totalitarianism today

Reading Thomas McGrath as the Confederate statues come down.

Richard Spencer throwing a party.

 

This is a nightmare nimble in the Big House,

Where sleepers are wakeful, cuddling their terror,

In the empty acres of their rich beds, dreaming

Of bones in museums, where the black boys yawn.

 

[from Thomas McGrath's "Deep South"]

In the era of tiki-torch fascism, when our consumer appetites for ethnocentrism are easily provisioned by Wal-Mart, I read Thomas McGrath to get a sense of what is falling. And what should have fallen long ago.

A few snippets from McGrath's incredible poem, "Ordonnance", which I discovered in my notebooks lacking any reference or context. 

During a war the poets turn to war
In praise of the merit of the death of the ball-turret gunner.
It is well-arranged: each in his best manner
One bleeds, one blots-- as they say, it has happened before....

.............

They are fighting, fighting-- Oh yes. But somewhere else.
In the dark.
The poet reads by firelight as the nations burn.

The poet's community must be built to encompass all human beings. All poetry-consuming mammals.

We have no property to defend that is not ultimately shared. No borders to maintain against one another. No statues to hold sacred. 

Comes now one who has been conquered
By all he sees. And asks what—would have what—
Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero?

 

More than the hands on the lines and the back aching,
The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty,
More than this forever lonely round
Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair:
Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate
More bankrupt than this godlike heresy
Which asks of love more leave than extended credit,
Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these
Worn acres even if over them
Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

[from Thomas McGrath's "Woodcut"]

Source: Atlas Obscura

Hope unto hope, dream beyond monstrous dream

I sought the world.

Now, at the black pitch and midnight of despair,

I find it was always here.

[from Thomas McGrath's "The Progress of the Soul"]

 

And then my favorite, a poem that has kept me company through the years, through the Iraqs, through the failures of foreign policy and humanity. McGrath's "War Resister's Song":

 

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove--
Or such as presidents may spare
Within the decorum of Total War.

 

A collage conversation on autofiction and writers using writers.

Good recommendations for #autofiction reading?

— alina stefanescu (@aliner) May 15, 2017

Joe Bunting: 

Autofiction is a term used in literary criticism to refer to a form of fictionalized autobiography. That’s the strict meaning of the word. It can also refer to fictionalizing a real event of the writer’s life.

Alina: 

In attempting to write the physical condition of pregnancy, I keep running into the epistemological limitations imposed by masculine bodies. Perhaps prose poetry is a form equipped to manage these epistemic challenges. 

Barbara Browning on Ben Lerner:

    We both had an approach to autofiction that drew attention to its own devices.

Barbara Browning:

I’ve found that most people like being fictionalized. More often, the anxiety they express is that after they’ve been written into a novel, I’ll somehow be “done” with them—but for me, writing someone into a novel is never about forgetting them. If anything, it’s a way for me to hold on to people I love.

Rebecca Miller:

I think perhaps the idea of the writer as someone who "uses" people is itself suspect. It makes the writer into a sort of predator—maybe even an abuser—whereas what you seem to be saying is that writing about someone or incorporating aspects of them into fiction is very often an expression of love, as it surely is when I write about you or aspects of you. But I think that a kind of love can be expressed even when the person is not painted in a totally flattering light. Under the umbrella of "love" in this case I'm including attention, focus, fascination, and the warmer aspects of the emotion. Writing is a way of connecting to people, and the writer sculpts in flesh. We only have other people, the sensual world, to clothe our ideas in.

Samuel R. Delany:

You have to remember there’s always what’s said and then there’s what happens. And there’s always a discrepancy between them.

Karl Ove Knausgaard:

…the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined my efforts.

Alina:

The gap between the male body and the female body is, in many ways, unbridgeable. I understand male resentment on they front-- to bear a body that bears only possibility, reliant on permission. The performative aspect of pregnancy fascinates me-- the difference between a wanted pregnancy and an unwanted approximates the value of the female body as desired or undesired. That's why the Women's March read like an auto-fiction. There were so many male bodies standing in for pregnant female bodies, filling in the imaginative gaps, performing resistance (and-- somehow) pregnancy.

Juliet Jacques:

There’s a really long history of trans people writing memoir that goes back as far as the earliest sex-reassignment surgeries, like Lili Elbe, who died in the course of an operation in 1931. A couple of years after her death an autobiography came out, called Man into Woman. That’s quite an interesting text in itself because the central character has a male pseudonym and a female pseudonym that weren’t the names Lili Elbe used either pre- or post-transition. Then it’s edited by someone called Niels Hoyer, which is in itself a pseudonym. So you have this text that’s gone through several layers of authorship and editorship, and no-one will put their name to it.

Alina: 

Twice he asked her to cancel the gym membership because he’d read a story in which a hallway of mirrors stole a girl’s image from her body and gave it to others. He wanted her image to be something between them. He didn’t want others to imagine the wench.

Jeff Jackson:

In fiction, I believe that the only truth and reality that matter are the words on the page. Events may or may not have transpired from real life, but the words themselves represent the only authenticity. So it’s not about shame and honesty—in fact, honesty is a word whose usefulness starts to vaporize in the context of a novel. In the realm of the imagination, the facts hold no currency. 

Alina:

I don't think Christ ever mentioned a fetus. The fictionalizing of an anti-abortion Jesus is the greatest heresy of the age. A blockbuster. 

Barbara Browning:

All you have to do is walk into a bar and have somebody start telling you the story of their life to realize that everybody, to some degree, is an unreliable narrator—especially of him or herself. I try very hard to be honest in my fiction, again not because I find that morally superior but because it interests me, what that means, to try to be honest in fiction. I talk about that in this book—that is, the narrator explains to someone who’s lied to her, “Even in my fiction, if I say, ‘This really happened,’ then it’s true. It really happened.” If she tells you something that didn’t happen, she says, “This is fiction.”

Alina:

On the porch, her husband flaps his hands and mimicks bird calls as a substitute for the emoticon she might have glimpsed of him on screen. She is not allowed to see his emoticons, as a man's emoticons must remain private.

Zbigniew Herbert's "The Wall."

 

We are standing under the wall. Our youth has been taken off like a shirt from the condemned men. We wait. Before the fat bullet will sit down on the nape of the neck, ten, twenty years pass. The wall is high and strong. Behind the wall is a tree and a star. The tree pries at the wall with its roots. The star nibbles the stone like a mouse. In a hundred, two hundred years there will already be a small window.

[translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter]

"Lies", a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Lies 

Lying to the young is wrong. 
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong. 
Telling them 
            that God’s in his heaven 
and all’s well with the world 
                             is wrong. 
They know what you mean. 
                        They are people too. 
Tell them the difficulties 
                          can’t be counted, 
and let them see 
                not only 
                        what will be 
but see 
       with clarity 
                   these present times. 
Say obstacles exist they must encounter, 
sorrow comes, 
             hardship happens. 
The hell with it. 
                 Who never knew 
the price of happiness 
                      will not be happy. 
Forgive no error 
                you recognize, 
it will repeat itself, 
                      a hundredfold 
and afterward 
             our pupils 
will not forgive in us 
                      what we forgave.

I found this translation online at The American Dissident, which also has two other Yevtushenko poems deserving your immediate attention, especially one of my all-time favorites, "Conversations With An American Writer". As former President Dubya taught us, lies don't magically disappear- they just blow up in other people's faces. 

My thoughts on Ukraine and Russia take the form of recycled poems.

In April 2004, Adam Zagajewski's poem, "Referendum", was published in The Guardian. It sums my thoughts on the current conflict in Ukraine. No revolution occurs without contest. No nation-states break apart without the feeling of losing a limb, often battling to keep the amputation from taking place. 

The question of intervention often involves deciding at what point forcible amputation must be applied- and whether the cost of agreeing to coercion leaves others more free and secure. There are no easy answers- and the guillotine's shadow hangs heavy.

Photo source: Sergey Ponomarev for the NYT

REFERENDUM

    (Adam Zagajewski)

Ukraine held a referendum
on independence.
It was foggy in Paris, the weatherman
predicted a cold and cloudy day.
I was angry at myself, at my 
narrow, fettered life.
The Seine was trapped between embankment walls.
Bookstores showcased 
a new edition of Schopenhauer's 
Douleurs du monde.
Parisians wandered through the city 
hidden in warm loden coats.
Fog infiltrated lips and lungs 
as if the air were sobbing,
going on about itself, about the cold dawn,
how long the night is,
and how ruthless stars can be.
I took a bus towards the Bastille,
razed two hundred years ago,
and tried to read poems 
but didn't understand a thing.

What comes after will be invisible 
and easy.
Whatever is hesitates between irony 
and fear.
Whatever survives will be blue 
as a guillotine's eye.

"A Strategy" by Czeslaw Milosz.

1939 changed everything for Czeslaw Milosz. Revolutions gone awry make slaves of some and poets of others. Milosz tumbled into the latter category.

In 1980, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He was depicted as the leading poet of the group in Poland that entered literature under the schooling of two tyrannies -- the Nazi and the Soviet (a group that famously included Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska). 

Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize, Milosz delivered the Norton lecture entitled ''The Witness of Poetry''. In it, he explained how totalitarianism alters the poet's relationship to the word:

''What occurred in Poland was an encounter of a European poet with the hell of the 20th century, not hell's first circle, but a much deeper one...... People's attitude toward the language also changes. It recovers its simplest function and is again an instrument serving a purpose; no one doubts that the language must name reality, which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness.''

"The Strategy" is a prose poem from his book, Road-side Dog, published in 1998. In it, Milosz grapples with the rationalizations a poet must sometimes give for bearing the sort of witness that allows him to continue living where others die. 

THE STRATEGY

He was everywhere, on a train carrying prisoners to the gulag, in a city trembling at a doorbell at dawn, in a prison from which the sentenced to death walked out and were loaded into trucks. He hated the Empire, yet he had to hide this. He was a poet, and keeping constantly in mind that these things were going on, simultaneously, and close by, would making writing poetry impossible. Besides, he was writing for those who, though theoretically aware of what was going on, did not want to absorb it with their imaginations. For these reasons, he failed in his duty to give testimony, he searched for a means, when writing, to preserve, unspoken, the presence of horror between his words and lines.

MORE ON MILOSZ

Milosz biography (Nobel Prize)
Milosz biography (Culture)
"In gratitude for all the gifts" by Seamus Heaney  (The Guardian)
"Captive minds: Now and then" by Tony Judt (New York Review of Books)
"Czeslaw Milosz: The Art of Poetry, no.70" (Paris Review)
"Late Ripeness" by Czeslaw Milosz (The Guardian)
"A Conversation with Jeanne" by Czeslaw Milosz (ibiblio)
"A Poem for the End of the Century" by Czeslaw Milosz (ibiblio)

A few brief notes on secrets, sociopaths, selfies, and integrity.

[Image source: Thinking Through My Lens]

Keeping a secret is hard work for the brain. And the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep.

Unless you are a sociopath.

For sociopaths, nothing is sacred.

Sociopaths tend to stare into people's eyes intensely. This act of unabashed staring, often despite social cues which encourage the contrary, is known as the "predator's stare". 

A sociopath suffers from antisocial personality disorder, or APD.  Technically, APD is “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” Typical characteristics include overconfidence, lack of remorse, high levels of manipulation and an inability to confirm to social norms.

Lacking an established sense of self, sociopaths are social chameleons- they adapt to different social settings depending on what the situation demands. They constantly change and transform to get the best out of the world around them.  

Integrity involves loyalty to one's core beliefs and principles. It requires a strongly-held concept of self. 

To have integrity is to be loyal to the "self" we try to be. 

There is no such thing as a sociopath with integrity.

Sociopaths are drawn to employment that involves wielding positions of power over people– the more helpless and less likely to be listened to the better. They flock to working with children, animals, the elderly, and the mentally, emotionally, or physically challenged. They also enjoy power-heavy jobs as police officers or prison guards.

They are aware of projecting a personality, though they have no remorse over failing to identify with this projected self.

[Image source: Design Instruct]

Some sociopaths teach Sunday school in the Church of Latter Day Saints. E.M. Thomas is one such sociopath. She likes to look into people's eyes:

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of my confidence is the way I sustain eye contact. Some people have called it the "predator stare." Sociopaths are unfazed by uninterrupted eye contact. Our failure to look away politely is also perceived as being aggressive or seductive. It can throw people off balance, but often in an exciting way that imitates the unsettling feeling of infatuation. Do you ever find yourself using charmand confidence to get people to do things for you that they otherwise wouldn't? Some might call it manipulation, but I like to think I'm using what God gave me.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, the basic physics of flirting involves making eye contact with someone, giving a small smile, then looking down and averting your gaze. 

I find myself wondering if sociopaths' sustained staring making it impossible for them to be coy. 

Sometimes people envy sociopaths for their lack of moral inhibition. They don't do what most of us call "regret". 

[Image source: Alapan]

Nor do they bother with what philosophers and psychologists call "human self-reflection", or the capacity of humans to exercise introspection and the willingness to learn more about their nature, purpose, and actions. A reflection is defined as "a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation". Sociopaths are very conscious and adept at observing their own reflections. A reflection also means "an image that is seen in a mirror or on a shiny surface".

Rachel Simmons says selfies are "good for girls". Erin Gloria Ryan says selfies are "a cry for help". We are drawn to ugly selfies. Scientists have linked selfies to narcissism, addiction, and mental illness. 

Many women take a large number of exciting, half-nude selfies after healing from breast implant surgery. Post-surgery selfies even include credits- the name of the surgeon or implant size is mentioned.

A sociopath is just as likely to take a selfie photo as any other American. They may even take selfies at funerals. But what they see in the selfie is rarely a self with whom they identify- only a personality they pretend. 

Selfies are the sociopaths propaganda machine, allowing them to flit rapidly from one personality to the next. Now you see them, now you don't.

[Image source: the new is tired of you]

I'm a big fan of shadow selfies.

Unlike selfies that reveal false facial expressions or newly-bleached teeth, shadow selfies reveal only the darkness that comes from the way our bodies block or absorb light. They depict only what they can afford to inhabit- a shadow of a self.

Shadow selfies, unlike sociopaths, have integrity.

"The Wanderer", a poem by Louis Untermeyer.

 

Another Roadside Attraction, formerly located on UA campus.

IS IT a tribute or betrayal when,

Turning from all the sweet, accustomed ways,

I leave your lips and eyes to seek you in

    Some other face?

Why am I searching after what I have?

And going far to find the near at hand?

I do not know. I only know I crave

    To find you at the end.

I only know that love has many a hearth,

That hunger has an endless path to roam,

That beauty is the ghost that haunts the earth

    And leads me home.

In praise of superfluous men: Ivan Turgenev stands before the guillotine..

The fervor of nationalism brooks no neutral parties. Dostoevsky’s infuriated response to Ivan Turgenev’s ill-fated novel, Smoke, demonstrates the extent to which opting out of a position on the ideological barricades only ensures that someone else will decide it for you. 

As a messianic, Eastern Orthodox, lover of Russia, Dostoevsky railed against Turgenev’s willingness to portray Russia’s backwardness alongside its charm. He was revolted by Turgenev’s admitted atheism, and the way in which his novels left Slavophilia without a primary source in God. In a letter to his friend Maykov, Dostoevsky claimed Turgenev told him “we should crawl back to the Germans because there was only one way, ineluctable and common to all, and that way was civilization”. 

Even Turgenev’s longtime poet friend, Fet, found a way to undercut Smoke . “It consists of insults to all things Russian, at the very moment when everyone in Russia is doing their utmost to be Russian,” Fet wrote to Tolstoy, going on to express his chagrin at the way in which Smoke  urged a turn towards the West to embrace a foreign future.

“As regards Smoke ,” Tolstoy replied, “I think that the force of poetry is in love; the direction taken by that force depends upon character. Without the force of love there is no poetry….. In Smoke , there is love for nothing, or almost nothing, and so there is almost no poetry. The only love is for a superficial, trifling adulterer and that is why the poetry in this novel is objectionable”. 

Always suspecting himself of being a “superfluous man”, a man in the mold of the character Rudin, Turgenev grew to honor his own reluctance to follow the political winds where they blew. Though a liberal, Turgenev viewed ideology as a dangerous fire that burned through the hands of those holding its torches, leaving behind only a smoke as old as time itself. 

The Kinck children and Jean-Baptists Troppman.

In the Paris of 1870, the crimes of the century had proper names. One of them was Jean-Baptiste Troppman, a 22-year-old mechanic convicted of murdering a family of eight. Troppman had been planning a counterfeiting operation with Jean Kinck.  When they visited a proposed site for the money printing plant, Troppman fed his partner a lethal dose of prussic acid (cyanide) mixed in wine.

Posing as Jean Kinck, Troppman then wired Mrs. Kinck asking her for money. Mrs. Kinck sent him a check along with her son.  Unable to cash the money, Troppman arranged a meeting with the wife in Paris and, having no more use for the boy, hacked him into to pieces. When Mrs. Kinck met Troppman in Paris, she handed over the 55,000 francs thinking that they were for her husband. With money in hand, Troppman butchered Mrs. Kinck and her remaining five children in a remote spot near the Pantin Common.

A workman uncovered the mutilated corpses the next day. Troppmann faced additional murder charges when the bodies of Jean and Gustave Kinck were unearthed. Tropmann confessed to the crimes and described them in great detail to the French police. "I killed Kinck to grab the money he said he had in his bank,” explained Troppman. “It was a necessity for me to kill the other members of the family so to suppress all the witnesses.“ 

A few weeks later, Troppmann revised his confession to exonerate himself. He touted three accomplices whose identity he refused to reveal. And he announced the burial of a mysterious wallet containing all the proof against his accomplices in the neighborhood of Steinbach. The wallet was never found- but it left behind a soil well-tilled for ghosts and conspiracy theories. 

On the December 31st of 1860, Troppmann’s five days in court ended with a guilty verdict and a condemnation to die by guillotine. The French emperor refused to pardon Troppmann. The preparations for the spectacle commenced in earnest.

Maxime du Camp invited Turgenev to observe the preparations for Troppman’s execution. Turgenev quickly regretted accepting the invitation to a scene of such horror. “I shall not forget that dreadful night when I supped full of horrors and acquired a permanent aversion for capital punishment in general and the way it is carried out in France in particular,” Turgenev wrote to Annekov.  

On January 19th, 1870, Troppmann faced his execution as both participant and spectator. To be sure, the spectators packed the place de la Roquette to witness the spectacle of state-sponsored justice. At 7 am, Troppmann was swiveled on the guillotine’s board. At the moment when the blade descended, Troppman somehow managed to bite the finger of his executioner. He was buried alongside other French citizens in the pauper’s cemetery of Ivry.

In a long article called “Troppmann’s Execution”, Turgenev detailed the preparations as well as his response to them. He remarked upon the shared guilt, the complicity between the guilty man and the entire society in this modern spectacle of revenge. He felt ashamed, his hands dirty with blood from the legalized murder. He linked this secret, unspeakable shame with “the fact that the horses harnessed to the wagon, which we peacefully munching oats, seemed to be the only innocent creatures present”.  

The man who gave us literature’s first nihilist found himself revolted by the European liberalism that could produce a spectacle so murderous and barbaric. Shaken to the core, Turgenev rushed back to his Russian estate at Spasskoye, where he stayed long enough to throw a few parties and remember, afresh, how his name was anathema in literary circles.

Turgenev was indeed a superfluous man. But his liberalism outlasted that of his literary compatriots, many of whom embraced killing fellow humans under the rapture of a flag or historical imperative. 

The photographs of Marc Riboud.

Marc Riboud is the sort of European who reads history in the lines of the people being made or unmade by it. As such, his photographs carry the burden of the past in a way that enlightens rather than shrouds.  (Note: I've included his descriptions of photos verbatim.)

Afghanistan, 1956. Fabriques d'armes tribales près de la frontière du Pakistan. Devenu grand ce garçon a-t-il porté les armes, et dans quel combat?

Paris, 1953. Une soeur de Saint-Vincent de Paul drague gentiment un chauffeur de taxi qui, par chance, est libre.

Washington, DC, 1967. March for Peace in Vietnam.

Khyber Pass, Afghanistan, 1955. When I crossed this pass, I hesitated. As I like to travel slowly, the arrow of right attracted me.

Afghanistan, 1955. Near Iranian border, two men watch over one close deceased.

Afghanistan, 1955. On the walls of a craft armory, the daily tools form a still life.

Calcutta, India, 1956. The Indian sun will soon remove Kali's statue and the numerous arms.