PART 2
PHILOSOPHER OF SHADOWS
When you speak up for the shadows
The shadows whisper secrets to you
~
Aye, filled with spleen these days
Splenetic to the max, & poisoned!
Days of light and airy harmonies
As bathed in bitter snake venom
Mean tongue unfurls, lashing out
Whipping the pretentious devils
Cunty autumn Bret in freest Fall
Boy of bile! Bad man! Grounded!
But ah … the firm, grounded man?
A ground for my electric current?
Give this cunty B, a splenectomy!
~
Is it really true that all art is mediocre today? Too uninspiring to stimulate any interesting critical reflection? Perhaps. But how much has this to do with the social situation of its presentation? The too-muchness? Are the individual artists in their fair booths not interesting within their own worlds, microcosms macrowaved into the market spectacle that democratizes everything to oblivion? Is this not a perfect example of Nietzsche suggesting we suffer from overfullness? Not a lack of art, but too much of it? Don’t all of these “orphans” (Heine) still clamor for a home in the critic’s reflection? And isn’t attention really the great bestower, filling even the mediocre cup? Or are all the cups mottled with holes that can hold nothing? How strange all this art overexposed under the market’s analytic fluorescent light, and yet which lives primarily in a shadowy realm of reflection parried.
. . .
The democratization of art is experienced as a bad sublime ~ individual artists stand as if under a massive wave of sloppy culture about to wash them away. Holding one’s ground against such a slop-tsunami would be futile; Calling it a revolution, delusional; Finding beauty in it … demented; Swimming in it poisonous. But is this not the storm so many wanted and many still clamor for? Perhaps we should be washed away! At least some parts of us. Lay me in ruin, says I!
Or maybe the slop-tsunami is actually a virtual mirage, a projection, and nothing washes over us after all.
Hollow shadow waves on walls of wallowed caves.
~
One must find aesthetic pleasure
In the open washed-out fields
Of Art post Contemptorary Art
No fear of new chaotic emptiness
The gates are flung wide wild open
Why fiddle with institution’s locks?
Find new life in air fresh opened
Oh, you say the sun’s too strong?
Shade’s found under the old trees
But you’ll acclimate to Apollo’s blazing love eventually
And learn to love drunken Silenus’s taciturnt field song
~
Perhaps only Melville understood how twisted and abject the incestuous bourgeois love story is. (Pierre)
“… in demagoguical America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues erected to it, but all things irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present.” — my favorite representation of modern culture still! You practically choke on the words, which feels true to the phenomena of culture today.
Vulgar cauldron of culture.
~
Anne Carson emphasizing the doubt part of Descartes "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am" is obvious, but important in a world of superficial affirmation that doubts nothing and vilifies any questioning as shady negativity.
I like Anne Carson. But I don’t love her. I don’t get that feeling with her that I get with eg Verlaine, Zukovsky, Pound, etc., even other contemporary, much less famous poets, random stackers here and there, where one has to put the book down because the words are so profoundly organized and evocative you can barely stand it, you wish you wrote it. My main issue with Carson is similar to my issue generally with much contemporary writing — it lacks music. In Carson’s case, it’s a bit more egregious because she’s a Sappho scholar, and she herself draws attention to Sappho’s musicality. Her notion that “reality is a sound, you have to tune to it” is great … but has she? Aye, but can anyone? Carson also has this thing that’s common now, where poetry comes dangerously close to self-help or sentimental pseudo-philosophy. But it’s a tricky thing — the poet always retains the vestige of it’s seer or prophet character, setter of communal values, which persists in vulgar, strange places today, and mostly canalized into ideology. What is the meaning of the poet and seer needing to be expressed as music, though? Perhaps in Carson (and elsewhere) we witness the splitting of the musician from poetry, in the era of medium specificity. But this splitting is also an experiment, an attempt to reduce the mediums to their irreducible essences — perhaps the attempt to split the poet from the musician will have proven too difficult, and no further splitting can occur without explosive damage?
I love Carson’s way of making Ancient Greek modern ~ the interest in Ancient Greece in modernity was never about classicism, but rather a vague feeling that there was something uncannily modern about the Greeks, almost that they were more modern than us, in some strange way. They did the cosmopolitanism of 19th century Paris first, though not as completely as Capitalism has forced us to, so we look to them as a kind of teacher who’s been there before.
But isn’t the popular appeal of Carson rather the zoomer’s pretentious neo-classicism and resignation towards the present? I suppose good artists like Carson are agnostic on the past, present, and future, a kind of lightning rod for all kinds of conflicting sensibilities.
~
I think what appeals to me about Iambic “blame poetry” is a form that successfully unites criticism and art. A form that vents criticisms while retaining an art of music seems to be what we’re after (perhaps only the rappers have made progress here?) For the last century, we’ve idealized the notion of the “critical artist” … and yet it exists only in the most degraded, caricatured, pseudo-intellectual, insufferably pedantic ways. The millennial failure of the ‘critical artist’ has led to the “aesthetic turn” ~ a turning away from any vestige of intellectual or critical content in favor of a formalism that has no fewer problems.
I refuse to throw the baby out with the bath water :— the task of a truly critical art remains.
~
If I’ve learned anything from Substack, it’s that readers like my cunty takes and shadow criticism of the prevailing culture more than my gay science poetry, even though I think the latter is the better. It’s funny, when we suppose people will like a certain thing, and they dislike it; when we suppose they’ll dislike something, and they actually like it. The need for a real criticism project to shed some light on our wild and weird aesthetic proclivities and mysterious pleasures, not just grading art the way beef is graded on the way to the slaughterhouse by the critic’s factory eyes.
~
We
are new people
we are cut from
a new different cut
there has never been
a people cut like us
new people new
frontier new mind
no pathos no habit
no preference
no reference
what will happen?
who could say?
~
The way AI lies and fabricates is so damned human.
When it gives you a longwinded but wrong answer, and then backtracks when you question, “You’re completely right to call me out on that …”
What’s more human than just making shit up & defending it with sophisticated language and infodumps that pull the wool over the receiver’s eyes?
Pretty much the stuff of humanity init?
~
My Beloved Daughter :— At the Ren Fair yesterday, when we were sitting in the upper row of the bleachers, waiting, I watched you walk out to the end of the aluminum plank and gaze out into the chaos of costumed people. You looked like the man confidently staring out into the sea of fog, but the sea was a society of actors, the fogscreen of social activity. What were you thinking?! How must this wild and strange scene appear to you?! I had a premonitory moment of seeing you in the world alone, strong, independent, solitary & beautiful. Half-shed of naivete and exposed to the chaos I can’t shield away with my clipped eagle wings. I beheld you for a moment as if a distant ghost warding your spirit. What will you become in this wild world? What chaos will impose itself on you, and what form will your fierce spirit impose upon the chaos?
~
The one who stands in front of a simple artwork and says “I can do that” with dismissive derision.
The one who stands in front of the same artwork and says “I can do that!” with inspired eureka.
Perhaps the most avant-garde artists are the ones operating on this level of rare, almost stupid simplicity that galvanizes nascent creators and anti-creators.
(Anne Carson has this quality)
~
Theater is “in”? Oh rly? For how long will this trend last?
Like Opera, seems many just want to appear sophisticated
Tawdry little decadents!
~
Incompetence as linked to a lack of will to curiosity
~
Via Negativa and Trust. They may call you negative, but the negative are also the only people that can be trusted when the community turns against them. And the community always turns on its own. Negativity as a so-called safe space. The cool respite of the shadows, the open breeze of doubt.
~
Astronomy
The night’s darkness is merely the shape of how young we are
The night sky is filled with light that hasn’t yet arrived to us
~
Jargon gets a bad rap. I love clarity as much as anyone, but confess ye! … There’s something aesthetically appealing about jargon, slang, legalise. The modern man’s esoterica. And esoterica can’t just be wished away.
~
What happens to lyric poetry after spectral music?
~
A Diaristic Review
Local artists talking shit on the Counterpublic Triennial :— I, the shadow poet-philosopher that underground people come to with discontents denied elsewhere.
Same thing every 3 years: a nepotized cavalry of misconceptual artists condescend upon St Louis on their well-groomed high-horses and one-trick ponies from New York, command the local artists to make their work . . . except that often they don’t even know how to make it themselves, lack curiosity or skill or even interest, and the local artists just make their work for them. Of course art is not reducible to manual labor or craft, not by a long shot. Yet, if one’s going to be a so-called conceptual artist and outsource their artistic work, at least have some interesting concepts eh? I think of the contemporary misconceptual artist as a kind of modern-day Circe, a nefarious witchery that circumvents and circumbscribes, that delays anyone on a journey of understanding through obfuscation. The viewers’ work is not to enjoy it, but rather to escape its clutches. Much of the work is vapid, almost nothing to it, so the artists’ primary contribution is draping a curtain of pseudo-theoretical and quasi-sociological wool over work they didn’t make. What Robert Storr once called “misconceptual art”.
Pulleys lifting bricks as alleged critique of local industry and capitalism, sure; moving plants; half-trick high-ponies. I liked the outdoor sound installation of watery recordings amplified to third ear volumes, very holographic yet obdurately physical, water divorced from cliche associations of Water, and beating against your tympanic membranes. Yet it suffers from what almost all experimental music and sound art suffers from: lack of music. Without the artful movement of music, “sound” gets boring very fast, not nearly as profound as is presumed in millennial academic theory that has grossly misinterpreted the work of “sound artists” who really were more composers in exile. Down by the Mississippi, Glenn Ligon made a petit serpentine brick wall, a nice form, but like Troy Sherman said, “It’s kinda small huh?” And even the great Ligon is not immune to the trite dangling carrot of creating work around bricks; When artists want to do something relevant to St Louis, it always has to be about bricks, dunnit? And never very imaginative either, just … bricks. It’s a shame the post-black movement died around 2016, there was once something there. At CAM’s Great Rivers Biennial, Vaughn Davis has his post-post-black post-Gilliam ripped paintings installed. I respect Davis’s commitment to painting and his curious mind, and always thought he might do something very interesting someday ~ but like a lot of young artists, the work seems premature, half-baked and hastened for an inflated demand of a poorly-cobbled millennial left culture market. I personally also don’t think Sam Gilliam is that interesting of a painter, and I’m not into the way contemporary painters often need to “subvert” the picture plane, which strikes me more as cowardly evasion. Like an unhealthy allergy. Trusting a painter who subverts painting is like trusting the hunger artist to be your chef. Vincent Stemmler has his ceramic work up too ~ always love his earthy sensibility, you really feel grounded with Stemmler, you sense he loves playing with earth. I liked the sculptures he showed for one of our one-day exhibitions a few years ago better though, they were more simple poetic busts, kinda Medardo Rosso-esque, naturalist, compared to this more discursive media installation. Again, something about the bombast of fairs that brings out a tendency in artists to overdetermine and overproduce. The only artwork of Counterpublic proper that compelled my attention was Li Yi Fan’s absurdist video game monologue. Humor is rare these days. I liked Chris Karl’s landscape work too, big vibrant orange coil gardens in the brownfields.
. . .
I’m all for importing artists from around the country/world, the global exchange of ideas and forms is one of the only reliable social supports for great art, from Ancient Greece to 19th century Paris. I actually like the art fair thang. What made St Louis interesting historically was that it was a cosmopolitan center ~ the French fur trade, the gateway to the gold rush, the Germans & Hegelians bringing kindergartens, breweries, and brick artisanship, etc. Provincialism and small town pride misses the mark by far. Yet, how pretentious that the New Wokers so altruistically occupying St Louis presume to bring ‘culture’ to remedy a struggling city, when they’re just bringing an exhausted academic contemporary art that has failed by almost every metric, kept alive by the artificial life support of art administration and millennial left ideology, and in our homogenous society already exists everywhere anyway. Mass of dross become pomp. But they get their grants, neo-liberal $support, and CVs that look like CVS receipts, which millennial bureaucrat-artists love, so what do they care.
In such a situation, I ask myself, How much of the collective shadow discontent has to do with ressentiment? There’s nothing wrong with imperfect artists getting support, after all. If we wait for airtight perfection, nothing will ever get exhibited, and modern art really is more a process towards understanding art, rather than the mastery of forms emanating from an already intact and complete understanding. We want some display of pathos and imperfection, right? Some kind of proposal, imperfect though it may be. So maybe some is ressentiment, feeling neglected or envious etc. Yet many artists are neglected often because their work is simply not coded in contemporary politesse, a decorum of self-righteousness that undergirds the form of so much predominant contemporary art these days. Not to say things don’t exist outside that, but that’s the point, it’s already outside. Put plainly, the primary medium of the millennial contemporary artist is decorum. Or, was? Many artists rightly just don’t respect decorum as a medium. Often what passes itself off as essential, righteous critical art is really just pretentious background noise.
. . .
I often wonder if our contemporary misconceptual decorum artists feel creatively and spiritually hollow on the inside. When I did that kind of work in my youth I longed for a form into which my mind could mediate, dispose and transform itself, ultimately finding in the forms of poetry and music just this mediation, a mediation which the misconceptual artists usually dogmatically spurn. I sense the vast majority of misconceptual artists these days haven’t even started the artistic process, let alone provide an example of artistic excellence that would inspire other artists. They are not reference points for how to create in the way avant-garde artists are (were?).
As someone who really went under myself, who withdrew from the social decorum for the sake of developing my practice, who communed with the shadows of art history, really getting into my process and taking the careful time to bake it all the way, and at the risk of complete irrelevance in following the unfurling threads of an inevitably idiosyncratic and alienated art, I lack patience for the half-baked bs that foregrounds art as a means of demonstrated social validation and aestheticization of politesse. Perhaps I should learn to suffer fools more cheerfully? I’m trying! I suspect many artists feel similar, and it’s this subjective discontent that has kicked out the support from under the contemporary art industry, rather than economic reasons. The post-studio situation has become a curse, not a solution. Perhaps viewing these decorum misconceptual artists not as the Great Intellectual Artists they self-righteously masquerade as, but rather as the cursed struggling with their pomo curse could be a way to view this art?
Socially, I’ve been watching the ole social art milieu morph over two decades, from more lumpen anti-institutional sensibilities to complete bureaucratic control of the institutions. Ultimately that’s what the social art ideology seems to have been about: institutional control. They’ve won, and artists who want institutional support will have to play their silly decorum games.
Not sure I’d advise the outcast’s position that is my cursed amor fati, but why play such games? An artist should take honor in their misfit alienated shadow position, even if it’s not ideal. After all, what’s to be gained, the resentment of your peers and maybe a few small grants? Oh yea, those CV receipts for the archive.
~
Soup season!
Made chowder with G last night, inspired by all this Moby Dick reading.
To Elijah’s “troubled reverie”, says I … “Like an irreverie?”
~
Dissonance is no random noise, but overtones very distant
Connection to fundamental is there, just very far removed
~
If Beckett is right (by way of Vico), language is deep-down simply about identifying things. Categorizing. From the primitive mimetic naming a thing in the landscape, to the growth of naming difficult emotions in the modern world of feelings.
State of the poetic art would then be the identification of emotions or phenomena too strange to grasp, new emotions on our social landscape.
What would these be today?
Alienation, resentment, engulfment, overwhelm?
What else?
I think of La Monte Young’s assertion that new harmonies create new musical emotions (the motivation for my music), and wonder if the new emotions simply come from innovative word harmonies.
A vague and insufficient thought, that’s essentially poetry init? Need to think through this more.
~
Many eager to sell their souls, nothing new in that … but why now for so little?
~
I didn’t like the music in the Odyssey, I thought it was very dull and monotonous. Millennial Grey. Especially poor form for a character that was a musician! Yet I gather what the composer was trying to do with those tritones was draw analogy between the most distant overtones (tritone) and being far out at sea. Good idea, poor execution.
~
Last year me and H went on a date to an experimental music show.
Bad idea.
It went on for far too long, and far too obnoxiously the “musicians” hacked away on their “instruments”. It was torture. Not sexy.
Why does experimental music lack eros?
Afterwards, we needed some respite, so she put on Hildegard to decompress, and we fondled each other to ascetic medieval church music.
Sigh. Culture today.
~
A lot of people in the DIY scene would make great policemen
~
If you think working for bureaucratic corporations is bad, try working for the public.
The grubby grasping needy hands in Hell, claw upon you all the longest wasted days.
~
I saw someone saying no intelligent person thinks people are generally stupid.
This person has never worked in a public library.
~
When the internet is down at the library, no one goes to the library.
~
The Plan
Go off all social
Leave society behind
Explore the spirit
Live off book sales
Cultivate my daughter’s life
Dream House foundation
Hyacinth House love
Erect new doric columns
Rise above the slop
Rest in the shadows
Eros under our oak tree
Smell the immortelle
~
The Irreveries is published this month. 20+ years of poetic-philosophical experiments, finally in book form. At ~600 pages I’ll surely catch criticism for the length, but idgaf, it’s my broken testament, abstract as it is. I will most likely not publish another book, (unless it’s collected essays, or maybe Spiraling Grace revised), but will do editions annually with new inclusions, edits, etc., in the American epic poetry tradition of Whitman and Zukovsky. Lucy Parker’s drawings also need to be added, and many more diagrams from the music, to properly manifest that image I had in the dream a few years ago. What can I say, if one doesn’t feel compelled to read it all, then don’t. The last thing I want is to be read out of social obligation instead of curiosity or sincere interest, which is how many experience art & lit these days it seems. A lot of space in there, but perhaps needing more space yet. It’s also poetry, non-sequential, so it doesn’t have to be read straight through, though it does paint a large portrait when taken as a whole, a very wide Whole Human gamut of emotion. I’ve lived a full life, with the emotional vistas to match. Maybe 20% of the writing is “good”. And yet even in its not-goodness it seems like it needs to be published. I left in a lot of bad poems as a kind of dissonant counterpoint. Even the bad stuff has its place. Maybe there’s a bigger lesson there. Or maybe not!
My main concerns with The Irreveries is that {A.} Not enough food or sex or particularities {B.} Maybe not directly American enough, though I do have a lot of frontier refs and it traverses Ohio, St Louis, NY, and Arizona etc. {C.} It’s a book that tends to see in everything a possible lesson; even many of the abstract poems have a parablesque quality to them. But that’s the gay science I suppose. Critical discontents transfigured by the gay science. {D.} I wonder if distilling and refining my critical fragments into poetry is maybe too abstract, after all. I thought it would be clarifying, but it’s likely more obscuring. Art is funny, it’s not really about clarifying, but obscuring in a truthful way. But there’s something interestingly artless about eg Archilochus and Anne Carson (and some other interesting contemporary writers.)
~
Whitman did “Greek cheerfulness” better than the Greeks did Greek cheerfulness.
~
Aesthetic judgment is the closest thing we have to a flaming sword.
Or a divining rod.
And most opt not to use it.
The vast majority of theories etc. evade it, lobbying for normative rules for experiencing art — we must be only open to the new, or entirely closed off for tradition, we must emphasize the artistic labor, the ethics, the artistic intention, sociological justifications, psychologizing of artworks, and on and on and on.
Nah.
Flies buzzing around, that’s all.
The only determining factor is our judgment. Do we like the thing or not? So simple it evades us. Social fear of freedom has its analogue in aesthetic fear of pleasure.
And in any case why do we like or dislike? That’s the only basis for any theory of art, if one’s even needed.
All else is ideology.
Flies buzzing.
~
Mass of dross that grows to pomp
Horses high and grooming clomp
Far below my open sky
Festivals that masquerade
The intellect in shady veil
My questions that wave ... goodbye!
