Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 2: Propositions 121-240

Joan Mitchell: Les Bluets (1973) 

Oil on canvas (281 x 580 cm) [f]

 

 

NB: part one of this post (reflecting on selected propositions from 1-120) can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

131 

 

This makes smile: 

 

"'I just don't feel like you're trying hard enough,' one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan?" 

 

 

134 

 

Once, I began assembling a book of fragments to do with the practice of joy before death - suicide notes, if you like. This proposition would've made a welcome addition: 

 

"If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones [...] and head down to the river." 

 

Philosophers, however, from Empedocoles to Deleuze, usually like to leap to their death like iridescent jumping spiders. 

 

 

150 

 

"For Plato, colour was as dangerous a narcotic as poetry." 

 

And, many centuries later, the Puritans also hated colours and "smashed the stained-glass windows of churches, thinking them idolatrous, degenerate". 

 

I knew both these things. 

 

But I didn't know that, before becoming a holy colour - one particularly associated with the Blessed Virgin - blue "often symbolized the Antichrist" (i.e., he who comes out of the blue to deceive mankind and deny the Father and Son).

 

 

156 - 161

 

According to Lawrence, it's a terrible thing to educate children into abstract knowledge, so that they may understand the world. For adults to solemnly explain to three-year-olds why grass is green is, he says, inexcusable stupidity and will arrest their dynamic development [g]. 

 

As there is always something a bit childlike about poets, it didn't surprise me to learn that although she had been told the answer several times to the question 'Why is the sky blue?', Nelson can never quite recall the explanation. 

 

The only part she does remember is that "the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it". 

 

Never mind the scattering of sunlight and the length of waves, etc., for Nelson the blueness of the sky "is something of an ecstatic accdent produced by void and fire".        

 

I love this thought: as I do the idea of divine darkness and agnosia - the latter being a form of unknowing that one discovers (or accomplishes) within the former: 'Explanations', as Wittgenstein once said, 'come to an end somewhere' [h].

 

 

164

 

I agree with Lawrence that the proverbial ideas of beauty as something sinful and shallow are all of them false [i]. 

 

And because I agree with this, I also very much like Maggie Nelson's proposition that, "despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said", beauty "neither obscures truth nor reveals it". 

 

And that blue - the colour of sex [j] - is perhaps the most beautful of all colours. 

 

 

167 - 168

 

When - like Cézanne, Artaud, and the American artist Mike Kelley - you've had enough of psychology and the narcissistic pleasure of seeing your own reflection (on film screens, for example), then it's time to attend to colour:

 

"Perhaps this is why I have turned my gaze so insistently to blue: it does not purport to be me, or anyone else for that matter."

 

 

171

 

Philosophically, this is at the heart of my project to do with the Ruins: gathering fragments of blue has nothing to do with paying tribute to (or wishing to recreate) some ideal model of blue wholeness; "a bouquet is no homage to the bush". 

 

 

183 / 185

 

Readers might recall that in proposition 20 Nelson stated: Fucking leaves everything as it is. 

 

Here, she echoes this by writing: "For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all. For the most part, I think it leaves everything as it is."

 

That's an unusual thing for a writer to say: usually, like Goethe, they are anxious about the possibly destructive nature of language; the fact that words can kill the essential quality of a thing. 

 

If for Warhol sex was just another (occasionally quite satisfying) way to pass the time, then that's pretty much what writing is for Nelson [k]. 

 

 

204

 

And now, finally, thanks to Nelson, I have an answer when someone asks why I can never be bothered to have things repaired (even when this will cause significant damage and expense in the long term): I have little to no instinct for protection ...

 

"Out  of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty - if one can be cruel to objects - I have given them up to their diminishment."   

 

Notes

 

[f] Maggie Nelson names this as her favourite painting in proposition 145 of Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), p. 57. She later admires Mitchell for her chromophilic recklessness, that is to say, for choosing her pigments "for their intensity rather than their durability". See proposition 154, p. 61.     

[g] See D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 123. 

[h] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell Publishers, 1953), §1. Nelson quotes this line in proposition 161 (p. 64).

[i] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Artcles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182 - 217. Lawrence writes: "Beauty is not a snare, nor is it skin-deep, since it always involves a certain loveliness of modelling [...]" (p. 192). 

[j] Again, see Lawrence; 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, pp. 143 - 148, where he asserts that "sex and beauty are one thing, like fire and flame" (p. 145). 

[k] Later, "upon considering the matter further", Nelson admits in proposition 193 that writing does in fact do something; namely, it replaces the memories it aimed to preserve.   

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 2)

Rhea Daniel: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (2017)

doodleaddicts.com

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and future possibilities.

After writing three earlier essays on this theme - two of which we discussed in the first part of this post - Lawrence wrote a further couple of essays on the novel in 1925, neither of which were published in his lifetime (or even typed). They first appeared in print in Phoenix (1936), along with other posthumous texts, edited by Edward D. McDonald. 

III. Why the Novel Matters

For Lawrence, the novel matters because it teaches us to recognise and to revere the life of the body; to know that "paradise is in the palm of your hand" [194], which - if you put it in Latin - would make a fitting motto above the door of a school of masturbation, were such an institution ever to be established.

Priests and philosophers may prefer to talk of the spirit - or the soul, or the mind - but the novelist knows that every individual ends at their own finger-tips. It's a simple truth, says Lawrence, but one that it's difficult to get people to agree on and stick to. It's also the core idea of his vitalism and for Lawrence, nothing is more amazing than life which exists nowhere but within the living body; be that the body of a man or even a cabbage in the rain.

One of the reasons that Lawrence hates modern science is because, in his view, the latter has no use for living bodies; it is only interested, rather, in the organism, which is a metaphysical overcoding of the body and its organs and the establishment of a bio-logical hierarchy within it. Great novelists are interested in dis-organ-ising the body and building what Deleuze and Guattari term (after Artaud) a body without organs, or what Lawrence describes as "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts" [196]. 

Novels, of course, are not actually alive; they are "only tremulations on the ether" [195]. But the novel can make the living body of man tremble and unleash strange forces and flows of becoming. That is why the novel is "the one bright book of life" [195] and can help prevent readers from joining the legions of the undead (according to Lawrence, there are many men and women walking about like zombies and eating their dinners like masticating corpses).   

Thus, the novel doesn't teach you how to be good: it does, rather, something far more important than that; it cultivates an instinct for life ...

IV. The Novel and the Feelings

Lawrence isn't impressed with civilised humanity, always harping on the same old note: "Harp, harp, harp, twingle-twingle-twang!" [201] The note itself is okay; it's the exclusiveness (and repetition) that becomes unbearable. He also thinks that we are poorly educated concerning the self, despite the fact that, as a species, we have "combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp" [201].

Ultimately, most individuals know more about the composition of celluloid and the latest fashion in shoes than about the stormy chaos within. But, says Lawrence, the times they are a-changin' and "wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us" [202]. If you listen carefully, you can hear them calling, although some are completely silent, like slippery fishes. Lawrence calls these wild creatures feelings, which he contrasts with emotions:

"Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a [...] decadent panther [...] We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through its nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service." [202] 

For the feelings, we do not as yet even have a language - and most often do not even allow that they exist, despite the fact that we only exist "because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us" [203].

Coming over all Nietzschean, Lawrence argues that man is the only creature who has deliberately - and successfully - tamed himself, fatally mistaking tameness for civilisation. The problem is that tameness, like an addictive drug, destroys us in the end, by robbing us of self-control and the power of command.

We thought tameness would lead to happiness - and, in a sense, maybe it has; albeit the happiness of the last man. But, ultimately, it leads to madness and an orgy of destruction, and unless we "connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources" [204] we shall degenerate inside our own enclosures.

We have, says Lawrence, to un-tame ourselves and learn to cultivate the feelings. But, of course, that's not easy: "It is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be taken seriously." [204]

Psychoanalysis won't help - for the Freudians show the greatest horror of all when confronted by the Old Adam, whom they regard as a monster of perversity. We have to listen, rather, "to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body" [205].

And if we can't hear their voices within ourselves, well, then, we can do the next best thing: "look in the real novels, and there listen in" [205]. Not to the didactic assertions or personal opinions of the author, "but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny" [205].

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 191-98 and 199-205.

Readers interested in part one of this post on 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', should click here. 

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts I and II)

Heide Hatry

I. The Sickness Unto Death

Dear Heide,

Many thanks for your fascinating five-part response to the posts on Torpedo the Ark that referred to your recent body of work, Icons in Ash. I'm touched that you kindly took the time to write not only at length, but with such good grace and critical intelligence. I will attempt to reply in the same manner and to each part in turn. However, I should point out that I'm unconvinced about the possibility (or desirability) of serious discussion: either two people agree - in which case there's not much to say; or they disagree - in which case there's nothing to say. This renders the attempt to exchange ideas narcissistic and futile; a vacuous academic game to be avoided at all costs.

Having said that, there's no need for absolute silence; we can surely keep company and converse without attempting to discuss things and break words apart. It's just a question of bearing in mind this idea of incommensurability and accepting that even speaking subjects who seem to share a language never truly understand one another; that there's always a pathos of distance between things, between people. It's not surprising, therefore, that you fail to "recognise" yourself in my words: for I don't know you. Indeed, if I might be permitted to paraphrase Nietzsche once more, we knowers are unknown even to ourselves ...

You ask if I have "really looked" at your work. Sadly, as I don't live in New York, I've not been afforded the opportunity to do so. I've had to make do with printed reproductions and images online. Perhaps this explains why I haven't "felt" it (though I'm not quite sure I know what you mean by this). Ultimately, it's fair to say that I'm more interested in what you (and others) say about the portraits, rather than the portraits themselves. As I'm neither a practicing visual artist, nor a qualified art critic, you'll have to forgive my insensitivity.   

I'm pretty much in agreement with your remarks on Deleuze and Guattai; certainly theirs was a project critical and clinical in nature and they regarded themselves as cultural physicians. But it should be noted that they have a very unusual understanding of what constitutes health and it doesn't coinicide with the dreary and functional good health which we've been given and which we're endlessly told we have to look after.

In fact, it's an irresistable and delicate form of health that the conventionally robust who eat their five-a-day and visit the gym after work might find feeble and sickly. The key thing is, whilst strength preserves, it's only sickness that advances. That's why we need our decadents, our convalescents, and those artists and philosophers who have returned from the Underworld with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. You mention Artaud and Rimbaud. I might mention others - such as D. H. Lawrence, for example. Theirs may not have been "salutary examples of the good life", but they were vital figures nevertheless. 


II. On Death and Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence       

I'm very sorry if my suggestion that, in calling up the spirits of deceased loved ones, you were seeking to have the last word upset you. It might well be that such a remark displays all of the faults you ascribe to it (banality, reductiveness, wrong-headedness, tone-deafness, remarkable ungenerosity, and wilful misunderstanding). Nevertheless, it surely has to be admitted that the dead, being dead, have no right of reply and cannot give consent.

In fact, one of the irritating things about the dead is that no matter how loud you cry and scream at them, or or how fully you explain yourself to them, they never listen and they never respond. Again, it's not so much rudeness or indifference on their part - it's just how they are (dead).

Obviously, we disagree on this ... It might please you to know, however, that I like the idea of the souls of the dead investing the lives of the living. And of the dead who do not die, but look on and silently help. It might be noted too that I've written sympathetically and approvingly of necrophilia and spectrophilia. But still - with the possible exception of those posthumous individuals who, as Nietzsche says, only enter into life once they've died - I can't quite accept that the dead have a great deal to offer (although, to be fair, neither do the noisy majority of the living). 

Moving on ... I opened my eyes wide in astonishment when you referred to (human) life as the "most glorious phenomenon" - but decided you were only teasing. I mean, Heide, c'mon - you can't be serious! At best life is epiphenomenal - a rare and unusual way of being dead, as Nietzsche describes it. To privilege life over death is just prejudice. I'm all for living life joyfully, but it's only ever a practice of joy before death and the real festivity begins when we make a return to material actuality.

To be clear: I'm not championing that negative representation of death conceived as a form of judgement which comes at the end of a life upon which, as you say, it "exerts an oppressive and defeatist effect". Rather, I'm speaking of death as a form of becoming (a line of flight and a dissolution). You mention at this point in your comments Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence and, clearly, it speaks of both types of death which Keith Ansell-Pearson characterises as heat death and fire death. Please note, however, that there's never any attempt at reconciliation in Nietzsche's work.

I wouldn't say Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is a "life-affirming" teaching (even you put this phrase in scare quotes); what it affirms, rather, is repetition and the difference engendered by it (the Same - das Gleiche - is not a fixed essence and does not refer to a content in and of itself). Nor is it a cheerful teaching - it's a form of tragic pessimism; there's no promise of salvation or any hope of transcending existence precisely as is. The happiness it promises is forever tied to pain and suffering (as well as moonlight, spiders and demons).      


To read parts III-V of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry. 

Dementia: From Bad to Verse

People who leave the obscure and try to define 

whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.

 
Living Words is a therapeutic arts organisation, created in 2007 by the writer Susanna Howard, which works with people - like my mother - who are dealing with dementia and the accompanying loss of speech skills and other neuro-cognitive functions.

The belief is that even the most delirious babbling should be regarded as valid expression and that by recording and faithfully transcribing what is said, you might produce a form of poetry in which the truth of madness, as well as the inner world of the person, is revealed. This, says Howard, is her great mission.

Of course, as she admits, the process involves editing. But, Howard insists, there is nothing added and no meddling; the meaning of the text is present in the utterance of the speaker and simply allowed to shine forth on the page with transparent authenticity.

I am, of course, extremely skeptical about all this - to say the least.

It's not that I think it impossible to establish a dialogue with those who can but stammer imperfect words and noises without fixed syntax, or the recognised logic of language. And I certainly don't wish to abandon anyone to silent oblivion, if they still desperately desire to communicate (although, having said that, I must admit to finding something beautiful in the total silence of the object).

Rather, my main concern is that there's a real danger in the Living Words project of subscribing to the romantic myth of madness; particularly in relation to the (equally romantic) myths of art and creative genius. Howard is profoundly mistaken in believing that every single word or sound that falls from a madman's lips is worthy of respect and only needs to be sculpted by an artist-in-residence in order to produce poetry and truth.

For as Foucault was at pains to point out in the conclusion to his history of insanity in the Age of Reason, whilst the madness of Nietzsche, or Van Gogh, or Artaud belongs to their work, their work does not belong to madness. That is to say, madness is precisely the absence of art and its annihilation; "the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent ..."

Foucault continues:

"Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition ... it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. ... Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ..."

And - let's be honest here - the Living Words team are not dealing with figures such as Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud; the poets they encounter in the various hospitals and care homes have very little of any philosophical interest or artistic merit to contribute, be they sane, senile, or somewhere in between.

Of course, not that this really matters: Toute l'écriture est de la cochonnerie.


Notes

Michel Foucault; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, (Tavistock Publications, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 287. 

Those interested in knowing more about the Living Words project should click here to visit their website.

Many thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this topic.