ABlog

John Yau, whose art criticism in American Poetry Review always interests me despite or perhaps because of my ignorance about visual art, has an intriguing piece on Jasper Johns in the January/February issue (pp. 43-50). His thesis is that Johns has all along been making pieces “about” time and dissolution—pieces that allude to the human body’s helplessness in the face of inevitable change and decay. Yau quotes Johns: “I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement.” Also: “I wanted to know what was helpless in my behavior—how I would behave out of necessity.” Yau then comments:

Both ‘necessity’ and ‘helpless statement’ suggest that Johns isn’t interested in social behavior, but that he is interested in what is fundamental to all human beings: sleeping and dreaming, consumption and the discharge of waste, involuntary memories and the effects of aging. Indicators of our mortality and deep-seated isolation from each other, all are forms of helpless behavior, necessary actions over which we have little or no control.

Later in the piece, he comments on Johns’s painting Periscope (Hart Crane), invoking a passage from Crane’s poetry:

As I stated earlier, Crane addresses Walt Whitman in “Cape Hatteras”:
Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok—your lone patrol—and heard
the wraith
Through surf, its bird note there a long time
falling….
On one level, the question the poet asks is this: Is it possible to envision the integration of man and nature amidst the chaos of reality, which in Whitman’s case was the Civil War and in Crane’s case was World War I. But the poet also asks: Is it possible to live in this world and recognize both infinity and the “wraith,” the endlessness of time and your own brief moment in it? After all, if our moment here is brief, why must we endure all that we do, particularly when we have so little control over what happens to us? The angled hand and arm in [Johns’s painting] Land’s End could be Job’s.

I’m moved by Yau’s daring to address so directly what I find to be the essential function of so much of the art (poetry, fiction, photography) I care for deeply: to express a very primitive, raw vision of the outrage of our existence in time. Yet I fail to understand the reason for Yau’s insistence on a separation between the social and the personal within this.

Isn’t history, too, concerned with form and dissolution?—both in the sense that the contemplation of history, the evanescence of power, evokes and reinforces a sense of physical mortality (“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings./Look on me all ye mighty, and despair”) and in the sense that everything human beings do—most emphatically including the making of history—responds to the problematic of our mortality. (What, after all, was Ozymandias up to in constructing his monuments if not the denial or postponement of his—and his family’s, his class’s—perceived brevity?)

And yet, I admit that Yau’s essay forced me to question: what if all my lamentations over the or arguably moribund state of the planet are only a displacement of my concerns with my own impending disappearance?

An absurdly phrased yet sensible proposition: we would not care about the world’s mortality were we not, ourselves, mortal.

Against which I pose the insistent conviction that we are as connected as we are isolate; that there’s a method to the madness of our investment in social behavior affecting what will happen after our own brief moment of participation is past; that “helpless statement” and “necessary behavior” are not the same in a time of imperial war, torture regimes, and savage inequities as they are in a time of peace and redistributive justice.

To me, the lines from Crane’s poem suggest precisely this—that even the meaning, the resonance of infinity can be altered by the events of history, and by our relation to those events.

Which brings me back to this sick pickle we’re in.

I just read online an excerpt from a wonderful project, Brooklyn poet Wanda Phipps’s “postmodern pillow book.” It’s in Coconut, along with work by Elaine Myles, Denise Duhamel, and others: http://www.coconutpoetry.org. Wanda’s piece is a very beautiful, diaphanous, lyrical, startling text-scrim. Sometimes discernible events poke through; mostly, it’s the journal of a consciousness, or “emotional sensation,” as she calls it. I was thinking that a journal of political sensation would be something to attempt. (That was sort of the objective of this blog early on, especially with the “Running Tab” feature which I’ve pretty much dispensed with due to time limitations.) Because it’s not necessarily the lead-story-in-the-Times type events that make the most impact or are most indicative. It’s more the daily soaking, isn’t it? The impressions, reports that one tries to turn away from, push out of consciousness.

So, here goes.
revulsion
self-righteous revulsion only the first layer
the ugliness
of all things that recoil
back on me
one’s enjoyment of disasters
(other people’s disasters)
disaster as spectacle
until it suddenly makes one sick
the sick pickle we’re in
no filibuster against Alito and then Derrick Bell writes a scummy letter to The Nation defending NYU’s union busting tactics against the striking graduate students. A tortured child has her crucifixion paraded up and down the public streets, advertised in the public square
proving
repeatedly with tabloid proofs
that a certain class of people
can’t be trusted not to
savage
their own
It’s that picture of mouth-stretched grief from around the coffin or the grave from the front of the Daily News that keeps repeating on me
self-portrait of a time in a certain world
we just happen to live in

No I said to D. at the entrance to the park I’m not coming to the meeting tonight. I didn’t want to do it any more—be on hand for the hand wringing. I don’t want to sit around and say what’s to be done and pretend to try to do some of it, get others moving (but they never want to move) and feel resentful and be irritated at what people say that’s so predictable because I’ve heard those specific people say the same things before (just as they’ve heard me say the same things before) or because I’ve heard similar people say similar things before.

I’m enraged at the idea—from a remote ancestral strain of Methodism perhaps or maybe just being a certain class of female?—that I have to fix it and fix it. Not that I don’t suppose I’m part of the problem too. Not that I think I’m pure. But still this rage at who gets to destroy and destroy. Still this rage at the world for being so fucking wounded. At “America” for its bargain with its leaders: make me comfortable and let the world go to hell. Make me comfortable and let me go to hell. Just make me comfortable. Just tell me a cozy story. Just paint me a simple picture.

And I’m supposed to fix it.

(Says who?)

Suppose one mobilized to kick ass instead.

Ha, ha. Funny, bitter joke.

More and more I think my job as artist is like being trash picker in a toxic dump. Somehow for however long I’m here I have to try and make something lively and life-related out of what’s heaped around us. Not for the sake of repair: I’m too angry for that. I’m too disillusioned with prior efforts. But finally as a gesture of “necessity”—because I’m still here. Because it’s not finished yet.

And another political joke to close: A feminist I know who’s trying to establish a gender studies program at the university level reports that administrators routinely inquire (disapprovingly): “So, are you going to be doing just gender?”

Cue laugh track.