This Week's Laughter #15
An archive of rotund joy
TRIGGER WARNINGS: Purging (as metaphor)
I place a curse upon the world which plates so much to be curious for and destroys all impetus and almost all aqueduct for delivery and satisfaction of this curiosity. Repeatedly dear friends of mine have told me, lately, “I love it when you’re bitchy.” Within my body there’s this compulsion to retch. I have this image in my head lately of those cartoon, animated-style sludge or tar-like creatures — formed enough to walk but clearly colored in a way that would signify toxicity. Derision is a powerful evocation. I laugh in meanness at the State, at the casual cruelty of governance, to let it know that it is unjust.
However blatant in the mind of the writer, anger is often a subtle emotion, laid bare not through an extravagance of noise, but a particularity of shaping.
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Often, avoiding anger is a way to pretend our readers are mind readers and will supply the emotions that we are unwilling to write into our work. And here I make a point to differentiate between the poem that inspires (or hopes to inspire) a sense of anger as a consequence of subject matter and a poem that conveys the speaker's anger as a result of poetic intent and decision-making.
In the essay "Uses of Anger" Audre Lorde writes, "anger is loaded with information and energy," and later "anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. The poet's job is to shape information into action, into provocation. … While Lorde talks about anger and its uses among women, her essay speaks to the larger applications of anger in poetry. It also speaks to the failure to use anger in service of good.
To write from a place of agony is to allow the reader to see the way such a madness blossoms, and to see how such a madness shifts and disappears as it bumps against the other myriad realities found in Knight's work. His poetry blossoms when these juxtapositions are most apparent.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, Feeling Fucked Up: The Architecture of Anger
I am writing from a place of agony, most times, these days. A minimally documented experience of rural America is the unnamed, casual grief of losing things you had expected to be fixed. I’ve spoken before about how much of my family lives within two hours of where they were born, has always and will always be in these places. At a young age, I intimated grief as the experience of losing people and things I cherished in their quest to expand the world. I equated grief with growth. Now, I read hundreds of books and essays every year, each one being a type of grief just as much as it is a type of growth. I will never not know the materials of these works again, and as such cannot justify a naivety regarding its materials.
To have read so much is to laugh as to not read at all is to laugh. The breath escapes the lungs the same as the sand inhibits the toes. How can one not be afflicted with agony? I find it difficult to experience life without this surplus of emotion, without feeling some concoction of anger, agony, mirth, ridiculousness, embarrassment, and delight. I never want to spell embarrassment with two ‘r’s.
Although the author stoutly maintains that "Our sphere of action is life's happiness," this sphere—namely the phenomenal world is portrayed in extremely bleak terms. Its postulated plenitude concerning sensual matters contrasts sharply with the sparseness, if not indeed the absence, of descriptions asserting nature's fruitfulness and beauty. Even in those instances where Rochester exalts the body's functioning, the language of his verse tends to undermine the physical ideal presented.
Abstractions found within poetry and literature, film and music, painting and dance, are such that plenitude is most frequently the problem and the solution. Working as a critic for some time and reading many other critics of various fields, I come to see people fixating on certain patterns of engagement: dissecting the referent of a work, or parsing the aesthetic moodiness, for instance. As if to be affected by a work is to know encyclopedically the references found within, or as if to know the exact pantone color code of the aesthetic being referenced.
Sometimes engaging with a work is thinking with it. Here, for instance, I provide you these samples from essays you may read and delight the more in. Some of the quotes I even take fully out of context. They might be found, hidden, within deep pulls of close-readings or examinations of source materials. And yet the sentences, the language, evokes regardless. Do I need to explain, for instance, what you will read further down, “I believe great poems allow us to be more vividly, if only for moments,” to provide a connective element for you? Or can you join me in reading the phrase, perhaps even uttering it aloud, and seeing if you find it true or false, what truths and what falsities it reveals?
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The second type of clarity follows from the poet’s self-consciousness, as it appears in expressions of frustration with the poem’s procedure or form. Self-consciousness reduces interpretive latitude in the sense of diverting the reader from the performative, rhetorical aspect of the poem to a simplifying awareness of voice, a voice often found to be struggling with confusion or irritated at a convention it cannot freshen by force of ingenuity. Self-consciousness, as a gesture, has a way of shaking the poem out of a rut, and enlisting the reader against the worst instincts of the writer
And so I write because in writing I sometimes unite my love and need. The work of writing helps me attend to a world I love but did not create. It is an act of soul-making that arises out of the need for the real work of our lives: the work we do not to acquire things but to be, to belong.
I believe great poems allow us to be more vividly, if only for moments. Consider how the sound of a poem, the physical feel of its words, the sinews of its syntax, all seem to be brought suddenly into contact with its sense, and the poem’s full resonance creates in us an elated sense of expansion. As the critic Sven Birkerts puts it, we “respond to the rightness of the verbal expression and, because of that rightness…suddenly grasp that the whole is welded together out of bits of sound. That organizations of sound mean—this is no less miraculous than the existence of physical laws. And both recognitions point in the direction of the first and last mystery that saturates the sacred writings of all cultures—that there is such a thing as being at all.” That a line of oak trees can astonish.
Sometimes, I’m not even really sure myself what to takeaway, and instead just find myself laughing in awe. For instance, the below passage from Hélène Cixous I offer purely because of the phrase, “the rhythm that laughs you.”
There always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other-in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix, cradler; herself giver as her mother and child; she is her own sister-daughter. You might object, "What about she who is the hysterical offspring of a bad mother?" Everything will be changed once woman gives woman to the other woman. There is hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was "born" to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself. The relation to the "mother," in terms of intense pleasure and violence, is curtailed no more than the relation to childhood (the child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes, there at the point where, the same, she others herself). Text: my body-shot through with streams of song; I don't mean the overbearing, clutchy "mother" but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body (body? bodies?), no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman's style. In women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes.
The rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; that part of you translating, always translating, the world around you, like a cake spinning evermore on a turntable, its frosting being smoothed down eternally; urges you to step to the side and inspect something no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other; there at the point where you stop walking down a hill to take a photo of the sunset almost perfectly blocked by a centrally-framed tree at an intersection outside a house that is clearly too large, too spacious, too fenced for you to ever dream of affording even should you find some miraculous richness.
This seems to me one of the central dilemmas of art making: What is the right way to keep working once the inspiration—the being taken possession of by the appropriate muse—has left you? How do you complete in a way that doesn’t distort or damage, what emerged spontaneously? Do you produce only fragments? Do you try to link the fragments by the thinnest threads that are as unobtrusive as possible? How do you finish what inspiration has left off? How the artist resolves this problem is everything.
Of Bonnard’s working method the curator Dita Amory wrote, “Only when he felt a deep familiarity with his subject—be it a human model or a modest household jug—did he feel ready to paint it…. Asked if he might consider adding a specific object to his carefully circumscribed still-life repertoire, he demurred, saying, ‘I haven’t lived with that long enough to paint it.’”
I have repeated that phrase in my mind so often since encountering it, twisting it this way and that: I haven’t lived with it long enough to paint it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to write about it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to love it. What does it mean to distrust the novelty of experience? To say instead that what one needs in order to create are not new things—not new grand adventures, not new wives or husbands or cities—but the same thing over and over again until a Platonic form of the thing builds up in the mind and becomes the model for what is written about, or painted?
If inspiration—the muses, the gods and goddesses—is fleet-footed, so that when it flits away one is left to stumble forward in the dark with no certain compass, Bonnard’s solution may be ideal. The Platonic form, built up across days and months and years, is rooted in a reality that transcends our fluctuations through time: because it was patiently and gradually created in the mind, it lasts and lasts and can be a model that one relies on, unlike inspiration. The Platonic form of a woman or a jug shimmers with all the many layers of life it contains: not the one time he saw his wife bathing, but the three hundred, or three thousand, times he saw her bathing, a form that solidifies naturally and of its own accord into a single balanced shape.
I love this essay from Heti. I love the counter-position it offers. I get so tired by the thousands of art-makers who insist the key to inspiration is experiencing more and more differing vantages of the world. I have a rich inner-life. I have a fascination with research. I am capable of living-vicariously through google searches, and do not feel obligated to take a plane of which the likelihood that Boeing forgot a critical component of is growing more and more by the day. This is not to say I do not wish to see more of the world but that that desire is not complicit with my ability to write.
Often, actually, I find myself utterly devoid of inspiration when I travel. I spend my time relaxing and trying to enjoy an espresso or a glass of wine without the obligation to produce from it. Without the obligation to perform some novel intellect or pretention. I don’t know anything about wine. And frankly I don’t even know anything about coffee even if I do know intuitively the difference between good coffee and bad coffee and even if I do enjoy both good coffee and bad coffee and coffee that’s been left in the pot for two days and kept barely warm enough to avoid mildewing. Beyond that I don’t know anything about laughter, and yet I laugh. Is knowledge an impediment to experience?
For then the essay is no idol of knowledge, thinking it knows how to think. It just thinks. I think it thinks. But I’m dizzy, and lost in wonder when I think of all these things, and sometimes when I regard them it really makes my head swim. Just like Theaetetus working so hard to think about thinking that he hardly knows what he knows. He and Socrates try so hard. They come up with a beautiful image—an image of apprehension. They imagine the mind as an aviary, and each bird there is a kind of knowledge. Which one you grab, you learn, you know. Hold enough birds in your hands, and you end up knowledgeable. I suppose those birds in flight are what I might call thinking. I like to think if you hold out your hand long enough a bird might simply perch there, or make of your palm a kind of nest. I can imagine it that way, thinking coming to the open hand.
I like that image. It makes me happy.
This week I played board games at a bar with a dear friend of mine. We got asked by the owner several times about what we were playing, about if we had recommendations for what types of board games the bar should order for community play, about if we knew anybody who’d want to host a board game night. It made me laugh, he seemed so bashful and shy about asking but seemed to care so much about the desire to make his bar a delightful location for his community.
This week I learned that you can, in fact, pull yourself up. Just like you can enlist others to pull you up alongside. Tug-of-war was never a game against other people, but rather a game to teach you that you can enlist others to help you drag a weight that is too much for you alone.