Celan, some versions

IRIE

That I have time to walk
across the crop stair,
that I have time, into your sleep
to walk the sleepscree,
time to cut grass
low on the land of the heart,
in the morning


YOU WERE my life:
you I could let go of
when everything swam here


AT THE rained-on waymark
little silence soapbox-hoarse:

as if you’d remembered, 
as if I knew that you had

re William Logan responds: (December)

Editor:

I write with regard to William Logan’s letter of Vol. 193.3, and with no stake in the controversy, since I have never seriously read Hart Crane. In fact I found the letter accidentally—I was browsing the magazine shelves—and without the internet would not have been able to read the writings of which it is a defence.

The letter, it seems to me, confirms Marjorie Perloff’s accusation that ‘Logan’s method consists of giving a few quotes […] and then declaring the poem in question a “dreadful mess.”’ I thought I should communicate my reasons for this judgement.

Logan takes fragments of Crane’s poetry and applies to them adjectives of disapproval: he does not make arguments for his descriptions’ validity. Here is an example, a random one from Adam Kirsch (The Modern Element, pp. 162–3), of evaluation backed by argument. Kirsch quotes Anthony Hecht in ‘The Man Who Married Magdalene’:

I have been in this bar
For close to seven days.
The dark girl over there,
For a modest dollar, lays.

And you can get a blow-job
Where other men have pissed
In the little room that’s sacred
To the Evangelist.

And responds:

While there is a moment of genuine scabrousness in these lines—the fleeting suggestion that the prostitute’s mouth is ‘where other men have pissed’—the poem’s other elements work against the potential shock. There is the odd use of the word ‘lays’, which is usually not transitive; there is the far-fetched joke about the Evangelist (the ‘John’). These things conspire to separate the author of the poem—ill at ease with slang, but familiar with the Bible—from its degraded speaker.

Note that Kirsch explains his description ‘odd’ with reference to grammar.

Logan refuses to make arguments like this. Instead, part of ‘Chaplinesque’ is ‘hapless and tone deaf’ and other parts are ‘schmaltz’. The Bridge’s ‘Proem’ is ‘stuffed with excesses of detail’: ‘inviolate’ is ‘religious’ (Logan dislikes it), ‘flailing’ is ‘empty rhetoric’ (if it is empty, is it ‘detail’ too?), ‘silver-paced’ is over-rich, ‘shrill’ and ‘cloud-flown’ are ‘melodrama’, ‘speechless’ falsely pious and ‘A jest falls from the speechless caravan’ ‘slightly nonsensical’; ‘scuttle’ and ‘white rings of tumult’ are overegged, ‘rip-tooth’ and ‘acetylene’ exaggerated and ‘bedlamite’ ‘wretched’.

In the following paragraph, Crane’s ‘Dirigible’ is an ‘ungainly symbol’, ‘ludicrously addressed’. The terms of this description (‘Cetus-like’ etc.) are not ‘exactly’ ‘obscure’, but are ‘childish and extravagant’ ‘rhetoric’ and ‘romantic goofiness’. Logan closes with the news that—where before he did ‘like’ ‘chained bay waters’—he is ‘not even keen’ on Crane’s symbol of the bridge. No justification for either feeling is attempted.

My objection is twofold. One, Logan never once argues the case for an adjective’s application to a phrase: he just puts them in apposition. The result is that we could swap them around without much damage to his sense. We could even apply them to his own writing. (What if I said that ‘stuffed’ is over-rich rhetoric, or that ‘wretched’ is a false exaggeration?) Two, Logan never argues why the fact that an adjective is, say, religious, means it is excess, or why any of these overeggings and exaggerations (which redundantly-varied terms beg his question) are in excess. There is no argument for his ‘stuffed with […] excesses’ point, only, in proximity, assertion, quotation and name-calling. A single Kirsch-like explanation would have been worth the whole list; indeed, to humiliate me here, all that Logan needs to do is provide one.

Logan may be right that ‘Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objectivity’ (his response to Crane is certainly that of a critic-poet, and betrays experience with a poet’s drafting-process in its inexplicitly reasoned, aestheticised elections and rejections). The performance of this letter shows that, in shedding this guise, Logan has also neglected the work of persuasion. Logan is therefore ‘solipsistic’ in the weak sense of the word.


Two further points. Logan should know that when he states, ‘I could not find that two critics I admire, Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill, had written much or anything about Crane’, this can prove nothing, as it would prove nothing for me to state that, although I am a fascinated reader of Hill, I do not understand his poem well enough to extract an opinion from it or to know that ‘you screwed us’ is not the speaker’s phrase. I could quote a different phrase, one that seems to say that Crane is a ‘prodigal who reclaimed us’, with as much justice.

Last, Logan’s moralising Wintersian subtext should not go unmentioned. He says: ‘Crane was the architect of his own grand disaster. The disaster of the life didn’t ennoble the art—it was responsible for the failure of the art.’ The question is, could no ‘disaster of the life’ (as Logan, under or out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it) have been ‘responsible for the’ success ‘of the art’ (as Logan, out of ‘the guise of objectivity’, defines it)? The answer is unknowable: ‘disaster’ could have been a condition of the art’s possibility; it could, success or failure, have fed into it. To me, it’s evident that Logan is reasoning, whether or not he realises it, from a general premise along something like these lines: ‘Unvoracious sexual appetites, no self-indulgence, no alcoholism and no mental illness—plus maybe decongestants—are generally “responsible for” success “of the art”, that is success in art.’ It remains only to wonder, recognising duly and again that Logan is a poet and critic, whether this formula for success has worked for Logan himself.

Ps. Two relevant links.

Rawlston

What he called the ‘ineluctable infantilism of faith’ I was less reconciled to. But I loved him so I went along. He would usually wear this foodstained jacket with epaulettes and come out with, ‘I like neither Scaliger’, quite haughtily, or ‘Britain’s claim I won’t rescind’ to annoy you. And lapse into temporary emphases—one day ‘hybridity’, another ‘trash-talk’—never bearing them out; it being the contrariness that counted. The label ‘intellectual’ he found anathema. What fired him up was, he’d say, the ‘earthly’ written word. He was on the edge of arrogance, charming you, always like this.

The fact was he loved dictionaries. Something about ‘the bare grammar’. Whatever philosophical tangle came up, it wasn’t a pseudo-problem so much as definitional—of the unclarity intrinsic to the medium as developed. Which is how he would have put it. I won’t say his personality was fancy, but liking as he did to call religion ‘that recurrently demanded apology for the constitutive’ he could tend to alienate, even with those pitying eyes. I suppose because he embodied it he wasn’t the best advertisement for what he thought. I hung around initially for lack of conversation.

He especially as I remember hated its making evil mercy. The world’s passive to god’s active.

He was overweight anyway, it wasn’t as if in his case the Universe had split the winnings. Letitia would tease him for having breasts. It was his way to scoff but he wasn’t unfit, not at all. That’s why he was able to enlist. The swimming he did eventually gave him soft loping biceps, though the belly stayed.

One morning I said it looked like a hair-bomb had been ‘exploded somewhere in the vicinity’ of his face, and he said (I felt rather feebly): Yes, the mops want liberation. He never was funny.

CETERA DESUNT

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Retraction. Alex Bubb’s essay ‘Caught in the old lady’s trap’ was totally rewritten by the editors, so cannot be said to reflect his views.

Clarification. Hester Lees-Jeffries’ notice ‘Something eschewed’ was edited to include phrases that Dr Lees-Jeffries neither wrote nor consented to. These are, with emendations italicised:

125. Shakespeare’s Poems eschews the more traditional introduction / Shakespeare’s Poems discards [...]
127. Less hampered by space, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen perhaps have a slight edge over Burrow in the fullness of their notes. / Less hampered by constraints of space [...]
127. Anthony Wells-Cole and others / [...] (and others)
127. (which the editors touch on, p. 38, and in their commentary) / (which the editors touch on by introduction and in commentary)
127. (The standard argument used the justify modernisation, that Shakespeare’s poems would not have looked ‘quaint’ to Shakespeare’s first readers, is of course fallacious: Chaucer’s, for example, published fewer years before his time than his before ours, may well have. This argument forgets history.)

From an Old Essay

Came upon this during Finals revision.

I distrust these ‘at once’ statements as much as any other sensible middle-class bloke. They are consistently an annoyance in Ricks. One room cannot be dark and light; a ball cannot be light and heavy; according to Ricks, though, hyphens in poems can at once pull to and push apart. Ricks is wrong—hyphens only link where a whitespace had divided. They mark juncture; the syntactic or whimsical roping-together of words unpartnered, rather like the ‘yoking’ Johnson perceives is characteristic of Metaphysical poetry. He can get away with it because most assertions about literature are insulated from any true procedure of proof. Sure, you can prove irrefutably facts about what happens in a text, like Nabokov in his Lectures (it’s arguable this is scholarship, not criticism), but in stating a more numinous view like ‘This hyphen at once attracts and repels’, all you can do is quote the hyphen and see if anyone believes you. Such quotation does not constitute ‘evidence’ any more than quoting the words ‘silken tent’ constitutes evidence for Paul Muldoon’s idea that ‘cunt’ has been hidden there by Frost. To my mind, the hyphens in ‘now-almost-meaningless despair’ (the last words of King Log’s wondrous ‘Arrurruz’ sequence) do nothing other than conflate those three words into a newly meaningful hybrid. (And is it beside the point that they improve the rhythm?) Omitting the hyphens would have put them apart. Simply because the effect works within the domain of literature, it cannot be said at once to have achieved contradictory aims. Maybe on second reading it seemed the hyphens were doing more than uniting. That’s fine, but it invalidates Ricks’ sly ‘at once’. If I were to push and pull a door at the same time, I would break the laws of physics, probably disappearing into a self-created black hole. Is literature so rarefied, so abstract and so closely involved with the intellect, that it need not obey these laws?

Sketch of Spin

Spin is nothing new. A metaphor which so comfortably settled into the language that calling it cliché would be redundant, the word is a vibrant Englishing of ancient means and ideas of persuasion. When used precisely, it is synonymous with ‘rhetoric’ as used colloquially; it denotes a class of rhetoric that would use language to shade facts that, bare of such tuned language, we would perceive either more positively or more negatively. How distinguishable is this from lying must be decided case by case, but the generalisation that spin is a form of deception (not the same as lying) is a safe one, because it is quite transparently a form of deception—that is, such is conceded by everyone who affects the responses of others to facts by spinning them in communication. What in politics is called ‘spin’ is a universally known and used tool of living, which needn’t entail the making of ‘linguistic choices’ where ordinary selection, or ‘selectivity’, will suffice. Choices about saying are, unambiguously, choices about doing, and it’s these choices—those of simply not saying what would cause difficulty if said—that constitute spin’s least ‘linguistic’ mode; in this extent spin becomes an ethic.

‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’
Email sent by Jo Moore, special adviser to Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, an hour after the destruction of the World Trade Centre

Jo Moore was not subject to open scorn, and then sacked, for couching the bad news about councillors’ expenses in emollient terms. Rather, what sank her was the choice mooted to release the news at a certain time. In a very recent speech, Tony Blair complains

Frequently the problem is as much assembling the facts as giving them. Make a mistake and you quickly transfer from drama into crisis. In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a Cabinet lasting two days.

It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day. Things harden within minutes. I mean you can’t let speculation stay out there for longer than an instant.*

Burying news under the ruins of the Twin Towers is a brutish way of ‘assembling the facts’, and it exemplifies spin as palpably as Blair’s choice of that dainty gerund to describe it. Daniel Finkelstein comments, after quoting the passage above,

Why?

Obviously, his reply would be that the resulting coverage would be awful. But does this matter? Nowhere near as much as he thinks it does.

This was the key sentence in the entire speech, because interesting though it was, it shows a weakness in Mr Blair – a tendency to take one’s own press cuttings too seriously.

The ethic of spin prioritises the reaction of others over the intrinsic justice of one’s decisions and truth of one’s beliefs; so ingrained is it in Blair’s mentality that he betrays its influence even when assaying criticism of the forces which he blames for causing it.* Thus is the blurring, which now verges on absolute identification, of politics with spin. Consider these book titles: Sultans of Spin: Media and the New Labour Government, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Could the mere exercise of linguistic choice to reflect or embody an ideological stance, which after all has been characteristic of politics forever, have occasioned such automatic endorsement of the view that modern politics and spin are equivalent? No, what encourages the assumption is the problem now that spin is an industry, is praxis; it is modus vivendi of all successful politicians because the medium by whose control success is achieved is the medium of perception, not of action—and power is power over perception. Politicians have militarised their self-representation in answer to the media’s own militarisation (several 24-hour news channels, instant distribution, everything filmed), and in the discourse of war, fact, truth, is subordinate to what wins.

*Earlier in the speech: ‘In the analysis I am about to make, I first acknowledge my own complicity. We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.’

One Reflection on Solipsism Prompted by Professor Hill's 'Tacit Pledges'

Excepting playschool stuff, I'm ignorant of the philosophical context, so it's likely I've been anticipated / in anticipation refuted. Nevertheless—

We cannot know there is something outside ourselves. Yet the concept of an 'outside' to self derives from the very illusion which, if there is nothing outside ourselves, disguises this nothing. Does the concept of a self derive so too? Does something which is not the self invent or impose or entail the self, making solipsism the tautological truth it is?

It is not only a belief that there is an outside to the self (which is the solipsistic fact), but also it is a belief that there is an outside counterposed. For why should it not be that there is only outside, and the self is illusion? I suggest a modification of solipsism: I can only know there is this; not that, positing else, this is in else or (even) in relation to else. And I cannot know there is else. Neither can I know that this is not what this would have me assume else is. I only experience this, and because I do not and cannot even know whether there is an else to it, I do not and cannot know it. In this I only can believe in this.