obstinate questionings

Yeats apparently heard voices in his head saying "Hammer your thoughts into unity." A hammer, sometimes, I think, will not suffice. At every turn (and I even recognize it in my own rhetoric), there is a this and a that, option A and option B, nature and nurture, war and peace, Hillary and Barack, to be or not to be. No union there.

Today, for example, I see an inside and an outside, an internet connection and a candle, a jellybean and a Vitamic C drop.

It was Earth Day. Like most, I hope, I can still experience spring as I did when I was sixteen: with a giddiness, a freshness, a gravity that draws me to the soil, to humanity, without weighing me down. Ah, but for the unmanageable allergies and other practicalities. So I stay inside. I read and read and write and write and this becomes as unmanageable and impractical.

Yeats' dialogic poems explore just such a back and forth. This, too, is two-dimensional. The most fundamental "conversation" is a two-party one, a call and response, a first term and a second term taking turns like a see-saw, cause and effect, response and reaction. It is endless, but never linear because it can never be complete. It does not stretch "into" infinity; it simply is infinity. You choose which parts deserve response and the rest is lost forever. The words just fall away. Perhaps they melt and half-freeze again, forming a soft snow-like cushion for the chosen words, resigned to being the throw-aways, the have-nots, second-rate to the meaning-makers. They are often invisible even in text messages and myspace comments. There are smiley faces, though: a symbol of a symbol, signifying in (not into!) infinity. What, then, is signified?

In my first post, I referenced my arrested development. And is this hammering into unity childishness? Often times the philosophizing makes me feel foolish, impotent. And other times it makes me feel whole and proud and innocent and untainted. No, no--not the innocence. Wordsworth writes of the "perpetual benediction" he feels toward "the thought of our past years," but not for our childish innocence, "but for those obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things." Perhaps my questions veer toward petulant, but I hope not to grow "out of" obstinacy.

"The Black Cat": one example of an uncomfortable crossing of worlds: the incompatible images of the self. There is me, relaxed as I attempt to be, professioning (I'm Timothy Leary, folks, passing out knowledge and crying Tune in!) in front of students nearly as old as me, some perhaps as smart, and it still feels a bit like show-and-tell. These things I "learned" in graduate school jump out of my skin like chronic eczema and I want so badly to pentrate our authoritarian-subordinate barrier and share. It is ok for them to know some things (I dig the new Raceonteurs) but not others (I didn't grade your papers yet because I was drunk on Tom Collins). Some things (I think Robert Penn Warren sucks), not others (if you quote your pastor in class one more time it's an automatic F).

So this barrier was crossed the day we read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." I mentioned one of the some things (I have a black cat) and it led to not-others ("What's his name?"). What is your cat's name. The question paralyzed me--perhaps my defenses were not as strong that day as they usually are--so i blushed. I was mentally transported to my messy apartment where I live pathetically alone and there are things I don't want them to see--a bra lying on the floor, a half-eaten bagel, post-its sticking out of books with My Private Reactions! (and other things I cannot even bring myself to write in a virtually anonymous blog). I am in a bright classroom in Cherry Hall but I am afraid they can see my dark apartment and my black cat -- Benito Burrito Mussolini -- hissing for them to leave. Get out!

Well, which is it then: in or out?

the guilty (and unreliable?) narrator

Yes, I sometimes call you/them stupid, but only indirectly, and at least I feel guilty about it.

This semester, I made my students read Joey Goebel’s Torture the Artist. And yes, this was selfish of me. And yes, this was rather fundamentalist of me, hoping that I could force my love of subversion-via-rock-n-roll on them.

In the novel, a very lovable narrator, Harlan Eiffler, is recruited by the evil magnate of a global media corporation. The figurehead is attempting to redeem himself by creating a division of his company called New Renaissance, which will attempt to permeate popular culture with “real art” (“whatever that is,” I hear you saying, recognizing the age-old conundrum) to replace the trashy entertainment that has become a signifier for a shallow dumb-ass culture. (Gee, sound familiar, VH1?) Harlan’s job is to torture the most promising student of the arts, Vincent. The best art, after all, comes from the tortured, does it not?

I won’t give away more of the novel here, but I’m perplexed that my summary focuses solely on the crux of the viable argument-paradox—the issue which allows this novel to be considered “appropriate” for study—when really I meant to reveal my true purposes: to say, Oh how bitchin’. The subculture lives. We, the elitist rock-n-roller hipsters who love our Ginsberg as much as we hate our Bush are “right.” We have access to what is True. We are the only Poets, whether we write lines or not. Pretentious as it is, we have been, as James Dickey writes, “the masters of the superior secret, not they.”

And this need to assert ourselves “above” frat boys and office drones is false. For some, this is an attempt to turn the hierarchy on its head and say ‘art rules, commerce drools’ much in the way that some feminists mistakenly think it is women’s role to say, ‘no WE are better.’

But to truly be an Other in America, do we have to be non-white, gay, lesbian, Middle Eastern, etc.? To be culturally Othered within our own culture, if such a thing exists, can it be a choice to be bohemian, to be scenester/hipsters with subscriptions to ReadyMade magazine? Is this Emerson’s new patrician class? It would be rash to generalize about the multitude of subcultures, but there is a (perhaps mistaken) commonality that used to be closely related to economic class in addition to artistic tendencies, whether chosen or imposed. But when I see kaffiyehs at Urban Outfitters and hoards of Jackie O wannabes sprawling around the bars at indie shows, I’m not so sure…

I feel guilty for it all. Wanting to be sub, not being cool, criticizing, not criticizing.

So just how subtle am I, introducing this text to my students with the intention of converting them into living, breathing, thinking beings with passions for what I think is inherently "good"--rock n roll, literature, etc.? Go read Torture the Artist.

P.S. I love ReadyMade, Urban, and Jackie O—I am a polyphonic text.

preface: the interstices of truth and aporia

The following concepts, and the pleasure I take in them, are the impetus for this blog. But, quite frankly, I am hopeful that the breadth of this apparently philosophical and literary introduction will allow me to write here whatever the fuck I want. Take pleasure!

aporia: “a difficulty encountered in establishing the theoretical truth of a proposition, created by the presence of evidence both for and against it”; “a figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question”; “an insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text’s meanings.” (all definitions from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aporia)

negative capability: John Keats’ concept of a state of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

jouissance: For Jacques Derrida (that silver fox!), jouissance is the pleasure with which a deconstructionist approaches a text. For Luce Irigaray, jouissance is feminine sexual pleasure, in all its plurality. For me, an American girl (not sexist—my age may say woman, but I am in arrested development), the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of sex are inseparable. When deconstructing, I rarely reach orgasm (come to a meaning), but the foreplay is the most fun, rebelliously, perhaps sometimes pugnaciously, contrary to a linear conception of ‘progress,’ moving toward an end. Instead, there is an Eastern meditative principle at play, where a ‘goal’ is insignificant and a sustained state of enlightenment is preferable.

And so:

When, for example, J. D. Salinger’s Buddy Glass writes so lovingly of his dear brother Seymour, who shot himself, he cannot help but answer when he asks, perhaps in Socratic, perhaps in Yeatsian, form, but certainly inhibited by a two-dimensional kind of meaning (even if it requires a metaphysical leap) like we all are:
“Isn’t it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say… I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.”

I am looking for a place, and I hope this is it, where I can reconcile without reconciling the hideous world of academic thought with the equally hideous worlds of the aesthetic, the mundane, the bodily, the colloquial.

At the interstices of truth and aporia, I hope to find an uneasy tantric peace, the Chaos of Home. I hope to write this blog with all my stars out, and have it mean, all at the same time: a. the stars are out and burning clearly, b. the stars are out as in "off," dimmed, hiding, and thus, of course, c., which means, quite stubbornly, with a satisfying finality, "?"

P.S. (post-script AND post-structure AND just p.s.!): the image here is a version of the ouroboros, or "tail-devourer," inspired by a painting belonging to my office mate, whom I'll call The Guru Dr. Drew.