The magazine Brooklyn Rail has given me two big reasons to like the artist Richard Tuttle even more.
The first reason is the following passage from a 2005 interview with Tuttle, about how he beat the draft during the Vietnam War:
I had this idea to study very hard for a multiple choice test and color in the answer to the left of the correct one.
It worked like a charm. They sent me right to the intensive ward of the nuthouse and then gave me an honorable discharge because they thought that it was their fault that I had gone nuts.
And still to this day, I don’t know if in fact I was nuts.
That last sentence is the kicker.
The second reason is contained in the following, recently published commentary on Tuttle's work, by Jeremy Sigler:
After viewing a Tuttle show, I instantly forget what I’ve seen.
I find myself unable to recreate mentally, while what I retain is the work’s considerable poetic impact. In memory, the work fails to function and then fails to exist.
But this actually contributes to its longevity. For their foggy impressions always leave reason for a refresher course in Tuttle's native tongue.
You might even say that the work becomes subversive through its knack at creating such an impression while simultaneously erasing the short-term memory, causing one to forget ever having seen it. Each time I return to Tuttle, it is therefore in real time and real space, and for the first time and in the first place.
The above observation is fascinating. But what on earth does it mean, exactly? I wonder about some possibilities.
Least likely: Tuttle's work contains some kind of aesthetic MSG. The viewer gets hungry all over again for the same meal. It hides empty calories. Filler. Maybe Tuttle sneaks through, buried in his art's presence, the lack of something that only going to another Tuttle exhibition promises to fill, but then does not fill.
Compare: What if an evil baker created a very delicious kind of donut in which, unbeknownst to the eater, the hole got eaten too, and caused hunger for more of the same donuts?
Would Tuttle's artwork not thereby create an ever expanding market for itself? Clever.
Or: Tuttle's work contains some kind of subtle cognitive copy protection. Maybe the pieces mess with the brain's duplication "standards," or contain an embedded mental encryption key. If the brain tries to burn a permanent, duplicate image, the file is automatically erased.
Sigler concedes that he does not forget Tuttle's art completely. Nor does he seem to want to. At least part of his memory remembers at least part of the experience. For example, he seems to remember the artist's name.
But how does his brain decide what to remember and what to forget? Does his brain retain a lot of the subjective, emotional feel of the artworks but few objective "facts" about them? As if the input goes straight to the amygdala for long-term storage? Somehow bypassing usual channels?
Does the overwhelming, immersive, sensory intensity of the artistic experience trigger a variety of selective amnesia? The very same thing happens to me when I go the opera. So I can understand and relate to saying to oneself, "I don't remember much of anything about the experience except that I loved it at the time. So I am anxious to go back and experience it again."
Thus the art guarantees that it can only be experienced "in the moment."
I wonder whether this example of selective amnesia has something to do with the more common and seductive but tricky, dualistic desire to know what it's like to "forget . . . but remember" something. To step out of time, to float alongside history.
Whenever I hear people (e.g., myself) express a desire to "forget" about an experience, I realize, they rarely mean that they want totally to forget about it.
Usually, they're talking in general about some unpleasant experience that they never want to repeat. So, they want to forget some parts, like the full memory of the physical pain, the burn of moral shame or the embarrassment at the failure to foresee and prevent disaster. However, they badly want to remember other parts, like the general facts of how horrible the situation was, or the warnings signs of the bad habits or dangerous circumstances that led to the previous trouble.
It is difficult to wield forgetfulness with the control and scalpel-like precision necessary to get the balance right; to carve away and separate the sticky, interconnected lobes of a seemingly unified experience; to remember and forget the correct categories of things, always in the proper proportion, at the right times.
Sigler provides a wonderful example of a case in which it is OK to let go and embrace a spontaneous forgetfulness, even if it is a kind that wants to stage an endless return to the same events.
A related question: How does the brain overcome a dispute among its various parts about whether a particular memory should be forgotten or kept -- or invented?
This question is asked indirectly by a very interesting online paper, "The Time of Unrememberable Being: Wordsworth's Autobiography of the Imagination," by Francis F. Steen of the fascinating CogWeb.
The paper is great for at least three reasons:
it contains a very cool diagram of how our brains "formulate a calibrated intention . . . that draws on the sensorimotor memories of the neocortex and is informed by the priorities set by the limbic system."
it includes many snippets of the writing of Wordsworth, a person whose appreciation of the beauty of forgetfulness we previously have noted.
I will now proceed to try to forget this post.
[update 2/23/08:
SK:
[T]he art of forgetting is not the same as forgetfulness. It is also easy to see what very little understanding people in general have of this art, for usually it is only the unpleasant they want to forget, not the pleasant. This betrays a complete one-sidedness. . . .
Forgetting is the shears with which one clips away what one cannot use -- thought, mind you, under the overall supervision of memory. Forgetting and memory are thus identical, and the skilfuly achieved identify is the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world. In saying that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved.
SK then goes on to warn against the dangers of friendship.
The foregoing is from Either/Or, part 1, chapter 6 ("Crop Rotation"), from the Penguin edition translated by Alastair Hannay.]
listen to entirety of James Chance retrospective box set. surprise self by enjoying it much more than expected. (decide that this is primarily because Pat Place's slide guitar is mixed to be nicely audible.) read liner notes.
↓
wonder if anyone's yet put up a MySpace tribute page to Anya Philips. research it. discover none. (but become happy that there is now a great page for The Bloods)
↓
read on-line discussion of memories of Ms. Philips. learn that owner of a key Bowery loft was one "Needles Jones." wonder what ever happened to him/her. research it.
↓
learn that Needles Jones moved to Philadelphia and is a much loved drag performer there. research more. begin to feel a lot of admiration for her.
↓
learn that Needles Jones is in the hospital because, approximately 48 hours before i first learned her name, she was beaten in her home to within an inch of her life.
(get well soon, i say)
↓
consider taking a moritorium on researching things for a while
As part of the arts organization Flux Factory's recently completed six-week obsession with Paterson, NJ, USA, one Joe Milutis led a weekly book club that read and discussed William Carlos Williams' long poem.
Milutis kindly posted audio files of three of the weekly discussions on-line on his fascinating Paterson-related blog. The audio files are very interesting. So is William's poem; it is obsession-producing in its own right.
Below are some unsystematic, various, noted moments from WCW's Paterson and the audio files, with an attempted parallel column of scattered, pointless, overly-long TiR-style research links and stray reactions that resulted from consumption of WCW & the audio. It all got posted here primarily to preserve weblinks of possible future interest (to me), and for the technical challenge of putting it together.
Suggestion of the bravery, creativity and challenges of Flux Factory's Paterson project is contained in this newspaper article; blog commentary on the article, here; and some apparent traces of the photographic sort, here.
WCW as ambivalent -- sympathetic yet reserved from the people he's bringing into the world
u know what he's doing but can't get ahold of it w/ yr mind
labile terms
white noise
WCW not sure he buys his own line
connected in non-linear way
words linked
constellations of meaning pieced together
uncentered sense
Baudelairian note
written spring & summer '47.
WCW to Babette Deutsche, June '47:
[I]n "Paterson," the social unrest that occasions all strikes is strong -- underscored, especially in the 3rd part, but I must confess that the aesthetic shock occasioned by the rise of the masses upon the artist receives top notice. . . . In Part or Book II . . . there will be much more in the same manner, that is, much more relating to the economic distress occasioned by human greed and blindness -- aided, as always, by the church, all churches in the broadest sense of that designation -- but still, there will be little treating directly of the rise of labor as a named force. I am not a Marxian.
[I]n the dialectical antithesis between distraction and concentration, [WCW] unhesitatingly took the most conservative side. . . . The depiction of the poet as a remote figure working in solitude so as to actualize the symbolic order of his aristocratic revolution is emblematic of William's ideology of the task and responsibility of the intellectual in a time of crisis. (from Carla Billitteri's "William Carlos Williams and the Politics of Form" (2007))
among the working classes SOME [SUM?] sort of breakdown has occurred.
Within three years the S.U.M. was party to the first American lockout, and three decades later to the first American strike. It was bad for the people, the economy, and the landscape.
(from Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era)
like Hamilton: use the roar of the falls for one's own purposes (Mariani)
the peon in the lost Eisenstein film drinking
- laughing, toothless?
Heavenly man!
the children with their dusty little minds
the inevitable poor, the invisible, thrashing, breeding . debased city
[Williams] remained closer to the original Imagist practice than many of the other poets in Pound's book [the anthology, "Des Imagistes"], including Pound himself. He opposed abstractions (Pound's GIFOA -- go in fear of abstactions -- was an article of faith for him).
This instrument of word order which the Chinese language has developed to the highest consistency and sharpness, might indeed, from a purely logical point of view, be regarded as the only truly adequate means of expressing grammatical relations. For it would seem possible to designate them more clearly and specifically as relations pure and simple, possessing no perceptual base of their own, through the pure relation of words expressed in their order, than by special words and affixes.
(from Cassier's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, Language)
A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meetingpoints of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. . . . The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things . . .
[T]he agent and object are secretly verbs.
[Fenollosa] warred on the copula: "There is in reality no such verb . . . , our very word exist means 'to stand forth.' to show oneself by a definite act.' In the Chinese, 'is' he found 'a splendid flash of concrete poetry.' . . . His great, his unassailable originality stemmed from his conviction that the unit of thought was less like a noun than like a verb, and that Chinese signs therefore denoted processes."
There is a strong, indeed barely repressible, temptation to consider the growing predominance of the formal function of the copula as a process of falling, an abstraction, degradation, or emptying of the semantic plentitude of the lexeme "to be" and of all lexemes which, likewise, have let themselves dwindle or be replaced.
(from Derrida's "The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics: The Remainder as Supplement: On the Third Person Singular of the Present indicative of the Verb 'To Be'")
Pound on the poetic image: a radiant node or cluster; . . . what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. (1914)(from Kenner's The Pound Years)
Williams' feeling-tone, as Donne's, groups an order of tangible objects. (Zukofsky, in Prepositions, on WCW)
[interwoven thing-clusters]
Forget it! for God's sake, Cut out that stuff .
min 46-47: Why should we be reading this? It's, like, crazy. It's the way I might talk to somebody I have issues with, in my head, pretending a conversation. Who decided? Why is this great?
To return to anything like values and clarity we have been forced into vulgarity. This is history. (WCW in The Embodiment of Knowledge)
language, tongue-tied the language worn out .
. .
I dare say you have, at moments
Blocked.
literature, as something disconnected from life
purely literary sympathies and understandings, the insights and humanity of words on paper only -- and also, alas, the ego of the literary man
cranky Nardi letter
so far ahead of his time, he didn't know what he was doing, not always conscious of it
Williams always did his best work when he did not 'think it out,' when both the theme and the form were discovered in the course of the poem itself. . . . [M]ake a case for the greatness of his poetry when he was not thinking, and were not about to try to strengthen and extend that case.
(Hyatt H. Waggoner)
abstract of paper about how Nardi cured WCW's writer's block: here
on MN's poems: their monstrous reality had triggered something in [WCW].(Mariani)
long blog post with WCW/Nardi info, analysis: here
re: Nardi in spring of 1942: Williams was crazy about her.(per Mariani)
1942: MN = in her early 30s. WCW born 1883 (age 59?).
from WCW's play "Many Loves" (written 1941) : Doc (age: "not so young anymore") to Clara, his patient, a "young suburban housewife" during a housecall:
. . . starved as we live, because we never, never, never, never took a chance among the five or six thousand or million people of our small personal world to know them actually and individually . . .what actually the creature in the next bin is doing or feeling. And all the shyness and all the prudery and all the moral carpings are no more than so much heartburn from our chronic emptiness. Shall we go upstairs now?
(Act 3, sc. 1)
from WCW's play "A Dream of Love": Dr. Thurber (a physician in his middle 40s). Dotty (woman in her late 20s). her response to hearing his theory of poetics: Dot: I love you. Doc: You mean you know what i'm talking about? Dot: Yes. Doc: You mean you understand what I'm after? Dotty: Yes. Doc: And it doesn't make you wanna puke? (act III, scene 3 (penultimate scene))(based on dream WCW had in summer 1942)
That woman would take a hundred shapes and forms over his lifetime, and Floss, troubled, confused, angry, amazed, would have to chide her husband for falling in love with every two- and four-legged female he met.
(Mariani)
[WCW vs. MN: competing visions of the socially engaged artist? cf. contemp debates, re: identity politics "authenticity" "who's more 'down (with)'?"
within the world vs. away from the world
art v. commerce]
WCW as doc served immigrant and black communities, refused to raise his prices during G. Depression when his competitors did, or to mail them bills (e.g., he did not charge Nardi when he treated her son, the first time he met her) (per Mariani)
who more truly got their hands 'dirty'? faced 'life'? (& must the choice be an 'either/or' one?)
[but Nardi gets the last word in the book. literally. (& almost unedited)]
re: Fred Miller [Blast editor] letter to WCW, early 1947:
Miller had been complaining about the Senate's attempts to block David Lilienthal's confirmation as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a blockage that would have -- in Miller's view -- turned the bomb over to a few powerful industrialists.
Chicago mayor, 1890s, pardoned Haymarket anarchists refused to call out federal troops vs. rail strike populist hero political casualty
Bk III:
network of associations not linear logic, through repetition of words, concepts, read by interconnecting,
comparing
from WCW's review of Muriel Rukeyser's US1 (New Republic, March 9, 1938):
[H]er poetic material, is in part the notes of a congressional investigation, an X-ray report and the testimony of a physician under cross-examination. These she uses with something of the skill employed by Pound in the material of his "Cantos." . . . This poem relates to big business and its "innocent" effects on the men in employs. . . . I hope Miss Rukeyser does not lose herself in her unjudicious haste for a "cause" . . .
[transparency of process vs. veiling]
WCW reading Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle circa 1946:
[WCW] was especially struck by Lowell's ability 'to mention local place names . . .without that jumping out of context which so often occurs to make a work false sounding. . . [to] treat of American things and name them specifically without a sense of bathos.
[WCW] also spotted Melvin Tolson's 'Libretto for the Republic of Liberia' -- followed by Allen Tate's 'Preface' in the July issue of "Poetry" -- and incorporated Tolson's refrain 'Selah!' by the way of praising Tolson's 'cultured intelligence' . . .
(Mariani)
mode of the tapestries (i.e., Unicorn) interweaving cross-referencing thought of the poem in terms of a fugue acentric, simultaneous effect coincidence recurrence circularity of time (see Margaret Lloyd Bollard's "The Interlace Element in Paterson," in Twentieth Century Literature, Oct. '75)
Randall Jarrell on "Pat Bk 1" in Partisan Review, Sept-Oct. 1946:
[T]he organization of 'Paterson' is musical to an almost unprecedented degree: Mr. Williams introduces a theme that stands for an idea, repeats it over and over in varied forms, develops it side by side with two or three more themes that are being developed, recurs to it time and time again through out the poem, and echoes it for ironic or grotesque effects in thoroughly incongruous contexts.
from Mezzrow's Really the Blues, about Bessie Smith records:
What knocked me out most on those records was the slurring and division of words to fit the musical pattern, the way the words were put to work for the music.
At best, there is a continual friskiness, the writing is a fugue, comparable to the scene in "Twelfth Night" in which the Clown proves Olivia a fool. . . . His line sense is not only a music heard, but seen, printed as bars, printed (or cut as it were) for the reading. . . . one does not think of line-ends in him but of essential rhythm.
[cf. WCW letters to Zukofsky & wife in A, asks 'em to put enclosed poems to music]
Futurist idea of burning libraries, Marinetti, anti-naturalist, pro-machine
the Falls' duality -- water dropping, mist & rainbow rise
mist = myth
lang as forgotten/forgetting, and looking forward, unsaid yet
the riddle = most unexamined violent trauma
hence his incoherence when talking about it
wax model of the falls
always systems of regress
cure thru representation (wax figure) through prayer -- which is lang.
but: the disease also = urge to representation
demonstrate the dilemma don't perform it
don't want to center things too much
sounds Freudian! -- (min 44)
from Marinetti's 1909 "Futurist Manifesto": Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers!
BT's busted nose == The Sphinx! (min 47)
BT = source of labor
men in Pat. make silk for beautiful things
min 56: kids outside begin terrorizing discussion group, singing at them.
kids enter. What you all doing here? Talking about poetry. Want something to eat? Asks 'em to sing again.
Kids ask for ice cream. Book group only has coffee, 7-Up.
Kids take snacks, leave.
You're familiar w/ the words, but still are not sure what they mean.
Artaud: need to communicate as if signaling through the flames
floating periods double periods calm waters that suddenly drop
[WCW's] translation, "in collaboration with his mother," of Philippe Soupault's novel, Last Nights [of] Paris (1929)"
words to be rebricked up
the triad that makes up "Paterson 3": first wind, then fire, then water . . . these become radical metonyms for the 'elements' of language itself
(Mariani)
[below falls riverbed mud/ bloody loam (Bk. 1) (fertile, useful material) what do you get when you combine mud and fire? bricks durability
post-trauma (What is the "catastrophe"?)]
min. 1:19 LouisGinsberg, Allen's dad, was Don's English teacher -- Don loved it, but LG was unhappy with loudness of falls, interfered w/ poetry reading near falls once upon a time
falls in with same folly as any identification or signification does -- it's a f__cking frenzy of particles in the Falls
language x 11
If [WCW] had some kind of sociological statement to say, he wouldn't be writing in this way.
Bks IV-VI:
credit x 24
do you joke when a man is dying of a brain tumor?
too much move into bio blinds us to the poetry
let it be
cloud of referentiality
identifying mode is patriarchal, more feminine not to identify [?]
'I am a man,' 'I am a woman' -- We overcode something so vast, we can't utter it, utterance = insigificant totality of social and life forces stand behind, complex history of material occurrences, but we try to read infinitenessimal sounds.
He's talking about not talking at all.
bks hang together less, he performs his own disintegration, as goes on
It's interesting that . . .
min. 46 (someone sings the title of the Police's "Synchronicity" )
radiant gist: radium? credit? labor theory of value?
Jefferson's 1775 "Resolutions of Congress on Lord North's Conciliatory Proposal"
Pragmatism -- pluralism -- polyvocality?
Deweyan aesthetics + Social Credit economics
William James:
Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere WITHNESS, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction ’and.’ Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives.
[a possibly useful distinction: 'what he means' vs. 'what he means for us']
James's "The Stream of Consciousness essay: created 1892.
the Dial magazine for June 1920 (table of contents here): the last page of John Dewey's essay "Americanism and Localism" faces the first page of Pound's "Fourth Canto."
Dewey: local American newspapers as the only genuinely popular form of literature we have achieved. . . . the local is the only universal.
cf. EP in ABCs of Reading Literature is news that STAYS news.
blaming the difficulty of writing on the legacy of Hamiltonianism: finance capitalism. (Alec Marsh)
Jefferson said it. We should have a revolution of some sort in America every ten years. . . . There has to be a new poetry. . . . [T]he altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem. Made of it.
Williams noting that the poet has no père -- no father . . . It is a resolution that splits through the very title of the epic, dividing it like the scar down Ahab's face: Pater/son.(Mariani)
Curie (the movie queen)
WCW's empathy & distance doctor/poet dialectic
Wasn't William Blake a chemist?
March or April 1944: WCW goes to see MGM's "Madame Curie" with Greer Garson
WCW, July 1945 letter: Somewhere in some piece of art resides a radioactive force.
And Billy Sunday evangel
Dissonance (if you are interested) leads to discovery
Billy Sunday, who [WCW] remembered had been called into Paterson in 1913 to break the back of the long, drawn-out strike by preaching God to the workers and reminding them of their religious duty to return to work. That Billy Sunday had preached at the Hamilton Hotel (ironically recalling the father of all those special interest groups that had crippled Paterson from its inception as a city), and that he'd received $27,000 for his services from the Union Factory Owner's Association, did not escape Williams.
(Mariani)
[Emma Goldman's reaction to B. Sunday: here; Upton Sinclair's: here]
WCW in "Against the Weather" (1939): churches as
monopolies using religion to bring a man under an economic yoke of one sort or another
and: preachers preach that one should give all they goods to feed the poor then throughout Western history turn to draining of every cent from the poor to their everlasting misery and impoverishment.
[M]en are not strong enough to "bat air" with women. That forever proves to me I am not a man; they, men, disgust men and if I must say it fill me with awe and admiration. I am too much of a woman.
[A man like a city and a woman like a flower. (Bk. 1)-- Why can't a woman be like a city too?]
You can learn from poems than an empty head tapped on sounds hollow in any language!
min 1:19 JMil breaks into Gershwin's "But Not For Me"
'and I''ll cause a riot' -- Newark! 1967! [40th anniversary
WCW explan. to Babette Deutsche on why he wrote Pat 5: merely coming 'home' could not be the end of it unless you say what 'home' is. (Mariani)
WCW to Marianne Moore:
If the vaunted purpose of my poem seems to fall apart at the end, it's rather frequent that one has to admit an essential failure. (Mariani)(emph. supplied)
deeply interesting. . . . late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against. . . .
(from Said's On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain)
I learned since that Williams was one quarter Jewish. Probably that quarter was the poet in him. [?]
Another day, he spoke of suicide attempts. He told me, with a wit that allowed me to think he was just playing with the idea,
"I try stepping off the curb in front of speeding cars all the time, but the drivers just swerve around me and speed away.
"My advice to you is, if you ever get something wrong with you, don't cure it, but cultivate it."(from Paterson Literary Review, # 34 (2005))
Sources most drawn upon for the above include Money & Modernity: Pound, Williams & the Spirit of Jefferson, by Alec Marsh, and Paul Mariani's William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.
Artaud added a new kind of character to his roster in this drama; namely, an impersonal - function type, The Great Sniffer (La Grand Flaireur).
This being walks on stage, larger than life, since he stands on stilts, and symbolizes man being led by his nose, as his name indicates. . . .
His follwers are made up of men with enormous arms and fists, unbalanced themselves, who follow him blindly.
When the Great Sniffer utters his innocuous sentences, he draws them out, ending each phrase in an echo-like fashion and with "unbearable yelpings . . . "
After each tirade, banners, masts, torches and the sounds of plane motors fill the air, a concrete expression of the effect of the Great Sniffer's speech on the masses.
from Bettina L. Knapp's Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision
(apparently on a version of "There Is No More Firmament [Il n'y a plus de firmament]") (1931-32)
"I'm sorry, but not especially, if it turns you off. . . "
Terry Eagleton in a book review last month cast a momentary light on a delightful fact about Mihkail Bakhtin:
[Bakhtin] settled in Saransk, where he lived for a while in a disused jail and taught at the Pedagogical Institute as a one-man world literature department. He also gave a lecture on aesthetics to workers at a lightbulb factory, and became something of a local celebrity.
(emphasis supplied)
A different, wonderful article by Eugene Matusov, mainly about Bakhtin's teaching methods, provides a little more detail about the lecture:
He was skillful in tuning his presentations to diverse audiences at any level.
For example, in the late 1950s, he gave a lecture on literary aesthetics at a lightbulb factory in front of as many as 700 electrical workers.
A reconstruction of Bakhtin's lecture, as pieced together years later by the fragmentary notes of the baffled factory workers in the audience, show that Bakhtin opened his presentation as follows:
You won't believe this, but fifty years from now, some of the people who read books by me will laugh at this joke:
Q: How many postmodernists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to ponder the subtextualities of change regarding the cultural hegemony of the electrical/manual pseudoduality, and one to call the janitor.
Heh heh. Isn't that a killer?
Heh. Heh.
Ahem.
How about this one?
Q. How many deconstructionists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. Even the framing of this question makes a grid of patriarchal assumptions that reveals a slavish devotion to phallocentric ideas - such as, technical accomplishment has inherent value, knowledge can be attained and quantities of labor can be determined empirically, all of which makes a discourse which further marginalizes the already disenfranchised.
OK, I lied about that whole last part (joke sources here and here).
But doesn't the idea of a lecture in a late-1950s, Soviet lightbulb factory sound quaint?
Actually, on further research, no it doesn't.
The Saransk lightbulb factory seems like it may have been a pretty big deal at the time, as was Saransk, both in its own way.
Some basic info on the city is here. The school at which MB taught seems to have become today's Mordovian State University. The school's website offers some more info on Saransk here.
If MB lectured at the big Saransk electrical equipment factory now known as LISMA, a picture of the place is here.
A history of that factory, which goes back to 1949, is here. The plant did not come into production until after several years of construction, until 1956. The factory's first lamp was manufactured only some 72 hours after the first public readings of Khruschev's "On the Personality Cult and its Consequences" speech, and right around the third anniversary of Stalin's death. The factory employed over 16,000 people, or around 17% of the Mordovian industrial labor force.
A big source of pride in the factory's first few years seems to have been the development of its ability to make fluorescent bulbs. These seem to have been a somewhat big, new thing in the 1950s. They had been introduced to public consciousness in the USA at the 1939 World's Fair. After the war, in the USA, fluorescents had only surpassed incandenscent bulbs in prevalence of use by around 1951.
[What if anything does the backdrop condition of the Soviet economy of the early-to-mid 1950s say about whether building the new factory in Saransk was an important thing or not? How much cash did the USSR have to throw around back in the early 1950s on a new electrical equipment factory? What was the state of the general Soviet economy?
This is a huge topic. I am not expert on it -- or anything. However, the period seems to have been one, there, of much economic transition to new priorities. Some scattered evidentiary pieces:
from MarkHarrison's January 2007 "The Soviet Economy: War, Growth, and Dictatorship" (.pdf):
In other words, by 1954, with Stalin's corpse already on view in the Red Square mausoleum, recovery from the effects of World War II was only half complete.
Within days of Stalin's demise, his henchman Beria, and then Khrushchev, began dismantling one of the dictator's proudest achievements, namely his concentration camps. They did so for many reasons. . . . . Most of all, though, they did so because the camps were an economic disaster and had distorted the society they were supposed to help build.
from Harrison and Byung-Yeon Kim's's 2001 paper "Plan, Siphoning and Corruption in the Soviet Command Economy" (.pdf)
[I]n the early 1950s the authorities pursued a policy of stabilising money wages and allowing living standards to rise by forcing down retail prices.
In the middle 'fifties Moscow was compensating many Communist governments for the wrongs inflicted on them: it disbanded the Joint Stock Companies through which Stalin had controlled the Chinese and Eastern Eurpoean economies; it annulled the unequal trade treaties he had imposed on them; and it gave up other forms of "penetration."]
In any case, it is easy to imagine that the new lightbulb factory was something of a regional showpiece.
Back then, the factory seems to have been part of a collective manufacturing association called Svetotekhnika. The magazine Svetotekhnika, "the official mouthpiece of state organizations responsible for the development of lighting equipment in the USSR," goes back to 1931. "Svetotechnica.com," meanwhile, today seems go to an electrical products group's website that has no English-language content but does at least feature a graphic of the form of a woman who looks like the lovechild of the Silver Surver and Grace Jones. Mordovia seems to be proud to this day of its electrical equipment manufacturing industry.
During the Soviet era, however, the electric lightbulb apparently was an invention of huge importance. The lightbulb was known as nothing less than "the lamp of Ilyich [Lenin]." A stirring vintage photo by Skurikhin (one of his many great ones) of some peasants reading by the light of one is here.
Moreover, you can't have a lightbulb without electrity, and you can't have electricity without electrification. Lenin and the Soviet Union took electrification very seriously indeed. Lenin famously wrote, in 1920:
Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
[Writing 16 years later in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky put an anti-Stalinist spin on Lenin's saying, when he wrote:
Lenin once characterized socialism as "the Soviet power plus electrification."
That epigram, whose one-sidedness was due to the propaganda aims of the moment, assumed at least as a minimum starting point the capitalist level of electrification. At present in the Soviet Union there is 1/3 as much electrical energy per head of the population as in the advanced countries.
If you take into consideration that the soviets have given place in the meantime to a political machine that is independent of the masses, the Communist International has nothing left but to declare that socialism is bureaucratic power plus 1/3 of the capitalist electrification.
Such a definition would be photographically accurate, but for socialism it is not quite enough!
At the same time, Matusov's article points out how Bakhtin's dialogic mind and teaching methods served in some clever ways to undo totalitarian pedagogy from within.
Thus, I like to imagine that MB's lecture was a two-way discussion with the lightbulb factory workers.
I imagine how they might have agreed to put in motion some kind of secret plan to try to remake the human mind, in ways that Lenin might not have imagined, through a sneaky agenda that would not reveal itself for decades, with MB working from the theoretical end and the lightbulb workers from the physical/technological end.
For the electrification of the Soviet Union, which the lightbulb workers worked in the service of, turned out to be merely a part of a much larger, transformational, 20th century global wiring.
McLuhan thought about the implications of how the electrification of the planet meant an extension of the human nervous system, with the result that "all such extensions of our bodies, including cities - will be translated into information systems."
No less a quintessential contemporary artifact than Wikipedia describes itself as "an intensely dialogic phenomenon."
So I foggily imagine Bakhtin appealing to the workers, something like:
Comrades!
When you go back to your assembly line and make your lightbulbs, think about what I said in this lecture.
If you do, I predict that your creations will magically absorb my ideas -- and me.
My ideas will become electrons, and inject themselves into a network that someday will span the globe, to influence all humanity.
Thereby, together, someday, we will revolutionize human consciousness!
Or at least it will be the closest thing to a symbolic way for me to get myself the heck out of Saransk.
A definitive collection of lightbulb jokes are here.
Some philosophy-related jokes, of which an overlapping category involve lightbulbs, are here.
[Though that last link does omit what is my favorite lightbulb joke of the instant, which is buried here:
Q. How many speech act theorists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Do you really want to know or are you simply asking me to change it?]
A month or two ago, I boarded a crowded vehicle of public transportation and rushed to sit in the only available seat.
The seat was next to a guy who looked shabby, unwashed and borderline homeless. I figured that everyone else was too snobby to sit next to him.
I sat down. He was a little fragrant. I got out a book and started to read.
Pretty soon, I heard what sounded like my neighbor, muttering to himself. I tried to ignore his voice. Then the following words of his caught my attention:
Well, the body was right there. I was right there next to him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that the guy was not talking to himself at all. He talked into a small cellphone.
I only pretended to keep reading. Instead, I started intently to eavesdrop.
No, I already saw him.
. . .
Because I was right there in the operating room. With the doctor, when he died on the table. I saw the dead body right there.
. . .
Because I'm the one who has to take them downstairs.
. . .
Downstairs. That's where they go.
. . .
No, don't nobody want to go down there with me.
. . .
Yes, I know. I saw him upstairs.
. . .
Because sometimes, when you're alone in the elevator with the body, your mind it'll start to play tricks on you. Sometimes, you look over and the body -- it looks like that body is moving.
. . .
And you're the only one in there. That's a long ride in that elevator, downstairs.
. . .
It sort of stays with you for a while.
I stopped listening only because my stop came. Rarely have I ever needed as strongly to exert mysef to stand up, as I did that evening.
The incident gave me a lot to wonder about afterward. Among many other things, a small part of me wondered if the incident could not be transformed into a folksy little life lesson, like "Always sit next to the homeless person on public transportation."
A larger part of me decided that such an uptight maneuver would be pretty condescending and nauseating, and considered the encounter (and my fellow passenger's life) sufficently awe-inspiring in its own right, without moralistic commentary from me.
As the weeks passed by, however, I thought and wondered about the encounter less and less. It lost its urgency. The part of me grew that considered a little sermon about it to be too showy and an offensive idea. The same part of me felt that to turn the incident into a blog post would be even worse.
So the purpose of this post is simply to announce that I have decided not to blog about the encounter.
Many of us have become used to this. We have to translate news; as the government says, to kill is to save, to go in to pull out, and so on. We have been translating all the time.
And we are calledtraitors: many of us are called traitors for being against wars and so forth, because what treason is it to translate?
It is some kind of mandarin thing to which we are traitors, but underneath that and I think -- to get to the music here -- one must dive far underneath into a place where we share experience.
from the great MurielRukeyser's "The Music of Translation,"
found in The World of Translation: Papers Delivered at the Conference on Literary Translation, held in New York City in May [11-15,] 1970, under the auspices of the P.E.N. American Center
(1971, P.E.N. American Center)
Most of the above embedded links represent me trying to entertain myself, playing around, and attempting to figure out how appropriate Rukeyser's remarks would sound, if spoken today.
She sounds to me as if she foresaw, from 35 years in advance, and plopped herself into the middle of certain post-9/11, GWOT-era, nativist, "English only," "Fortress America" tendencies.
Then again, I might be entirely misreading her.
By that, I mean: My ears are very tone-deaf.
By that, I mean: I always misread and distort other people's statements with willfulness, consciousness, cruelty and malice.
By that, I mean: I do it accidentally and thus horrify myself afresh every day.
By that, I mean: Oh, please.
By that, I mean: Whatever! [Sigh.]
By that, I mean:
However, let's pretend for the sake of argument, that Rukeyser, who in the USA of 1970 spoke during wartime, put her finger on the following phenemenon: When a nation
(or a multicultural "nation of immigrants," like the USA in particular?)
is at war against another nation, a possible tendency of some within nation # 1 is to believe that a way to help "win" the war is to achieve on a national level some kind of regulated mental, ideological and linguistic unity -- or purity. The polyglot is suspect.
(Her actual point seems to be that the USA's monolingual ideal in modern wartime is a regime of Orwellian doublespeak. I admittedly am taking her observation about "translation" more literally here.)
How much further would be the lengths that the USA would need to go, in today's circumstances, with today's "enemies," to achieve such purity, compared to the situation in Rukeyser's 1970 USA?
[Consider:
According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization services, only 650 Vietnamese arrived from 1950 to 1974.
[Yes, I know that a truer 1970-era statistic would be the size of the population in the USA that a paranoid Nixon thought to include Communist sympathizers.]
vs.
In 2000, 1.2 million people reported an Arab ancestry in the United States.]
Different question: How "appropriate" was it for Rukeyser, almost alone among her fellow conferencers, to mention the Vietnam War in a conference of scholars in NYC in mid-May 1970? More generally, was it not weird that she would have reminded her colleagues of armed conflict and political unrest, phenomena which one might think are far removed from the worlds of academia and study?
I have no idea. I guess the answers depends on whom you ask.
Here, however, is a chronology of some events that were going on during the first half of May 1970:
Tuesday, May 5: "Freeway March" in Seattle's University District.
Wednesday, May 6: Irish goverment ministers (including the late Charles Haughey) sacked over "Arms Trial" allegations of illegal weapons importation to the IRA.
Thursday, May 7: In response to days of worsening student riots, California Governor Ronald Reagan's shutdown of university campuses begins.
Friday, May 8: Hard Hat Riot against student protestors in NYC
Saturday, May 9: over 150,000 mainly student protesters descend on Washington, D.C.; Nixon & Kissinger barricade selves in White House surrounded by armed guards and machine guns.
Sunday, May 10: anti-war student protester sets himself on fire in San Diego
Monday, May 11: FBI secretly proposes to local cops a "disruptive-disinformational operation" against the Black Panthers in San Francisco and Oakland.
Tuesday, May 12: "Darin Invasion"-era Bobby Darin [blog here!] at LA anti-war rally announces "Phone for Peace" campaign.
Wednesday, May 13: Beulah ("We're not raising our kids to go fight your war") Sanders of National Welfare Rights Organization occupies (.pdf) (or "liberates") HEW offices
Thursday, May 14: Elmer Dixon appears before U. S. House of Representatives in its hearings (.pdf) on the Seattle Black Panther Party, invokes the Fifth Amendment in response to every question.
Thursday-Friday, May 14-15: Police gun down students in Jackson State killings.
[OK, I know what "you" are thinking:
What does the above chronology really explain?
Chronologies are great things, because when you create and present one, you can kid yourself into thinking that you have actually explained something.
So, a chronological list is a red flag.
You can always tell when certain people are anxious and about to realize that they are sinking into a bog of confusion, because they start to put things into chronological order. A timeline creates a false sense of order. Construction of a timeline has the same effect on some confused people as does swallowing on the sly a little pill of anti-anxiety medication.
Why do you think that so many holy scriptural books being with chronologies and genealogies? Someone might answer that this is because the book writer is about to attempt to lull and bamboozle the reader, the more easily to sneak past them a heaping pile of bulls--t.
TiR knows that its readers are too smart to fall for such a transparent ploy. Its readers have learned long ago immediately to navigate away from this page as soon as they see the start of a chronological list of something.
Therefore you are not even reading this paragraph.]
The above is actually just a roundabout way to get to the real point of this whole post, which simply is to post some text about a poem that Rukeyser quoted, that I thought was very funny.
She went on to say:
There is only one poem in the world that I know that can really be translated. And it's the only abstract poem . . . .
That can be translated, yes, but you can only do it by opening and shutting your mouth or anything else you have.
But that is it.
The movement of Rukeyser's argument is clever.
First, she presents the issue of war among humans who speak different languages. Then she implicitly counterposes all humans, regardless of language, against another species, and its language.
The gentle suggestion here is clear -- so obvious that I should not even need to mention it.
The above can only mean that Rukeyser and Morgenstern before her foresaw and prophesied a day when humans of all nationalities would need to unite against a common, non-human enemy.
Moreover, they foresaw that the threat would come from the sea.
Could I mean ---?
Yes. The next and final trend in translation studies is apparent.
