Messy, but Charming

Hild,

- “In the pure air / to be further complicated…”

Late Fellow of the New York School, James Schuyler, has that same quality of writing in a way that simulates impressionistic thought, of self-correcting mid-poem (as though the poem is a live performance rather than a carefully crafted machine made of words). As Lee Harwood commented:

“…a reader of Schuyler’s poems nearly always finds himself in the present. Not a narrow present, but one that includes asides, memories, double-takes, and all the vivid associations that pour into the brain in a few minutes. [It] often feels like looking over his shoulder as he writes. The process is that open to view.”

This Soft October

Monday, October 17, 1988

mid-morning
the light, what light
there is
that is, comes
from the east
under the sky
not from it
more a pulsation
than a glow
the glow
that on Sunday
(only
yesterday? was
it only yesterday?
It was
it was) shone
from the west
from
Manhattan
the train throbbed
on toward
light tasting
of Chateau Yquem or
less grand
more glorious
the fortified wine
used at the
sacrament
in communion
this is the cup
of life
the blood
of salvation
light lighting up
the scrub
in red
and purple
and gold


Note how this piece begins in the middle of a thought (and a morning), and then immediately corrects its hesitant, opening assertion “what light / there is / that is”, as though anticipating that we might be there too, capable of qualifying his claim to the intensity of the light. Thus, he continues, it’s “more a pulsation than a glow”. Having discovered the limits of straightforward, descriptive language to render the light for us, this initial image of underwhelming “under the sky” light soon gives way. Once he emerges from the reverie on time, “only yesterday?” he turns, in his description of that previous morning, to figurative synaesthesia: “light tasting / of Chateau Yquem”. But even here he corrects the image, and, typically, does so tentatively, “less grand / more glorious”. Well he might be tentative, as this final volte is going to take us into the metaphysical, a moment of linguistic transfiguration akin to the cathartic power in your O’Hara poem which enables Schuyler to make the only assertive, unequivocal statements within the piece.

Even though the first of these, “this is the cup / of life”, is really in the voice of the litany he is imagining; the second: “light lighting up / the scrub / in red / and purple / and gold”, is a firm statement in his own voice. Or as firm as he can be (Schuyler never harangues the reader). Not quite the confidence of religious belief. Even here language is still turning back in on itself, revealing its limits, as the semi-comic reference to light “lighting” the scrub shows, but, despite the absence of a full-stop, suggesting that there is more to be said that cannot be said, a resolution of sorts has been achieved.

But that was yesterday, when the train “throbbed”; now, the light only pulses. However quotidian the subject might appear to some, the quality of light on that particular morning meant something. Or, perhaps, marked a moment of significance that the poem doesn’t (or cannot) show us. Perhaps there is a clue? “Was it only yesterday” when this transfiguring glow came from the opposite side of town, from the well-heeled, Chateau Yquem drinking district of Manhattan? He assures himself (and us) that it was only yesterday, repeating the bald fact as if to taste it on his lips and appreciate its significance. What has caused time to slow down with such force? Where has the glorious light of yesterday gone? Whatever happened in-between these two snapshots of light held in counterpoise by line-breaks that simulate the jerky punctuation of thought has made a significant difference.

Light, in and of itself, is not really the event. But the true event is withheld because it’s the feeling that matters. Perhaps Schuyler is too polite to burden us with the personal psycho-drama that rendered this moment meaningful for him; he just wants to record the moment, and the feeling, whatever it is, as truthfully as he can. Even if this feeling is a wistful yearning, Schuyler structures the poem to end with an upbeat gesture at the transcendent power of ordinary, yet exquisite, sights: the scrub is made rich with colour, even gold. Some might baulk at this. Is it sentimental? I don’t think so. The poem is too reticent about experience, too much haunted by the ineffable, by the transient, by the frustration borne of encountering the limits of one’s own language. The poem seems to admit its own failure, and that’s part of its charm.

Messy?

Arrowby,

“Its about time for my arrival”, sings Christina. Much dirtier, I think, is American poet Frank O’Hara's present participle:

You are gorgeous and I’m coming

Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
it sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh
normally I don't think of sounds as coloured unless I'm feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yet it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Metro towards a realm of encircling travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens' stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being


Frank dares to dwell on a process that is taking place as we are reading the poem. Not the “you” to whom it is addressed, we become voyeurs (this word is not quite right, though I cannot find a sufficient term for lascivious reading rather than gazing). Christina, on the other hand hides behind euphemism, abbreviation and futurity: without offering any details, she tells of an event that is about to happen. Where she wants to “hit the spot”, Frank's poem is interested in suspending a moment of being. The refusal to end the poem with a full stop marks an attempt to leave it unfinished. Although Frank describes “captured time”, he refuses, finally, to lock it up.

But this is not a dirty poem you might say! Where are the bodies? The penetrating purple sound roars from, not a partner, but the New York Metro. The golden downed thigh does not belong to any visible, tangible actor; it is simile's limb. And it is hardly a smutty image, representing, as it does, an idealized body. Golden, it is godlike; downy, it is childlike (so with resonances of virginity and innocence). Downy also implies a body in stasis - where is the sweat? And where are the senses, smell, touch, and taste?

It is in sound, however, that we really experience the eroticism of this poem. The sparse punctuation gives us little time to breathe, we accelerate in order to get to a comma, we gasp with the poet when we reach it, we join in his breathlessness, we experience the first stanza’s “yet” as an emphatic “yes!” In the second stanza, the repetitive motions are heard, even if they are not seen: “falling”, “thundering”, “shaking”, “aggregating”, “encircling”, “rending”, “repeating”, “breathing”. These participles are spaced further apart as the poet decelerates into respite.

But perhaps we should not separate these sensory experiences from one another. Sex scrambles Frank’s senses. He hears purple. The synesthesia here is reminiscent of the poems of Rimbaud - a poet he mentions (look, for instance, at The Drunken Boat: “the blue and yellow awakening of singing phosphorescence”). ‘You are gorgeous’, in this sense, is not so much dirty, as messy (conceptually, at least). I notice this particularly in the frequent juxtaposition of apparent opposites: there is purifying and complication; emptiness and refilling; the public metro and intimacy; adventure and locality; cliché and novelty. And what is the meaning of the final line? Humanity become stars or star-like?

Frank’s experience, a happening, has not yet been converted, by memory, into an object of exchange. It cannot be given casually in return for admiration or a similarly smutty story. Because there is something about it that the poet doesn’t understand, he cannot share it with us fully. This is not the kind of deliberate holding back that seems to titillate many pre-Kerfufflians (the exposed top of a stocking is thought sexier than a fully exposed thigh). Of course, there are secrets in this poem - you'll notice it is an acrostic (V-i-n-c-e-n-t W-a-r-r-e-n). But it is also the case that the experience itself is keeping secrets.

This leads me to consider whether there are certain things we shall not be able to bring back to Hengist I. Censorship policy being as lax as it is, we don’t have to worry about presenting overly ‘dirty’ descriptions. But are some objects or experiences too messy to be properly described?

Dirty?

Hild,

- "All work is cleaning up."

I enjoyed your pensées on the Kanye West video. And they chimed with some thoughts I’ve been having about the presentation of dirt and grime in pre-Kerfuffle art. Generally, the default mode of social realism seems to be that you highlight the dirt, dust and grime. It’s part of laying claim to authenticity – the fact that it’s difficult to remove stains; that ‘real’ life leaves blemishes. The default mode of the hyper-utopianism of advertising features is, of course, the contrary: that the special recipe of Cillit Bang, or whatever the hell else, will provide an easily obtainable, stain-free existence – however filthy you might happen to be.

The Victorians seem to have been gloriously dirty. Dickens’s novels are replete with grime, soot, smoke and fog. It tarnishes the buildings, billows from backslaps, gathers in the cuticles. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Watson seem to possess a predilection for surprising criminals by entering their lairs via murky back-passages; a Freudian preference shared by Dr Jekyl’s alter-ego, Mr Hyde. Before the invention of thermoplastics, chrome and Domestos, dirt (both literal and moral) was all pervasive: simply an unavoidable condition of existence.

But in the twentieth century, once technology rendered dirt optional rather than inherent, the signification changes. Artistic visions of the future begin to develop a dialectic of dirtiness: dystopian fiction/film can be sub-categorised according to how dirty the landscapes are: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is appropriately filthy; Huxley’s Brave New World is clean as a laboratory (so long as you’re not a primitive); Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker bogtrots and revels through murk and muck; the landscape of I, Robot (and most other Hollywood engendered dystopias) is chromatic and shiny to the point of sterility.

A common trope in the cleanly variety of such films is the disturbance created by the sudden appearance of blood, dirt or any other bodily effluvia within an otherwise clinical environment: an alien bursts out through its host’s abdomen, and the camera shows blood spattering on the shiny scalpels and lab-coats; or, a quarantined victim of a super-virus coughs up blood on the plate-glass windows of his laboratory-prison. It’s post-Enlightenment anxiety about the limits of Science in a single, cinematic frame: we have finally built a world devoid of dirt and stains and, look! this mucky human stuff we thought we had eradicated has contaminated our utopia yet again.

Unsurprising that the pre-Kerfufflians note a correspondence between cleanliness (or, rather, dirtiness) and moral character. They even have an idiom: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” But I’ve heard conflicting interpretations of its meaning. Most seem to think it refers to cleanliness being adjacent to godliness, as in a sort of synonym for godliness. One or two contrarians, however, claim it suggests that cleanliness is a sham substitute for godliness, that the cleanly are somehow masking their lack of moral depth behind a shiny veneer. I prefer the latter, but it’s clearly the deviant reading.

But action/adventure films, particularly in the 1990s, did employ this deviant reading: the hero had to be prepared to get himself dirty, as Bruce Willis, for example, always did – his increasing filthiness towards the end of the Lethal Weapon films is the badge of his courage and moral strength; the villain, however, typically has an aversion to dirt (or some sort of O.C.D.), and this is the signifier of his wickedness.

Kanye West seems imprisoned in the clinical austerity of his ‘Love Lockdown’, but even the sweat and body-paint of the tribal dancers that signify his inner dirtiness is – as you point out – sanitized. Consider, then, by way of comparison, the presentation of dirt in Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirty’, in which the protagonist claims repetitively “I wanna get dirty”.

It’s easy to see from the video what she means by this (the entire thing is a visual euphemism almost entirely devoid of wit or subtlety), but I was intrigued more by the lack of actual dirt. Even though literal dirt is clearly beside the point, you’d think they might have included a bit more to serve the obvious metaphor. Sure, it’s a bit sweaty, there’s graffiti on the walls, some bare-knuckle boxing, weight-lifting, break-dancing, and some sloshing about in a pool of water that seems to have leaked through the roof of a disused warehouse. It’s not clean enough to eat your dinner on, but neither is it particularly unsanitary. It reads as the somewhat timid attempt by someone who’s been raised in an anally-retentive environment to break free of the shackles of an aversion to dirt; like a child who’s trying, too late, by playing with some new 'dirty' friends, to discover the pleasures of rolling about in the mud, but can’t quite override her conditioning. Or, more to the point, a bleachy-clean child-star from the Disney Channel announcing a new artistic direction and set of influences. Not so much Cillit Bang as...(well, something else). I’m not sure we should show this to Hengist I. But I suspect you'll have more to say on this item.

Love Lockdown

Arrowby,

- "What could be more comforting or more rich with malice?"

Rapper, singer, and self-confessed spectacle Kanye West claimed in a recent interview that his video for 'Love Lockdown' took its inspiration from Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho. "You know at the end of the movie he didn't really kill anyone," he is careful to remind us. "[I just liked] the clean aesthetic and the way he was all about labels. I wanted to express all of that in the video." Unsurprisingly, his description elides an important aspect of the protagonist Patrick Bateman's character: his love affair with music of the most banal kind. Favourite artists include Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston. Perhaps you have seen the film? Bateman kills two prostitutes in his apartment to the warblings of Houston's 'The Greatest Love of All'.

Of course, Bateman's actions (whether real or imagined) taint these songs. They speak now of the attempted repression of carnal and violent desires; their visible absence cannot be smothered with smooth grooves and comfortable clichés. This reminds me of something that the psychoanalytic theorist Slavjov Zizek says in his Pervert's Guide to the Cinema: "All work is cleaning up". He illustrates the aphorism with the wonderful scene from Hitchcock's Psycho in which the murderer Norman Bates dedicates more than ten minutes to mopping Marion Crane's blood from the bathroom floor. I wonder what is undone by the bleachy-clean quality of Kanye's work? Both song and video are devoid of all mess and clutter; even the voice is put through an electronic filter lest an all-too-human inflection burst forth.

But what of the tribal warriors? Representative of Kanye's libido perhaps - it is a love lock-down, after all. Don't they shatter the sanitized mirage? Yet even these are rather benign. Ethnicity is lost with browns, oranges and yellows; only artificial colours, neons, are permitted, and then only towards the end. The high contrast abstracts real human fleshiness and makes the figures appear coldly androgynous. A similar technique has been used in Beyonce's recent video 'Single Ladies (put a ring on it)'. The colour is held back, as the diva holds back from her deserting cad of a lover. Rather than screaming sexuality, it whispers refusal and restraint. Yet should we criticize Kanye because we find little horror in his heart of darkness (as presented to us in this video)?

The video's benign character may be a nostalgic comment on a past Kanye has recently deserted. In his new album he exchanges rapping for singing. Abandoning rap, he simultaneously throws off an image that has tended to be (whether wrongly or not) connoted with – to pinch Aesop Rock's phrase – 'Fast Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives'. It is partly because the irony of such songs is so popularly recognized that the 'bad-boy' image had to be deserted. But we might also consider the success factor. What is the image's relevance for a musician who has achieved such staggering popular acclaim? He can mince around in his Ikea kitchen all he likes, chopping onions with his stainless steel knife, provided he makes good music.

Black and white often signifies the past (see The White Stripes 'My Doorbell'). Yet the black-and-white of 'Love Lockdown' also points towards the future (the white is too bright to be achieved by natural means: it is both engineered and expensive). The future before us is a haunted one. There is nothing to mark any idiosyncracy in Kanye's room: no small trinket to make it 'home'. What is more Kanye has lost his voice to the machine. Here, I think, is the death in Kanye's video. Where Snoop Dogg raps wryly of a tired but still performed identity in his similar video 'Drop it Like It's Hot' -"I'm a gangsta, but y'all knew that/ Da Big Boss Dogg, yeah I had to do that" - Kanye is more cut-throat. A worrying pointer towards what happens once the past is abandoned? A metaphor for what happened to us perhaps? Maybe this warning should go to Hengist 1.

What Difference Does It Make?

Hild,

Remember that 7' Single you found in a bargain-bucket on the Tottenham Court Road, ‘What Difference Does It Make’ by The Smiths? How it intrigued us with its elastic bass, contralto wailing and edgy guitar; its narrative of how the persona’s admission to a guilty secret (being gay?) caused the regretful breakdown of a heterosexual relationship whose ardour had been fuelled by collaborative shoplifting sprees.

The cover uses a black-and-white still of the actor Terence Stamp, from his appearance in a 1965 film called The Collector. Stamp was huge in the 1960s, and very much the man-about-town. His star seemed to have faded in recent years. The last significant performance I’d seen until recently was his masterly rendition of General Zod, the arch-baddy in Superman, in the 1980s/90s. This year, he appears in the new Jim Carrey vehicle, Yes Man.

I’ve discovered that this band always used such backward-glancing, nostalgic images on their single and album covers. Most feature an individual, in black-and-white, on a mono-hued background. Most of these individuals are from New Wave British and French Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, and therefore tend to be, or tend to be playing, working-class heroes of one sort or another: Billie Whitelaw, Rita Tushingham, Shelagh Delaney, and characters from the films of Jean Cocteau. Drag queens and famous gender-benders are also common: Candy Darling (of Andy Warhol fame), and Leo Ford, gay porn star and lover of Divine (a famous transvestite). Icons of popular entertainment feature too: Pat Phoenix (from Coronation Street), Yootha Joyce (from George and Mildred), Sandie Shaw, Elvis Presley, Diana Dors and Billy Fury. What does all this signify?

In The Collector Stamp plays a young, working-class inadequate with a lepidopterical obsession, who wins millions in some sort of lottery, buys a grand house, and becomes obsessed with an artistic young girl, who he later kidnaps and holds prisoner. Most of the novel/film involves their discussions and negotiations, many of which involve the nature of art and, of course, collecting beautiful things. There’s no direct link to the plot of the song; neither do I think there’s supposed to be. The image is, however, iconic. It was the film that made Stamp’s career; ‘What Difference Does It Make’ was an early single that did much to establish The Smiths. But they can’t have known that would necessarily be the case, unless they were possessed by extraordinary confidence in the song. I gather that Morrissey, in particular, wasn't.

At a stretch one might see a parallel between the haunting mien of regret in the protagonists of both works, especially with regard to the keeping of secrets, and behaviour undertaken in the name of love. But this is all too literal. It seems to me that The Smiths were making reference to a set of influences, dropping little hints about their formative cultural experiences, and proudly displaying their outsider status. These singles were released during the 1980s, a time when the default mode of pop iconography and video was brash, forward-looking technicolour. Yet in the sleeve design of releases by The Smiths there’s a delight in the counter-cultural, under-the-counter ‘perversions’ of the banal and quotidian world of the masses. Black-and-white here denotes either working-class realism, or a bygone era when pop icons meant something (should I say everything) to someone living on a terraced street in Northern England.

Stamp looks cheerful, but only hesitantly so. It’s the image of a man trying to be upbeat, but with some traces of psychic uncertainty still loitering in the corners of his limited mind. When you know he’s holding a chloroform pad with which he intends to sedate his captive, it becomes more disturbing; the homely cardigan, open-necked shirt and preppy quiff less reassuring. He knows what he’s trying to do: to keep possession of the beautiful girl, and this, in itself (he thinks) must be a good thing. Yet, he’s still not entirely confident in his behaviour. He thinks he’s benign, but the chloroform makes him look maniacal. He doesn’t seem aware of how he appears to an observer; that his aspirations to the world of art and culture have rendered him malevolent (even though he can’t seem to believe in his own malignancy). In many ways this image of pathetic, timid, moral dubiety – an unsophisticated brand of working-class anxiety – fits the note of most songs by The Smiths perfectly.

Stamp objected initially to use of the image, so Morrissey was photographed in a parody of the scene, holding a glass of milk rather than a chloroform pad. A few, now limited (and consequently expensive) releases, feature this mock image instead. So, a clever joke: milk is a milder soporific than chloroform. In any other context it might be a comforting image, for who wouldn’t view the gesture of milk-bearing in a benignant light? Is this an autobiographical character sketch of the band: they identify with the character in the film, a working-class aspirant to cultural sophistication, but they are not capable fully of becoming villainous in the pursuit: they will always be benign to the point of domestic banality. Yet, when set against the industrial guitar riffs and mild criminality of the song, this contrapuntal iconography is a clever piece of double-think. And it works. Ordinary life is full of psychotic disturbances; yet, these disturbances are the familiar landscape of most lives. What secrets lie hidden behind the veneer? What would be the cost of their being unveiled? “All men have secrets and here is mine, so let it be known…” A young man in a cardigan brings you a glass of milk. What could be more comforting? Or more rich with malice?

After a while Stamp relented, and subsequent releases reverted to use of the original sleeve design. I think we should seek a second copy of the single, one with the Morrissey sleeve, and take both back to Hengist I.