It's not so much the Everything is wrong. Of course everything is
wrong, especially if you view everything exclusively from political
and socio-political perspectives. It's more the Everybody is to blame,
as it is worked through the at once subjectivising and totalising
agencies of modern poetry heavily influenced by central European post-
war synthesizing philosophies, until it is totally inescapable except
by striking the board and shouting, "enough!" and chucking it out of
the window, which I think is the only way to liberate yourself, as a
poet, from the imposition of cultural blame and the resulting pessimism.
It is for instance surely typical of this "advanced" solidarity to
claim that such a thing as WW1 was the result of a "culture" rather
than the acts of leaders, technicians, and politicians within a
history. "Culture" just spreads the guilt out, off the shoulders of
the actual perpetrators and onto everybody. It ceases to be a
historical event. It becomes a factor of a misbegotten climate
inhabited collectively. And we, everybody, still, 2015, we are all
responsible, and must seek expiation for this and all other wrongs.
Poets do this through their poetry, perhaps. Or for another instance
that "fracas" which Tim referred to, surely this showed the pseudo-
religious dynamic in operation when a continuing social injustice is
treated as a sin which can be expiated only by repentance, and
people's individual beliefs and good-will count for nothing against
accession to the collective "cultural" crime. And really, out there,
outside these neuroses, you wouldn't believe how fresh and promising
things are and spring is in the air and how much people recognise the
truth of the feminist claim even if they drop the wrong pronoun now
and then…
Let persons be praised for the good they do, nothing else is ever
going to do it.
pr
On 17 Mar 2015, at 07:20, David Bircumshaw wrote:
I can resist observing, having just heard on the radio that
International Happiness Day has just been LAUNCHED by the United
Nations (it will be on March 20th and I really think they ought to
have a concert featuring Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and Gary
Barlow. In Tikrit.) observing, as I verbed, that being miserable in
script isn't exactly a modern innovation. Leopardi, anyone? Jacobean
dramatists? The Book of Ecclesiastes? There is also a time-honoured
tradition for writers to be affable in person but miserable in print.
Kafka was apparently quite good company and I recall a comment of
Thomas Hardy's second wife that he was never happier than when he had
just written one of those 'miserable poems'. She was not making a
critical remark. I think we should all stand up for the right to
resist commodity and jollity. Reasons To Be Cheerful? Nah. Myself I'm
of a naturally happy disposition, except when I'm not, but I'm pretty
sure that a statement like 'life is a swindle' might be quite close to
that Awful Matter, The Truth.
Cheers, and Schopenhauers all round
David
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