Retallack #7: "The Problem of Evil"

Of "The fans.are screaming like a God dividing light from dark" and of many who are at an exhibition, not the creators of it, but attended audience of expression ambiguous cathartic and potentially destructive only but they are not the primary actors but fans and a possible singular God contested Of a single vs polytheistic structure Of one and many of monotheism's "one God" and yet possibly interoperable as one of many to be it looks like Retallack might be influenced by a template mode I think of George Oppen in "Of Being Numerous" as she and earlier he (do they know each other) considers the complex Ten Commandments and potential monotheistic imagery around the liturgy including the Jewish Sh'ma or even the concept of trinity and integrated religious and metaphysical ideating around maybe the loss of polytheistic thinking and modes Latin and experience creating or being a primary actor and not audience or Iggy's "passenger" only, especially art and of and many is one God and possibly one of many is a daring interpretation about which I have to ask a Rabbi and of

I respectfully request that we be called Retallacktites in honor of those of us who feel like we are just managing to hang on as we pursue our goal of reaching the bottom of this cavern of seeking an understanding of Joan and her inspirers.

I’m assuming the stadium sport alluded to here, the green and white grid, that blimp, is football—American football—which I’ve never learned the rules to. But I do know just enough to recognize the lexical resemblance to military tactics (green and white here instead of dire lexical black and white) and homoerotics (a lot of penetration among mascara-ed behemoths in tights.)

There’s definitely torqued cliches and idioms and other strange conflations and slippages. Telling sleeping dogs lies. Hopping to keep from burning up: the floor is lava—a more innocent child’s game playing at dire consequences.

The menacing image of a bedside intruder, sneezing and covering your mouth instead of his—a hygiene convention breached in the middle of a possibly violent act.

That jump cut from bedside to stadium, screaming fans at first sounding like ceiling fans? And the the flashing message on the blimp, echoing the flashing LED of an answering machine.

Then the shuffling through of different metaphors with light—Judeo-Christian cosmology, logical positivism, mortality, suddenly that intruder that sneezed in your face is whispering vaguely liturgical sweet nothings in your ear?

And then the confusion of the second section. I think when I first read this I somehow thought the only variation was in the enjambments, and only now realize it’s like an expertly shuffled deck of cards, the entire poem divided halfway and then shuffled to create a woven but intact sequence of the two halves. The first line is still the first line, and same with the last line. Somehow the effect, the muddled semantics somehow not so disjunctive or transforming, is of a dream retold in montage, or a postmodern take on some pre-socratic mystical allegory.

And with that ponderous title, THE PROBLEM OF EVIL? It’s definitely complicating Zoroastrian Judeo-Christian notions of light and dark. It’s making me think of Jack Spicer’s Imaginary Elegy #3, which we read in Jason Zuzga’s amazing SloPo last year, where Spicer offers darkness as an alternative ethos.

What is this morality then, this notion of good and evil, if not binary, then another notion of lived and perceived complexity, societal senescence, moral relativism? Is it banality of pragmatism, Gertrude Stein not only cooperating with but heralding the Vichy government. The poethics of regarding a figure from a different fin-de-siecle and their complicated mix of progressive and reactionary ideas that seem to put into question our own ethical stance as contemporary subjects and constituent observers in our own thick descriptions, the politics unspoken but inherent in our poetics.

This is all starting to feel to me like Bergvall’s strange and ambivalent descent in VIA, like the poem can go on reshuffling and reshuffling and the idealities getting murkier and muddier. Or dough folded and stretched over and over, the troubling strands longer, tighter, stickier.

Oh my gosh: screaming fans. Not overhead fans whose motors are bad or some poetic hyperbole regarding the sound of fans?
A sporting event?
Completely completely did not see that.

I like the way this is phrased.  “This is a game” refers directly back to ‘The Problem of Evil’ wherein the “light of reason” only serves to make things opaque.  The application of reason itself is “highly metaphysical / and suspect”.  Sorry but “a god dividing light from dark” is “like the figure who appears / in your dark bedroom and sneezes / before he puts his hand over your mouth”.  Good and evil can’t be separated just as light and dark can’t be separated.  You can’t have one without the other.  And there is no way to figure it out.  There is no discernment to be gained in rational disputation by the light of reason.  It’s a reason to let sleeping dogs lie.  I.e. trying to figure it out only causes more confusion.  Lying like a dog is to lie a lot - to tell many untruths.  Best not to wake him up.  The way to elucidate the problem of evil is not to shine the light of reason on it but to compose a poem that works as JR has done.

Who is Miss Pasta?
It’s rather Epicurious.
The past has left you
Another ominous message.

Yes, yes. That.