Written in 1963 as "the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon", this is as relevant almost fifty years later....moreWritten in 1963 as "the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon", this is as relevant almost fifty years later. The sheer ugliness of American racism is now embedded in the discourses that hide it, those gentile liberal nicenesses that serve exactly the same bourgeois lackey function in keeping hidden the vicious oppression of the ghettoised and oppressed in every 'liberal democracy' with their fine glows of meritocracies and equalities. Such discourses are from the pseudo-innocent who blithely act as cultural bureaucrats to perpetuate oppression, and while Baldwin states that “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.” he is a man of enormous love to understand their psychological states (based on fear) so that “…these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act upon what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
It takes enormous courage and resilience to resist the definitions of identity forced upon one by oppressive discourses, and it takes enormous compassion and strength to achieve understanding as a prime requisite of positive resistance, to, for Baldwin, love America with all his heart and demand attention to its devestatingly negative impact on his own and a so many of his fellows' hearts, minds and identities.
The first third or so of the book's main essay is a useful companion to Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain: here there is more commentary upon the desperate enticement of religion as an alternative to drugs, drink, pimping, despair as counters to utter oppression, yet Baldwin, whose every sentence is charged with ruthless honesty, confesses his intense rupture from the church as conceived in its sectionalised formation: “Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives. And I don’t mean to suggest by this the ‘Elmer Gantry’ sort of hypocrisy concerning sensuality; it was a deeper, deadlier and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter desert.”
Again paralleling the novel, he notes with distaste: “I don’t refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Caillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.” As his point within the wider context of the essay is to universalise certain human tendencies regarding power, oppression and the masks of a convenient God, the hatred, self hatred and despair, to my mind, are undeniable aspects of much arid and hateful American Protestantism. This universalising, really an insight through intense experience, of deep human structures of thought is applied equally to his analysis of the Nation of Islam: he understands its appeal, he meets with Elijah Mohammed in a richly courteous setting to hear him talk of the 'white devils' put on earth by the Devil, and who will soon be eradicated, before leaving for a meeting with some friends, white devils themselves whom he loves dearly.
For this divided nation (I mean today) either side of a Manichean polarity could use the following structure as axiomatic starting point for justification or rebellion: "God going north, and rising on the wings of power, had become white, and Allah, out of power, and on the dark side of Heaven, had become - for all practical purposes anyway - black."
Rather than pretend such polarity does not exist, "One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief", that the bedrocks of values and beliefs are not a potent part of our reality, Baldwin seems instead to take the tragedy of their existence as a part of the pain one must bear in order to be a Christian. I am inferring that Baldwin's Christianity is a basic one, in direct contrast with Christendom and the claims on Christ as justifier for all sorts of evil howsoever 'innocent' (and hence much of the pain is to be again disidentified - first as a Negro - and to be rejected, again, from the the community of goodness, to be in some ways to be without a church.)
Experience is repeated by word and example, again and again. Although he generalises whiteness in terms of, for instance, not only its cruelty but also its own inner fragmentation (his couple of pages dealing with music are splendid: "White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad....Only people who have been 'down the line', as the song has it know what this (jazz,blues, 'tart and ironic') is about.") and is extraordinarily acute in his analysis of the deadly signs evidenced by (much) white culture as to the state of the individual psyche, he, throughout, is for understanding and forgiveness, the courage to face the pain of history and the courage to live, to forgive, to be.
Yet there is no concession whatsoever to liberal culture represented by those "so helplessly, defencelessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices". He talks of the "incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtusenss of white liberals" who can "deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man." They are the type who read lots of books but never learn anything new. To learn something new, what this essay is really about, is painful, scary, and, most terrifying of all, abandons delusions in the name of exposure. Or, to put the pain in Baldwin's words: “I was frightened because …. I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles – perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worst.”
It's not equality or integration or acceptance by whites that Baldwin indicates is at stake, not these empty facades. For who would want to be 'equal' to, as the highest point of achievement, a white culture so clearly in turmoil, so unhappy and confused? Baldwin will not accept the American myth that having been "released from the African witch doctor... I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist." And, bearing in mind the universalism of human thought structures I discussed above, Baldwin talks of the American and Muslim errors equally as they imprison " in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death". For ultimately, it is that great taboo around, and denial of death which for Baldwin is at the heart of America's crisis.
There are existential refractions throughout: the welcoming of death as reality, the importance of face to face humanity, the richness of suffering, the ethical growth to resilience and forgiveness, and a demolition of labels, symbols, and so on. (Baldwin doesn't himself ever refer to any existential claims explicitly). For him, in a great reversal, to the Negro in history it is the 'the man', that is 'the white man', who is seen as a child, as only 'three fifths of a man' (as the Negro was once labelled in the Constitution). Like children, they actually believe deep in their hearts that "their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure." The Negro has a privileged position cleaned through a history of pain and suffering.
This book is a call for action, not a modest entertainment. It suggests that the Black perspective on American history throws light on denial and reality. It was written in 1964 when "internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster." References to the ideological function of the Cold War with Russia are outdated, an other has taken its place. Baldwin's views on the American nation are still precisely germane as the atavistic manifestations of hatred in that nation spew forth in ever more cases of virulent racism, and there is hardly a word needs changing to apply to America in the world today. Bravery and pain are called for:
"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfilment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!" (less)
Six lectures. like six walks with a fascinating companion who’s courteous, humorous gentle with the reader. He’s erudite, of c...moreWonderful and beautiful.
Six lectures. like six walks with a fascinating companion who’s courteous, humorous gentle with the reader. He’s erudite, of course, but his insights come unforced and ‘natural’. Natural ‘talking’ as opposed to ‘articificial’ – one of the dyads he mentions in passing almost as a casual observation about fictional theory. The only demand he asks of his ‘model’ reader is attention 0 and, well, fascination. It feels inappropriate to say much about anything where Eco is concerned since he says it all so perfectly, and I think no matter how nuanced the reading the nuances of the writing may well be missed. One could say must be missed, for the woods are not some well-ordered landscape manufacture but “Sacred…tangled and twisted like the forests of the Druids.” In any case, anything I or anybody else says about this or any other text is at best an interesting, or even useful, diagram but nothing like the richly experiential, one may – or may not – appeal to the noumenal - immersion within the woods, within the text. I’d say that if you only read one page of this book read the last one to see what ‘immersion’ and precision may mean.
There are interesting methods that can be learned for approaching fiction if one takes one refraction of Eco’s book, one thin layer, as a guide. I’ve suggested this in practice by glimpsing Dermot Healy through a few of the ways. In particular, the dyads of model reader and empirical reader, the use of a text and the interpretation of a text are seminal. I’ll be returning to the empirical reader as the substance of this post. Suffice it to say that the attention Eco requests from his reader is a requirement to realise the distinction between empirical usage of a text for whatsoever pleasure or other employment a reader may make, and a nuanced sensibility to a text (which does not, of course, exhaust a text’s possibilities: he has been returning to his beloved Sylvie year upon year).
Not surprisingly, another dyad is the fiction-truth twinship that wriggles, writhes, and spreads rhizomes throughout the woods – for I as empirical reader may, even as model reader, legitimately take with me on my walks not only my own memories but the collective memories of my ancestors including Deleuze or whomsoever. There is a type of mainly male psyche which I shall be looking at in a later review of A Goat’s Song which is angrily opposed to ‘mere fiction’ and thereby an unconscious victim to the personal and cultural fictional narratives that effect subjectivity (including, a point Eco makes merely in passing, the subjective narrative of continuing self). As Eco’s lecture series reaches its final point, the fact that a knowledge of narrativity is absent moves from being innocent to being deadly serious.
In an early lecture he suggests that the ‘completion’ of narrative against the messiness and contradictoriness of the world was behind much of the appeal of fiction, myth (and, I think, by implication art generally, including poetry). I marked the passage in rather angry pencil; in my brain I etched cliche, and ‘depoliticised speech’. Yet as the series moved on it came as no surprise that Eco began by asking at the start of his final lecture whether the world could be read as fiction, and whether a ‘work’ of fiction could be constructed to represent the actual (non-neat narratological) mess of living. Swiftly moving through some interesting asides about language and theories of the semiotic-narrative (and I think he was resurrecting tthe possibility of looking again at the idea of grammar’s fundamental axis around activity, that each sentence is a story), he relates the dreadful history of the fictions-as-truths beginning with the Knights Templar of the fourteenth century, through the Rosicruceans, Scottish Freemasons, Jesuits, and all the other stuff – read it, it’s only a few pages – to that dreadful moment of protofascism beginning in nineteenth century France, informing Germany and with us still today in an ugly and terrifying antisemitism. This empirical reader sees fiction as too important to be ignored by the ideology of fact cataloguing.
It is good and human to move back the other way, to that innocence and beauty, the thrill of walking in the woods. We need consoling fictions too, the ones that are neat and well ordered, the way we would like life to be. It’s important too that we know the other end of the spectrum. Life is a struggle, it’s political and ends with death. As Eco ends his sixth lecture: “..since life is cruel, for you and for me, here I am.” (less)
Personal explorations and childhood recollections by the authors (united into one voice), plus a good trawl of references to writings, art and photogr...morePersonal explorations and childhood recollections by the authors (united into one voice), plus a good trawl of references to writings, art and photography informed by those 'edgelands' which border the city proper and the "countryside"), seen only as edges if, as usually, simply travelled through, but as territories in their own right when imaginatively visited. At the quarter way through point, this is enjoyable and easy to read, succinctly chaptered into subjects (e.g. "Dens", "Containers", "Paths"), and each chapter chunked into paragraphs with spaces so as not to wear out the typical modern reader. Both authors are poets: the blurb refers to them as "well known poets", a phrase which is a crime against literacy, since if they are "well known" it seems insulting to both them and the reader to assert the fact.
As poets, they point out that poetry often deals with the mundane and overlooked, which they do here, and too they have some witty images and asides (which possibly signifies some modern poetry). How one may long, however, for a writer to realise that in dealing with liminal issues a liminal discourse, a refreshment is required rather than a tarted up trudge through familiar banality. To be fair, the method of working is to "snapshot" - as image (beyond concept), concept (abstracted from image) and metonym - a particular scene and move on quickly, to thereby evoke a running contrast between looking and seeing, between fast time and slow time; plus, for those of us who still wander wastelands and edgelands - literally and through the places of the mind - there is the delight of recognition; for those of us whose childhoods were spent in these places there is a deeper delight. Perhaps a way of expressing the book's method analogically is suggested in the authors' discussion of artist Edward Chell and his paintings of motorway verges: He has described the powerful visual metaphor of the verge as poised between the ordered, policed and restricted boundary spaces of the state that we are only allowed to look at travelling at great speed, and the slower, uncontrollable energies of nature.... (His images) suggest our perception in flux: the way, seen at speed, the intricacies of grassland and vegetation shift in and out of focus as our relation to the incident light changes. Because Chell is interested in vision, how we look at (or don't look at) what lies all around us. His paintings concentrate our gaze on what's usually fleeting and reduced to blurred texture; at the same time, their stillness seems to contain speed, and its shifting effects of light.
Clearly, there is a central focus upon what for brevity's sake nay be termed 'the ideology' of land and landscape, the borders and powers of governments and private power, and the acts of subversion represented by edgelands and the human activity that takes place there. Also there is, in the thesis itself, a radical questioning of the conservative gardening of 'beauty' and order, and thence an interrogation of the ideology of 'aesthetics', and an oblique suggestion of the tawdriness of 'beauty' on the one hand, and the 'beauty of ugliness' on another.
Some of the laddish wit irritates, imagery seems clever and abstract by and large rather than 'fleshed out' as one would indeed hope from poets. Perhaps the better reflections and refractions are conceptual rather than poetic. A discussion of an evolutionary term 'progressive detachment', for instance, is offered as a 'beautiful, poetic, idea', yet it may be better formulated as sharing the beauty of mathematics. In science, the authors state, "metaphors change... in an attempt to be more faithful to the evidence"; presumably, an analogy is being suggested by which new imagery needs to be found to express new discoveries (such as the edgelands). As I've said, the whole discourse of this book, and the imagery in particular, is pretty much off the shelf and lacks a fresh approach.
Possibly some sort of category error has been made, firstly by trying to catalogue 'edgelands' into discrete categories; secondly by identifying them too closely with their physical location. One would have thought that by nature, edgelands are not subject to classification and territory (and hence the requirement of a more adventurous mode of expression). Strangely unpeopled except by monolithic categories of types (e.g. families en route to Benidorm or Ibiza at airports), the authors share that peculiar modern sensitivity to what they perceive as any charge of misanthropy (early on they dismiss attempts to dismiss edgelands in favour of transcendental trips to the Highlands, or as evidencing edgelands as showing the mess we have made of the planet as "shortcuts to misanthropy"). The edgelands in this book have a ghostly quality that, I am sure unintentionally, leaves out the human and exploits a detritus of attributes, dislocated and disconnected.
All landscapes are imaginary, cities are imaginary. As the writers say, "we can concentrate on the local, the immediate, and devote our attention to a few square feet of earth." And rather than having to find edgelands in the obvious geographical border between town and country, we can see them wherever we are, wherever there is human activity. There are many strata of populations in all our cities, and the demographic metaphor is apt. We live in edgelands whoever, wherever we are.(less)
Communist Liverpool writer, seaman, docker and closely associated with the International Workers of the World (the 'Wobblies'), Garrett lived through...moreCommunist Liverpool writer, seaman, docker and closely associated with the International Workers of the World (the 'Wobblies'), Garrett lived through the turbulence of the times from the First World War and what Eric Hobsbawm calls the 'short century' ((The Age of Extremes). This collection contains a previously unpublished (and fragmentary) autobiographical sketch, short stories, critical reviews and accounts of the conditions facing the working class in the 20s onwards. During this time workhouses were turning poor away at the door so great was the demand, and on the 1922 Hunger March Garrett was appalled to come across a workhouse set up like a concentration camp (the British having invented concentration camps during the Boer War):
A high-wire fence divided the workhouse grounds into sections. Through this, wives conversed with husbands, and children with their fathers. Some of the the marchers stared in amazement as little tots pressed their lips to the wire in awkward kisses for their fathers, stooped low on the opposite side of the netting.
Yesterday I watched with others a mid-1950s British Pathe documentary covering the same period. Not a single mention of any of these issues, the political upheaval, the mass sufferings. Instead a glorification of Liverpool soldiers embarking for war, of the marvellous new housing being built for the people, public cheering at the visit of royalty: the old lie that 'we are all in this together'.
This collection includes Garrett's accounts of the 1921 highly disciplined protest marches in the streets of Liverpool, for adequate maintenance or jobs; an extract about the 1922 march for jobs to London; and a brief fragment of his autobiography, "Ten Lives on the Parish". Also included are some of his literary criticism pieces. The bulk of the book is given to some of his short stories: they disply a straightforward set of skills in crafting a well formed tale, and their compression and starkness perhaps far outweigh any amount of academic studies in revealing the texture of life in the times. (less)
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