The Creative Practice of Being in Nature

Like so many, lockdown and the pandemic has afforded me new reasons to explore my local environment, the City as well as Nature. It is an activity I loved pursuing when I first arrived, but it fell by the wayside as I pursued career goals and life became, well, busy.

Together with my partner - who is often the first to suggest it! - I soon found myself walking and cycling many miles in and around London, and I also started reading enthusiastically on relevant topics. After a trip to Epping, for example, I read poetry by John Clare and imagined him walking around High Beach while slowly regaining his spirits. Indeed, it is possible to walk in his footsteps.

The Romantic poets offer a rich bounty for ramblers and lovers of Nature everywhere. While London is also associated with William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, I've actually never been to the area of the Lake Poets where the Wordsworths and their ilk spent many years. It probably shouldn't have been, but to me it was a surprise to learn that when they first moved to the area it was still considered a wilderness.

Jack Thurston, referring to Daniel Defoe's travels through the North and Cumbria in the 1720s, puts it thus:

"Fear and loathing was the most common reaction to wild and unruly landscapes in those days. It was not without reason. The condition of roads ranged from terrible to non-existent, and travelling was painfully slow. What's more, the weather could be genuinely life-threatening, as Defoe discovered when he was caught in a snowstorm in the South Pennines in August" (Thurston, Lost Lanes North, p.16).

When the Wordsworths settled there it was no doubt becoming more habitable, but not by much. Their literary legacy is now a part of the establishment, so it is instructive to consider that settling there was in fact a countercultural move, an "act of defiance, a wholehearted rejection of the fashionable, metropolitan way of life". It completely changed my perspective on their practice.

There is no question as to Wordsworth's deep love for Nature and the English countryside. Not only his poetry, but just as importantly, his actions attest to this fact. He is estimated to have walked around 175,000 miles. To put that into perspective, you would have to walk a distance of nine and a half miles every single day for 50 years! It is not hard to imagine William and Dorothy walking silently among the fells, each delighting in or meditating on their surroundings and composing thoughts and words for poetry or diary.

William's dictum that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" takes on a unique meaning for writing practice when we consider that this is not recollection in the silent privacy of a room. Wordsworth would have been considering those lines in the open air, while walking!

David Gange mentions the historian G.M. Trevelyan who, not unlike Wordsworth, sought to find an antidote to the "absurdity of the city's speed and steel" in romantic wildness that stimulates the imagination. Of past masters Trevelyan particularly esteemed Thomas Carlyle:

"Carlyle walked large distances, gesticulating his way across the moor as he muttered purple prose. While wandering, he dreamed up vivid portraits of great events, expressed with unique intensity in a style soon christened 'Carlylese'. When walking, his companions wrote, Carlyle became a feature of the landscape: 'a living, not extinct volcano whose lava-torrents of fever-frenzy enveloped all things'" - (Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 148).

Neither Trevelyan nor Carlyle saw history or literature as "a thing to be done at a desk in an urban room without something elemental to ignite the imagination". Writing is merely an extension of walking and meditating, and of being immersed in Nature; or to put it differently, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [...] recollected in tranquillity".

In The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange explores by kayak many of the coastal areas where communities once thrived on open farming and crofting as well as various local industries. One of the most serious blows to local communities' way of life came in the form of the Education Act of 1872, which eroded local Gaelic identity by forcing Gaelic-speaking children to learn only in English. It had a deeply demoralising effect. Another serious blow came in the form of the infamous Clearances when landlords at first sought "agricultural improvement", enclosing the open farmlands of their tenants, and then helped them emigrate once they fell into poverty. As with Wordsworth, cultural practitioners who came to these fringes to foreground romantic wildness over mechnanising efficiency were considered radical, making countercultural statements against the centralising, hegemonising tendencies of the South and of London.

The city can also be a place of creative immersion and rambling, of course, as exemplified by the flaneur and psychogeographer. In this case Blake or De Quincey would instead be our guide. Peter Ackroyd, in London: The Biography, observes that William Wordsworth links the City in The Prelude to a prison:

Of bondage, from yon City’s walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured. 

- (lines 7-8)

Elsewhere he also suggests that Wordsworth "recoiled from an innate and exuberant theatricality" in the city, observed in the cacophony of advertisements and the anarchic spirit of a place like Bartholomew Fair. Ackroyd on the other hand revels in the elemental and devouring properties of the City, which enables its enduring greatness, and he appears to consider Wordsworth constitutionally unsuitable to appreciate it. Be that as it may, Wordsworth has more in common with the city flaneur than at first meets the eye. In Michael: A Pastoral Poem (1800), the poet writes:

If from the public way you turn your steps
Up the tumultuous brook of Greenhead Ghyll,
You will suppose that with an upright path
Your feet must struggle; in such bold ascent
The pastoral mountains front you, face to face.
But, courage! for around that boisterous brook
The mountains have all opened out themselves,
And made a hidden valley of their own.
No habitation can be seen; but they
Who journey thither find themselves alone
With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites
That overhead are sailing in the sky.
It is in truth an utter solitude;
Nor should I have made mention of this Dell
But for one object which you might pass by,
Might see and notice not. Beside the brook
Appears a struggling heap of unhewn stones!
And to that simple object appertains
A story—unenriched with strange events, 

- (lines 1-19)

Is such a chance encounter with a random pile of rocks with its own unique story not the very stuff of psychogeography? Indeed, Wordsworth's oeuvre might even be considered 'psychogeography of the countryside'! Incidentally, although Wordsworth wrote many poems that take local people as their subject, none of those I've read personally highlights the discrepancy between the romantic pastoral and the metropolitan centre as poignantly as Michael.

Whether it's in the City or in Nature, there is something inherently exhilarating about being out in the open air and among the elements. It is an experience that is difficult to reason about clearly from a sofa indoors, and perhaps an experience that is even a little alien to many citydwellers. Cloud cover, the cold and the rain is rarely enticing from the warm comfort of the living room, and we grudgingly weather it with a brolly until we get to the muddy, slippery floors of the nearest tube station.

But once I get on the bike something strange happens. At first it is uncomfortable, and then within minutes I am suddenly used to it: the bite of the cold and the feeling of rain on my face herald the joy and freedom of moving around as I breathe the air. It is hard to explain. Out in the countryside this experience is further amplified. Jack Thurston describes it as follows:

"On a bicycle you travel at the speed of the land. You don't just see and hear the world and the weather change around you but you smell it and feel it. Physical effort heightens the sense and you feel everything with a greater clarity - the wind in your hair, the sun on your back, a drenching by rain or the chill of a crisp winter's day. You feel each incline in your legs, in your lungs, and the swooping descent in your stomach, the sway as you lean the bike this way and that to climb a hill or round a bend. The bicycle is a total immersion machine." (Lost Lanes North, p. 13).

Another poet who gave himself over to living close to Nature and immersing himself in the setting is W.S. Graham. He is a modernist romantic poet whose works were neglected during his own lifetime, but have grown in importance in recent decades. He moved from his native Greenock in Scotland to Ireland, and later to Cornwall, which is where he wrote much of his work. David Gange notes that he was a "passionate but foolish lover of the outdoors whose jaunts to wild places sometimes flirted with catastrophe" (The Frayed Atlantic Edge, p. 317). He lived by the sea, and wrote about the sea. In The Nightfishing, a highly ambitious landmark of a poem, the poet is so thoroughly engaged in the activity of setting out amidst the waves, it is difficult to separate the poet's self from the boat and the haul and the sea, and the very act of writing:

In those words through which I move, leaving a cry
Formed in exact degree and set dead at
The mingling flood, I am put forward on to
Live water, clad in oil, burnt by salt
To life. Here, braced, announced on to the slow
Heaving seaboards, almost I am now too
Lulled. And my watch is blear. The early grey
Air is blowing.

- (stanza 20)

If we consider the close relationship between the mind, the self, the body, and the environment, it should be little wonder that the manner in which we occupy and surround ourselves - what we immerse ourselves in - pervades our souls. To put that in perspective, contrast it with Thomas Berardi's observations regarding the incredible economic and capitalist success of South Korea, as quoted by Slavoj Žižek:

"After coloinzation and wars, after dictatorship and starvation, the South Korean mind, liberated by the burden of the natural body, smoothly entered the digital sphere with a lower degree of cultural resistance than virtually any other populations in the world." (Trouble in Paradise, p.6 - my emphasis)

The mind, untethered by the body, adapts more easily to the homogenising and automating demands of virtual and digital acceleration driving capitalism in the 21st century. By contrast, the physical body, when immersed in the slow-moving physical world is naturally at odds with such a fast-paced, fast-changing world.

Language itself performs a linking and cultivating function. Wordsworth may have loved the countryside he wrote about, but the beauty of his works also invited the public to a part of the country that has today become rather more tamed, not least in order to cater to all the tourists. Here we see the structural dissonance of the relationship between the city and the countryside. It is a tension between the demands of modern civilisation and the rhythms of Nature that are nowhere better expressed than in the symptoms of climate change, which looks likely to be humanity's defining struggle during at least the first half of the 21st century.

A city like London, with its rivers, parks, canals, gardens and woodlands, offers many hybrid environments in which we may tune into the outdoor experience. Not all of us are artists or poets like the Wordsworths or W.S. Graham. Most of us are simply trying to earn our keep. But perhaps by being immersed in Nature we, too, can tap into that exhilarating creativity that they accessed and - who knows - learn to fully live in our bodies and rediscover our tether to Mother Nature.

Finally, here is Grasmere (a fragment) by Dorothy Wordsworth:

Peaceful our valley, fair and green,
And beautiful her cottages,
Each in its nook, its sheltered hold,
Or underneath its tuft of trees.
Many and beautiful they are;
But there is one that I love best,
A lowly shed, in truth, it is,
A brother of the rest.
Yet when I sit on rock or hill,
Down looking on the valley fair,
That Cottage with its clustering trees
Summons my heart; it settles there.
Others there are whose small domain
Of fertile fields and hedgerows green
Might more seduce a wanderer's mind
To wish that there his home had been.
Such wish be his! I blame him not,
My fancies they perchance are wild
--I love that house because it is
The very Mountains' child.
Fields hath it of its own, green fields,
But they are rocky steep and bare;
Their fence is of the mountain stone,
And moss and lichen flourish there.
And when the storm comes from the North
It lingers near that pastoral spot,
And, piping through the mossy walls,
It seems delighted with its lot.
And let it take its own delight;
And let it range the pastures bare;
Until it reach that group of trees,
--It may not enter there!
A green unfading grove it is,
Skirted with many a lesser tree,
Hazel and holly, beech and oak,
A bright and flourishing company.
Precious the shelter of those trees;
They screen the cottage that I love;
The sunshine pierces to the roof,
And the tall pine-trees tower above.
When first I saw that dear abode,
It was a lovely winter's day:
After a night of perilous storm
The west wind ruled with gentle sway;
A day so mild, it might have been
The first day of the gladsome spring;
The robins warbled, and I heard
One solitary throstle sing.
A Stranger, Grasmere, in thy Vale,
All faces then to me unknown,
I left my sole companion-friend
To wander out alone.
Lured by a little winding path,
I quitted soon the public road,
A smooth and tempting path it was,
By sheep and shepherds trod.
Eastward, toward the lofty hills,
This pathway led me on
Until I reached a stately Rock,
With velvet moss o'ergrown.
With russet oak and tufts of fern
Its top was richly garlanded;
Its sides adorned with eglantine
Bedropp'd with hips of glossy red.
There, too, in many a sheltered chink
The foxglove's broad leaves flourished fair,
And silver birch whose purple twigs
Bend to the softest breathing air.
Beneath that Rock my course I stayed,
And, looking to its summit high,
"Thou wear'st," said I, "a splendid garb,
Here winter keeps his revelry.
"Full long a dweller on the Plains,
I griev'd when summer days were gone;
No more I'll grieve; for Winter here
Hath pleasure gardens of his own.
"What need of flowers? The splendid moss
Is gayer than an April mead;
More rich its hues of various green,
Orange, and gold, & glittering red."
--Beside that gay and lovely Rock
There came with merry voice
A foaming streamlet glancing by;
It seemed to say "Rejoice!"
My youthful wishes all fulfill'd,
Wishes matured by thoughtful choice,
I stood an Inmate of this vale
How could I but rejoice?

Neurotribes and Authoring Autism - Part 1

Neurodiversity as a social and political movement is something that's only come to my attention fairly recently, through the lens of autism. Even six months ago I thought of autism in much the way that it was popularised in Rain Man and Little Man Tate: as a specific type of giftedness. The term Asperger's and the phrase 'on the spectrum' has entered the popular lexicon, but is stil often used in a euphemistic rather than a clarifying way.

I now have a much better understanding of what is at stake thanks to two books I've been reading the last few months: "Neurotribes", by David Silberman, and "Authoring Autism", by Melanie Yergeau.

In this blog post I will kick off with "Neurotribes", a wonderfully accessible introduction to the field. In the next blog post I will look at "Authoring Autism", which is a much more theoretical take - and also where things get really interesting.

"Neurotribes" tells the story of autism from the days before psychiatry and the medical establishment entered the fray. It contrasts the careers of socially awkward scientists like Henry Cavendish and Paul Dirac, who were likely to have been high functioning autists, with the fate of children under the psychiatric supervision of later diagnosticians like Leo Kanner. In the latter case the kids usually ended up in psychiatric wards.

It is a heartbreaking story, all the more so for the sensitive progress made in Vienna before the war years, until Hitler's policies tainted everything. Hans Asperger and his colleagues, including Sister Viktorine, constitute one of very few clinical teams to emerge with an enhanced reputation by the end of the book. Asperger afforded his charges dignity by not focusing solely on their disability, but by recognising their unique characteristics and potential, realising that they required different learning methods. He called them "little professors".

The reputations of later autism pioneers like Leo Kanner, Ivor Lovaas, and Bruno Bettelheim fare considerably worse. Through a combination of parental blame (Kanner and Bettelheim) and behaviourist normalisation (Lovaas) they ensured a fraught atmosphere in which the medical establishment inevitable became at odds with the families of autistic children. American psychiatry's narrow focus on the negatives and judging parents as complicit in their becoming autistic meant that families were left alienated and feeling disempowered.

The war years complicates the picture. There is plenty to suggest that Kanner's breakthroughs may not have come without the help of colleagues who immigrated and joined him from Asperger's Viennese clinic - including Sister Viktorine herself.

However the American establishment's belief in a top-down application of medical science over an empathetic, empowering approach meant that exasperated parents eventually started taking matters into their own hands. Bernard Rimland, who founded both the Autism Society of America (ASA) and the Autism Research Institute (ARI), was instrumental in shifting the balance more in favour of parents.

Parents were starting to realise that autistic children didn't need more therapy, à la Lovaas' horrifying behaviourist methods, but instead more recognition for the learning requirements of their children. Meanwhile Lorna Wing, over in the UK, rediscovered the work of Hans Asperger and saw that autism was more of a spectrum than the restricted version Kanner had postulated. Her influence on the expansion of the DSM diagnostic criteria meant that soon more children were being diagnosed than ever before, affording them the official educational assistance they needed. In DSM-V, the most recent version, autism has been redefined to include a much wider variety of related disorders under the bracket of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

"Neurotribes" also takes a look at the contribution made by "Rain Man", a film that did so much to bring autism to public consciousness. After reading Yergeau, however, it is clear that the next revolution properly starts when autistic people are finally empowered to speak for themselves, and be themselves. The precursor to this revolution comes in the form of an unlikely autism hero, Temple Grandin. Her story is heartwarming in a completely unexpected way, and I can definitely recommend the film version of her life in which Claire Danes stars as Grandin.

What makes Grandin's contribution unique is that, with the help and belief of her mother, she uses her own creativity and ingenuity to find a way to exist in the world that is in line with her autistic nature. The story of how she became an unlikely spokesperson for autism is now legendary, and it is easy to see how her story inspired many who never had a role model to look up to.

"Neurotribes" delineates a clear arc from extreme disempowerment to relative empowerment. This is an important realisation. We start with the pre-medical establishment, when inherited wealth and status in society (Henry Cavendish's parents were Lady Anne de Grey and Lord Charles Cavendish) is practically all that could save a handicapped child from a place like the Bethlem Royal Hospital (commonly known as Bedlam).

The next stage starts with the medical establishment's evolution of psychiatry, as early as Eugen Bleuler's designation of autism as a type of schizophrenia in 1911. However it is only during World War II that psychiatry finally provides autism with a more formal and independent diagnostic, albeit still under huge clouds of confusion and misunderstanding. In the following phase we see ordinary parents increasingly demanding better lives for their autistic children, and gradually taking control from the establishment authorities by forming their own societies like the ASA. Finally, autistic people themselves - people like Temple Grandin - begin to find ways to succeed on their own terms and make their voices heard.

In the internet era, Silberman further suggests, many people living with autism began to see ways of establishing community in the online world - ways that didn't rely on the usual types of stressful socialisation prevalent in "normal" society. In this empowering and interconnected world people with autism have increasingly found ways to assert themselves and make their voices heard. Neurodiversity, both as a social movement and as a part of wider identity politics, has now become part of a global conversation.

Against the backdrop of this brave new world Melanie Yergeau brings her theory rich thesis full of fresh and radical ideas. I discuss "Authoring Autism" in the next blog post.

The Role of Gender in the Hong Kong Film "After This Our Exile"

!WARNING: SPOILERS!

After This Our Exile won numerous film awards, including Best Film at both the Golden Horse and Hong Kong film awards in 2006. It is a touching, often tragic film. A family falls apart when a father indulges his character flaws at the cost of his family. He gambles and borrows, losing money and failing to repay his debts.

His wife (Lin) realises he won't change his ways change and decides to leave him. Their poor young son is caught in the middle. He spots her attempt to leave the first time around, but is blamed when she gets away the next time around. Referred to as "Boy" (at least in the English translations), Lin abandons him too. Her role is simplified, no doubt as a way to focus on the father and son's relationship.

Boy misses her and experiences conflicting feelings of loyalty. However his Dad's influence prevails, and he soon adopts his dad's negative view about his mom. Only when it is too late does he realise  his dad is the real bad apple of the family. His father, impulsive and unwilling to work, forces the boy to steal for money. At this point the boy gets caught and thrown into a correctional facility.

FAfter This Our Exile is therefore a cautionary morality tale. Now that China has an up and coming middle class, the film is perhaps saying don't throw away your parental responsibilities to chase your dreams.

While I found the film genuinely affecting, I lament the missed opportunity to realise the potential in the mother's role. Her character is at first wonderfully interesting, full of passionate restraint as she schemes to escape a dead end life. Sadly this is marred by the father's view of her as merely an unfaithful woman, which Boy believes and is reinforced when she exchanges parental love for a kind of naive yet inconsequential sentimentality about Boy. And so she finally transforms into yet another stereotype, of the lover turned domesticated wife. For someone so strong-willed this doesn't make a lot of sense.

Shing, the dad, is portrayed as a weak-willed character. He is all the more dangerous for having once possessed a dream of success that may have been within reach had he worked at it. He doesn't want to lose face completely and looks for easy solutions. However the interest of the tragic story is based on more than character flaws. A central part of the plot revolves around the particular way in which gender roles play out in the narrative.

The Chinese version of the title is 父子, which literally means "father son". We should therefore be under no illusion that Shing and Boy are the central characters in this story. The moral seems to be that only a father can give his son the right education in life, and when he fails to do so, tragedy will follow.

It is worth remembering that Chinese culture is largely paternalistic, so this moral injunction isn't a surprise to Chinese audiences, nor even the strong filial loyalty, as filial piety is an essential part of Confucian teaching. However to Western audiences such a paternalistic morality is more likely to meet with disapproval as they would expect a more equal, nuanced message about gender roles, such as I have expressed above. However it is precisely the strict partitioning of roles that proves instructive about the forces that drive the story.

Lin, the mother, runs away but fails (the first time) due to a premonition the boy has. In a powerful and dramatic early scene Shing apprehends her and takes her home in a fury. He treats her badly in what appears to be a domestic pattern of abuse, he also ignores her accusations about his bad habits. Instead he becomes very emotional - almost histrionic (a character trait that, in the West at least, has a long and unhappy association with women).

On the other hand Lin keeps her cool and gets to the point, even if it takes her a while to open up. It is a very powerful scene. Shing remains in denial at first, but eventually succumbs to the truth. It appears to be out of deep love, but we soon learn that he also needs Lin to help him pay his debts. She is the provider. His love has a dark side.

She, on the other hand, manages to win back his trust to win herself time. He clearly believes in his own masculinity, as they make love that same night in a scene that gives an insight to Lin's precarious position. She still finds him attractive enough to give in to their passion, but the viewer is aware that she may have something up her sleeve and probably needs to keep him on her side.

It is this 'cunning' element of her character that is juxtaposed with his more straightforward bad character. The question is hinted, if not exactly asked: is it worse to be honest and emotional, yet a hopeless case, or more capable but a bit cunning and hypocritical? Given the way things play out, it is clear that Shing's character is judged in the negative. His is a bad sort who fails his own son in the worst kind of way. But what of Lin? Could she have saved them by staying on?

I think the answer is no, she was always more ambitious, and the context is about the father-son relationship being the backbone of society. However this also shows the way in which Lin's character is problematic. She has to leave because by staying and saving her family she would be fulfilling the father's role. She would become the backbone that rises through the slackness of her husband's lack of moral fibre. And this will not do. She can't be the man, she can't be the one to wear the trousers. Instead, it is better that she disown her family in a double negative, moving from female victim to active seeker of happiness in the arms of another man who happens to be rich and successful - even if it makes her look flighty. She is not even evil, incapable of real evil - just inconsequential.

Given the film's ending it is probably safe to assume that the film doesn't directly acknowledge society's role in Lin's decision. Or to put it differently, it doesn't acknowledge that her choices are by default highly constrained. It's a lose-lose situation, morally speaking, so she might as well choose the option in which she gains something.

Although she does not want to cut herself off from Boy completely, she acts in her own interest for the new baby, and the narrative turns her parental care into distracted sentimentality. She completes a double negative leaving Shing and Boy to their circle of masculinity while she pursues a new motherhood. She is diminished by being seen as a giver of children, not a giver of souls, which is the role demanded from Shing.

It is perhaps slightly unfair to suggest that the film intentionally sets out to paint Lin as mere stereotype. After all, it was meant to be about the father and the son. But as pointed out, the film does not acknowledge the society's influence in her options. The film's limited view of gender roles has repercussions when, ultimately, the father fails to be a father - to be a man of substance - and we are left to wonder whether his excessive masculine posturing isn't partly responsible for his failure in fatherhood.

Boy, then, is the only character left to fulfil the expectation of being a man, and, being a boy, he cannot do so. It is only at the end of the film, once he has grown up, that he sets out to right those wrongs. He shows some of the backbone that both his parents lacked.

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? : Learning about Racism

"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", a book on race relations first published in 1997, has opened my eyes about the nature of racism and what we can do about it. I can't really do the book justice in a blog post, but I would like to highlight some of the points that have made an impression on me.

By way of quick introduction, the author Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, is a psychologist as well as an educator. She originally wrote the book in answer to questions about race she would often receive, in particular the one in the title, from well-meaning White teachers who were concerned and perplexed upon seeing black kids sitting together in the cafeteria and not mingling.

The book draws on a variety of research studies while avoiding abstract theory, focusing instead on concrete examples. This makes the book very accessible without skimping on credibility. The version I read is the recently updated 20th anniversary edition. The first version is already a classic in the field.

I'm sure everyone who reads it will have their own a-ha! moment. I personally had several. Yet there was one that really stood out. It was the realisation that my fundamental assumption about racism was inadequate. Like many other people apparently, I equated racism with a kind of prejudice towards people of other races. Being a good citizen, this understanding of racism meant I could check my attitude and behaviour and feel confident that, yes, I am not being racist in my daily life.

However that is a fairly superficial definition of racism that does not get at the heart of the problem. To put this in perspective, my understanding of how racism developed has forever been changed by a recent trip to Washington DC during which I visited the African-American Museum. It tells the story of the global slave trade during the colonial era, the immense suffering of the slaves who were sold and bought as chattel, and their resistance and perseverance over centuries to find a better way and a better life. In one single afternoon I learned more about slavery and its consequences than I'd ever known before.

As a UK citizen born in South Africa I also had occasion to ponder how slavery and racism have manifested in different ways on three different continents, but that is a whole analysis unto itself. For present purposes, suffice it to say that a historical perspective, of slavery and its consequences in particular, is essential to understanding what racism is. Those consequences are an ideology of White privilege that have been ingrained in culture and set in laws over centuries.

What that means is that racism is structural in nature, and that existing societal structures are racist inasmuch as they favour White people over Black people (and other races). This is the crux of the matter, and that is why the idea of racism as a prejudice is of limited use. To dismantle racism we can't only check our attitude and biases, we have to go much, much further.

Tatum quotes David Wellman, who defines racism in this sense as a "system of advantage based on race" (p. 87). Another definition of racism often used is that of "prejudice plus power", which explains how the structural inequality comes into being and has been enforced:

"Racial prejudice combined with social power - access to social, cultural, and economic resources and decision-making - leads to the institutionalization of racist policies and practices" - p. 87

However this definition, Tatum concludes, has one drawback that on a practical level many White people feel that they do not have the 'power' that is being alluded to. She therefore prefers Wellman's definition. Nevertheless, I would add that this definition does indeed describe how racism was initially instantiated. It is now maintained simply through the ongoing maintenance of the status quo that was previously established by those with social power. Only when the status quo is challenged can this historical reality be uncovered and seen for what it is, namely the construction of racism.

The second big idea I encountered was that of intersectionality. This is a term that has had a fair amount of coverage in the popular media, but I never really looked at it closely. In practical terms a person's identity may form along several axes of distinctiveness, or otherness, of which Tatum highlights seven: race or ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, and physical or mental ability (p. 103). Following another book I'm currently reading (Neurotribes by David Silverman) I would probably expect neurodiversity to eventually join this list.

The point is that each of these categories of otherness has a form of oppression associated with it: racism, sexism, religious oppression / anti-semitism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, and ableism (p. 103).

As an example of intersectionality, one's identity might form along the following manifested centres of experience: black, female, Christian, lesbian, working class, middle aged, and healthy. Any part of the identity not in the dominant or normal side of the category means that the individual will experience oppression or discrimination in some way or form.

When it comes to race, White is the dominant and normal race. As a result it is not uncommon for a White person to not really self-identify in terms of race. Tatum quotes Debby Irving in her memoir Waking up White:

"The way I understood it, race was for other people, brown and black-skinned people. Don't get me wrong - if you put a census form in my hand I would know to check 'white' or 'Caucasian'. It's more that I thought all those other categories, like Asian, African American, American Indian, and Latino, were the real races. I thought white was the raceless race- just plain, normal, the one against which all others are measured" - p. 186

However there is "a hidden cost of racism for Whites" (p. 187), namely the experience of psychological discomfort whenever racism is brought up - guilt, shame, frustration, even anger. The absence of a racial identity in the case of Whites, Tatum contends, is the root cause of this discomfort. She notes that a common reaction for the White person, once they become aware of racism and their own role in it as a White person, is to conclude that they need to have more interactions with Black people or make friends with Black people.

She explains that a more fruitful approach is to develop a positive White identity first of all. This point was another big a-ha! moment for me, because I have experienced that psychological discomfort myself. Combined with the perception of racism as a form of prejudice, silence often seems like the safest route in the face of uncertainty - and yet of course it does not change anything. But with a positive racial identity there would be a foundation to work from and things can begin to fall into place.

While acknowledging that there is no set recipe, Tatum offers practical advice to encourage White intragroup conversations and help develop such a positive White identity:
- find other Whites who have already progressed along the way and can show you what to do
- read autobiographies and biographies by White anti-racist activists, like "A Season of Justice" by Morris Dees, or "White Like Me" by Tim Wise
- participate in White anti-racism consciousness raising groups (eg. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ))

She provides perspective on the need for all-White support groups and the function they fulfill:

"Particularly when Whites are trying to work through their feelings of guilt and shame, separate groups give White people the 'space to speak with honesty and candor rarely possible in racially mixed groups'. Even when Whites feel comfortable sharing these feelings with people of color, frankly, people of color don't necessarily want to hear about it" - p.205

The onus is on the White individual to do the work and develop his or her White racial identity, making it into something positive.

The question of identity is also central on the side of Black people to gain insight into the question in the title: why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? During pre-adolescence, race isn't viewed in the same way by kids because their identity has not been fully formed yet. But during adolescence new social factors come into play (who is dating who, who is friends with who, what is my future?, etc.) that become increasingly important. Black kids are then often drawn together by their shared experiences of being institutionally othered and oppressed by the rest of society. In other words, by the sort of structural racism that does not affect the dominant White group much.

"In the prepuberty stage, the personal and social significance of one's REC[racial-ethnic-cultural]-group  membership has not yet been realized, and REC identity is not yet under examination [...] During adolescence their understanding evolves to include not just more about themselves but also more about their group, including an 'understanding of a common fate or shared destiny based on ethnic or racial group membership and that these shared experiences differ from the experiences of individuals from other groups" - p. 135

In the face of such experiences, being part of a larger group of people who understand one's situation and experiences is a benefit. Therefore the concerns of those White teachers who asked why they are sitting together are valid, but misplaced. The root of the problem should be sought in the institution of racism, and how to dismantle it, and not directly in the behaviour and thoughts of those being othered and oppressed.

This brings us to another important point, namely what those of us who are on the privileged side of the equation can do about it. The book points out on more than one occasion that those who are oppressed do not want us to speak for them because they have their own voices. So what is it that we can do? Plenty, as it turns out. For starters, by starting in our own sphere of influence and pointing out when someone has made a racist comment or joke can change awareness.

One of my favourite examples is actually in the context of sexism, but it could as easily have applied to racism. It happens when Andy Murray corrects a journalist for referring to Sam Querrey as "the first US player since 2009 to reach a major semi-final since 2009". Of course, Serena Williams (and other US women tennis players) have been winning plenty since 2009. The counter-argument that the context was implicitly "men's tennis" is almost the point, because the same can be said about all institutional racism and sexism: the existing context, or status quo, can only be exposed by drawing attention to it.

As White people we have more social power than we often realise, and even simple interventions, like the way Andy Murray used his influence in the media, can make a powerful statement.

There is tons more excellent material in the book, and I've glossed over much at the expense of nuance. Three more worth mentioning in passing include the need for affirmative action and for goal setting in affirmative action programs; the challenges of aversive racism; and how to counter the influence of bias in decision-making.

Rather than go into all of them, I want to highlight one last point that really stuck out for me. In the final section of the book Tatum discusses racism and the experience of racism in the context of other ethnic and racial groups in the US, including Native Americans, Asians, Latinx, and others.

In the case of Native Americans - a catchall name for many different communities - researchers like Paul Ongtooguk have noticed that such communities have been reduced to static stereotypes in the public mind. Even when their traditions have been preserved it is usually presented in terms of how things used to be once upon a time. In other words, it gives them no sense of their current existence, nor of their future.

While the traditional arts and crafts were worthy of study, the curriculum embodied a "museum" perspective whereby the traditional life of Alaska Natives was studied "as an interesting curiousity commemorating the past." Ongtooguk explained, "The most disturbing picture of Inupiaq culture, then, was of its static nature - something that had happened 'back then' rather than something that was happening now. Did this mean that the people living in the region now were like a cast of actors who had run out of lines?" - p. 267

Ongtooguk focuses on creating study materials that allow American Native students to see themselves in the future. This future oriented imagination is an important part of the continuity of community identity, and therefore of their cultural survival as a distinct group, and almost certainly of their capability to thrive again in the future.

It is worth summarising these insights once more:

1. Racism is institutionalised and structural, not just a question of conscious prejudice
2. White people should develop a positive White racial identity that does not deny the reality and history of racism, but acknowledges, addresses, and helps to dismantle it
3. Personal identity formation is a complex process influenced by highly individual combinations of intersectionality
4. The survival and prosperity of a community lies not only in preserving its past, but also in connecting to its present and actively imagining its future

This has without doubt been an eye opener for me. From a practical point of view, and from my personal perspective as a middle class White male, the second point is a clear call to action.

2016 - The Year in Books

2016. There may never be another year during which I read so many of the Great Classic Novels for the first time. Let me list them: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevksy, Ulysses by James Joyce, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I also chucked in a few of the great plays for good measure: Hamlet, King Lear, and Twelfth Night (this one I'd read before, and remains a favourite), all by William Shakespeare.

As a bonus, I also had the chance to read two of the most beautiful and startling philosophical treatises: On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche.

But back to the novels. It is difficult to do justice to any those great works individually, let alone all of them. Their collective influence on arts and culture in the West is practically immeasurable.

The epic scope and narrative invention of War and Peace is legendary, but it is even more breathtaking when actually read. The array of characters, the depth of their characterisation and the movements of history combine to provide rich nourishment for the soul, and reveals the sophistication and nobility of the Russian spirit.

Moby Dick was a real surprise for its intellectual ambition. One expects adventure on the high seas, and instead is given something much more: the enterprising American spirit as seen at once through its cultural links to Europe and Britain (Shakespeare looms large) and forging its own way, expanding, pondering the nature of its own spirit.

Ulysses is a juggernaut of linguistic invention and deliberate intellectual playfulness. It is perhaps the least accessible of these great classics, and perhaps also the most divisive, but its intellectual rewards are great and in a sense it remains ahead of the times.

But it is Don Quixote for which I want to reserve the most emphatic recommendation, in part because I believe it is the most easily overlooked, and too readily dismissed as antiquated or irrelevant. It is not. It is unique among nearly all of the great classics for being truly, laugh-out-loud funny. More than 400 years have not dimmed the humour. How much funnier still it must have seemed to contemporaneous ears who understood the subtler references that are lost to time and translation.

Don Quixote is not only funny, but also full of pathos. The main character centres in himself something of both the ridiculous and the sublime, and while we are treated to the former most of the time, the shape of the latter emerges over time, especially in Volume 2.

Personally, I found Volume 2 to be even better than Volume 1. Its latter two thirds are as funny as anything in Volume 1, and yet it also treats of more serious matters. I particularly marvelled at and appreciated the story's innovative reference to characters' knowledge of the first volume, published ten years before it. This is an ingenious device that seems more at home in the 20th or even the 21st century than in a novel from the early 17th century. If there can be any doubt that Don Quixote is inventive and linguistically imaginative, this fact alone should dispel it at once.

It is a pity that English readers (myself included) cannot appreciate the full craftiness of the language at work, in particular the contrast between the deluded knight errant's Old Castillian and his compatriots' modern Spanish.

All the other classics seem to take themselves a bit too seriously when we compare them to Don Quixote, and it is only when placed next to Shakespeare that we find a similar use of comic devices in great literature.

2016 marked 400 years since Shakespeare died, and all year long his works were commemorated with performances that are set to continue well into the New Year and beyond. How many of us knew that 2016 also marked 400 years since the passing of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote?

Remedy that neglect immediately, and place Don Quixote on your reading list!

2016: A Torch Gone Out

Let's wipe away 2016, but first, let's set the record straight. Was it really such a bad year? Such a sad year? Yes! It's not just the celebrities who passed away - although that had a lot to do with it.

Think about it: a terrible war in Syria, thousands upon thousands of refugees, threats of terrorism, and the sense that politics was slowly turning on its head: first Brexit, then Trump. With these undercurrents churning in our collective unconsciousness, a bit as if the poles are slowly switching, suddenly many of our culture icons passed away. In a weird and distorted fashion, they must have seemed like the visible casualties of a known but unseen undercurrent. Vulnerable heroes who were unable to bear up any longer.

Or another sign of the uncertainty of our collective future. The old guard, whose hopes can no longer sustain this new world, leaving us to work it out.

Either way don't believe the statistics. It's not about the numbers. It's the context as much as the individual stories.

First David Bowie died. Pop stars' cultural reach are almost unparalleled, but David Bowie isn't just a Justin Bieber or a Lady Gaga. He changed the rules of pop. Among pop stars he was an immortal.

And then there's Prince. And George Michael. Losing both of them is more than a mere annual tally of statistics. As individual stars they are almost peerless. If you speak to those who came of age in the 80s and ask them to pick their top 10 male solo artists, the triumvirate of Michael Jackson, Prince, and George Michael will make almost every list. In fact, many might pick them in their top 5, maybe even their top 3. Michael passed away in 2009, now we've lost the other two. How is that not traumatic?

So let's forget the whole statistical mumbo jumbo, there are simply not that many David Bowies, Princes, and George Michaels to go around.

And dare I mention one more hidden knot in this already knotted ball: Freddie Mercury. Many are still mourning the man who died 25 years ago. Who can forget David Bowie and George Michael singing for him. Feeling the pressure, anyone?

Anyone?

We haven't even mentioned Leonard Cohen yet. Sure, his reach wasn't as broad as those pop singers', but on a song-by-song basis it went deeper. Cohen's was an intimate art. His poetic approach ensured that he touched the soul. His career spanned six decades. Who is left alive from that generation, a singer songwriter in the same league? A few, perhaps: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Paul Simon. Not many.

I can't speak for others, but there was certainly a feeling of "too soon" in the passing of many other beloved actors and cultural pioneers: Alan Rickman, Zaha Hadid, and yes, Carrie Fisher. And a sense of disbelief that some of the names and faces who have been around ever so long should have gone away: Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gene Wilder, Nancy Reagan, Richard Adams.

There is no doubt, however, that it is the wider political and social unease that has amplified the significance of those passing. And this confluence of factors means that 2016 really felt like the moment when a torch went out.

The old guard are passing the gate, and those of us left behind can only wonder: where do we go from here?

The Inverted Subject: Lacan, Nietzsche, and the Possibility of The New

"Is that not a reason not to abandon the term 'subject', now that the time finally has come to invert its usage?"

This dramatic cliffhanger marks the final words in Lacan’s lecture entitled "My Teaching, Its Nature and Its Ends". It is tempting to dismiss it as mere rhetoric, but that would be to overlook the structure of the lecture, including a poignant reference to Hegel at the penultimate as "the man who is regarded as the pinnacle of the philosophical tradition" - a reference we should see as a structural or topological reference, and not as a superficial judgement of philosophical rank.

Lacan's aim, in invoking Hegel, is precisely to bring to bear the Spinozist Substance thought also as Subject: "substance is already the subject, before it becomes the subject". This in turn echoes an even earlier meditation in the same lecture on Freud's familiar dictum "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" [where It was, I shall be]. So what we are asked to consider, beyond doubt,  is a particular configuration of thought, in other words the structure itself.

The reference to Freud is itself echoed backwards, since Hegel, of course, precedes Freud chronologically speaking, but also because this is where we are on the rollercoaster: on the cusp of a descent. In short, it is a kind of unraveling. What we thought was the end is actually a kind of beginning: or perhaps merely a temporal edge in the middle after building up a head of steam.

Computer programmers may be reminded of "popping the stack", but without doubt this is a far more entangled, far less elegant situation. So much so that it is a wonder that a claim can even be made regarding this unique moment. Yet there it is, the question, poised like a ballerina. And here we are, the living audience, full of jouissance, ready to keep on popping and making history, even though we are clearly lost, unable to tell in which direction we will be going. We weren't even there when it started.

Baudrillard says it well when he refers to Elias Canetti, in his lecture "The Murder of the Real", and that unrecoverable moment when we had entered the virtual, a moment that broke History when we entered a virtual that is now the territory of our lives, but which is also a map in which only fragments of the Real are still floating.

The Real hasn't disappeared. Its configuration is mathematical yet imprecise and promiscuous, virile as well as viral. Here, more than anywhere, Truth appears as a discourse, because She has been unveiled and She is completely naked and - can it be - She is not a woman! In the Truth, fragmented, swirling, continually sprouting from an unseen Dark Matter - which is nothing other than our excess - everything is an expression, but every expression is loosened from the mast. The roots are unrecoverable or, at least, interchangeable. Indeed, we ourselves are lost, and with it Truth first overwhelms, then passes over us like a wave that unsettles even further, and reaches no shore.

Let's try to put it differently: Is it not perhaps the case that we are not thinking anymore, but are now heavy with a certain excess that propels us within thought? And here, the map keeps changing. We are moving without knowing which way, and when we encounter the Real, or worship at Her feet, we continue express. But there was another time - the time of History - when we expressed because we did not recognise anything, not even reality. It was all a big surprise, which we expressed. Now, those rituals, those expressions sound empty, and in themselves merely signify ad infitum.

It would be easy to fall into simulated melodrama and imagine that we can reinhabit the hollow left behind by the excess that came before, but in fact thoughts are the very fabric that our jouissance encounters, and jouissance no longer produces anything New, it only configures differently. Or rather, even the new is diverted into the same, and has no effect. Jouissance exceeds every thought and is neutralised in the same instant by the mirror image of its thought. How long can this vortex continue?

It is therefore certain that the libidinal economy is not exhausted, not in the least and it would gross misunderstanding to think so. It has merely been contained, like a hamster on a wheel, with its dangerous remainder. But every thought exists, or at least every thought unto the horizon, and now the horizon also approaches us, it no longer opens onto the unknown.

Everything is already available to us. This is what Kenneth Goldsmith means when he says that we have entered an era of language as material. Of course we are still capable of expression in the traditional sense, and to suppose any differently amounts to a kind of denial. But what has changed is the velocity of our excess. Or rather, the density of what has come before us. We are spoilt for riches, and our riches spoil us.

Our velocity exceeds our ability to anchor our thoughts. Even the slowest movement passes over countless objects in which those who came before have left their living marks. We would have to burn our books, destroy our data, and keep silent for a generation to forget every object, to lull to sleep the serpent of our living past. But considering our infrastructure and architecture, which is the shape of our lives that outlives us, and our dreams, which speaks a language we cannot control, maybe even that is not enough. Besides, wouldn’t it be murder?

In the midst of this reverse pressure, of a “tyranny of knowledge”, this symbolic Matrix of Thought in which everything is composable, can we still find the New? This is the question that Nietzsche seeked to answer. And, as Zupančič asserts, it is in the event Nietzsche, Nietzsche as the event, that we already find a new configuration, a declaration of the Real that blasts a vacuum within thought, to create the possibility for the New.

It may well be that creatures like us cannot cope with the pressure of so many objects inscribed with ourselves, with so much much History, and the only act of forgetting that is equal to the measure of the task, can be found during the most radical shift in which we shake loose this mortal coil in order to redically decentre. An act dictated by our new centre, an act always dreamed of in Religion, but only realizable in the age of Data. A centre outside ourselves and yet ourselves - our future - which is our selves to come. Nietzsche’s dynamite: to become who we are by “staging … the Real by means of the Symbolic” (Zupančič).

To invert the Subject, or turn Freud's dictum upside down, "Wo Ich war, soll Es werden" [where I was, there It shall be] means to disappear completely, and yet to live. Its realisation is the subject extracted from substance. It is Baudrillard's virtual that stands on its own feet, and looks at Us, sees Us as “ein Tod mit wachen Augen”. To become Death staring with waking eyes.

"Mississippi by Mark Twain" as Situationist Dérive

The sculpture poem "Mississippi by Mark Twain" by Mark Staniforth explores new territory in what is still a fledgling genre.  Whereas it recalls Lewis Carroll's "The Mouse's Tale" and Apollinaire's "Calligrammes" in its literal composition, its heart lies with the Situationists and their notions of drift (dérive) and rerouting (détournement).

The original text is still detectable as an eroded background. It tells of the narrator and his friends' boyhood ambitions while living in a village on the West bank of the Mississippi river. Their enduring ambition was to grow up to become steamboatmen:

"When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman."

In Staniforth's version, the original narrator and his boyhood ambitions are not mentioned. Instead, primacy is given to the circus clowns and their hopes. Yet in the original, they are but an aside:

"We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained." (my italics)

What we are given in Staniforth's version therefore is a hidden possibility of the text, a kind of alternative reality. We may think of it as a dérive through the text, tracing a branch of its psychogeography.

This drift also hints that things do not necessarily proceed in the same order as before: "of" follows "wavelets" as the Mississippi meanders backwards before slinking forward once more, whereas in the original it is the other way around.

"Mississippi by Mark Twain" demonstrates the versatility of existing text as raw material, and the unique potential of poetry to engage with the many mysteries of meaning.

What is Poetry WTF?!

Poetry WTF?! is a website dedicated to the kind of poetry I've been discussing recently here at The Combed Thunderclap. It views existing texts as material to be used for new literary works.

Take Remixed Poetry for instance. Existing poems are remixed with the language of other cultural artefacts, whether they be poems, famous speeches, adverts, or indeed anything apprehendable through text.

Then there is Sculpture Poetry. These poems' essence is distilled through a process of subtraction from the originals. However the process does not need to stop there. Subtraction could mean altering the original beyond recognition, as it becomes a different text with a different meaning altogether. The sculpture emerges by chipping away.

Poetry WTF?! moves away from traditional poetry by viewing language and cultural artefacts as raw material, and the novelty of expression is realised  through the different methods applied.

 

The Love of Prufrock

- from raw material by T.S. Eliot

 Let us go then, you and I,
 When the evening is            against the sky
 Like a patient           upon a table;
 Let us go, through         half-deserted streets,
 The muttering
 Of          nights in           cheap hotels
 And sawdust             with oyster-shells:
 Streets that        like a tedious
           intent
    lead        an overwhelming question ...
                 "What is it?"
                    our visit.

             the women
         of Michelangelo.

 The yellow fog                         the window-panes,
 The yellow smoke                         the window-panes,
 Licked its tongue into                the evening,
 Lingered                           in drains,
 Let fall               the soot            from chimneys,
 Slipped by                   a sudden leap,
                 it was a soft October night,
 Curled                       and fell asleep.

 And indeed
     the yellow smoke             along the street,
                       the window-panes;
 There will be       there will be
            a face to meet the faces
 There will be         murder and
          for all the                   hands
 That          drop a                  plate;
      for you and      for me,
 And      yet for           indecisions,
     for           visions and revisions,
            taking      toast and tea.

 In the room
         of Michelangelo.

     indeed there will be
            "Do I dare?" and
         turn back              the stair,
      a      spot in               my hair--
                      his hair
 My         coat, my                               chin,
 My necktie                                  a simple pin--
                          his arms          are thin!
      dare
         the universe
 In a minute
                                            will reverse.

 For I have known                 , known them all:
            the evenings,           afternoons,
 I have              my life with coffee spoons;
 I know the                           fall
                   from a farther room.
   So how should I
       have known the eyes          known
 The eyes
                           sprawling on a pin,
           pinned               on the wall,
      how should I
    spit out                      my days
   And how should I

       have known the arms          known them all--
                              white and bare
                               with light brown hair!
 Is it              a dress
 That makes me    digress?
 Arms that lie along          or wrap about
   And should I             ?
   And how should I      ?

           *         *         *         *

              I have gone at dusk
 And watched the smoke
 Of lonely men

 I should have                       claws
 Scuttling across the floors

           *         *         *         *

     the afternoon               sleeps
 Smoothed by      fingers,
 Asleep                  it malingers,
 Stretched                       beside you
 Should I, after                   ices,
                      force                         its crisis?
            I have wept and         wept and
               seen my head
 I am no                        great matter;
 I have seen                     greatness flicker,
 And             the eternal Footman                   snicker,
 And           I was afraid.

 And would it                            after all,
 After                          the tea,
 Among the porcelain                         and me,
 Would it have
                                                a smile,
 To have squeezed              into a ball
                   some                         question,
 To say: "I
                                             shall tell you all”
 If                           her head,
   Should say: "That is not what I meant
                   at all."

 And would it have been
                    worth while,
       the sunsets                                the           streets,
       the novels,                                 the skirts

           and         more?--
                               what I mean
                           threw               patterns on a screen:
                         worth while
 If one, settling                          a shawl,
 And turning                    should say:
   "That is not
               what I meant, at all."

           *         *         *         *

              Prince Hamlet      was meant to be
                           that will do
    swell a progress,       a scene or two,
                    no                tool,
              glad to be
 Politic            and meticulous
 Full of         sentence
                   almost ridiculous--
 Almost

 I grow old
 I       wear                my trousers rolled.

 Shall I part my hair       ? Do I dare               ?
 I shall                                       upon the beach
              the mermaids               each to each.

   do not            they      sing to me.

             them riding                  waves
 Combing                         waves
          wind blows the water
 We      lingered in                 the sea
 By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed
 Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Roland and the Dark Tower: An Inverted Oedipus Complex

Introduction

Stephen King does both horror and sympathy exceedingly well. For those who know him better for his reputation as "America's Shlockmeister" it is worth pointing out his uncanny ability to sympathise with and inhabit the worlds of his characters. This is seen and felt very clearly in some of his famous non-horror stories, such as Rita and the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (if I had a pound for every time I mentioned that Stephen King wrote the story for The Shawshank Redemption, and people responded: "Really?!" then I could probably feed Hackney's homeless for a day), and also his early work Blaze (a re-discovered "trunk novel" published in 2007).

In this respect the type of stories King writes, both of the horror and the non-horror kind, actually fits quite well with the legacy of Romantic fiction in America. It is in spirit akin to Poe, and shares his deep sympathy of the soul. Whereas I'd noticed these traits before, and Bag of Bones in particular is a remarkable blend of the romantic and the supernatural, it was after reading Wizard and Glass that I felt compelled to make a few observations in this regard. Whereas Wizard and Glass compelled me to start writing this, it was The Wind Through the Keyhole that allowed me to complete it. So at this point, anybody who hasn't read The Dark Tower up to The Wind Through the Keyhole, or Salem's Lot, and don't want any PLOT SPOILERS, do stop reading now.

Roland and Ben, they walk away

A part of the plot line in Salem's Lot, Stephen King's 1975 vampire novel set in the small town of Jerusalem's Lot, involves Ben Mears' relationship with Susan Norton. Susan, unfortunately, falls prey to Barlow, the resident vampire overlord of Jerusalem's Lot. As a result she dies - first as the human Susan at the fangs of said vampire, and again later, as vampire, at the hands of Ben Mears. There's a memorable moment in the film version where Ben heads away from the burning mansion and mutters something like "sorry Susan" before leaving the cursed town behind.

There is something similar at work in Wizard and Glass, and this got me thinking a little bit. In this case it is Roland of Gilead who, lured by the Dark Tower, walks away from Susan. She is captured and dies at the hands of the town folk due to her association with Roland. It is interesting, if not necessarily intentional, that both Susan Norton and Susan son of Pat share the same name.

We know that, due to what the orb revealed to him after Roland takes it from Eldred Jonas, Roland saw that Susan is not in his future. As a result he became less concerned with her as the love of his life, and more and more pre-occupied - nay, consumed - by the Dark Tower. He later speaks to his friends of a choice he was offered. There were two alternatives: family life with Susan on the one hand, and pursuit of the Dark Tower on the other. He reasons - or rationalises - that he and Susan would have had no future if the Dark Tower was not saved, so he chose the pursuit of the Dark Tower. This choice, brought on by the glimpse offered by the orb, coincides with him losing Susan to death. He had underestimated the orb and Rhea, and by focusing his attention on the Dark Tower the orb had led him away from protecting the one he loved. 

 

Roland's Guilt

Now we skip forward a bit. It is revealed that Roland unintentionally killed his own mother. Roland is consumed with guilt. Roland, naturally, thinks he is responsible for his mother's death, even though it was probably a trick played on him by the orb. The irony, of course, is that it happens exactly when Roland goes to beseech his mother to "change her ways". On the other hand it may have been predestined. "Ka," as Eddie remarked. "Ka like a wind."

In both cases, his mother's and Susan's, Roland suffers because he believes he had a hand in the victim's death. In the case of Jake, again, he has the option of saving Jake or pursuing the Dark Tower. He chooses the latter, and suffers for it as Jake dies. He suffers terribly ... and so does Jake.

An Inverted Oedipus Complex

Roland's story is a partial inversion of the ancient Oedipal archetype. Recall that King Oedipus runs away from Corinth to escape his foretold destiny (he believed his parents in Corinth to be his real parents) and inadvertently kills his father on the way back to Thebes, his real home. After solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus is entitled to marry the queen - who actually turns out to be his own mother. Much later he realises his true identity, and therefore that he murdered his own father and is sleeping with his mother, and is so consumed by guilt that he pokes out his own eyes.

Roland's story goes the opposite way. Firstly, it is not his father who is killed by his hand, but his mother. In addition Susan Delgado, his love, also dies due to a choice he makes (when he chooses to pursue the Dark Tower). In the Oedipus complex, destiny brings Oedipus closer to his mother (who also becomes his lover), whereas Roland's destiny takes him further away from both his mother and his lover.

The Evolution of Consciousness

 

1. The Uroboros

In the history of world mythology there are recurring patterns and mythical images, which Erich Neumann (a student of Carl Jung) correlates with the evolution of consciousness. Western civilisation as an evolving consciousness, he argues, started with the Uroboros, the self-contained circle that encapsulates both masculine and feminine opposites. It is the self-begetting circular snake that bites its own tail. This early state is what Neumann calls in his work The Origins and History of Consciousness the "dawn state, showing the infancy both of mankind and of the child" (p. 11). Compared to the world as it became once it had "moved on", Roland's time in Gilead seems idyllic and self-contained, like the Uroboros.

2. The Great Mother

The next stage of the feminine is the Great Mother, also called the Terrible Mother because she overpowers men and literally drives them mad. Both personality and body are dissolved. In early cultures the Great Mother was attended by eunuchs with weak egos. But the Great Mother is also a powerful sorceress who "transforms men into animals" (p. 61). Rhea is an echo of the Terrible Mother, and is in a sense Roland's nemesis in Wizard and Glass (in contrast to Maerlyn, who turns out to be a rather tame obstacle). According to the logic of the evolution of consciousness, she is the unconscious aspect of the Great Mother, who has been split out into the Good Mother (Roland's own mother at the point of her death, when she wanted to appease) and the Terrible Mother, which is relegated to the unconscious. It is therefore apt that Roland's mother's image in the glass orb shows up as Rhea. They are two sides of the same coin. (One could argue that Roland's mother's unfaithfulness is a dark side he cannot accept, and therefore would prefer to repress. Yet it surfaces just as Rhea appears, which provokes his own violent unconscious urges and results in his mother's death.)

3. The Hero

It is only much later in the evolution of consciousness that the heroic figure comes to pass. The hero signifies a progression in consciousness as the male principle is split away from the female, and femininity becomes suppressed in culture. The rise of the hero corresponds with the domestication of the female (suppression of femininity) and the subsequent relinquishing of female goddess worship in favour of male god worship. 

As Neumann says: "The individual has in his own life to follow the road that humanity has trod before him." Roland can be construed as a heroic figure who must live through various unconscious phases. We've already seen that he enacts a curious mirror image of the Oedipus myth (by killing his own mother), but there is more: he is also a harbinger of awareness. He himself is more intuitive than intellectual, more romantic than rational. But his eyes, set on the Dark Tower - and a tower has ever been a symbol for human aspiration, achievement, intellect and also folly (think of the tower of Babel) - is a journey towards awareness. We may therefore say that Roland chooses consciousness over the alternative, which could be called the domestication of his own passions and unconscious, but according to him also the very destruction of reality. This decision results, not in domestication and repression of the feminine, but in death for his mother and for Susan. Potentially also resurrection, just as in the myth of Osiris, who after he is murdered by his brother Set, is resurrected by Isis. But about that we will have to wait and see...

The Myth of Osiris

The Osiris myth is also instructive in other ways. In the myth, Osiris is murdered by Set. Isis then resurrects Osiris and conceives a son with him, a boy called Horus. Horus is now in direct competition with Set for the throne. Here we find further parallels with Roland's story (as well as deviations). We see hints of Horus in Roland, of Osiris in Gabrielle, and of Set in Marten Broadcloak. In particular, Marten knows that the young Roland is a threat to him, and provokes him to try to earn his guns prematurely. This strategy backfires, as Roland succeeds. At this point in the story, Roland is not yet the hero figure, but still a struggling consciousness that is only beginning to emerge from opposing forces.

Roland's family drama also deviates from the Osiris myth in that Marten Broadcloak seduces Gabrielle, rather than trying to kill Steven Deschain directly. Roland's father Steven is emasculated psychologically just as Isis was emasculated physically (in the myth, Isis' penis is the only part of him that Osiris could not recover), even though Steven Deschain remains an important part of his life and a wise mentor. The seduction poses questions about Gabrielle. In the Osiris myth, Isis' role is unequivocally on the side of Horus. Yet Gabrielle has allied with the "enemy", even if unwittingly, and this complicates things. Whereas most characters in the Dark Tower are clearly delineated as good or evil, Gabrielle's role puts her in an ambiguous position. It also leaves a residue of consciousness that is a wildcard in Roland's quest for the tower.

Reconciliation

Nevertheless, the revelation at the end of The Wind Through the Keyhole resolves this potential anomaly more or less elegantly. SPOILER WARNING! Gabrielle Deschain, it turns out, was foretold the fate of Gilead, and also her own ("you die at your brat's hand") by Marten Broadcloak during a much earlier stay at Serenity. She wrote what she heard in a message to be kept safe by Everlynne, to be given to Roland one day when ka finally brings him to Serenity (an event that is effectively the main story of The Wind Through the Keyhole).

All of the letter is significant, but the final words are the most important:

"I forgive you everything. Can you forgive me?"

Gabrielle foresaw Roland's torment, and knew that he had to reconcile his guilt in order to fulfill his own destiny. Yet it also required great moral courage from him, because it asks him to forgive her in turn. Indeed, it requires compassion.
 
Once Roland reveals the words to his ka-tet, Susannah asks Roland: "And could you, Roland? Did you?" To which he answers unequivocally: yes.

As if to emphasise the great importance of this act of forgiveness, Stephen King treats readers to a short afterword, which we must read as the very last word on the Dark Tower if we consider the chronology in which the Dark Tower books were written. These final words of the afterword are:

"The two most beautiful words in any language are: I forgive"

We are left in no doubt as to their importance.

Reconciliation through forgiveness would clear Roland's mind of the cobwebs of guilt and confusion, and focus his mind on the true task at hand, which is to reach the Dark Tower. In the letter Gabrielle reveals she was also warned by Marten not to return to Gilead. Yet her intuition told her it was ka to go back to Gilead. So she did, a fact that restores Roland's mother's dignity. It reveals her to be someone who acted according to her own convictions. She was therefore not just a helpless pawn of history, even though she could not change her own destiny. (Bear in mind that it would probably have been a great convenience to Marten Broadcloak if Gabrielle had stayed on in Serenity.)

Most of all forgiveness, and therefore compassion, hints at the unity of consciousness that is an increasing feature of Roland's world. It binds the ka-tet, and also connects characters across the various worlds.

Conclusion

It is perhaps apt that this post should end where it began. I observed that Susan Norton's  relationship to Ben Mears in Salem's Lot, and her subsequent fate,  was an interesting precursor to Susan Delgado's relationship to Roland (and her subsequent fate).

I was therefore more than a little surprised to find Father Callahan, also from 'Salem's Lot, making his return in Wolves of the Calla (which I recently started reading). Not only that, but Father Callahan's retelling of the story of Jerusalem's Lot has Eddie, Roland and Susannah finding parallels with their own ka-tet. In a sense, the world of The Dark Tower is also Stephen King's metaphor for the connections and parallels between his own various fictional creations.

To conclude, I wondered what - if anything - it means that Roland's relationship to Gabrielle and Susan inverts the old Oedipus complex. The Oedipus Complex (a proposal by Freud) concerns desire for the parent of the opposite sex and competition with the parent of the same sex, and we likewise see Roland desiring Susan and competing with Marten Broadcloak. The Dark Tower represents Roland's search for the truth about the state of the world (and to fix it), but his real evolution of consciousness happens while he becomes more compassionate and draws his ka-tet around him (the Dark Tower novels don't actually reveal all that much about what is really happening to Roland's world, and in fact are much more about the various people and their stories).

If it is suggestive of anything, perhaps it is that Freud's (now often considered defunct) proposal harks back to an earlier stage of Anglo-European civilisation wherein the intellect dominated. In Roland's world intuition and surprising synchronicities are more the order of the day than empirical and analytical certainties. In this perspective, The Dark Tower is a story about that stage of civilisation entering its last days. The Oedipus complex is replaced by a different family interaction that reflects the need for compassion and intuition over intellectual and technological achievement.

And now I can't wait to read the rest ...!

Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Writing part 2

This is a follow-up post to my first encounter with Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing.  In the present post I would like to highlight, as much for my own benefit as others', some of the influences from whom he suggests we, as new writers of the digital age, can learn.

To recap, Goldsmith advocates the use of text as material, rather than as expression. He rephrases Douglas Hueber, saying "The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more". 

Writing, Goldsmith believes, is at the juncture that painting was when photography arrived. As a result

"writing's response [to the internet] - taking its cues more from photography than painting - could be mimetic and replicative, primarily involving methods of distribution, while proposing new platforms of receivership and readership. Words very well might not only be written to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated, sometimes by humans, more often by machines".  (p. 15)

The internet is a vast archive that's ripe for literary exploitation, to be used as material.

What he leaves unstated, perhaps because it is out of scope for his thesis, is that text will increasingly be processed by computers for commercial and business purposes.  Big Data methods will look at the same text the new writer looks at when he or she searches for raw material, but instead use it to learn about the online habits of users in order to monetise their interests and desires. The textual territory is therefore no virgin wilderness, but a problematised space in the service of commercial and other influential interests. The flipside is that the writer-artist is no more privileged than any other user to distinguish between "authentic" text and text inserted specifically to serve commercial and business interests. This includes marketing material camouflaged to look like casual commentary, and other tricks of the trade.

However, this does not invalidate Goldsmith's suggestion. If anything, it suggests we may have to look even deeper into the workings of the medium to see beyond the inevitable onslaught of digital politics, commerce and ideology. This would be a continuation or parallel development to the situationists' critique of capitalism and consumption. Understanding the medium (the technical side of information and technology) and its stakeholders (commerce, politics, consumers) will become of paramount importance to the new writer. That, however, would have to be explored in greater detail, and may eventually form the topic of a future post.
 
Without further ado, let us look at the influences Goldsmith recommends. My approach has been to leave out unnecessary explanation, and where possible to link to an authoritative resource. Headings are those in the book.


Introduction
  

• Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• Oulipo: eg. Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
• Jonathan Lethem: The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism
• Nam June Paik: Magnet TV
• Marcel Duchamp
• William S. Burroughs: cut-ups and fold-ins
• Bob Cobbing: distressed mimeographed poems
• Andy Warhol

Chapter 1: Revenge of the Text

• Charles Bernstein: Lift Off, "chooses to emphasize the workings of a machine rather than the sentiments of a human"
• "A long line of modernist poetry that sought to forgeround the materiality of language", eg.
• Stephane Mallarme: Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard
• Ezra Pound: Cantos
• James Joyce: Finnegan's Wake, "a six-hundred-page book of compound words and neologisms, all of which look to the uninitiated like reams of nonsensical code".
• Neil Mills: Seven Number Poems
• Shigeru Matsui: Pure Poems

Chapter 2: Language as Material

• Materiality as primary goals: concrete poetry and situationists

Situationists, 1950s:

• derive: (means drift) move through urban spaces without intention (Guy Debord)
• detournement: recontextualisation, Rene Vienet, Asger Jorn, Malcolm MacLaren and the Sex Pistols, dinosaur egg, Sara Charlesworth 1978, Matt Siber removed text from photos, Language Removal Services
• psychogeography: mapping psychic and emotional contours of a city

Concrete poetry:

• Mary Ellen Solt: Forsythia
• bpNichol: Eyes
• George Herbert: Easter Wings
• Stephan Mallarme: un coup de des
• Guillaume Apollinaire: Calligrammes
• E.E. Cummings: stacks of atomised words
• Ezra Pound: Chinese ideograms
• James Joyce: compound neologisms
• Noigandres 
• Decio Pignitari: Beba Coca Cola 
• Max Bense "the concrete poet seeks to relieve the poem of its centuries-old burden of ideas, symbolic reference, allusion, and repetitious emotional content"

Chapter 3: Anticipating Instability

• Peter Hutchinson: Dissolving Clouds
• Wittgenstein: duck-rabbit
• Lawrence Weiner: Statements
• Pornolizer
• Henri Chopin: Rouge
• Sonic Youth: Goodbye 20th Century
• Fluxus

Chapter 4: Towards a Poetics of Hyperrealism

• Ara Shirinyan: Your Country is Great
• Claude Closky: Mon Catalog
• Inversion of Roland Barthes' project in S/Z
• Alexander Nemerov: First my Motorola
• Tony Hoagland's At the Galleria Shopping Mall vs. Robert Fitterman's Directory
• Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
• Vanessa Place: Statement of Facts
• Charles Reznikoff: Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative

 
Chapter 5 : Why appropriation?

• Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project
• Borges: Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote
• Picasso: Still Life with Chair Caning
• Duchamp: Fountain
• Ezra Pound: The Cantos
• John Cage: Rolywholyover
• Elaine Sturtevant: Louise Lawler, Mike Bidlo, Richard Pettibon
• Ron Silliman offended by Issue I

Chapter 6: Infallible Processes

• Sol LeWitt: Paragraphs on Conceptual Art & Sentences on Conceptual Art
• Yoko Ono: Instructions for Paintings
• Ian Hamilton Finlay
• Andy Warhol: a: a novel, Diaries
• Roland Barthes: Death of the Author
• Andy Warhol: Popism

Chapter 7: Retyping On the Road

• Simon Morris: Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's head

 
Chapter 8: Parsing the New Illegibility

• Enormous amount of text, eg. internet
• Gertrude Stein: The Making of Americans (impossibly scoped)
• My Secret Life: Victorian Novel
• Douglas Huebler: Variable Piece #70
• Joe Gould: An Oral History of Our Time
• Craig Dworkin: Parse
• Louis Zukofsky: A
• Derek Beaulieu: Flatland
• Christian Bok: Xenotext Experiment, Eunoia

 
Chapter 9: Seeding the Data Cloud

• Felix Feneon: Novels in Three Lines
• Samuel Beckett: Worstword Ho
• David Markson: Reader's Block
• John Barton Wolgamot: In Sara Mencken
• Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy: Status Update, The Apostrophe Engine
• Rudy Rucker: Lifebox
• The Flarf Collective

Chapter 10: The Inventory and the Ambient

• Boswell: Life of Johnson
• Erik Satie: Furniture Music
• John Cage: Vexations
• Brian Eno: ambient music
• Tan Lin: Ambient Fiction Reading
• Thomas Claburn: I feel better after I type to you
• Georges Perec: Attempt at an Inventory

Chapter 11: Uncreative Writing in the Classroom

• The Hitler Downfall Meme
• Retype 5 pages
• Transcribe a Short Piece of Audio
• Transcribing Project Runway: transcribe TV show in chatroom with other classmates
• Retro graffiti: take old political slogans and graffiti non-permanently in public space
• Screenplays: take a film or video that has no screenplay and make one for it

Chapter 12 Provisional Language

• Words are cheap, language is the new frontier

Afterword

• Bill Chamberlain and Thomas Etter: The policeman's beard is half-constructed, RACTER
• Christian Bok: The Piecemeal Bard is Deconstructed
• Susan Blackmore: the third replicator