[Earlier this week, I rummaged through old notebooks looking for “contingency,” a theme that intersects with a sharp angle in a book I’m reviewing, a fabulous book about history and family and stories of origin. Knock on wood, I get this draft turned in soon. It was uncanny to discover that my notes were structured by lyrics from a PJ Harvey song — yes, me and my music issues— at a time when I was also writing the poems that would become my heresies. In the interest of breaking mirrors, I leave the typed notes alongside a collage that allows me to stand next to my grandfather’s outdoor shaving mirror, located on the green door that leads to the kitchen from the back porch of the family house in Bran, Transylvania.]
NOTEBOOKS, JUNE 2023:
The slow drug. Mirroring and mirror-rings. On revolutionary time in Buchner; various constructions of labor; the paradox of boredom; thinking in time and about time; terms of address in personal correspondence; Auden and Isherwood; the cost of business; oppositional aesthetics; prescribed happiness in Adorno's MM; the speech acts of billboards; prophetic voice; suicide and Benjamin; Keats' early death; "the book of what happened" . . .
See this winged boy falling
Falling out of something
Buchner’s play, Danton's Death, holds death in its title. But perhaps it is not a eulogy. One could argue that Buchner resists the elegiac mode by playing into the limit of revolutionary time. This occurs, paradoxically, when Danton is overtaken by BOREDOM in the middle of revolutionary events. Self-determination and resolute action don't result in ‘freedom’; the fireworks of Events become monotonous, predictable, devoid of meaning. It takes more and more dynamite to light up the night. Unlike giving birth to a child, birthing a revolution is a condition in which one's body is used without creating something that one expects to be independent of one's body.
A child is a radical unknown; the revolution is the absolute measuring chart penciled in on the wall, a form of measurement which foregrounds physicality rather than mental development. The labor created by caring for children is often ignored by scholars; this absence asks us to imagine it rather than find excuses for refusing to consider it. There are different forms of labor, and different ways in which this labor acquires meaning over time, across the span of one's relation to the labor, where time is defined simply as the description of events. Revolutionists could calculate and act but they were not free to think, if thinking is a mental state characterized by discontinuity, recursion, marvel, and absence of linear progression. Calculation is located in the linear – it can be slowed, sped up, charted – but thinking (as distinct from argument) meanders; it cannot demand or ascertain its end-point in advance. It isn’t in it to ‘win’.
Calculation is a skill that grows into a way of being: to be “competent” under late capitalism is to be “calculating,” to assess relationships and actions transactionally, to bring the cold quid pro quo to the fore.
Childhood is gutted on the day when one realizes “winning” and “losing” are the only terms by which the game is played among adults. Then, on that day, you realize you have no one to “play” with. Only the page.
[Objections —Argument that revolutionist has a relationship to transcendence, in this characterization, or at least an elevated sense of time that hovers above things?]
Transcendence. Now the terrain has changed. Now the angle is the term of address within time, the tempo, so to speak. The epistolary form comes to mind because it crosses time without knowing its outcome in advance. The speakers write themselves through intimate address to the person the other is being, a person that sometimes coincides with becoming or changing.
Speaking of address, the boundaries of the public and private are often delineated in personal correspondence through naming and titles. Only W. H. Auden's closest friends called him Wystan. And he used Wynstan when signing letters to intimates. Politics publicizes what friendship keeps secret. The terms of address swivel between these expectations—- and yes, Theodor often becomes “Teddie” to us after we have immersed ourselves in his papers, publications, and private correspondence. The author feels close to us: that’s the pleasure of intertextual encounter. Nothing compares to it.
[Ellipsis: The Who is the interlocutor, and what does the act of locution expect in the context of that relationship? What can it claim to know?]
“Locute” and “locate” are near-homophones.
In February 1939, Christopher Isherwood was living with W. H. Auden in New York, among the bohemians and artists. But Isherwood took stock of the scene provided by culture and media. In a letter addressed to his mother, Isherwood complained that Americans wanted "everything canned": "They want digests of books, selections of music, bits of plays. Their interest is hard to hold for long... Everybody is constantly being reconsidered... There is a lot of cruelty in the public's attitude to has-beens."
Despite the refugees arriving from Nazi Germany, Hitler's embassy in the US remained open for business. Bohemianism assumed that the ethical could be defined by what the bourgeois didn't do: it was an oppositional aesthetic with a reactionary political tail.
Watching out the windows
Watch the way the wind blows
Contingency gets read out of the stories we tell about the past. I want to imagine Buchner's play was written in a time outside of time, just to see if it possible. If my brain can even do that. By 1944, other refugees had arrived from Europe. Theodor Adorno was one of them. He was disturbed by the anti-intellectualism that he blamed (in part) on commodity culture. Perhaps his longing for the German language and his intellectual community accounted for his disdain? I don't know. I'm not sure a dispositive claim can be made about the relationship between longing and contempt. Adorno in exile differed from Hannah Arendt in exile. No two exiles are the same. No exile can be read as an example of exile without mutilating reality. No reality can be mutilated without making it more difficult to understand the thing one purports to be examining.
Nevertheless, in the US, Adorno glared at the social good called "happiness." He scowled at the happy face it valorized; he railed against the pathologization of unhappiness, trauma, and dread. Against the emerging social conventions of happiness, Adorno posed inappropriateness and imbecility.
“Billboards speak to prosperity,” the self-regarding billboard tells us. (See also the sense in which billboards call prosperity into being, as an aspiration, an expectation, an amorphous goal.) Should we challenge this assertion? If so, at what level of consciousness can we challenge it? How close can we get to the object we want to study, given the nature of the mirrors that ask us to study it?
“Adorno is said to have started his mirror selfie by taking inspiration from Ernst Bloch's photos showing Bloch and his friend Hans Meyer in the mirror. In any case, he carefully prepared himself before taking each selfie, so it probably looked funny because he was a clumsy person.” (Synekura Audio)
Since Adorno couldn't have imagined the future entirely, we can help him by looking back at him from inside this future, by laying his words next to each billboard which promised fulfillment. I'm going to quote from the marked passage in Adorno's Minima Moralia:
The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness.
This relationship between happiness and consumption worried Adorno. Happiness had become the rallying behind the consumption of certain things, the foundation beneath the erection and metrics of happiness-events.
The word fun is money.
It carves out a site where fun must be had.
An outraged Adorno leaned into the oracular (or prophetic) voice when addressing the reader. The prophetic voice is aspirational: it wants to earn its stature, or to exist in relation to having merited it. The prophetic voice believes that it has risked enough — popularity, community, status, humiliation, abjection, etc.— to be memorable. But the prophetic voice is interesting because it makes a claim about the future, and draws authority from the possibility of being seen as having predicted events and warned others about them.
Back in Germany, in continental Europe, in France, in Spain, there is a silent interlocutor who can no longer hear Adorno. Walter Benjamin died by suicide on the French-Spanish border when his papers were rejected. Benjamin offers the past as a book which we can read in order to find similarities or traces across time and, in so doing, change the past's "character" by waking the dead, offering them victory over defeat.
The look matters—and the looking— matters. Benjamin believed things retain some of the looks which have come to rest on them. This reparative aspect in looking back has been loosely described as the Angel of History; it's a common figure in poetry, cinematography, and art, a way of describing time that focuses on teleology.
"The genuine conception of historical time rests entirely on the image of redemption," per Benjamin. Assuming his work is familiar to you, I want to preempt a question by facing it: Was Benjamin "suicidal"? This question is complicated its robust silences. What does it mean to be suicidal? Is it the description of a moment in time, a climate, or a personality? For example, is it suicidal to overstay one's welcome in a foreign land? Is it suicidal to remain in a homeland that has classified you as an internal enemy or security threat?
These are questions that writers must ask themselves continuously. We tend to believe that dying young is a tragedy, but this assumes the value of living. It assumes there is something to be done, or something worth continuing.
My man Sigfried Kracauer in 1930.
John Keats was 21 when he asked for a decade to "overwhelm" himself in poetry, but the cosmos gave him three years. Seeking the intensity of poetry, Keats didn't live long enough to see that hunger diminished, corralled into complacency, silenced by shame, effaced by interpersonal duty. His short life was devoted to learning, feeling, studying, and — like the autodidact — he did not know what it meant to be read outside a dialogue form, outside the intimacy of epistolary. The screams of pain were present; the emotions generated by verse were taken by Keats as sacred connections, part of his apprenticeship to "the religion of Joy." He wrote from his reading—Ovid, Shakespeare, myths—and from art (see "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles").
"I never cease to wonder at all that incarnate delight," Keats told his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. When he wrote this, Keats could not yet have known that Severn would be the one near him, sketching the room of his final breaths, abiding in the womb of his death.
It is not my intention to encourage those living in human bodies to focus on death. Nor do I wish to romanticize it. Happiness is inseparable from the reified hierophanies of consumption. I’m not even sure happiness is a legible concept under late capitalism.
Write these words on the cover of this notebook in permanent marker: "The expression book of nature indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the 19th century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened."
*
“. . . adopting realism as the de facto orthodoxy does little to reinvigorate art or criticism. The desire to do our part in making the world a better place simply does not transform every movie into a reactionary confession or a revolutionary manifesto.”
— Jarek Paul Ervin, “Critical Cul de Sac” (Damage Magazine, Nov. 2023)