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?

Integrity is a troubled word these days. People seem to think that there is not much of it around anymore. And without it, trust becomes difficult, which leads to all kinds of social problems and a general cynicism that undermines faith in basic political processes. The idea of integrity goes back a ways. It played a key role in determining an array of the modern world’s forms-of-life where the individual was a crucial, foundational concept and when integrity established the basis for relations between individuals. A literal definition of integrity is intact wholeness (out of integral), the opposite of duplicity’s dishonest doubleness. From this troubled moment in late or postmodernity where we now find ourselves, the basic underlying ideas that would make such an opposition meaningful, ideas like fact, truth, evidence, seem to be disintegrating, if not already gone. Who, then, can one trust?

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.

Read the rest at Merion West

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.