Nathaniel Mackay's oppositional nostalgia, and mine

 

The poet Nathaniel Mackay wrote a brilliant, manifesto-like  essay in 1987 entitled “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” that begins, as most American poetic manifestos do not begin, with a consideration of anthropological fact. Mackay begins with the belief about sound and music – bird music, wind music – of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Kaluli myth – rather like Greek myth – locates the origin of music in the moment in which a human being is transformed into a bird. Philomela of course has left her mark on modern poetry – jug jug to dirty ears/so rudely forced. In the Kaluli case, a boy and his sister are catching crayfish. The boy begs some of the crayfish from his sister. She refuses. He puts a crayfish over his nose, which becomes a red beak. Then he spouts wings and flies away as a muni bird. Rather like the Grimm’s tale, the Juniper Bush, in which the soul of a murdered boy becomes a bird that sings an accusatory song, the muni bird’s song goes: "Your crayfish you didn't give me. I have no sister. I'm hungry . . .”

Mackay begins in Papua because he wants to make a point about the world.

 

“One easily sees the compatibility of this musical concept of the world, this assertion of the intrinsic symbolicity of the world, with poetry. Yeats's view that the artist "belongs to the invisible life" or Rilke's notion of poets as "bees of the invisible" sits agreeably beside Zuckerkandl's assertion that "because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world. The intangible and invisible is itself a part of this world, something we encounter, something to which we respond.” Victor Zuckerkandl is the musicologist whose story of the Kaluli is sampled by Mackay.

Which brings us to the question: isn’t this all just pre-scientific nonsense?

Mackay’s argument, his poetics, begins with the rejection of the overarching positivism that poses that rhetorical question and comfortably answers it with an “of course”. But Mackay doesn’t want to reject that positivism for some reactionary theology. Instead, in a wonderful coinage, Mackay calls for an “oppositional nostalgia.” Mackay’s essay is centered on black music, the orphaned boy’s song, but moves widely among a number of texts, including Toomer’s Cane. “Cane is fueled by an oppositional nostalgia. A precarious vessel possessed of an eloquence coincident with loss, it wants to reach or to keep in touch with an alternate reality as that reality fades.”

My own sense of politics is absolutely in touch with Mackay’s poetics. My mature life has coincided with the fading of all the postwar social democratic institutions. And I have seen the left hamstrung by a rhetoric and conceptual structure that, while useful to the making of those institutions, seems at a loss to defend them. I’ve seen that especially lately in France, where Macron’s killing of the social security system is opposed by the vast majority, which is an opportunity that the left does not know how to take advantage of. But this is an old story, as old as my twenties, the years of Reagan and Thatcher. The reification of revolution only gives us a past to break from. But a larger perspective shows us the need for an oppositional nostalgia – for the reference landscapes of childhood, for instance – those landscapes that have been decayed and attacked by our petrochemical treadmill of production, to the point that they are turning against us.

There are many levels of oppositional nostalgia. I think I have moved within that term, without knowing it, my entire life, and I think I know some of those levels.