Class, Shame & Aspiration

So I set out to "learn how to behave," to acquire what Marx called "cultural capital," or what's more simply called learning to "pass." This aspiration, celebrated in the phrase "upward mobility" is rooted in shame and, in its undermining of authentic selfhood, creates the vulnerability required by all manner of predators from child molesters to military recruiters to advertisers and financial institutions. After all, aspiration is not an identity but the rejection of one's identity.

* * *

Everyone in my family called themselves middle-class, all my aunts and uncles, each and every household, whether anyone had a job or not, regardless of what kind of work they did when there was work, regardless of whether or not they had "a pot to piss in."

We never used the term "working class." My father called us working people....

~ Richard Hoffman, at Mnemosyne's Memes

[via wood s lot]

Birds Say

Stan Brakhage:
"I always liked best what Hollis Frampton said (a great filmmaker, Hollis Frampton, a teacher and an aesthetician as both of us hoped to be). He said the whole history of Hollywood movies, any movies, was comparable to birdsong. He discovered after years of listening to the birds that there are only five things that birds say, and he discovered that there are only five things that movies do. They say 'Good morning!' 'I found a worm.' 'Love me.' 'Get out!' 'Good night.'"

What Hollis Frampton actually said:
"One fine morning, I awoke to discover that, during the night, I had learned to understand the language of birds. I have listened to them ever since. They say: 'Look at me!' or: 'Get out of here!' or: 'Let's fuck!' or: 'Help!' or: 'Hurrah!' or: 'I found a worm!' and that's all they say. And that, when you boil it down, is about all we say. (Which of those things am I saying now?)"
~ from Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts 1968-1980

Masks

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, "Here-in-after, here-in-before"
(1963); gelatin silver print, approx. 6.5" x 7.25"
(Click on image to see more of Meatyard's work at George Eastman House)

"If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie."
~ Banksy, Existencilism (2002)

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
~ Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" (1891)

"All Plots Are Arbitrary"

"When I find the novel on the bookshelf, I want the sense from it that all plots are arbitrary, and what matters is to begin, to set out. To begin writing and then to follow through this beginning, being loyal to it, letting the narrative reverberate with the Origin it cannot reach. I want to know that it is no plot that matters, but another kind of intrigue, in which Writing has been caught by Writing; in which the Origin is allowed to speak in what is only the beginning of a story, an arbitrary story."
~ Spurious, "A Secret Collision"

Leaves

"Hints of red are often found in green leaves. The color of a lilac leaf, held so that the sun glances from the surface, is full of sparkles of red. The under sides of leaves, as in the case of maple and elm and poplar leaves, often show a play of colors different from those of the upper surfaces."
~ Walter Sargent (1868-1927), The Enjoyment and Use of Color, Chapter 4: "Composite Colors"

Monstrous

"But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition."
~ Wendell Berry, "Faustian Economics," Harper's Magazine, May 2008

Better and Happier

"Men, like dogs and cats, fawn upon you while you leave them on the ground: if you lift them up they bite and scratch; and if you shew them their own features in the glass, they would fly at your throat and tear your eyes out. This between ourselves: for we must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind. By doing so, we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain. Philosophers have taken this side of the question to shew their ingenuity: but sound philosophers are not ingenious. If philosophy can render us no better and no happier, away with it! there are things that can; and let us take them."
~ Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (1829), "Barrow and Newton"

The Untutored Eye

"How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color."
~ Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (1963)

Critique

"A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning."
~ Paul Valéry (1871-1945)

Oscar Wilde: "Study in Green"

"In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other."
~ Oscar Wilde, from "Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green" (originally in Fortnightly Review, January 1889)

This magazine article recounting the life of the murderous artist and writer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) is also the source of at least two other bons mots from the famously quotable Oscar Wilde:

• "A mask tells us more than a face."
• "All beautiful things belong to the same age."

Patterns

"According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos. There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.”
~ Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

Photo by Helquin.

The Blank Page Is Not Blank

PALIMPSEST:

But it is not true that "nothing is given": Language comes not only with an infinite potential for new combinations, but with a long history contained in it.

The blank page is not blank. No text has one single author. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always write on top of a palimpsest (cf. Duncan's "grand collage").

This is not a question of linear "influence," but of writing as dialog with a whole net of previous and concurrent texts, tradition, with the culture and language we breathe and move in, which conditions us even while we help to construct it.

Many of us have foregrounded this awareness as technique: using, collaging, transforming, "translating" parts of other works.

~ Rosmarie Waldrop, "Palimpsest," from "Thinking of Follows," in Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Link:
Rosmarie Waldrop at the Electronic Poetry Center


Photos by Helquin.

Penetrate the Mystery

"Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. [And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug --ourselves -- which we take in solitude.]"
~ Walter Benjamin, from "Surrealism" (1927), in Selected Writings, vol. 2
[First encountered (in part) in "Draft 85: Hard Copy by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, via wood s lot.]

About the flâneur:

"There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city."
~ Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals

Wikipedia article
Flâneur.org's Flanifesto
Walter Benjamin's descriptions

Limits

"Life is not only stranger than we imagine; life is stranger than we can imagine."
~ J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964)

As quoted in Robert Sapolsky's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award" acceptance speech, at the 25th annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (23 November 2003)

More J.B.S. Haldane online.