his complete lack of self-respect. He can’t ride, can’t rope, can’t do any cowboy things, and worse, keeps falling off his horse, which he does during a cattle drive (1:4), losing his hat. Feeling sorry for himself, he whines to Lloyd, “I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” to which Lloyd replies with the Cowboy credo, “Nobody is, Jimmy. It’s gotta be cut into you,” and tells him not to come back without his hat.

Left behind, looking for his hat, Jimmy has a transformational encounter with a stranded calf. Tiny. Vulnerable. Big soft eyes. Cute as hell. Abandoned, entangled in briars, and pleading for help as the herd including its mother rides away in the distance. A connection materializes between the two creatures and both are changed. They touch each other. When Jimmy shows up at the ranch with the calf over his saddle, releasing it into a pen where its mother has been going crazy crying with anxiety, Lloyd says, “That’s as cowboy as it gets, Jimmy.” That connection to and recognition of the animal’s need, yes, but more than that, its co-presence in the world, as if the sudden knowledge of the integrity of its Being sparked a desire to be better in Jimmy. To be more worthy of the calf’s love and dependeny. As Walker points out to Beth, animals don’t bullshit. They have an inherent integrity.

In the end, the different responses to Yellowstone and Succession are predictable—critical success for one and popular success for the other. The critical success of Succession is connected to the fact that the critics by and large—the ones who make a difference—live in cities. They are urbanites for whom the world of Succession is reality and the sharp satire a welcome commentary on their daily experience. Succession lacerates the pretensions of the uber rich. It eviscerates the destructive banality of rightwing media empires. It mocks the powerful. Incisively written, it lays bare the shallow, competitive dynamics of the forces that rule contemporary political realities and subjects them to contempt. But finally, it has little to offer emotionally and intellectually beyond contempt.

Yellowstone’s enormous popularity is a bit more complex. Apart from the melodramatic thrills (which are not to be dismissed), it offers an intense emotional experience focused on the struggle to preserve the Land from the very people who are the players in Succession. The Land entangles us in unparalleled magnificence, irreplaceable beauty beyond any beauty we think we know. The Sublime. The threat to it is real. And those who take on the burden of defending it against the Dominators are admirable, even heroic in their integrity. Millions and millions of people love the show, for many different reasons. To make nostalgia for integrity a significant part of that diversity may be pushing it. But consider our moment in history.

A brief post-WWII period of frenzied war generated prosperity spilled down for a couple of decades to the less economically privileged and created a large “middle class”. Then, following the Just Say No of the 70s, the neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 80s and 90s, the much ballyhooed “globalization,” ravaged those same people. They were promised trickle down wealth even as their jobs were exported, and the foreign economies they were exported to grew rapidly. Then came the bank generated financial/mortgage catastrophe of 2008. The rich, as you might expect, profited handily. But the rest were left with no job, no home, no material goodies to distract them from the spiritual wasteland capitalism had created, and no shared spiritual meaning that could see them through the catastrophe. If it hadn’t happened to them yet, it was just around the corner. They were showered with empty promises, prevarications, hokey excuses, and ruthless indifference as they watched more and more wealth accumulate in fewer and fewer (offshore) bank accounts. And the lies piled up.

Ivan Illich has written movingly about the dignity of subsistence in the world beyond the excesses of modernity and its nefarious project of “development”. For all its poverty, he describes a world of integrity. No one gets rich, but the work is honest as are the relations among those who work together to survive. That dignity has been stripped from those ravaged by current economic forces. They have been mowed down by “development”, abandoned by the rich who get richer and richer while mouthing platitudes about the inevitable historical suffering caused by the “Progress” of the Industrial Revolution and the unfortunate cruelty of change. The sense of an America where honesty and hard work are rewarded is gone, along with the wilderness, the Land, that defined its soul. Is it any wonder that asked about integrity people respond with cynicism? The world of Succession, a world alien to the thought of integrity, is the world that dominates and ravages people’s lives. And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that given the bleakness of a world that has rendered them historical detritus, people respond with enthusiastic attention to the imagination of a world in which the defense of integrity is central to every aspect of the (melodramatic) story.

How Does a Poem Mean

A  brief primer for the curious and stumped

—for Frank Aiello

“. . . art [poetry] is always the art of not saying it, of exposing that which is not to be said (not an unsayable, but the not-to-be-said of sense) along the edges of all that is exposed, as the sayable itself, and further, as saying itself, as all of saying in its fragmentation.”

    —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World

There was a time, not that long ago, say, a hundred years, when nearly every house in North America contained at least a few volumes of poetry. People read it for refinement and moral edification. Tennyson was a favourite, and a bowdlerized and sweetened Emily Dickinson. Longfellow and Whittier were big. But also moderns like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost. And Shakespeare, of course. Every home had a collected Shakespeare, a Bible, and a copy of Emerson’s essays. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound with an assist from Gertrude Stein, have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of putting the boots to that fabled moment, crashing the genteel poetry party with their rude and rowdy ways, ruining everything with obscure scholarly allusions and fancy paratactic assemblages. People were stupefied, even outraged. Instead of being left with an elevated moral understanding or a fine sentiment, they were left stuttering, What does that mean? And things have only gotten worse since then.

Poems aren’t the only things whose meaning escapes us. If someone says to me, “to complicate matters further, cotton is a fungible commodity,” I might respond, what does that mean?, in which case, I am asking Mr. Smarty Pants Interrogator to explain his big words so I can understand what he’s saying. Ditto, if you are talking to someone about some stupid thing you did without thinking, and she says, “The development of all natural and spiritual life rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic,” you might very well reply, “What on earth does that mean? Talk English.” In that case it’s not just a word that’s the problem, it’s an entire idea. Or, even more weird, if a stranger walks up to you on the street and out of the blue says, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” you might either slap him or demand that he explain what that means. In this case it’s not a word that’s the problem, or even an idea. It’s language itself which has become a puzzle in need of explication, clarity. What does that mean covers a lot of territory, perhaps more even than we can think of, and getting to know how a poem means requires thinking a bit about meaning first.

One thing for sure—we like to know the meaning of things. It’s satisfying. The meaning of things, the intent that shapes, informs, and directs them, the sense of their significance, relieves us of the anxiety of uncertainty and locates us in and connects us to a world of meaning. It settles the unsettled. Before we faced an aggressive blankness, a kind of implicit chaos, then suddenly . . . Light. We fall into a clear order, the order of the understanding of a word, an idea, a burst of nonsensical language. Suddenly, it makes sense. I carried around a line from a poem by Jack Spicer that stupifued me for 25 years, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to pry some meaning out of it. It was like a Zen koan for me: “Sable arrested a fine comb.” For years it teased me, irritated me, tested me, would suddenly run through my mind as I was cooking or out for a walk. Then one evening as I was about to start a one night workshop for school teachers on “difficult poetry,” it suddenly made sense, the meaning – a meaning – or meaning, anyway, popped into my mind out of the proverbial blue and I felt the world fall into an order. Of which more later.

It gets more difficult when the stake is not just the meaning of a word or an idea, but of, say, life. Does life have meaning? Most of us like to think so. And if it does, how? Does belief in the existence of a Supreme Being give our lives meaning? Does work give our lives meaning? Does family give our lives meaning? Or is meaning an illusion we cleave to in order not to face the fact that we are just random atoms randomly assembled and living in a random world that has no meaning, no intent beyond what we project? Do we just make it up? Without some sense of meaning, how can we know what’s right and what’s wrong? How can we orient ourselves so that our actions are moral?    

This is the point, traditionally, where religion steps in with the idea of God and an order of God’s design, the transcendental ground of existence, the Unmoved Mover, the stability at the centre of the Tumult. God (Whichever One) guarantees meaning, grounds existence in divine Truth and Order beyond the flux of the workaday world, the profane and the mundane. Philosophy does that too, but philosophy always tags along behind religion, even when it pretends not to, because it lacks religion’s access to emotion. Reason will only get you so far over the void before urging caution and sober second thought about the original plan. Think Wiley Coyote here, running off the edge of a cliff and getting half way across a chasm before realizing what he has done and falling. Religion says to Hell with it, throws caution to the (divine) wind and goes for it because God wants you to—means for you to—and may even hold you up—though you can’t count on that second part, which is the point. Do you believe or not? Belief is nothing without a bit of uncertainty.

The trouble is we find ourselves in a modern world in which the authority to say what’s real and what the meaning of that is was passed from Religion to Science a long time ago. Business followed up on that by using Science and its child, Technology, to make a world where everything has been turned into something, at least potentially, for sale and the only value left is exchange value. Religion may claim that water can be turned into wine, and the dead can be raised from the grave, but science knows better, can prove it, and business can use that knowledge to manufacture a cheaper wine than you could make from water if you could make wine from water. This doesn’t mean that people don’t hold to belief in a Divine power. But it does mean that that belief no longer determines the orientation of the culture, which makes some people extremely upset and gives rise to a lot of noise about culture wars. Belief has become individualized. Plus, science deals only with truth and falsity, never with meaning.

In the Medieval world, everyone shared the experience of the sacred which shaped and determined the experience of time itself. Every moment was sacred and informed by divine presence. Each hour had an angel. Each day had a saint. The year circulated around sacred, holy days, days that returned time to the originary energies of Creation. In what was called Christendom, everyone shared in the profound experience of the birth, death, and resurrection of God as those eternal events manifested in the calendar year. Now instead we have “The Christmas Shopping Season” whose profound importance is that something like 80% of retail business takes place during that time, thus maintaining the health of “the economy.” Whereas Christmas once meant that the eruption of the Divine into time disrupted the profane world pulling people out of their workaday lives into the sacred Story, now it means a lot of shopping and the anxiety of massive credit card debt in January. Now, you could say, it means nothing, at least nothing of value.

But of course it means something, just not what it once meant. And that’s the crux. What does it mean to ask what does it mean? This is not just a cute puzzle, but an entrance into the maze where meaning dwells, proliferates, hides, metamorphoses. If Christmas once literally meant that the birth of God was immanent in our lives, now it means that the commercialization of the world has superseded that other sacred reality and replaced it with a shopping season, the ultimate sacred experience of the world transformed into stuff, commodities for sale in a Mall that has swapped out the cathedral as the center of people’s lives. The “meaning of Christmas” shifts from an experience redolent with something called sacred value to an experience of sociological facticity. Both are modes of meaning, but of different orders. So when we ask, what does it mean? we may think the answer is simple, but it is not.

People argue about whether or not language is the source of our experience of meaning which is a pertinent question when thinking about how a poem means since one definition of “poem” is a thing made out of words. Both sides of the argument make reasonable points, but, origins aside, there can’t be much doubt that meaning is always tied up with language to some degree. Our particular sense of meaning is deeply implicated in its rhythms, structures, and references. It may even be that our desire for meaning begins with meaning itself as desire. Robin Blaser, quoting Charles Olson on Alfred North Whitehead points out: “’The condition is hunger,’ ‘mouth,’ and I note that the hunger – the appetition to use Whitehead’s more abstract term – is of both body and mind. Meaning in this sense is an aspect of desire.” Some deep drive in our being propels us beyond ourselves, and a sense of meaning is part of that. Whitehead say, “Appetition is immediate matter of fact including in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be.” Is meaning, a sense of meaning that must always precede meaning itself, implicit in the dynamic “realization of what is not and may be”? We first form in the rhythms of speech that resonate through our mothers’ bodies, vibrating, calling us. We are conceived, born into, and dwell in language and the meaning that preceded us. And desire forms in the mouthandthumb.

The idea of the meaning of a poem gets mixed up with the fact that meaning is a singular noun, the same as ball or racquet or egg. For most of us, that translates into an object or object-like condition, some thing out there where objects dwell. Asking “What’s the meaning of that poem” implies that there is an answer that begins, “The meaning of the poem is . . .,” in the same way “Where is the ball?” gets answered, “The ball is in the basket.” In that sense meaning is either there or it isn’t, in which case the poem is meaningless. This is frequently a complaint about some poetry written after 1910. People read it and don’t understand it and decide that it is meaningless. Blame Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein.

In addition to the singular noun problem, we have another—the transformation of human beings from their various roles into a Universal Consumer, Humanity as Bezos’s Gimp. Desire, the great mystery of our lives, desire, desiderare, de sidere, is from the stars. What Whitehead has as that hunger that drives us beyond ourselves, meaning itself, has been disciplined into the bottomless need for a new sweater, a new car, a new blender, a new book. Cigarettes are the perfect commodity in this world. You want it? You need it? Just light up and get 5 minutes of guaranteed satisfaction (addiction is useful that way), something akin, arguably, to meaning. Click on Jeff’s handy link which already holds your name, address, phone number, clothing brand preferences, taste in books, credit card number, facially identified mug shot, and DNA. Click (one click shopping) and it’s yours, just like when you snort that line or hit that needle. Or spark up your next smoke. So why not meaning? What’s so special about meaning it can’t be had like peanut butter or the new, improved iPhone 238?

But that’s an impoverished understanding of meaning’s possibilities. It imagines meaning as something you get, with its implied clutch. What if we think about meaning not so much as a thing that you understand or get, but, say, as a multi-dimensional field you enter into relation with, or just enter, a field of sense alive with interconnected energetic micro-events (rimes) that resonate in the bodymind of the listener with various flashes of coherence? What if differing modalities of language formation (images, similes, metaphors, metonymies, etc.) resonate with the rhymes between sounds and rhythms enlivening measure with multiphasic overlays, vibrating palimpsests? Meaning in this sense in a poem arises out of the interplay of multiple linguistic devices and components which create an event of complex, energetic relations. You could even see the poem as a receiver as Jack Spicer did, or step transformer, an arrangement of words that channels energy from the cosmos into a form of meaning humans can deal with. To experience meaning is to participate in the event as you can, which will never be the same twice. And some events are much richer and more complicated than others. Which means 1) there is no meaning to “get”; there is an experiential event to enter; and 2) meaning comes in quanta, and though each quantum is whole and coherent, it is never the Whole; and 3) you can never get all the meaning, so savour the meaning you’re with.

Poetry, good poetry, is an Opening, and it has no specified form or formal commitment. It is not a feature of this poetry or that poetry. Dividing poetry into binaries made up of antithetical components such as mainstream and avant-garde, aesthetic justice and aesthetic illiberalism, meaningful and meaningless is a favourite pastime of academics staking out claims for their authority over poetry but will not yield any useful meaning. The language event called poetry opens new realms of sense rather than narrowing them down to a choice between two. Binaries will never yield a sense of poetry’s Opening into a further world, a wilderness of sense where elements of wild meaning circulate in a fecund turmoil—phonemes, syllables, individual words, phrases, concepts, rhetorical devices (rhyme, metaphor, metonymy, etc.), feeling tones, sonal oscillations, rhythmic patterns, all resonate in relation to each other at and across various frequencies and scales. Resonance beats at the heart of this experience, the vibrations of rhythm and rhyme (both rooted in measure and number)—creating the spontaneous synchronization of oscillating systems to neuronally entrained rhythmic stimuli, also known as grooving. That’s one way of thinking how a poem means.

Jan Zwicky, who wrote a good book called The Experience of Meaning, approaches the question phenomenologically—she investigates the experience of meaning rather than meaning. That is, she only finds meaning in human experience as if it did not exist otherwise. She says, “This is what the experience of meaning is: the perception, in challenging circumstances, of a gestalt.” That certainly seems reasonable—up to a point. In that sense, wanting certainty is tied up with the desire, the hunger, to feel the revelation of wholeness, completion, the satisfaction of seeing the pattern emerge. Why the hunger? She calls it an “evolutionary pleasure” and says “it’s what the mind is for.” It’s a habit that we picked up a few eons ago while adapting to the often hostile, changing world. It may be, as Zwicky argues, inherent in the ordering of the creature, the physical structure of our brain. It may also be, as Blaser proposed, an aspect of desire, where desire is understood to be a divine manifestation. It may also be an adaptation of the creature not just to the threats from the world, but also to the world of meaning it finds itself in.

Perhaps because of this, Zwicky embraces the possibility of a poem being meaningless. A friend of hers leveled this criticism at a poem, and Zwicky was concerned to address it in her thinking of the experience of meaning. As it turns out, she kind of wants to have her cake and to eat it too when it comes to meaninglessness. On the one hand she equate meaninglessness with bad poetry. The real (good) poem is resonant, and the meaningless poem has no resonant relation to a resonant world. On the other hand, she finds the beginning of meaningless poetry in the work of Dada early in the 20th century, and sees it expand from there. I may not fully understand Zwicky here, but I would argue that even the work of Dada was not meaningless. Kurt Schwitters, one of its founders, described himself as someone who “cultivates nonsense.” Nonsense is a very different kettle of bicycles than meaninglessness. Nonsense operates in relation to sense, and that relation is meaningful. No one, I think, would accuse Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of being meaningless. Their nonsense roils with meaning. Talking about Merz, his own post-Dada practice, Schwitters wrote:

The word ‘Merz’ had no meaning when I gave it form. Now it has meaning I attached to it. The meaning of the concept ‘Merz” changes with the changing understanding of those who continue to work in the spirit of the concept.

As Schwitters presents it, meaning is not a Given, a fixed quality. It’s not either/or. meaning or meaninglessness. Meaning is alive. It is created, born, given form, which changes as it becomes part of a conversation and ongoing work. Schwitters’ meaning is a deferred event that displaces meaning as presence, but never becomes meaningless even as it oscillates between sense and nonsense, or takes up residence in nonsense.

Zwicky is critical of what she sees as a tendency or belief among some poets and artists that “art is supposed to be unintelligible.” And while I do not think that art should be anything, much less unintelligible, isn’t a certain unintelligibility a necessary part of the poem’s meaning? If the poem is to be responsive to the world of its address, shouldn’t it harbour some inaccessible secret, some unintelligibility along with its clarities, revelations, and transformations? The world is not transparent. It’s full of confusion, secrets, opaque complexities. If the poem is accurately to reflect or entertain the world, that impenetrability needs to be part of it.  The indigestible serves as essential reminder of our finitude, of our service to language which always is more than we are and always finally escapes our uses into meanings beyond us. Or you could say it serves as an opening within the poem to that which is always beyond it even in the midst of its precisions. The unintelligible is an essential part of intelligible life.

And the poem’s relation to life is always at stake in its articulations. Poems don’t represent life. Nor are they “rent” from it in some act of avant-garde faux heroic violence. Poems teem with life which cannot be encompassed, with language animated by life, with the energetic evidence of compositional choices, and with linguistically coded fragments of that life. Teeming with life means the language of the poem is composed in such a way that the world of its address enters into the field of the poem’s sense and becomes part of the energized meaning, the resonance which dances with coherence.

The poet’s life, the forms of her presence in the world, figure in that activation in multiple ways—sometimes through fragments of re-presentation, but also in modes of selectivity, diction, emotion, and compositional strategies and choices that arise in relation to the event of that life and the determining world of its occasion. The poet’s intent, what she means, reveals itself furtively, appearing and disappearing in the play of language.

No reductive opposition between, as some have proposed, “life experience” and “aesthetic experience” can approach the complexity of the poem’s linguistic entanglement with the stuff of the poet’s life. They are both part of the energetic field of sense that generates a rich meaning. The poem may be a balm or a provocation or a revelation, or all simultaneously. It may be a centre of contemplative attention. It may play with joy, or dwell in anger, locating them in a world of deep form. It may indulge the jouisssance of word play or aim to arouse emotions in the pursuit of the instigation of resistance. Yeats was great at that. One thing for sure—the poem is never Just This or Just That, and anyone who tries to sell you that line is a huckster, no matter how many poetry medals they have pinned to their puffed out chest.

The meaning of a poem, then, is not easy to put your finger on, so don’t despair if you find yourself stumped by a poem. Treat it like the person it deserves to be treated as. When you meet someone, especially someone you anticipate to be interesting, you don’t expect to understand them in 10 minutes. You savour the revelation of the person unfolding over time.

Ditto with the poem. If you don’t immediately “understand” it, carry on the conversation and see what unfolds. It’s not that there is something wrong with the poem. It wants to teach you something and you haven’t learned it yet. You think just because the poem is in English and you speak English, you ought to be able to understand its meaning, and if you can’t, there’s a problem with the poem. Wrong.

The problem is not that the poem is meaningless. The problem is you are approaching it in the wrong mood. Instead of trying to understand the meaning, trying to get it, relax and listen. Then you may hear something, a little thing, and think, wow. That’s an encounter with meaning. You may not feel that you “understand” the poem, but that’s OK. You don’t have to understand it in order to encounter meaning. Do you understand the Grand Canyon? Do you understand the Pacific Ocean, humiliating in its disguises as Spicer has it? You got a flash of meaning and there’s more where that came from. The poem is not going anywhere. It’s not that it’s teasing you, although a good poem is seductive. But the poem doesn’t give it all up just because you want it to. It doesn’t even give it all up to the poet who wrote it. It has integrity. It has secrets. But it does want you to share in its meanings. Maybe it’s a rhyme you hadn’t expected, then, bam, there it is. Or a rhythmic phrase that repeats and varies with a beautiful twist. Maybe it’s an image that stuns you, or a brief flash of insight into a moment of the poem’s thinking. All these are meaningful encounters with meaning. They can never be the Meaning. But there’s plenty of meaning to go around.

Meaning fills the poet’s mouth and the reader’s as well. The sound is tactile. She sounds the energy that fills her and she transforms it into vibrating flesh using words as a medium. Meaning is not an answer. Meaning is an event, and like all events it goes on and can’t be encompassed. As long as the poem exists, the event of its meaning continues and changes. But the way a poem means may ask more of you than you knew you had. It may ask you to rethink your idea of reading for instance. One reading is never enough, which is anathema in today’s culture of tweets and instantaneous connection where speed and more speed has become the Given. The poem stops you in your tracks, refusing to inform and communicate even as it radiates meaning that requires you to engage it. If you want to know what it means, you will have to slow down, look stuff up you are unfamiliar with, and read the poem over and over, say every night for a week, maybe two weeks. It will reward you for that with prodigious gifts of meaning.

Poetry resists the rush to transparency by meaning too much. A poem that means too much requires not just two readings, but many readings. Give it what it asks of you and it will yield to your fidelity. In a world dominated by instant “information” that doesn’t inform and instant “communication” that communicates only instructions, poetry offers a door into another experience of what we call meaning. It offers you a world beyond anything you think you know.

Big Bitch at the OK Corral

Camille Paglia has long been a self-professed bitch. In a typically over-the-top, in-your-face display of female machismo, she seized a male-centered term of derision and turned it into a post-feminist exercise of female power. The bitch, or more properly, The Bitch, is the nightmare incarnation of the terrors of all moralists. She is nasty, bad tempered, and does not suffer fools at all. Elevating the Bitch to the status of a pagan divinity, Paglia has waged unrelenting war on the proper, the correct (politically and otherwise) and pretenses of all shapes, colours and sexual preferences. At her best, she is capable of genuinely challenging the moralist banalities that pass for politics in too many circles, right and left, today, not to mention the often-preposterous assumptions we all tend to harbour in unexamined corners of our lives. Occasionally, she can even make you laugh at yourself, a genuine political contribution to the health of the polity. On the other hand, more often than not, she’s just what we used to call a shit-kicker.

Not there’s anything wrong with shit-kicking. Having spent a few years in the Teamsters, I’ve been known to kick a bit myself once in a while. But as fun as it is to be a provocateur (and it can be really fun to watch the moralists pop a gasket at your command), it’s a mistake to confuse shit-kicking with thinking, as Paglia’s 1999 talk to the McLuhan Institute demonstrated. Published as “The North American Intellectual Tradition” in Salon in 2000 and in her 2018 book, Provocations: Collected Essays), Paglia’s essay attempted to define some uniquely American mode of thinking stretching from Emerson to her own heroes of the mind, Marshal McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown. There’s nothing really new in that aspect of her proposal. It’s the same compulsive influence anxiety that’s been convulsing through American thought for at least 200 years. Paglia’s contribution is to attempt to link it to the energies of American pop culture. And it’s not that she’s wrong, though she isn’t right either. As Stanley Cavell made evident, Emerson, and after him Thoreau, redefined the possibilities of philosophy in a new mode of thinking tied to their understanding of the unique energies of the ordinary world emerging in USAmerica. What she misses or ignores is the interconnectedness of the thinking of that new common world with the thinking of Romanticism, especially as it was being written and practiced in Jena.

Embracing the liberatory energies of pop culture and elevating them to almost philosophical status, Paglia neglects to pay attention to the cosmology it drags along behind it. This is what happens when you take your McLuhan straight with no chaser. The medium (and its admittedly Dionysian energies) so totally overshadows the content that it’s simply forgotten. Paglia’s argument is a case in point. How else explain how she starts off proposing a critique of contemporary continental philosophy and ends up at the OK Corral?

On one side of her archetypal gunfight are the Clantons (the Clintons?) in the guise of three Continental scumbags—“Black Jack” Derrida, “Ladyboy” Foucault, and “Iron Jacques” Lacan­—spiritually sick refugees from a ravaged, post-war Europe, lurking in the shadows of the barn waiting the bushwhack the Earps with a blast of incomprehensible prose. The Earps, marching three abreast down the sunlit streets of Tombstone with their scatterguns nestled lovingly cross their broad, homo-erotic chests, take the form of upright Marshal Marshall McLuhan (or is that Marshall Marshal?), lovable old “Lightning” Les Fiedler with his grizzled beard and his pot belly, (ah! the body, he seems to say with each sure step) and cantankerous “Nobby” Brown wearing a dress shirt, cut-off jeans and black street shoes, and sporting inked knuckles that read “Love” and “Death”.

As Paglia stages the showdown between the slick Euro-trash philosophers reeking of last night’s overindulgence in Heidegger, and the lovable old Yankee cowpoke theorists, their eyes lit up with the immense blue skies of Montana, one thing becomes glaringly obvious. This is not a discussion about ideas. It’s a classic American pop-culture confrontation between the forces of good and evil. We could be in any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the last 25 years. Our Bitch, it seems, has something of a moralistic streak to her after all, and ideas are the first thing out the window when moralisms break through the door.

It’s too bad, too, because the territory Paglia stakes out is interesting and full of fascinating complexities waiting to be explored. One by one, though, they fall like innocent bystanders beneath the fullisade of gunfire from the shootout. Paglia states at one point that her good guys derive from “the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive North American English.” She neglects to mention, however, that British Romanticism derives almost wholly from—gasp!—German Romanticism via S.T. Coleridge, and that German Romanticism was one of the great inspirations for Paglia’s arch-villain, Martin Heidegger. Add to that the fact that “pragmatic English” has strong roots in German, and you’re faced with a universe of marvelous, even awe inspiring, connections, relationships, derivations, and cross-pollinations.

Even more confounding to Camille’s vision of philosophical Armageddon is “Black Jack” Derrida’s debt to one of Paglia’s boys in white, R.W. Emerson. Emerson was a chief inspiration for the post-philosophical thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (you can read Nietzsche’s enthusiastic comments and even cribs in the margins of his copy of Emerson’s essays), and Nietzsche, contrary to Paglia’s apocalyptic vision of philosophical collapse after his work, was a major source for both Heidegger and Husserl (who, incidentally, were far from being “narrow French thinkers”—when did Heidegger and Husserl become French, anyway? Or is it just their “thinking” that’s French?) both of whom were struggling to find a way out of the impasse of European philosophical rationalism. Derrida, who was indebted to them both, can in that light be seen as a kind of Talmudic, post-holocaust oracular Emerson returning in disguise to haunt his own source.

These are fascinating connections, offering a world of fruitful contemplation and scholarly detective work into the intricate intellectual filiations that extend back and forth across the Atlantic, taking on different casts and emphases, but confronting common historical realities. But Henry James Camille ain’t. All these obscure and obscured relationships lead to a sense of complexity, sometimes a source of illumination and clarity, sometimes a sea of confusion. And confusion, we know from all those movie westerns has no place at the OK Corral when the guns are blazing and everything decent and wholesome and American is on the line. The glory of simplicity and certainty light up the purple mountain’s majesty. The Bitch single-handedly clarifies all confusions with a dramatic gesture of unexpected common sense—don’t leave your keys on the car.

It’s interesting that much of the thinking of the bad guys in this staged shootout—the Euro-trash scum bags—has consistently moved to lay bare the structures and dynamics that lead to the kind of knee-jerk dichotomizing that Paglia seems happy to wallow in, drawing out the ways in which that binary thinking upholds certain structures of power. One fact haunts their thinking: the death camps of World War II, and the minds that could conceive, build, and operate them by mobilizing all the institutions of the Enlightenment. This may be what Paglia refers to when she speaks with contempt of war-ravaged Europe. What the scumbags found there was a ubiquitous demonic us against them that eventually permitted any horror. Maybe that’s why Paglia is so upset with them. She doesn’t want to have to think about what she might meet there.