Alison Croggon wrote:

>Yes - it's all in relation to, though - Isn't it Celan who speaks of the necessity of poetry to be "against the grain", and if the grain is all fragmentariness, because received opinion posits that life is fragmentary, then there may be profit in a contingent vision of wholeness, and vice versa. And I do think the issue of fragment or whole goes deeper than merely a question of technique, to that of perception, and also to the perception of perception. But either, in being resistant, express problems with those macro stories which seem to be especially dominant

Yes, of course, it's all in relation to, for instance how the "grain" that one is "against" is defined or "against" itself? It's interesting that you mention Celan, since I would think that generally he would be considered to be a poet of the fragmentary, and yet, I think he posits the whole elsewhere. His neologisms which combine several terms in (usually) a noun are a reconciliation of impossibilities, bringing the whole to bear upon a word. I think what I was thinking (who knows?) was that poems which seem to me to be alive (a subjective sense but out of the totality of being, in the same that one can tell, subjectively, the difference between a living hummingbird and a dead one)are both "apparently whole" and "apparently fragmentary," just as being is both, apparently. The "issue of the fragment or the whole" does go deeper than merely technique to issues of perception or perceptions or perception, as you note. But it also goes deeper to issues of being. However, it seemed to me that in the earlier part of this discussion, the "apparently fragmentary" was referring to poems in which line or form was broken or fragmentary as opposed to those that are "apparently whole," and granting less lie and more critique and resistance to the first. Which is essentially an identification by technique, a formal quality, and which grants greater validity to the fragmentary or the whole depending upon which has the greater play against the prevailing grain. And I simply don't think that is true, the poetry gains in validity, in resistance or critique, or in truthfulness or ethics, by being against the prevailing mode, but rather that its validity and resistance and critique exist when it is most autonomous, neither for nor against, neither fragmentary nor whole, or any other either/or, but possible and impossibly with both. 

It is surely true as you go on to say that consumerism and commodification require a fragmentariness in the individual, one has only to look at the ways in which various products are advertised as a way to "wholeness," to see how that fragmentariness is necessary to that sales pitch. And, this may be an odd extension, but I think this is why some people are often disappointed with poetry, for being fragmentary and in a fragmentary state, they go to it expecting the ancient qualities which might be characterized as the "beautiful" or that which seems sacred or healing, looking to it for the wholeness they do not have, and are so frustrated and disappointed when the poems are fragmentary, full of scraps and rags, violences, etc, or resistant to any idea of beauty or intelligibility. In a sense what they find are fragmentary transparencies of the real fragmentariness they are already fragmented by. So perhaps, yes, as you say, wholeness would be more resistant, or more against the grain, though the poet, being equally a fragmentary creature and originating in the same culture, would have to find that wholeness first, perhaps in the other that he or she is, or as Stanley Kunitz said "the first job of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems." 

Oh, and I thought what you said about beauty was beautiful, and, true.

Best,

Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com 

-------Original Message-------
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 07/17/03 11:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Spectacle

> 
> At 3:52 PM -0600 16/7/03, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>And it seems to me either might be resistant, or a critique, and not a
lie.

Yes - it's all in relation to, though - Isn't it Celan who speaks of
the necessity of poetry to be "against the grain", and if the grain
is all fragmentariness, because received opinion posits that life is
fragmentary, then there may be profit in a contingent vision of
wholeness, and vice versa. And I do think the issue of fragment or
whole goes deeper than merely a question of technique, to that of
perception, and also to the perception of perception. But either, in
being resistant, express problems with those macro stories which seem
to be especially dominant at the moment, but which have always been
there to protect the interests of the powerful. For example:
consumerist society demands that people feel fragmentary and
discontented, a collection of free floating desires which are
predicated on lack, in order that they supply the demand for an ever
increasing economy of obsolescence (and one day I might understand
the concept of economies which are supposed to infinitely expand,
like the universe, but I don't).  So the idea of "wholeness" (using
the word very roughly here, but I can't think of a better) might help
people to understand their lack, which of course is a condition of
existence, in other ways than in the crassly material sense capital
requires.

At 3:08 PM +0100 16/7/03, Jon Clay wrote:
>To some extent I think that beauty _is_ reconciliation and is
>necessary (as well as desirable) - as long as it is, as you say,
contingent
>and transient; otherwise it becomes monolithic and is easily co-opted
into
>the spectacle, into commodification, it can become a tool for reification 
-
>which, if it's anything, poetry should not be, should even be opposed to.

Well, I can go on and on about beauty, what it is and what it isn't.
But it seems to me that beauty is by its nature transient, or it
never achieves the condition, the shattering poignancy, that seems to
me what beauty is: it isn't merely aesthetic - or perhaps I ought to
say it is _deeply_ aesthetic, it is a matter of feeling, in the sense
that style is always a matter of feeling.  In Buchner's story "Lenz",
the poor playwright in the title role says: "What I demand in all
things is - life, full scope for existance, nothing else really
matters, we then have no need to ask whether something is ugly or
beautiful, both are overriden by the conviction that 'Everything
possesses life', which is the sole criterion in matters of art... The
most beautiful images, the most resonant harmonies, coalesce,
dissolve. Only one thing abides: an infinite beauty that passes from
form to form, eternally changed and revealed fresh, though needless
to say you can't always capture it and stick it in museums or put it
into music and then summon all and sundry and have them prattling
away, both young and old, and getting all excited. You need to love
mankind to be able to reach the essential being of each individual,
you must consider no one too lowly, no one too ugly, only then can
you understand them..."

Lenz is saying this in the grip of an excitement that he can't bear:
but what he can't bear is his own mortality, the condition of life
and therefore of his idea of beauty (and Buchner's idea, too, which
he also adumbrated in his scientific papers). And if you'll forgive
me quoting myself, I'll paste a bit from navigatio, a novella I wrote
in 95, because it says what I mean -

"I cannot understand myself except through language.  This is a
misfortune:  there are better, simpler and more direct ways of
understanding.  They are the spaces of silence which we inhabit
fully, the epiphanies which are always Edenic, which language
struggles so hard to enter and, in doing so, exiles us from the
garden.  And yet, in its trespass, a poetic language retrieves the
unanaesthetised reality we inhabit at our births, and reminds us
that, in its perpetual destruction and restoration of language, in
its serious play and playful seriousness, in its derangement of
dualities and smashing of unities, in its acceptance and rejection of
mortality and finitude, poetry is nothing if it is not a making of
love.

...beauty is nothing, sang Rilke, but this terrifying beginning...
The terror of beauty is that everything is beautiful.  It is the
chaotic self, the chaotic body, the chaotic world, fragmentary,
diffuse, unassigned to meaning, against which form, an aesthetic
armour, a self by which we understand our given selves, defends
itself from the chaos within and without it.   And art contains the
terror of obliteration, which inhabits the centre of beauty.  It
admits the reality of death, of human finitude and failure, it admits
that the world is not us and that we do not control it.  This
admission is love:  the voluntary renunciation of self-tyranny, the
ascension to the place of ordinary beauty, which redeems nothing."

Best

A

--


Alison Croggon

Blog
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