Some passages in which JR advocates for difficulty

Since I posted I’ve read the next essay titled Blue Notes on the Know Ledge and find that JR is following her swerve further from what might be mistaken for any academic sounding prose encountered earlier in the book.
I believe I read earlier on in JR’s first essay that she had arranged to have the book read chronologically. I wish I were a better reader who didn’t have to second guess himself like that but I believe she did say something to that effect and also did question someplace as well whether her essay was poetry or not. I think such questions depend upon definitions and are not so important.
Blue Notes on the Know Ledge I believe deserves a siting by Maggie Nelson for her more conventional memoir/ essay/ poem Bluets as I would tend to think a writer as able as Nelson is aware of JR’s work. JR’s essay was written well before Bluets appeared and although JR’s shorter essay is substantially distinct it also delves into a varied philosophical exploration of the color blue. JR becomes increasingly enlightening and entertaining as I read further into her book and she moves closer toward the quirky and original formulations she makes a case for setting into practice. Ironically there’s a perception of a development, a concept like progress that one might suppose antithetical to views espoused.

Hi Denny, Ray, Jim and Cat.

There must come a time to let go but this thread has engaged my thoughts for the last several days. I hope this gives an idea of how it is coming together so far.

Cat is concerned about this:

4. About writing she does NOT admire: “An aesthetic of persuasion. In which the reader must be made to feel what the author felt, must be convinced of the author’s omniscient perspective, must come to believe in the characters and the point (singular) of view…. The reader’s activity is not one of participatory invention but of figuring out. Figuring out what the author as master creator means.” She says that this applies to “the lyric fictions of the I-poem” as much as to most conventional novels.

Me too. But sitting on the fence on this didn't feel comfortable. Then today, by chance, I came across mention of Edward Bernays (who was Freud's nephew)
I had to look him up and his wikipedia entry includes this:


'Bernays touted the idea that the "masses" are driven by factors outside their conscious understanding, and therefore that their minds can and should be manipulated by the capable few. "Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos."[65][71][72]

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

– Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10

Propaganda was portrayed as the only alternative to chaos.'

But what is the problem with chaos? Is it the fear of democracy? Or 'organized habits' that don't fit with capitalism?

Here I want to pick up something that Ray pointed out about behaviour at the subatomic level. Statistical uncertainty about behaviour is not the same as chaos is it? I may be wrong but I got the feeling that Ray was suggesting that behaviour at the macro level can't be compared to that of a subatomic particle. Is that because the behaviours are different or because at human scale we lack the interest or capacity to see the uncertainty and complexity in everyday life? Or an expanding universe? Expanding into what?

So going back to Bernay's quote, what he sees as 'chaos' is the unrecognised uncertainty in the behaviour of the 'masses'. He sees justification in manipulating and to controlling this behaviour. Which brings us close to thinking about the differences between democracy and totalitarianism: a contemporary and real world issue. But perhaps no less a real world issue than poets seeking to recruit our feelings for the sake of 'a wild ride' as Cat puts it.

At this point, I am still not decided about the nature of 'transcendence' that Jim raises. Can you 'transcend' a real world political issue of this nature? Do we not have to descend into the uncertain and risky engagement with this type of debate?

So I wish to remain 'uncertain' about transcendence. And for two reasons: firstly because that leaves room for my thoughts and feelings to evolve in conversation with others; and secondly it reminds me that this kind of thinking is new to me. Even with Al's guidance the 'Poethical Wager' is going to take several more years.

I hope Cat still has the kettle on!

I’m a science dummy myself surrounded by scientists but no physicists. Without consulting wiki my understanding is that it’s correct that the physics for the macro differs from the physics for the micro but that this is viewed as a fundamental flaw in the physics itself and thus the continuing search for something elusive called a unified field theory that would work to explain both.
Is that a correct characterization? I’m not sure if that’s quite right.
I did run into a couple mentions of Gödel by JR since my last post ( the ‘Gödelian aftermath’ and another Gödel reference in her essay about Rosemary Waldrops novels in the poethical )
I find Bernays twisted logic a bit perverse, rife with elitist delusion and open for corruption. But in a world where a dictator with solid control of the media uses that arm of propaganda to continue an unnecessary war he began in no small part by claiming to be the one being attacked while doing the attacking ( the oldest propaganda ruse in the book) than it might be necessary to confront and acknowledge Bernays ideas as a form of realpolitik.

As far as art goes certainly everyone tries to contain and constrain it within the bounds of definitions which art continually and
chimerically eludes. Certainly capitalism encourages dreck and innovations and the polish of competition but with an emphasis on product and end result at odds with the spirit and ethos of much art. The court of public opinion is also no small factor in promoting conformity and familiar traditional and conservative approaches.

It’s important I think to note that JR uses the qualifier ‘most conventional novels’ when contrasting her ideas about a ‘complex realism’ with the omnipotent author perspective of 19th century realism. When one considers specific authors and works the critique of the genre as somehow less than becomes a little facile and pat. I don’t think some of the great 19th century authors are so easily dismissed nor pigeonholed.
Tolstoy for example, who was mentioned by Al on the zoom as an example of conventional realism can I suppose be described as omnipotent author but the complexity of his characters and their situations leave room for interpretations and are hardly simple and questionably deterministic perhaps because his thinking was so steeped in ideas. In War and Peace Tolstoy offers up a theory of history not unlike Gertrude Steins and at odds with Bernays view of control by the few. Tolstoy uses the of the whole novel to argue that history just happens by the mass movement of individual minds, akin perhaps to Jung’s ideas of a collective consciousness, and that the ‘great’ leaders of history claim credit falsely by merely being adept at reading the unseen currents of these mass movements

     Hey Denny, Adef, Ray and Cat – to continue the discussion some....

     Cat points out JR's ironic persuasion against poetry that persuades – and of course the traditions of poetry and rhetoric are related – perhaps JR overstates her case like so many do to get their point across (and later, Cat says “JR's statements are true for her at the moment of writing as a kind of manifesto—but can't be universally true, because yes! to different modes....”) Tho she feels her methods of composition are right for her and important in the evolution of the tradition of poetry, I don't think she has any less respect for what has preceded this, or, for that matter, other kinds of writing either. Who couldn't help but to enjoy Gonzo journalism? (The Curse of Lono is my favorite illustrated book of all time) And, just to add to the later discussion of chaos, Thompson thrives on chaos in his writing/living, turns the world upside down for a better look at it. When it comes down to it, great writing is great writing, whether simple or complex. Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience are great in their simplicity, almost approximating nursery rhymes – but equally engaging are his more complex and philosophical works, even the shorter "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."  So many great works of literature are simple on their surface yet have deeper levels of complexity and depths even now yet unsounded while there are readers left – Shakespeare comes to mind. Ray mentions Moby Dick as contrast to Finnegan's Wake. I get more out of Pound's essays and letters than I do from his Cantos after say #30. I respect Balzac and Dickens as masters of their craft even tho I can feel as manipulated as a reader by them as I do when watching a Hollywood movie. I'm guessing that anyone who likes poetry and literature has a diversity of tastes. We get what we can out of whatever we read.

     Ray brings up Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and suggests that “JR is working in a literary mode equivalent [to] the sub-atomic one in physics.” - in which the “effect of the reader” is part of the poem's equation – the observer affecting the observed. I would add two perspectives to this: first, that of the unstable self (which Cat hints at in her first post when she says, “An author's perspective is generally not a stable perspective anyway, since people are not trees but move around, take mind-bending drugs, etc”). We are all filled with innumerable selves, so often contradictory and some even alien to us (for an extreme example look at patients whose corpus collosum has been severed and who perceive a separate self within – which some have suggested is cause of hearing voices, divine inspiration, etc). Earlier this year discussing Frank O'Hara with Ken Hays in forums I quoted this, worth repeating in this context:
         John Grieve in his Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics quotes Pound from his essay “Vorticism”:
                  “In the “search for oneself,” in the search for sincere self-expression,” one gropes,
                   one finds some seeming verity. One says “I am” this, or the other, and with the words
                   scarcely uttered, one ceases to be that thing.” (p 33)
and then comments on this:
                  “The self is seen above all as a construct fraught with indeterminacy. Expression of
                   that self is a frustrating task doomed to inevitable failure since such a protean entity
                   will always escape the confines of any constant or integral voice.” (p 34)
And so if the observer is just as unstable as the observed, what the consequences there for a poetry of complexity in which the author and the reader are entangled with each other??
     And second, something that relates to exegesis of poetry and to Lyn Hejinian's “Rejection of Closure”. In Lisa Samuel's 1997 Dissertation “Poetic Arrest. Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens and the Modernist Afterlife” she writes:
     “Criticism errs when it favors rational explanation or philosophical systemizing as the most crucial commentary on a given poem. In the inexplicable, in  interstices between determinable word definitions, for example, significant modern “meaning” happens.” Such readings may feel “unfinished,” but we            must become more comfortable with forfeiting critical closure – in practice, not simply in theory. Fixing the meaning means losing the momentum, as          naming the momentum means relinquishing fixity...” (56) [akin here to Keats' “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”] [And those “interstices”  remind one of the inner workings of Stein's Tender Buttons.]
and shortly after:
     “Another reason to prefer the momentum metaphor for reading [Wallace] Stevens is that his poetry shows forth its momentum, constantly. The very   fluency of his lyricism is part of the reason we must slow down the poetic film, as it were, to try to figure out “what he means.” It is impossible to perform   this slowing and to write about it without effectively altering the poetry itself (Heisenberg again). The difficulty in commenting on Stevens' form in any   satisfying way must first be situated in the work itself: the consistency of his poetic style has the effect of making it disappear as a topic.” (57)
     Samuels here equating the relationship of the fixity of meaning and the rhetoric/style/form with the instability of the relationship (in measurement, or exegesis) between a photon's momentum and position in sub-atomic physics. The key here being exploration not explanation. But here is an example of how the principle of the micro can be related to the macro – as Cat brings up in her mentioning of fractals and JR's oscillations between levels. And helps us understand Ray's division of micro/macro literary modes. Another useful metaphor might be Einstein's particle/wave duality theorum or figure/ground relationships – ways of knowing that are multiple and unfixed – complex.

     Denny brings up science and art and their realtionship to Modernism. Maybe you could expound on this, especially how painting is concerned – impressionism, cubism etc, etc. - and then how we could relate this to procedural strategies for art and poetry. What about postmodern art, chaos theory, ??
     Denny also brings up Montiagne who JR commends for practically (if not) inventing the exploratory essay form full of diversions and parathentical thought that never necessarily “arrives” anywhere, least of all where one thought one was going at the outset of the expedition. And toward the end of his long essay on epistemology, he concludes that “Finally, there is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects” - even in the 16th century, a comprehension of the relativity of knowledge and the certainty of uncertainty, both the self and world in flux.
     I hope you'll continue to post here as you make your way through The Poethical Wager.

     Adef originally considered “what questions or approaches [transcendence] stops us having to ask about those features of complexity that mean there are things that are beyond our understanding because we have yet to understand what they are.”  In relation to this, I'll add a paragraph or two from a post I made for “The Poethical Wager”:
     “One of Retallack's major themes is that of the limits of our understanding, and that instead of trying to transcend these limits in an abstract or metaphysical sense (for example Kerouac's curative for fear in the Buddhist/Catholic notion that we are already “safe in heaven dead”), we should both attempt to recognize and explore these limits and their possible causes – as for instance our language, our vehicle of understanding. And also the limitations of our physical brain – as she says (or quotes/samples?) in “The Ventriloquist's Dilemma”, “We weren't designed / to perceive most of what surrounds us or to fully / understand the rest.”
     In exploring the notion of alterity - the notion of “the other” whether it be a stone, a tree, a dog, a shark, a god, a stranger or a friend, and our relations to it – she rejects the strategy of analogy, of the pathetic fallacy: “These things cannot be known by merely examining our own minds.” This quote is from the beginning of her essay “What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?” - and later in the same essay she discusses John Cage's rejection of analogy where we “imitate nature's appearance (always saturated with our desires)” and proposal to “adopt her manner of operation”. And here is where the study of natural science, mathematics, physics, and other similar subjects and the merging of these disciplines in our self-education (for there is no other) with poetry and the humanities might bring about new perspectives of understanding, new possibilities for the solution of problems and opening up our “geometries of attention” and ways and methods of seeing the world.
     Here also is where her notion of reciprocal alterity comes into play – by recognizing the “rights” of the “other”, the independent existence of the “other” - and by investigating each side of any binary opposition (not picking sides), by being open-minded and open ended. And here too “D. W. Winnicott's theories of play as the imaginative activity that constructs a meaningful reality in conversation with the world as one finds it” (The Poethical Wager, p7) You know, like every minute you spent in early childhood before you were taught (or firmly believed) anything. When the spiders were your friends.”

     Later Adef quotes Bernays from Propaganda – and truly some great revelations in Bernays about how culture is created in many ways at the top and handed down to us often in the guise of grass root movements when nothing could be further from the truth. We should remember that his Uncle Freud's studies and the early advances of psychology in part grew out of the science of hypnotism, with Franz Mesmer and Charcot (whom Freud studied under) and that, in a sense, advertising and media and propaganda are forms of hypnosis, to put us to sleep, or at least in a (vulnerable) suggestive state of mind. And that tho written in 1928, Bernays describes what still goes on today. (For a great documentary on Freud and Bernays and consumerism, check out Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self – available on YouTube)
     One aspect of what Bernays means by “chaos,” esp in the phrase “order out of chaos,” is that it is the motto of the 33rd degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. The relations of English poetry to the occult are well documented, from Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism to early 20th century paranormal investigations and various orders of “Magick” from the Golden Dawn to the Ordo Templi Orientis. From Christopher Marlowe to Yeats and Pound. Even Aleister Crowley was a poet! Like science, occult knowledge can be used for good or evil. And the relations of the occult and intelligence services go back just as far with John Dee in Elizabethan times (and again, Marlowe). Is the cloak and dagger cliché of intelligence a cover for the greater role they may play in creating culture and influencing the public? In this sense the chaos is just the freedom of the individual which can be viewed (wrongly and paranoidly) as a danger to the state. What better way to close down thinking than the latest Hollywood epic or the melodrama of the world of politics (worse than pro wrestling)? Celebrity politics.
     Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Totalitarianism – in our modern world they can often be confused for one another. In Plato, Democracy is just a stage on the way to Tyranny. It's a 2-Tiered system, always: the rulers and the ruled.
     I've been watching 60's Jean-Luc Godard films (a great “blurring of genres” in Godard) – everywhere Marxist-Leninism – Johnson (LBJ) referred to as Hitler – the victor writes the history. And all that political activity of the students, in Paris and other major Euopean cities, in U.S. Cities, it all seems like a dream that never actually happened. Where did it go? Is there such a thing as a just war??
     Poetry and Art can be a way of rejecting this system, by making living an art, by making art a way of living, by not being concerned with monetary wealth but with wealth of the intellect and heart. It's not transcending everday life, but concentrating on what one finds real value in. One can't do this when one's life is under threat by violence or poverty, but those of us lucky enough to have the freedom to live under comfortable conditions can contribute somehow to making the entire world a better place to live in – and one way to do so is in our attitudes toward what is really important in life.

     Finally - to return to the subject of the occult and poetry one more time – and attempt to dovetail it to Retallack's comments on methods of composition and the lyrical I, etc: We can trace “dictation” as a method of composition back to Yeats (Golden Dawn member) and his wife – that era when Theosophist writers like Blavatsky and Besant were “receiving” texts from “Ascended Masters”, the era of automatic writing. But listening to Jack Spicer's lectures on dictation and poetry (available on Penn Sound) can remind us that many writers compose their works without any plan or outline in advance – fiction writers often talk about their characters coming alive and acting on their own so to speak, the book writing itself, just as often as poets talk about organic composition and the poem writing itself, the poet not knowing what the poem is about or where it's going but discovering this in the act of writing. And I would say this is just as ethical as procedural poetry.
     And to bring this full circle with one one last example of writing that has value while still being written in the first person, maybe Keroauc wasn't just writing spontaneously composed (with trial runs) autobiography, but Melvillean spiritual autobiography as in Pierre (see Charters editorial comments in Selected Letters, Vol 1, pg 310). Maybe a precursor to Hunter Thompson's Gonzo Journalism??

     - Jim