No ideas but in THINGS

Well, for various reasons a slight hiatus here at Allumination; most recently because I am shattered, having been enjoying an epic cycle commute between Clapham Junction, Acton, Stoke Newington, Acton, Oxford Circus and at last Clapham Junction again over the last couple of days! Very satisfying. So this is going to be more of a roundup post than anything else.

That’s not to say that there’s not been – as ever – much Weird Pondering going on at Allumination Central; most recently about H P Lovecraft, and in fact even as I type I’m about to get into the bath and carry on re-reading a key HPL masterpiece, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (which rocks, as they say, like an out of control battleship).

As a true HPL geek, I’m typing this while listening to psychedelic 60s rock loons H.P. Lovecraft play their mind altering classic, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ – key lyric, ‘no, my friend, you’re not toooo hiiiiiiggghhhh… you beloooooong… aaaat the moooooouuuunnnntains ooooooooooooof maaaaaaddddneeeeesssss….’ (which is perhaps missing the point somewhat – but hey, it was the 60s - and in fact that album saw me safely through many a Glastonbury back in the 90s, so they must have been doing something right); and much other HPL related stuff has synchronously popped up over the last couple of days.

First of all, there’s this, recorded in Summer ‘97 by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration, somewhere in the Pacific – perhaps the sound of Cthulhu himself, RISING FROM UNKNOWN R’YLEH?!?!?!?!?!? I certainly hope it’s not him; the Bloop is actually a rather unimpressive sound, and in fact my sanity is scarcely blasted despite repeated listenings. A disappointment.

This is rather less disappointing. It’s Charles Stross’ most excellent novelette, ‘A Colder War’, which is both a superb alternate history, refracting the Cthulhu Mythos through cold war paranoia and beyond, and a ferociously pointed warning about where the innate destructiveness and paranoia of those we too often let lead us might take us all.

It’s also very interesting in the light of Farah Mendlesohn’s comment that Lovecraft was in fact writing ‘the epic poetry of the age of corruption’ in her (very enjoyable and just released) ‘Rhetorics of Fantasy’. That’s something I’m going to ponder further and return to, so I’ll leave you with the thought unrambled on for now. And on RoF - I’m about halfway through it, so more on that too when I’ve finished it; for the moment, well worth picking up a copy.

And finally, much pondering of HPL’s relationship with modern art, and in fact Modernism in general. Many debates to be had there, for sure, but for now - Unknown R’yleh as Cubist as it gets? For sure – and is it not spooky just how well Ezra Pound’s Imagist diktat ‘no ideas but in things’ fits the thing-ridden New Englander? Ho yes… but for now, my plush Cthulhu and I wish you good night, as once again the bath has run, and it’s almost Kadath-o-clock…

Pound 1, Brancusi 0

Just spent a lovely weekend in Venice, with H; great food, great boozing, lovely company (of course), much architectural beauty, and also of course much time spent looking at art and (as ever) following Ezra Pound around.

This year’s Ezra stalking was particularly successful; our hotel was just round the corner from his and Olga Rudge’s house, and just next door to the quayside where he’d considered throwing the proofs of his first book into the Grand Canal – and, with it, his sense of poetic vocation. He remembered the moment in Canto 76 thus, standing by the:

 

‘…soap smooth posts where San Vio
meets with il Grande Canale
between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos
shd I chuck the lot into the tide-water?
                 le bozze “A Lume Spento”’

I re-enacted the moment, to minimal dramatic effect. Anyway, from there we hit the Guggenheim Museum, amongst other things taking a look at the Brancusi ‘Bird in Space’ they have there. Here’s that:

And it is, of course, rather lovely. But I also found I had a bit of a problem with it.

My problem is that (this version of) ‘Bird in Space’ an entirely optimistic piece of art. It’s about positive, upward flight; a utopian sense of the possibilities of being; an expression of a desire for, and a faith in the possibility of, transcendence. Brancusi described it as a ‘project before being enlarged to fill the vault of the sky’.

That kind of thing used to inspire me, but now it unsettles me. If the 20^th Century was about anything, it was about the problems of transcendence, about the way that transcendent thinking can so easily create an other that needs to be eradicated before paradise can come about.

Brancusi’s work rejects the gross and earthly; in art perhaps laudable, but when that same impulse is translated into politics, and used to image a new, purer reality, one that can be real if only the dross of this world is destroyed – well, you know where that leads.

Which lead me back to Pound. He spent World War II in Italy, broadcasting to America on behalf of the Fascists. After the war, he was locked up in a prison camp near Pisa, and only spared execution by a plea of insanity, which led to 12 years in an asylum in Washington DC.

He then returned to Venice, where he lived out the rest of his life – along the way apologising to a visiting Allen Ginsberg for the ‘stupid, suburban sin of anti-semitism’. The last years of his life were characterised by an almost unbroken silence.

His sense of regret also found expression in one of the final sections of ‘The Cantos’ –

 ‘I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
      Let the wind speak
                   that is paradise

Let the Gods forgive what I
                have made
Let those I love try to forgive
                what I have made.’

Begun as a transcendent project, in the full bloom of High Modernism, ‘The Cantos’ came to embody a rejection of that sense of transcendence. Pound lived the mistakes of the 20th Century, and learned from them.

Brancusi sought to purify; Pound understood what that purification could lead to, and pointed his reader back to direct, passive engagement with what’s already there (‘Do not move / Let the wind speak’) rather than an active attempt to create Paradise by carving away and discarding everything that doesn’t deserve to be part of it.

Pulp street indeterminacy

Well, it’s blog-o-clock again, and today’s pulp fiction pondering has been triggered by an exceptionally interesting essay about different modes of poetry by Reality Street supremo and exceptionally cool modern poet Ken Edwards. Here’s some of his poetry; and here’s the essay.

Edwards launches a sustained assault on systems of reading that privilege a (relatively conservative) mainstream over a (relatively experimental) ‘parallel tradition’, taking as his exemplars competing poems by Matthew Sweeney and Allen Fisher.

The essay’s well worth reading, not just to find out more about modern poetry but to be reminded that the most powerful system of discourse operating within a given field isn’t necessarily the most *right* system, and that such systems can achieve their dominant position for a variety of different reasons, many of them having nothing to with quality of debate or inherent worth.

But something pulpy leapt out at me as well. I was particularly taken by Edwards’ definition of Fisher’s poem as a ‘nonequilibrium structure’. That’s a scientific term; such a structure is one that requires ‘a continuing input of energy to sustain [its] ordered structure’. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one such structure; for Edwards, Fisher’s poem is another, because it requires the ‘continuous creative input of the reader to constellate its energy’.

That energy is needed because Fisher has, very deliberately, avoided writing a poem that resolves into a single fixed and coherent meaning or image set. Rather, it creates an open field of thought and feeling within which the reader is free to play, creating his or her own definition of what the poem is or could be. Deliberately incomplete, Fisher’s work demands the collaboration of the reader to attain one of many possible final forms.

That tends to be the kind of poetry that I prefer, and oddly enough it set me thinking about the visionary pulp writers who lie at the heart of so much of what’s interesting in the great tradition of SF and Fantasy.

There’s an incompleteness to much of their achievement too, but not necessarily such a conscious one; it springs from overwhelming indulgence of deep and exclusive personal obsessions, or an only partial attention to key aspects of the craft of writing, rather than from in-depth attention to literary theory, the deleterious effects of crumbily obvious poetry, and so on.

The Pulp Furies – ferociously obsessive, searingly primal, utterly unputdownable and at their best unforgettably resonant and evocative – created a literature that remains addictively engaging precisely because of its often lopsided incompleteness.

Hurling unhinged imagery, berserk plotting and often terrifying prose out into the void, for the most part not even noticing the classic procedures of fiction, still less paying any lip service to them, they created their own ongoing nonequilibrium structures.

Fifty, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years later, we’re still engaging with those structures, still finding them fresh precisely because of their failure to resolve into any final meaning. As readers, we collaborate with them, filling the gaps that obsession left with our own obsessions and thus finding life in them where other, more formally achieved works come across as decaying, if not dead.

Oh, and I was rooting around on his web page because of this excerpt from his new book, ‘Nostalgia for Unknown Cities’, available here - astonishing writing that I haven’t properly got to grips with, but that struck me on first reading as a kind of assembly code for an entirely personal fantastic.

Mondrian in New York

Rushing around today, so here’s a notebook entry from when I was lurking in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was a very exciting wander – and particularly exciting was seeing Mondrian’s various late New York paintings. So, I sat in front of them and pondered.

‘The geometry of this composition is partially based on sketches of partially demolished buildings.’ The artist as a maker of partially demolished buildings – paring back to the fundamental structures, destroying as he / she goes, creating something that explains and defines but can never be lived in – or at least, occupied only by the mind, the imagination, the viewer recreating a personal whole from the objective part and then moving into it as an inhabitant. ‘What would it be like if I lived there?’ The great question of the viewer / reader of art. The impossibility of ever finding out.