“To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by
means of signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every
style; and considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally
large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art
of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,”
4.
Early in my teen reading Nietzsche set down a tough act to
follow. Not only for the incandescent
jolt of his thought, a way of shaking up a lot of dust and sending the shadows
for cover, but for the style of his writing, a way of making words dance and jeer
and sing and flout every sort of constraint.
For Nietzsche, everything he meant seriously came under the heading of
the Dionysian. This isn’t a hedonism
because one of its staples is, as he just said, “an inward tension of pathos,”
where pathos is nothing less than suffering from the conditions of existence,
from the given that we all must deal with.
Did Nietzsche have a remedy for such suffering? No, except to exhort anyone who would keep
company with him to stop whining about it!
To become “multifarious” in order to avoid being restricted to one order
of “being.”
It should be said that what Nietzsche chose to see as “decadent”—as
not serving life or the spirit or anything of much use—is a long list of things
that most intellectuals pay lip service to, at one level or another. As he says in Ecce Homo, his amazing self-evaluation, his “seeing morality itself
as a symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first rank
in the history of knowledge.” Or: “becoming, along with a radical repudiation
of the very concept of being—all this
is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date.” Or: “I consider dialectic as a symptom of
decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case of Socrates.” And, having named his nemesis from the
ancient world, there’s only left his nemesis from the Christian world: the God
of St. Paul: “God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom
merely a gross prohibition for us: thou shall not think!”
All this is typical Nietzschean rhetoric, and the fact that
he uses terms such as “decadent” and “indelicate” shows that, to a large
extent, what he is talking about is a matter of taste. There is always an aesthetic of the spirit at
work in Nietzsche, and that’s what attracted me to him early on. Repudiating the Christian viewpoint of my
first teachers had its part in the initial glee, but that was soon superseded
by the fact that, if an artist should need a philosophy in order to make art
(blessed is she who doesn’t), Nietzsche was one of the foremost for that, if
only because the “becoming” he speaks of is what one engages in the making of
art for—maybe also (I would have it) the reason one interacts with art at all. In other words, if art isn’t adding something
to one’s becoming, it’s wasting your time, and if the art you’re making isn’t
moving beyond what you already did, then … why bother?
The parts about morality and dialectic and God all to some
extent speak a 19th-century language one would like to think we could do away
with. The sad fact that that’s not so is
what makes me still think about Nietzsche from time to time. In America, “God talk” is at its worst in my
lifetime, and the bolstering of self-aggrandizing arguments by means of “moral”
claims—while I’ve never known that not to be standard procedure—seems even more
nakedly the struggle of one will to power against another that Nietzsche always
insisted it was. He was fond of the
imagery of emasculation, the sense that Christianity and pious moralism were,
inevitably, a way of cutting off a man’s balls (though he never said it that
way), and there’s always some degree of truth to that. He saw Christian morality as “old woman’s
morality” for that reason, pointing at the demographic which truly had no use
for virile masculine members. But the
same kind of irony I’m treating his terms with is very much of the essence of
his irony as well. He was no
worshipper of the phallus as the staff of power, after all. But he often used its claim to a kind of
visceral essentialism as basic to how the systems of power that men have
developed for themselves and for women have been understood.
Art was about power of a different kind. And the place where I was always a bit
skeptical about Nietzsche’s claims came in there. Much of what he would call “decadent” might
in fact play its part in a work of art, might in fact contribute—for the
beholder—that pathos that, if not Dionysian, was at least akin to its release
from convention. Which might just be a
way of saying that Nietzsche never had to confront modernism, or cinema, or
rock music.
But when I read today those lines about style, I heard
Nietzsche opening a door for Metro Lace
to walk through. I won’t say that I am “multifarious”
or that “the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case,”
but that, if that poem does anything, it makes manifest many inward states in a
tension of tempo and signs. Which is to
say that pathos is the rhythm, the feeling, while the signs—the words
themselves—are the melody and the lyrics, or more properly, the voice. What interests me in that formulation is that
such a poem is not about a topic nor a reaction to what has been said or done
elsewhere. It’s an extension of an inner
state. Which is why it’s not something I
can do “at will,” but only when seized by that particular pathos that speaks,
that needs a voice.
Sometimes I wonder if such articulation is in itself a
betrayal. I mean a) my talking about the
poem in that way betrays its intentions, but more to the point, b) the poem
itself is a betrayal of something best left unsaid. I believe at some level I’ve always taken that
to be the case. The poem comes from an
effort to take “someone” into “someone else’s” confidence. I might like to think that it “speaks for”
someone other than me, but, if it does, it only does so to the extent that the
speaker isn’t me. I often don’t know who
it is, only that it’s a voice that wants to interact with that inward tension,
to supply signs that might suffice.
The over-riding contribution that comes from me, from my own
intelligence and preferences, is a skepticism about the entire procedure. And so there is a further tension I would
call the tension of ethos, which is to say, a struggle about the “value”—as truth,
as judgment, as precision and accuracy—of the “testimony” of the signs. Do they say what should be said? Can they
provide images that do what they should do?
And a further tension is that of eros.
All lyric poetry, for me, is love poetry. Traditionally, one speaks of “a muse,” saying
that this figure for one’s desires and unfulfilled longings dictates what one
must say to woo her, to make her lend ear, to bring her to the table or bed or
wherever one hopes to meet her halfway.
In Metro Lace there are a lot
of figures for such encounters, and the terms by which eros enters into the
discourse concern beauty and pleasure. Who
wouldn’t want to show his lover a good time?
These tensions—pathos, ethos, eros—have a further fellow
traveler in the search for signs that will suffice. It’s the dimension that Nietzsche liked to
call “the timely.” Bear in mind that
Nietzsche was one who saw “the ‘historical sense’” as a “typical symptom of
decay,” “a disease.” And yet. There is a strange process by which one’s
context, one’s temporal and spatial surroundings, become grist for the
mill. They not only furnish signs—the way
people speak in one’s own time and place and the things they speak of—but they
furnish an attitude that one is always at pains to engage with, if only to
ignore it. One’s audience, in other
words, is an attitude toward speech—whether in poems or other texts—and this “timely”
sense is never out of earshot, so to speak.
If I had to be candid about it, I would probably say that a deliberate
stretching of such context—by means of diction and the detritus of speech and
reading—is what drives the mechanism that makes the poem.
Or rather: a state of pathos—suffering from time itself—sets
up a rhythm and what “completes” or “answers” that rhythm is a string of signs
that, with whatever blend of ethos (truth value) and eros (desire for beauty),
try to trip the light fantastic out on the edge of intelligibility, to prove (“the
finding of a satisfaction,” as Stevens says) that language, no matter how
debased or disused or derivative, can find resources to make its presence felt …
for the moment.
And it’s that momentary aspect of the whole thing that makes
me look askance at its ultimate worth.
If I “feel better” for having said “that” on “that occasion,” what merit
does reading that statement have at some other moment, or in some other mind—even
if only my own mind at another time?
On three to four occasions, Metro Lace has endured my doubts: the original writing of it in
2010, the typing of it into a document, the revisiting/revising of it in 2011,
and the revising and posting of it in 2013.
In changing any of its signs, the decision usually goes in the direction
of “timeliness”—finding a way of putting into words something that concerns me
at that time. The more obscure aspects
of the poem were shaped by a conversion factor—inner state to articulation—that
eludes my conscious choice. Which is to
say that the “rightness” of a sequence or phrase has to be left to some factor
of pleasure that is peculiar to me and my ear and my tongue when I read the
words.
All-in-all, I suppose, poetry for me is simply a manner of
speaking, with such “tensions” and “constraints” as one faces whenever one
writes, but made more acute by the lack of a definite topic, theme, or purpose. That makes a poem like Metro Lace utterly spurious and utterly serious, for it has no
measure for success or failure other
than some nebulous sense of pleasure and necessity—the need “to communicate a
state,” to find “a style” acceptable to the pressures of the occasion.
1 comment:
My favorite bit here:
The poem comes from an effort to take “someone” into “someone else’s” confidence.
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