On poems

 

I like a poem that, at some point, I can say to myself. That moment of saying the poem to oneself is not all a poem is about, but without it, the poem has no skin, no place where the nerves end. Anatomical dolls are not our idea of beauty.

J.S. Mill, as we know from his Autobiography, was saved from the horrid erudition shoveled on his head by his pa by poetry – specifically, Wordsworth’s. He tried to define poetry in an interestingly wrong headed essay, making, among other distinctions, this one between poetry and fiction:

“Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives; and, in almost all good serious fictions, there is true poetry. But there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as such, and the - excited by poetry; for the one is derived from incidence, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility; in the other of a series of states of mere outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected more or less by representations of the latter kind, and or almost all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest correspond to two distinct and (as respects their greatest development) mutually exclusive characters of mind.

“At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story, merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and, not having been even in the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued, and the story-teller in greatest request and honor? In a rude state like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all nations in the earliest ages. But, in this state of society, there is little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, --that is, essentially stories,--and derive their principal interest from the incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchild-like age, the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry: the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too, with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons whom not merely in books, but in their lives, we find perpetually engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those who do not possess, either in the vigor of their intellectual powers or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative: the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.”

This seems to me to get one of the main things right – the last sentence especially – but the main thing wrong, as well as the anthropology. Children love verse that tells no tale, but sounds funny or interesting, for one thing. Of course, Mill’s casual sense that the Europeans are adults and the others are children – though of course living, technically, at the same fucking time – is at the temporal center of the colonialist mindset. Mill, related on all sides to the Indian Office, couldn’t help himself. It is important to remember this way of looking at poetry when thinking about poetry in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as poets sought to navigate the a-chrony of it all.

The main thing, though, is that Mill gets entangled in the distinction between emotion and incident without having a clear sense that these two are very interwoven. The idea that reality doesn’t care about your “feelings” is a shrew denial that, indeed, feelings are as real as rocks. This is a familiar and endlessly tugged against trap. I think it is just the wrong way to talk about poetry. Mill is not alone, of course – Eliot has expressed a similar notion, now and then, and the distinction has had a long and hale life that continues today. With nefarious consequences, insofar as it empties out what we can say when we talk about a poem. It de-motivates the poetic impulse.

Myself, I prefer to think of poems in terms of orientation, or maps. Pound's periplum. What does this mean?

Let me explain by way of an illustration. There is a story in Oliver Sacks The Man who Mistook Himself for a Hat. A music professor was examined by Sacks. The professor was, according to all tests, physically blind. The blindness was caused by the deterioration of the retina. Yet the man claimed to be able to see. In order to understand the case, Sacks went to the man’s home. And, indeed, he seemed to get around the house, and to say things about the house, which only a man with sight could similarly do and say. Or so Sacks thought. Then they had dinner, and Sacks noticed, during dinner, that the professor was “singing” the dinner to himself. He had a song, a sort of hum, that he used to orient himself to all the things on the table.

This is what poetry does, ideally, for me.

Centro-Scriptorium: a poem

 Centro-scriptorium

« … du centro-scriptorium, c'est-à-dire de l'endroit d'où partent les impulsions centro-motrices qui occasionnent l’écriture… »

The doobie is burnt to ash and mood

And within the centro-scriptorium

There’s a ghostly feeling of abandoned lab

A rush after we all looked up

And saw the mushroom cloud framed in the window.

The time that passes.

Subtitle dates mark the hiatus.

Ex-es, ghostly erections, squalor of nights

Strapped down. Unstapled wires sag from the ceiling.

Big themes in the algae frosted Aquarium.

Within the centro-scriptorium

Move, obscurely, the mother current lost

That volted me from girlhood to dame

And kept me going, ghostward

Ever ghostward.

-Karen Chamisso

Reading Andrew O'Hagan's Stay Classy, in the LRB, about Prince Andrew

 Victoria Hervey, Epstein friend, English MAGA supporter, was simply saying what the Epstein crime class believes when she responded to O'Hagan's request for a comment here:

"When I contacted Victoria Hervey to confirm that she had called Virginia Giuffre a ‘whore’, she doubled down on the comment. ‘It’s what anyone with a brain knows,’ she told me by email."

Compare this to Leon Black, the unprosecuted billionaire whose mystery doings, as outlined in Epstein's emails, prodded no investigation by either Trump or Biden's DOJ.

“I took it seriously,” Black said. “But I didn’t take it that seriously. I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year.”

Yeah, didn't take it that seriously. Why should he? Serious would mean Leon Black might be stripped of his billions and treated like a normal perp in a rape case: and in that milieu, Black's, Epstein's, Trump's, Clinton's - these things don't happen. It is more likely that a dog could talk than someone from the dog class, the waitress, the high school gilr (in a public school no less! A real tee hee for these guys), could actually retaliate via the mechanisms that theoretically exist to make everyone obey the law.

The deal is that as our belief in the impartiality of the law evaporates, as the law becomes a joke, so too does the inhibition against electing jokers. Too big to fail is the death knell of any even slightly "progressive" party. Gaza children too small to worry about as you sell their murderers bombs - middle class girls working a part time job in high school - businesses ignoring the law and the SEC never doing squat about it - all these things wrap the social up in a ball.

We can punch holes in that ball, but not by looking for some easy to hate target. No justice, no progress.

All that Fall by Jérémie Foa or: voices from the pit

 

1.  The process by which a historian becomes a superstar is determined by the zeitgeist - that is, by factors that are often outside the scope of the discipline itself. In the seventies, the zeitgeist was with the microhistorians. The old liberal panorama, which was built around European “discoveries”, still had juice – in 1983, Daniel Boostin’s The Discoverers was an enormous best seller – but it was taking hits in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the rescuing of women’s histories, black histories, the anti-war movement, the inward turn that marked the 70s lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms in 1973 and Ladurie’s Montaillou in 1975 were the markers of a turn towards the histories of the obscure. Back to the people was no longer just a slogan, but a methodological imperative.

2. The obscure are, traditionally, the mass upon whom history is made, not the makers themselves: the screen for the movie. This is a strong remnant of what was once, in Europe, a very stable class structure, with the nobles on top. The noble as the hero of history still trails behind it many many popular histories. Whereas the statistic as the hero of history trails behind it much academic history. The obscure, though, between the statistic and the hero – they are hard to voice.

3. Among the very obscure are the massacred. Our dead rely, for the most part, on the family to keep them dimly alive, ghosts that sometimes populate the stories we tell each other. Without ghosts, is there even such a thing as a family? And though literacy has injured this monopoly the family has on the past, it has not at all destroyed it. For instance: my boy knows about my great grandfather Louis because I have told him stories that were passed down to me from my parents and grandparents. Louis still exists, dimly, in the extended Gathmann family; and not so much elsewhere. Yet if the Gathmanns were wiped out, would Louis walk after death, or would his ghost story be extinguished? Who, after all, would be interested?

4. This is the ethical component of the micro-history.

5. Jérémie Foa is not an internationally known historian – yet. In France, though he is relatively young, he has already been the center of a special issue of the Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for his book, named after a Beckett play: Tous Ceux qui Tombent: Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. Surely someone somewhere in Anglophonie is translating this book. Which is on the same frequency as Ginzburg’s The Night-Battles, in as much as it is an effort to disinter the voice, the experience of the obscure.

6. Saint Barthelemy’s massacre of French protestants started in August, 1572, in Paris, and spread to the major towns and cities of France in the fall of that year. Formally, it is much like the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda – it is a genocide of circumstance. It arose from the assassination of the Protestant admiral, Gaspard II de Coligny, who, while tying his shoe in his room,  was shot dead by a Catholic fanatic, one Charles de Louviers, who aimed at him from across the street. This happened on August 22. Almost immediately afterwards, the tocsins sounded in the streets of Paris. Come out, come out, whereever you are.

7. Foa’s approach is not so different from that of the detectives in the TV show, The Wire: it is a matter of casting a broad associative net, finding properties, bystanders, property documents, marriage documents, memoirs of survivors and brags of the murderers. After one has a denser sense of what was happening on the street, and in people’s lives, at the end of August in Paris, or the end of September in Toulouse, or elsewhere, the event with its amorphous edges comes into focus.

8. An example of the method is Foa’s uncovering the itinerary of  one of the great Prot persecutors, a man named Thomas Croizier, who boasted of killing four hundred Protestants that August. Many of the victims were taken out  and, alive or dead, dropped in the Seine. By sheer legerdemain in the archives, Foa found property records for one of the drop off points for the mass murder, a place known as the Vallèe de la Misère, since obliterated by Parisian urbanists, but located in 1572 at the foot of the Pont du Change near Notre Dame – about a half a mile from where I sit, typing this. And by looking at the property records, Foa found that Croizier was a part owner of one of the houses there – more or less confirming a “legend” from the Prot martyrology about a house with a red door where many were taken, their throats slit, their bodies plopped into the river – thus “cleansing” Paris of a heretical stain.

9. Foa is not afraid of allusion, of rhetoric, of a high style that can include bits of René Char and quotations from Derrida’s Archive Fever. But this style works for him in creating a way of historiographic “listening” – taking seriously the work of Arlette Farge, the strong advocate for a history that is aware of voices. In this vein, Foa also pays attention to recent work on genocide. He quotes from Helene Dumas, a sociologist who has written about the Rwandan massacres, finding her comments pertinent:

“At the heart of social intimacy in its affective and topographic aspects, with regards to killers and victims, is the fearsome question of the reversibility of the ties forged in the time before, when neighbors, friendship, religious practice and even family ties are mechanized as so many means favoring their tracking down and execution.”

To know another person on a deep level is to know things about that person, their habits, their residence, their stuff, their other connections.

10. Foa notes that in the accounts of survivors, it wasn’t the tocsins sounding, the civil alarms which rang out, that signified murder. Rather, it was the tapping at the window, the ringing of the door chimes, the voices outside going aunt? Uncle? Or a nickname, which roused the sleepy resident and got them to open the door on the unexpected crowd outside, equipped with knives and axes, who quickly moved in. I was reminded of that terrifically horrifying scene at the beginning of Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days when a crowd moves in to lynch some Jews:

“Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs…”

11. It should be noted, in this year, 2026, that the genocidal wannabes around Trump know about this reversibility in their guts. They were sure that a little push, the ICE in the street, would activate a popular massacre of immigrants and people of color – this was the whole point. They openly derided empathy, those connections that keep us from using our knowledge of the other to track them, to take their stuff, to drag them out, to put them in the truck and never see them again. So far, though, this has been a massive failure. What works on Twitter doesn’t work in the street.

12. This time.

13. One of the interesting sidelights in Foa’s book is a pre-history of revisionism. Holocaust revisionism, with its weird nitpicking of details, its false frame of references in which a sort of mathematics can be applied (how many people could fit into a crematorium?) was preceded by Saint Barthelemy revisionism. One Abbe Jean Novi de Caveirac, in 1758, published just such an account  of the massacre. Caveirac attacks, for instance, the figure of 1100 murdered by alluding to a document that shows eight gravediggers were employed to bury the bodies, and by seeing how long they took before they were finished with their work, proves to his own satisfaction that the murdered must have amounted to a mere hundred or less. “It is almost impossible for eight gravediggers in eight days to bury 1100 bodies.” Case closed.

We can recognize, here, the ancestor of the denialism that recently, applying bogus stats and gut feelings, has swept the alt right about COVID: turn out nobody died of COVID!

14. Bones, buried in the ground, turn up. For instance: when the Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1887, the evacuation of the foundation revealed a mass grave. It was at a strata that indicated that these were bodies from the massacre. The bones were removed, for the most part, the concrete was poured, and the Tower was erected. What visitor to the Eiffel thinks of the massacred upon which the Tower has, in part, its footing?

Answer: nobody.

Right?

Peter Baker crawls out from under his rock

 Vacay is over. Trieste, I must tell you all about Trieste!

But then there is coming back to this period of absolute shittiness. I'm nominating absolute shittiness as the name for whatever this is. It is not post anything, it is what comes out of your post-erior.

I've been re-reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a genius novel from the era of genius American novels, the 1970s. The book is narrated, in part, by Richard Nixon, and tells of his ardor for Ethal Rosenberg as she is about to be electrocuted in Times Square. One of the bits that I really love is that Time Magazine is the national poet laureate of these here states, and so Time articles about the Red Menace and American Democracy and Our Boys In Korea are spaced out as poems on the page.

In the absolutely shit war at present, the NYT has thrown itself into the role of poet laureate. The NYT sees that underneath it all, America is just a democracy supporting country. And shucks, so well intentioned! In a thumbsucker by one of the NYT's heteronyms, Peter Baker (of course! they have developed this persona well, from Bush asskisser to Trump apologist - a fiction worthy of Pessoa!), we read these heartfelt lines in the elegy entitled: Wars Often Lose Public Support/Over Time.

Trump Started This

One

Without Much

we read: "Even some Americans sympathetic to the goal of toppling the repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Tehran find it difficult to embrace Mr. Trump as commander in chief." Really, the "repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Teheran" reaches the pathos of TIMES poems in the 1950s about the glorious trial of the Rosenbergs:

it

was a

sickening and

to americans almost

incredible history of men

so fanatical that they would destroy

their own countries & col

leagues to serve a

treacherous

utopi

a.

The Peter Baker heteronym has been in this business for years. Who can forget the odes to George Bush, a man of superhuman strength and vision? Which were wrapped up, in the end, by Baker's great 2013 Epic, "THE FINAL HEARTFELT CONFLICT THAT ENDED THE BUSH-CHENEY PARTNERSHIP, which has been compared to Dumas's classic Three

Muskateers, except there were two of them.

“Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger// had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as/ George Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks/

they confidenty steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam/ erecting a nationa-security apparatus that their successors have largely adopted and prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that/ members of the administration take pains to emphasize, toppled two brutal regimes.”

The Peter Baker heteronym is obviously representative of NYT's approach to all problems abroad, mainly caused by people abroad being abroad, and thus not being Americans and tending towards brutality and terrorist-support, unless we bomb the shit out of them, kill their kids, and point out such models of amity and freedom-lovin' as our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And here we are again!

The part where we are fucked

 The beginning of this pirate raid is going to plan, with Democrats assuming the Daschle position – a sort of pro-Israel whiffle bound to please their owners, the donors, while so irritating their voters that they will stay at home – and the media doing its best to present a united front of American patriots who have been itching and moaning to bring their opinions about the proper governance of Shiraz to fruition – and who among us has not noticed that Americans drop everything when they can dream, aloud, about the best qualified undersecretary of culture in an Iranian government of our choice! Why, it makes discussions of the price of gas positively petty!

That 58 percent of said Americans in the latest poll are opposed to the war will make no nevermind to the American press, which from the Free Press to the NYT, including the Elllison networks and beyond, will select only those Americans properly appreciative of Iranians dancing in the street in the joy unleashed in the fact that, at last, a foreign power is willing to drop bombs on their girls schools.

In the circs, it is good to look back at the golden year for freedom lovers everywhere, 2001. We all remember how it rolled out: a president who stripped away the awful Clintonites, forever going on about terrorist attacks, in the period after Bush’s inauguration; the man himself poo-poohing the CIA warning he received in August, knowing many Saudis, all of them rich and generous, himself and willing to trust those guys; the attack; the media and Daschle-ist response, which was not that we had the stupidest puppy ever for Prez, but instead, that we were ruled by a superhero!; the warning to the Taliban (and a policy happily summed up as a very glorious thing indeed, by the poet laureate of American foreign policy, Tom Friedman, as “breaking things” – the tantrum as an endall in itself!) to hand over Osama bin; The Taliban’s response that they’d give him up to a third Islamic power, like Morocco (which was the closest the U.S. ever got under Bush to actually laying hands on Osama bin, not something that the American establishment, with all that Saudi money at stake, wanted to happen); the farcical invasion, employing a comically small U.S. force, allied to a rapehappy congery of warlords, presided over by a General surveying the whole thing from a base in Florida; the happy battle of Tora Bora, in which the U.S. sent a message by bombing the entrance of the cave system not the rear (it would have been unseemly to have just said, escape by the rear you dingbat, we need you around to be a threat on tap!); Osama bins flight on a magic pony, to who know where, just so hard to find that guy!; and finally, the assembly of much of the Taliban high command at Kunduz, with U.S. troops surrounding them, who were evacuated by plane by Pakistan with the tacit consent of the Bushies; all in all a glory that we need to revisit in a speeded up version!

We remember, fondly, that the media during this point in time was careful not to report news that they accidentally found out about, like that Kunduz matter – this would depress your average taxpayer, who would not see the Rumsfeldian cleverness of it all! Far better to report the news on things two to three years after you find them out, so that nothing could be done and we could forget what happened.

We can speed through the rest – the U.S. war against the tally high command that our U.S. ally, Pakistan, to whom we were giving billions a year, had airlifted out, as per above; - the jailing of random Afghanis, and the delicacy with which we let our Afghan warlord allies rape and steal; the famine which we all just forgot; and one of my fave memories, the way the Bush administration promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and then (oopsy!) put $0.00 down on the plan in their 2002 budget. Because words, as we know, are much more important than acts. After all, in the beginning was the word, and the rest you can pocket in bursts of money as a subcontractor, privatizing the whole deal!

Down this road we hop again. That is, our power elite. Out here in the countryside, though, where upper middle class libs and their AI invested friends assure us it is all redneck racism, we are not so sure. In fact, we are sure the war with Iran is the worst kind of shitstorm available, ignorant peasants that we are. But the political people saying this are surely extremist. What we want to do is listen to podcasts from the Third Way, torture transpeople, and guarantee the safety of Israel all the way to Valhalla!

I title this part of American history: how we became so fucked.

Untitled by Karen Chamisso

 

Untitled

 

I, too, stumbled with Raskolnikov

hatted in the dusty street

the sun’s eternity hanging

like an accusation in my pupils

 

and cursed the oppressors of the people,

and cursed the people, oppressed.

Rapist drunks loll

In their vintages in the ditches.

 

The money lend who opened the door

- I was her, too

- as  the ax split open my head.

Last thought: don’t kill, mister

 

My crippled sister hiding in the closet

- my wounded eternity, my bled and fled identity

absorbed entirely in

this impotent flash.

 

- Karen Chamisso