Navigating (Part 4)
One thing I have a lot of problems with is Adorno's line about how there can be no poetry after the holocaust. I think about it actually quite often -- for what reason, after all Adorno was wrong about a lot of things (he didn't like Jazz) (I SAID HE DIDN'T LIKE JAZZ), so why should this bother me?
Poetry is subtext, and when it isn't subtext, something really terrible is happening. That's why it was easier to cook (having never cooked before) than it was to write poems in this pandemic. In this pandemic particularly because there was so much fear that was not the virus but played upon the virus - namely, the fear that the isolation of the quarantine wasn't just the obvious consequence of a viral pandemic but the confirmation of our fears that we are alone and will never not be alone again. A natural manifestation of an already present truth. That was the feeling.
A lot of people put it down to the Trump presidency, some people put it down to social media. Now I am biased because I really don't like to do things quickly, but I think it's a pacing problem, personally.
The gravity of this cannot be overstated: meaning -- all of it -- rises from the chaos via attention. Attention is necessarily tied to time. The more attention you give something, the more meaning it will reveal. The measurement of "more" where meaning is concerned is depth. The meaning becomes deeper. The less attention you give something, the less it means - regardless of how you label it. That is to say, the existence and depth of meaning is dependent on the length of your attention span. Right, that might seem trite but give it a second to settle in. The existence of meaning. That's a pretty big deal; at least I think it would feel like a pretty big deal if there was no meaning anymore.
This is where The Atlantic or The New Yorker branches off into a conversation about how capitalism benefits not only from our attention (the new product) but in particular from splitting it into brief episodes. If you never look at something, you won't buy it. If you spend too long looking at something, you won't buy it. You get the idea. But this isn't a think piece about late stage capitalism. It's a think piece about why the parallel meaning between there can be no poetry after the holocaust and never again bothers me so much.
What I come back to is the inevitable truth that there is a time for not poetry. A pandemic or a holocaust. But not all bad times are bad for poems; many of them are well served by poetry. The time for non-poetry is when the poem rises from the subtext and becomes the pretext. An elegance that cannot endure the complexity of humanity. A virus is elegant, fascism is elegant. Poetry is the perfect, clear lens on complexity, but the measure of a good poem is how well it reveals the simplicity from which complexity is built. This is the challenge, even right now the desire to shape what I'm talking about weighs on me with an urgency. Don't you see? Poetry -- the art of poetry -- is the art of seeing the complex as if it were simple, no -- the art of revealing that the complex is simple. It is revealer. But this function must necessarily live in the subtext of our lives, all attempts -- natural or man made -- to enforce a perfect, elegant and clear system on top of humanity is necessarily tragedy.
To reveal, via top-down administration, the gutting simplicity of the beautifully complex, is the method of the concentration camp. To discern, from the subtext of our lives, the way the complex distills into the simple, is the method of the poem.
Adorno was onto something. It troubles me. It troubles me that the poem as a governing structure is fascist. I love poetry. I love slowness. I love meaning, especially the elegance of it. What can it mean that this is not the rule by which to govern people? This is what the critical theorists must have struggled with. From this, the idea that governing is to point at every passing policy and yell "this sucks!" From this, the idea not to reveal elegance but cacophony, a mess. An uncertainty, an inefficiency, a confusion that forces us to pause, indeed to get entirely turned around sometimes. In the midst of the governing mess, though, we have the subtext, and in the subtext the poem's redemption arc.
What an idea! What an idea! No, I think it has come up before -- something about the journey being more important than the destination, but I don't think we ever read that and thought "ah yes, it is only through inefficiency, meandering, mistakes and messiness that we can arrive at the poem instead of the concentration camp."
But there it is. Take your time. Try not to succeed too quickly or too well. Celebrate the disheveled, absurd state of your life for what it is: the poem garden.