the end of the european pastoral

 

When I was an adolescent, embedded in metro Atlanta, I dreamed of Europe. The Europe I saw in movies. The Europe I read about in books. The Europe I saw in paintings, or to be more specific, reproductions of paintings in books.

In this Europe, people strolled in meadows. Hell, sometimes they lounged naked in meadows. And, significantly for a child of suburban development in land that was once half junkyard, half forest, these Europeans never seemed to worry about being bitten. They swam in streams and didn’t think about water moccasins, they skipped about in meadows without slapping down mosquitos and gnats, and, significantly, they could plop themselves down anywhere without inspecting the area for ant mounds – that is, for fire ants.

I have plenty personal experience of fire ants, and they do disturb the pastoral mood. And o my droogs, they are always on for a skorry up the legs and a little collective stinging. This they are amazingly good at. I remember, once, doing a landscaping job in Louisiana, when I was out of my pissant teens, and somehow rummaging up a metro of the fuckers. It was not a good time to be me.

So imagine my horrors when I read in Liberation that pastoral Europe, the Europe of picnics, prime vacation and retirement spot for cavemen in the paleolithic, the Europe of my teendreams, is going going gone. Fire ants have landed. In fact, there are now metros of them in Sicily.  

“In September, an article in Current Biology revealed the presence of 88 nests near Syracuse. Monday, the same researchers in the same journal confirmed that the species, an especially invasive one, has in reality put down its hooves in the southwest of the island since at least 2017.”

Of mosquitos, the turn of the climate has delivered a nice soupy warm niche for them in Paris and all over France and one gets bitten even in the winter, now. But this dread footfall of the fireant on Sicily is truly the forenote of bitterer things. The last time the order of nature was broken up by some underground force in Sicily was when Proserpine was raped by Hades.

“Neare Enna walles there standes a Lake, Pergusa is the name.

 Cayster heareth not mo songs of Swannes than doth the same.

A wood environs everie side the water round about,

And with his leaves as with a veyle doth keepe the Sunne heate out.

The boughes do yeelde a coole fresh Ayre : the moystnesse of the grounde

 Yeeldes sundrie flowres : continuall spring is all the yeare there founde.

 While in this garden Proserpine was taking hir pastime.

 

In gathering eyther Violets blew, or Lillies white as Lime,

And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap,

Endevoring to outgather hir companions there.”

 

The end of that rape story was the start of the seasons – which, as we know, we are now seeing the end of, seemingly frozen in shock. It was another fiery insect – the fire fly – that was lamented in a prophetic essay by Pasolini: Where have all the fireflies gone? This was written in 1975.

“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches) fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and terrible. After a few years the fireflies were not longer there. (They are now a painful memory from the past; and an older man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters, as he once was, because they have no store of such memories.)”

We all know that extinction is the price of prosperity. But what happens when the prosperity turns, finally, on us? For are we really more useful than the fireflies? A question that the fire ants can answer – we’ve been o so useful to them. Ring down the curtain on a world that endured from Ovid to Pasolini, then. It brings juice to me glazzies, it really does. Finis.

Renata Adler on pre-totalitarianism

 

In 1977, Renata Adler inaugurated a piece for the New York Review of Books with two great, dire paragraphs that seem like banners for that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War decade:

“When too many scandals have gone on for too long, uninterrupted and inadequately investigated, they tend to merge. What began as isolated instances of corruption grow toward each other and finally interlock. The nursing home operators, and private garbage collectors, and parking lot owners, and film industry executives, and cable television interests, and vending machine distributors, and recording companies, and casino operators, the teamsters, the Mafia, and defense contractors, and finally the investigative agencies of government and elected officials up to the highest level begin to have in common not just a general corruption but joint ventures and even personnel.

That is an extremely dangerous moment in public life. It is almost impossible to understand. People with an abstract turn of mind adopt conspiracy theories—when the problem is not a conspiracy but some other link. Investigative reporters, meanwhile, find sources, gather facts. There is a lot of news. But the meaning, the most obvious inferences, in a time of high scandal, are lost in a deluge of trivially depressing information.|

Those two graphs still give me a contact high. Adler had been a speechwriter for the chairman of the House committee that investigated Nixon in 1973. She was then a self-proclaimed liberal Republican – a species even then suffering a drastic decline in the popular base. The line from Teddy Roosevelt to Teddy Lindsey had been annexed by the Southern strategy, which proved fatal to anything like the centrist politics Adler affected. She located herself in a niche outside of “ideology”, when such positioning seemed viable after the ideological forays of the New Left.

Reading the essay now, one notices that, after beginning with two quotes from Henry and Charles Adam’s great essay on the Eerie Railroad, a prescient warning against corporate power, Adler dismisses the problem of the corporation as an entity in a democratic republic and turns to the corruption of the Teamsters Union.

“What the Adams brothers feared never quite happened; the republic survived its corporate threat. But that threat had all the elements—in particular, the collaboration of the morally and intellectually disoriented victim—which we have recognized, since Hannah Arendt,  as pre-totalitarian. The threat recurs, in other times, in other forms. How close, after all, is the analogy between the present member of any notoriously corrupt union and the Adams brothers’ small investor. Every teamster has for decades had reason to know that his leaders are not only, in some way remote from his own interest, criminal. They are stealing his pension. Still, it is “his” union—in precisely the sense in which the robber barons’ rail-roads were the small investor’s corporation.”

The seventies was the age of de-regulation, a strategy lead – and this has gone down memory hole – by Senator Ted Kennedy. A liberal of the type that doubled down on capitalist competition as the solution to our woes. It was Kennedy that led the fight to deregulate airline travel, resulting eventually in the destruction of the FAA. Out of this fight we get our current airline monopolies and the inability to get to medium sized cities in America as we no longer subvent those flights.

A long-term Kennedy enemy was Jimmy Hoffa. Adler’s shot at the Teamsters was standard for the time. It was also true, to the extent that the Teamsters were in cahoots with the Mafia. Jackie Presser, the Teamsters president, was on everybody’s payroll – including the FBI.

However, a little thing happened on the way to the Union’s “reform.” The Teamster member whose dues were being stolen, much to Adler’s dismay, saw his union taken over by a government oversight committee. A headline from 2016 sums up the result: “How the Teamsters pension disappeared more quickly under Wall Street than the mob.” In fact, what the Adams brothers feared happened just as they imagined it. The learned inability of the state to act as a social democratic entity has given us a far right Court system, deregulation on every level, massive wealth inequality, and a lifestyle only supported by massive household debt. The democratic deficit we are struggling with has nothing to do with the corruptions of unions, and everything to do with legalizing the corruption of corporations.

That said, one does admire the icy clarity of Adler’s prose – even if that clarity is purchased at the expense of pre-suppositions that are not clearly argued for. So here’s a bit about Watergate that is all about our present:

“What we had for a time at the heart of government was not what Ron Ziegler, in the tapes, so memorably called a Rashomon situation, but a scenario from an earlier work. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the hero is a man who has been recruited as a police agent in a group of seven anarchists, each of whom has adopted the name of a day of the week. At meeting after meeting, a member of the group is exposed as such an agent. As Friday, Wednesday, and several others are discovered, Thursday fears each time that it is he who has been found out. By the end of the book, it turns out that every single anarchist was really a police agent in disguise. It is, in real life, normal for police and outlaws to be mutually dependent and to share an interest—as prison guards require, for their continued employment, the continued existence of prisoners, and therefore, of crimes. But when they share an identity, when the enforcers of narcotics laws are the sellers of narcotics, when the cops are the robbers, and the investigators the coverers-up, the foundations of common truth and honesty are shattered altogether, and society requires a subtle (and lucky) combination of forces to dig itself out.”

We have long passed the point where this combination of forces is marginal. It is as central to our functioning as flows of untaxed black money from unspecified sources are to the functioning of banks and private equity firms.  We are all Panama, now, Jake.

Tasting with your eye: on the too much of reality

 

« Savoir  être  superficiel par profondeur. » I extract this maxim from Georges Salles “Le regard” – The look. The deep know how to be superficial – the English explains too much, decompresses the spring, here. English is a good language for punchlines, while French is one for epigrams.

I came upon the name Georges Salles in Adrienne Monnier’s essay about her late friend, Walter Benjamin, published by Mercure de France in 1952. Monnier was Sylvia Beach’s lover – two real live muses, Beach, of course, of James Joyce, and Monnier of a number of writers, including Walter Benjamin, who she first met in 1930 at her famous bookstore/salon. He wrote Monnier a letter when he was on his final flight from the Nazis out of Paris to Marseilles, and then, by a fatal misstep, by way of the Pyrenees to Spain.  

“I keep thinking of you not only in dreaming of Paris and rue de L’Odeon, for which I wish the most powerful and least solicited protective divinities – but also a many of the intersections of my thought.”

A muse in need of a muse.

Georges Salles’  Le Regard was a shared enthusiasm of Monnier and Benjamin. Salles was, officially, an expert on “Asian” art. He was also a great defender of the art of the connoisseur, an art founded not, for him, on signatures, on attribution, but on the ocular enjoyment – like the tongue, the eye has its pure pleasures. Salles was the grandchild of Gustave Eiffel, and the collaborator of Andre Malraux. However, a book about the sensual delight of the visible, published in 1939, was not likely to survive the sensual horror of the war.

«  The certainty of the amateur’s glance is neither more intellectual nor less organic than the selection of a gourmet. Everything happens in the shokc of an impression, confusing to our mind but distinct to our senses.”  Here was a man of a certain radical empiricism: thought follows the senses at a distance, as the kite, as spectacular as it may be, follows the string held by the child. The child determines, in the last instance, whether to bring the kite down or to let it go.

It is the last chapter of The Look that might have truly fired up Benjamin: the day. The author goes out of the museum, away from the paintings and sculptures, and into the streets of Paris to use his heightened optical sense. This return to life is I think something we have all experienced – although for me the experience is going from a movie that has really delighted me or moved me out of the theatre into the streets. Ideally, the movie ends at, say, eight o’clock p.m. on an early spring day. Ideally, the city is New Orleans or Atlanta – and I am in my twenties. The transfer from one realm of fascination to another is a curiously delayed passage – the streets “look” cinematic. This experience is described by no one better than Walker Percy in The Movie Goer. I know the streets that Percy’s character, Binx, walked around. I have a distinct memory of coming out of Prytania theatre dazzled by one movie or another, and walking back across Audobon Park to the apartment in the upper floor of one of the big houses that I shared with Frank. Frank is long gone in my life, a boat that has drifted away, but I do remember the elevation of common life that succeeded seeing some movies, that little extra around things – as Nietzsche puts it in the intro to the Twilight of the Idols, “nothing succeeds without some measure of exaggeration. The too much of force is proof of force.”

This is named, approximately, the “Search” in the Moviegoer. Binx, the narrator, calls it waking up and finding one is in a strange place. “The movies are onto the search but they screw it up.” Or sometimes, when you are young, they give you the impulse. Even movies shown on TV gave me that moment, sometimes.

It isn’t such a long distance from Georges Salles in 1939 in Paris (to whom Benjamin dedicated his last published bit of writing when he was still alive) and me in 1982, walking home from the Prytania movie theatre. An almost equal distance separates me from 1982 and 1982 from 1939. In Seven league boots, I go backwards.

Non-agression pacts: from Molotov-Ribbentrop to James Angleton

 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has been burned into our intellectual history: here, at last, Stalin cast off the mask and Soviet Communism was revealed as a reactionary force. It has become a trope in the literature: how violent anti-Nazi communists, overnight, turned into pacifists.

However, a secret and parallel non-aggression pact was made after the war – this time, between the American military and intelligence services and various talented anti-communist Nazis. This pact was not officialized with any pomp – rather, it was the object of various “programs”, codenamed Dustbin, or Paperclip, or simply acted upon by various American intelligence agents who carried into the field America’s enduring racism and a hefty backwoods or Yale educated anti-communism.

The products of the later pact sometimes emerged in trials, and sometimes emerged in memoirs. The entire West German intelligence service began under Gehlen, a highranking Nazi Abwehr officer, pretty much where it left off in 1944, when Gehlen’s army – Hitler’s Army – was in mass retreat from Russia.

In Italy, the non-aggression pact was operationalized by the leading intelligence officer in Italy at that time, James Angleton, who had family connections in Italy who had connections to various highranking fascists. These fascists included many who, later on in Italian history, subvented neo-fascists groups, created various behind the scenes groups, and occasionally broke out into outright attempts at coups. Angleton’s friend, the “Black Prince”, Junio Valerio Borghese, famously plotted one of those coup, which failed in 1970, forcing Borghese to flee to friendly Franco’s Spain.

Another result of what one might want to call the Angleton-Borghese non-aggression pact was the American support for Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe, the effects of which have ramified over the decades. Violen Trifa, a Romanian Iron Gardist,  lead the youth wing of the Iron Gard in a merciless rebellion in Bucharest against the government in 1941. The Iron Gardists were ecstatically sadistic: Jewish prisoners were taken by the Iron Guard to the municipal  slaughterhouse. "There," White [an American correspondant] wrote, "in a fiendish parody of kosher methods of butchering, they hung many of the Jews on meat hooks and slit their throats; others they forced to kneel at chopping blocks while they [Iron Guardists] beheaded them with cleavers." Fourteen years later, after Trifa had found his way by various backroutes to America and become a bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church and a standup anti-communist, he was invited by Richard Nixon to give the opening prayer at the U.S. Senate. Trifa’s is an extreme case – he denied for a long time being part of the Iron Guard - but the American military and intelligence forces in Germany and Austria after the war soon put into practice their own form of Ribbentrop - Molotov. And they kept their bargain with their former Nazi factotums. Walter Schreiber, who apparently gave good data from his biowar experiments on concentration camp inmates, was imported to the US and found employment with the Air Force. Unfortunately for Schreiber, the press got ahold of his past – a rare case in the fifties – and so the U.S. arranged for him to slip away to Argentina. Eventually, he ended up working for Paraguay’s fiercely anti-communist dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. A memo from the Pentagon showed the military exasperation with the pettifogging around such as Schreiber: “an organized medical movement against [Schreiber], emanating from Boston, by medical men of Jewish ancestry, I would suspect.”

 

These stories have been around since the late seventies – from John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret in 1982 to Ann Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip in 2014. The books are not, it should be noted, by academics, nor is there an academic sub-department dedicated to what happened to the Nazis, fascists and collaborators after WWII – in the popular imagination and in academic studies, what happened was the Nuremberg Trial. And, in particular, while Yale University, for instance, publishes a whole series on Communist spies in America, nobody mixes these studies with the study of the use, by an unelected American establishment, of Nazis in America, and elsewhere. This is no small blind spot – if we had a good, contextually rich sense of how the extreme right was supported after the war by its former enemies – the U.S., the U.K., France and the U.S.S.R – we would have a morally clarified image of the history of the last 75 years. We don’t have that.

 

But even from what we do have, we know that an American establishment long identified anti-communism as the guiding star of American foreign and domestic policy, much more so than democracy of “freedom”. As a result, Americans – liberals and conservatives – have a very distorted view of America’s “exceptionalism.”

Eye-traps - the dash in Emily Dickenson

 

When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Twain in Huck Finn, Emmiline Grangerford, with her creepy sub-Poe fascination with funerals. She was the farthest thing from the wilder shore of Walt Whitman, I thought.

I read Dickinson as she was edited and domesticated, starting with her first posthumous editors, her brother’s lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It was only in the 60s that the wilder shore of Dickinson’s poetry started to emerge, beginning with the complete edition of her poems edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1960. Crucially, Johnson restored the dashes to the poems – which are to the poems what the axe was to Lizzie Borden. The dash, that punctuation interruptus, gave the poems back their sanguinary impulse. We could finally read Dickinson.

The chronology of literature can’t be specified by dates of publication, which is why it has a strange causal structure. For instance, where in that chronology would I place the great book by Susan Howe – My Emily Dickinson. Howe’s book is in that rare vein of poet’s books – Williams In the American Grain, Zukofsky’s Apollinaire, Olson’s Melville – that shifts your vision and shows that the order one assumed is not the true order at all, at all.  For Howe, Dickinson was the most radical poet of the 19th century.

 

To make a comparison she doesn’t make – just as Georg Buchner seemed to invent the theater of the 1920s in the plays he wrote in the 1830s, so, too, Dickinson seems to have invented the lyric difficulty we associate with the poets of the end of modernism – poets as different as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich - around the time of the American civil war.

 

Howe adroitly inserts Jonathan Edwards into Dickinson’s intellectual background, and Emily Bronte as her true contemporary. One poet she doesn’t mention is Lord Byron.

Thomas Moore’s edition of Byron’s Letters and Journals was published in the U.S. in the 1840s. The letters were defanged, but the journals retained Byron’s characteristic skipping dash, for instance: “While you are under the influence of passions, you only feel, but cannot describe them, — any more than, when in action, you could turn round and tell the story to your next neighbour! When all is over, — all, all, and irrevocable, — trust to memory — she is then but too faithful.” Byron’s dashes, unlike Dickinson’s, have an aristocratic disdain for the mere plebe assemblies of rote classroom English. Dickinson, though, if she read Moore’s edition, would certainly have seen how they could work.

 

Jane Stabler, in an essay on Byron’s dashes, has noticed how they bothered his critics when he plied them in his poems. One of the critics used the term “eye-trap” for this use of dashes:

 

When the British Critic praised Byron for omitting the dashy “eye-traps” in Lara, the phrase “eye-trap” (from the 1750s, according to the OED) was used presumably as a variant of “clap-trap,” the extended pause that set apart moments of high emotion in theatrical performances, designed to attract the attention and applause of the audience.

 

On the page, Byron’s promiscuous “em” dashing resembles the visual appearance of the Shakespeare plays David Garrick prepared for the Drury Lane Threatre. Garrick used a dash to signal where an actor should pause for effect so that in his published adaptations, as Warren Oakley has shown, “[t]ypography indicates the location of each dramatic caesura, but is silent about the nature of the action filling the expressive pause … prompting the imagination of the reader”  

 

 

Of course, Dickinson was a pretty radical DIY type of poet, and may well have done without prompts. But I would love some genealogy of the dashes, on the lines of the way Guy Davenport, in his essay on Cummings in Every Force Evolves a Form, saw how Cummings saw the opportunity in the way Greek verses, as for instance Sapho’s, were published with scholarly apparatus in the Loeb Library editions.

 

"And when these early poems, none of which has survived entire but exist on torn, rotted, ratgnawn papyrus or parchment, are set in type for the modern student of Greek, such as Edward Estlin Cummings, Greek major at Harvard (1911-1916), the text is a frail scatter of lacunae, conjectures, brackets, and parentheses. They look, in fact, very like an E. E. Cummings poem. His eccentric margins, capricious word divisions, vagrant punctuation, tmeses, and promiscuously embracing parentheses, can be traced to the scholarly trappings which a Greek poem wears on a textbook page. Cummings' playfulness in writing a word like "l(oo)k"-a pair of eyes looking from inside the word – must have been generated by the way scholars restore missing letters in botched texts, a Greek l[oo]k, where the 1 and k are legible on a papyrus, there's space for two letters between them, and an editor has inserted a conjectural oo."

 

I think Dickinson unleashed is such a different spirit from Dickinson leashed that to read her poems in the normalized editions is not to have any true sense of her, if such a thing were possible.  Compare:

 

Wild nights – Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

 

Futile – the winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

 

Rowing in Eden –

Ah – the Sea!

Might I but moor – tonight –

In thee!

 

As compared to this:

 

Wild nights! Wild nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, —

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in thee!

 

This is of course one of the famous poems. The referential strangeness – rowing in Eden? – is subdued, I’d claim, in the second version, just as the Wild Nights, a repetition that is divided by a repelling dash to create a sort of negative identity, is annealed in the double exclamation marks of the more conventional, the more romantic exclamation of the second version (Ah! the Sea!) The placement of the exclamation marks in the second version – and the erasure of the exclamation marks in the second stanza, after “done with the Chart”  - seems, similarly, to take us to the stylistics of romantic poetry, rather than the asperities that Howe sees in the Puritan doctrine underneath the lines, asperities that tossing away the Chart makes more vivid.

 

 

the contemporary

 

It was the late nineteenth century social philosopher Gabriel Tarde who first suggested that the public and publics, which in earlier times were defined for the most part by their haptic proximity – all those salons and coffee houses – are formed, now, by the subordination of the haptic to another kind and degree of proximity, a social mode of temporality – simultaneity – that Tarde mentions in connection with the news.

News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, there is an important conceptual shift, in as much as news is connected, in English, to the new, whereas actuality is connected to a block of time we can call the “present”. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity,” but unfortunately he does not disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity in all its extension as a social form of time, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”.

However, we know that  ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. There is a curious paradox in following “the-same-time” – it is rather like following oneself on a walk. Is your walk separable from the you that walked it?

Yet the social temporality of the simultaneous is defined by the way it keeps moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under this baptism and curse. Modernity is the era in which the modern is invented.

The philosopher Vincent Descombes, in “What is the contemporary?”, takes a shot at defining this form of social time. He divides its meaning into two grand and different semantic regions. The first is from the point of view of history: “The contemporary is an age. It comes in the programs of history which include, as their last part, the study of the modern and contemporary world: the contemporary world appears as the most advanced point of the modern world.”

The second is “furnished by reflection on time.” Descombes takes a strongly Aristotelian approach to time. “There where nothing changes, there is no temporality. In fact, the notion of change imposes conceiving something like a temporal distance or a difference of times between many states of the world. Time is the order in which changes are made, an order of what is before and of what is after.

If one asks a philosophy of time for a notion of the contemporary, one would conceive the contemporary as a competition between many actual changes. To be contemporary would mean sharing historical actuality.”

Descombes language is in the abstract philosophical line, so that “worlds” don’t refer specifically to the history that we know of this world, but simply to ontic ensembles. In this way, the contemporary is lifted from its material anchors and one can talk of a contemporaneity in any world. This is useful, anthropologically – it at least lays out the terms of an anthropological project. But to my mind, what is useful about the notion of the contemporary is that it gives us a “quasi-transcendent” which we can see emerge in what Lotman called the semiosphere – in media itself.

Lyric apocalypse

 

Poetry, sez those who refuse to include the whole universe of the blues, rock, punk, emo, rap, dap, and other music in the poetry genre, is no longer popular, or read, or used, or culturally central.

I’m doubtful of those claims. Poetry is, I’d contend, what happens when a person thinks – poetry first, logic afterwards.

However, it is true that the lyric – and of a particular type, with the shrinking of the poem to the poet, to the poet’s word, a shrinking from persona to personality – has triumphed over other forms. Pound’s Cantos, Olson’s Maximus poems have their draw and make their mark, but the great influences are confessional, personal rather than persona centered.

That form of lyric has its price: the toll of suicided American poets alone is impressive: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell. A lyric apocalypse. Robert Lowell only succeeded in avoiding putting the knife to his own throat by sheer luck: the manias and cruelties of his life are well known.

What I’m getting at here is: a poetry that throws off the mask is, perhaps, a symptom of something going on within the poetic system. Hart Crane’s children, in a sense, lost contact with the endurance at the heart of Whitman and Dickinson, the founding poets. A poetry that measures how much you cannot endure – this is the siren of negation, tempting the sailor to jump.

In “The Rational of Verse”, Poe writes: “Verse originates in the human enjoyment of equality, fitness.” Poe is writing of the compensatory movement of sound in the rhythms of poetry.

I’d suggest that the birth of the lyric as confession originates in an infant trait studied in depth by the psychologist Katherine Nelson. Nelson was fascinated by the puzzle of infant amnesia – the fact that humans do not remember very much about their first years. In pursuing this puzzle, Nelson came across two academics whose child, Emily, showed great signs of precocity. The parents took to recording their girl’s monologues in the crib, before she went to bed, from the age of 22 months to the age of 37 months – something that would only occur to academic parents. Nelson was surprised to find that Emily’s “crib talk” – the monologue she repeated to herself as she went to sleep – was linguistically more sophisticated than most of her talk with her caregivers and other children. Nelson’s attributes this higher level of discursive quality to the fact that these monologues were not aimed at sleep so much as they were at understanding her “self” – what she had done, what she was going to do, what she felt, etc. As Nelson puts it, the themes of Emily’s monologues concern “what happened” (with its attendant linguistic markers of tense and temporal adjectives), “what is going to happen”, and “what should happen”. Into these person-centered themes she also introduces story themes from stories that are told or read to her.

Our little Emily is, as it were, giving birth to all the forms of poetry – the epic, the dramatic, the lyric – in her monologues. Out of crib talk, Berryman ‘s sonnets and Plath’s lyrics. Helen Vendler wrote that the “lyric is the genre of private life: it is what we say to ourselves when we are alone.”  Emily’s crib talk, in a sense, precedes the private life – an in this sense the lyric does not derive from what we say to ourselves when we are alone, but is how we begin to have a private life that consists of saying things to ourselves when we are alone. The pulse and the heart are coeterminus.

Which leaves the question: why is the poet’s crib talk so risky to the poet’s chances of survival?

Here’s Emily in Episode 1.4 – Nelson divided the monologues into episodes.

1.    Maybe the doctor,

2.    Took my jamas (very soft) I don’t know.

3.    Maybe, maybe we take my jamas off.

4.    But I leave my diaper

5.    Take my jamas off,

6.    And leave them off,

7.    At the doc-

8.    My have get my check up,

9.    So we take my jamas off.

10.  My don’t know this looking all better

11.  (??) doctor, doc,

12.  The boys take back home.

13.  The, and we maybe take my jamas off.

14.  I don’t know what we do with with my…

15.  Maybe the doctore take my jamas

16.  My jamas off cause my maybe get check up,

17.  Have to to take my jamas

 

Talking oneself past the disaster that threatens to swallow us and take our jamas off – that is obviously both one of the functions of the crib talk and of the lyric invocation of existential menace. But lyric understanding might set up that menace, those disasters, all too often to endure, without a countering experience – say, of returning with one’s jamas intact. The “I don’t know” balanced by the “Now I know”, the passage into experience. But if we insist on returning to the I don’t know, that moment full of self’s lack of control –  if such is the movement of the lyric – and if we insist on staying there, in the negative – we might lose our practical ability to get out of it. Or rather, forget our practical ability that has, in the past, gotten out of it.  We lose touch with experience itself.

Only one aspect, of course, of the lyric apocalypse. But one to consider in these dark days.