To Confront the Culture of Power with the Power of Culture--class="gmail_quote">Edward Said, quoted at Palfest09 after it became, thanks tothe Army and Ploice
literaly and literally true--
I sent earlier this week a piece re Fear of Poetry, Poetry of Fear and Poetry FOR Fear--and Fear FOR Poetry--
as "fear of poetry " was at the origin of the long discussion that is most recently re what to do abt about lists/discussions--(this is initially written as a response sent t the buffalo poetics list--
I don't know if anyone else has been following it, but from 23 May to 28 has been the 2nd "Palfest"--Palestinian Festival of Literature.
The festival is actually a touring one, beginning in Jerusalem and traveling to several different towns and communities before returning to Jerusalem for the Closing Night Events.
Jerusalem was chosen because this year it is the rotating Arab Capital of Culture. Every year the Capital is in a different City and country--
Opening Night was set upon by Police and IOF soldiers; the French consulate volunteered their cultural spaces--so to speak- for the night and the Festival proceeded without a hitch.
The final night--last night--the same thing occurred--the Army and some police appeared, a paper was nailed to a door--and the planned Theater site was made a Forbidden Zone.
This time the British Consulate stepped in and provided the site for the Events.
I've been posting a steady stream of the videos the Palfest Photo stream, and also many International reports on the events. (Ha'arretz has a lot f l inks at its site--and very good coverage--most of the reports i have found so far are Israeli and from various Arabic networks. (The only language i checked in so far is English--now on to more--)
http://
davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.comhttp://
www.palfest.org/The only mention so far found in the USA media is a tiny note today from USA today.
Also haven been posting readings , interviews, articles, reviews of several contemporary Palestinian and Palestinian-American writers and performers and as ever music videos also.Esp of one of my favorite bands, Checkpoint 303--one of the most interesting and original electronic/sampling, unplugged acoustic, uses of recorded documentary sounds in streets and from literally old documentaries. bands around in their uses of sounds, mixes, ,live recordings and techno and "natural" instruments--across three countries and two continents--
Perhaps the "Fear of Poetry" is too evident in the attempted closing downs to be considered an "interesting enough" form of fear these days?
On the other hand there is the Fear of reporting about these events and also,of discussing them,--in terms of the discussion here--to really discuss, rather than censoring or attacking-- because this is "not really to do with poetry." does that mean that it really cant be discussed at al in such a relation?
or is that simply "yet another reason to rid oneself and language of the troubling obstacles to the purity of the language the tribe--"
Or simply in the case of the "conflict," only one side is really permissible to think of and act on in the US.
This fear is the one impressed on one in a culture and society which has developed a powerful denial of events in favor of words, and in this way interiorized self censorship regarding many issues, among them quite prominently the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict."
To be rid of conflict means that there remain now " no opposing sides"--no contradictory language
IT IS ONE
it is won
Of course it is not a fear or closing down only on the account of Poetry, but oon account and due to al aspects of a culture and people, because any acknowledgement of them is taken to be a criticism of the other side, when it may not be anything other than a simple statement of fact.
Which is the most feared of all, these facts, because they do not agree with the discourse which has been created for these situations.
In order to keep hidden the US and its Black President supporting an Apartheid Regime, the word "Apartheid" as much as possible must be attacked if mentioned, and the person--as Jimmy Carter found out--writing or saying the word is attacked personally, morally, aesthetically, in every way possible, so as to give an object lessons in what happens unless the repellent word is expunged not only form language, but from thought itself.
This is basically the project that Orwell outlines in 1984 and its appendices on the development of Newspeak.
The reduction of the lexicon that is permissible and remains in use though every day shrinking a bit, by bit----this reduction of vocabulary creates also a reduction in thinking, and especially thinking of any "critical" kind. Instead, one is trained to dutifully be unquestioning in the acceptance of whatever one is told, even if yesterday one was expected to believe the exact opposite.
This "forgetting" via unquestioning belief erases memory also, so another critical faculty is expunged.
Over the last couple years--and in this discussion, pronounced by Amy, the term "dumbing down" has become something that is being contended with in re poetics and poetry.
Apparently the "dumbing down' is considered a natural casualty of adjustment to quite different times etc, and different technologies, and, ironically, "difficult poetries."
(Perhaps the "dumbing down" makes the "difficult poems" much more prevalent and easier to not only create but also constructing itself as a discourse that does not even permit the thought that it is making itself ever more less capable of understanding the "difficult poem," which in itself is being turned into ever more gibberish, as no one really notices--and al that matter is that the "difficult poem" be preserved against the "attack of the dumbed down readers."
Now why would an intellectual or a poet, as I read Charles Bernstein also speaking of "dumbing down" being something that the was accused of-and didn't seem to find so bad--, why wd a poet want to speak so casually of the fact that one must accept the dumbing down, as what one "gains from it," is at least for the nonce, more important.
Perhaps for the simple reason of taking advantage a situation in order to be advantaged by it and so --making it the only existing "alternative"--
That is, the "dumbing down" of others makes ever more "evident" the difficulty of the poet's "difficult poems." Both the dumbed down and the poets themselves will see very clearly that the difficulty of difficult poems is a matter of a simple and natural occurrence,and fate, of some persons being less dumbed down than other, making them the ones capable of making and understanding the difficult poems so difficult that the vast run of humans may wel not arise to the levels of thought required to "understand" or "process" the difficult poem
The debates over the lack of "critical, satiric or negative reviews of books of poetry," are in a sense a barking up the wrong tree.
For if only those capable of reading difficult poetry are reading writing and reviewing it, how wds any one out side the circles of of difficult poets ever even know care or be interested if what they are reviewing is good bad or ugly--
The problem is, that after a certain point, the dumbing dow and expunging and erasing of vocabularies, meanings, references, allusions, creates the impossibility of the mind to recover or reverse engineer what it was was dumbed down from.
Dumbing down, considered as a process of effects and aims on the "mental state and well being of individuals," iis not unlike the "we had to destroy the village to save it," deformation of thoughts and words that the Vietnam War-and every War-produces.
The "fear of poetry" often discussed on this list as in a certain way at times being seen as a "positive sign of its difficulty"--is taken to be a fear of "poetic language" rather than perhaps motivated by class differences, cultural differences, political imperatives or simply that the elite practitioners need to feel that they are in possession of something"too difficult" for the great unwashed to grasp.
Indeed, "difficult poetry" is felt to be its own sure sure guarantee of one's elite status in comparison to those weak and hopeless dullards who are the bards of al other poetries--
I wrote previously of many different reasons that a person might fear not poetry, but simply being asked questions that are being "noted down" and counted observed, polled and --what then--by these nosy and snooping individuals from perhaps a secret undercover govt agency?--
This age of Security ,wire tapping, email decoding,library card watching and checking, the time of the monitoring of the destinations one not only flies but drives to-walks to--the stores and public restrooms frequented--in an age like this
what is really needed i is not Security on the part of the State, but of the interiorization of the behaviours habits, thoughts and words of the Security States directives and recommendations of "dumbing down" and also of the "attack of the difficult poems"--as a reminder to each particular group of its positioning in the hierarchies of the society vis a vis one another.
The Thought Police, the Brain Police--especially now that the Obama Administration is essaying to introduce into US Law the concept that one may "detain indefinitely" a person who MAY IN THE FUTURE THINK OF COMMITTING A CRIME--OR EVEN COMMIT IT.
To arrest someone because they have the possibility someday of doing such and such--is a truly disturbing form of instilling fear, because one will have to be ever more carefully monitored by ONESELF--trying to desperately to control and prevent one's inward thoughts and their outward expressions."happening" or "behaving"in any way remotely suggestive of a future criminality-
The self censuring citizen will need no censor from above or outside itself, as everything will be censored before leaving the consciousness of the citizen involved.To continually fear not what has happened and being caught, for it, or what is happening and being caught, but to not caught,not charged, not accused, but simply "detained indefinitely" for something one has never done--simply so that one may in fact NEVER DO IT--
basically delivering one over to the authorities via breakdown and the overwhelming sense of guilt----like Winston Smith's in 1984--guilt not for something in the past as Freudian psychology and religions would have one be wary of--but of something which one does not have any idea of which others think one is be capable of doing in the future--so capable that it is better that one is detained indefinitely--
(Why not lock everyone u after being born and nursed long enough to make the transfer to the life time cell--
in a sense this is what a good part of Earth's billions are bron into--not to mention the imnese prison of Gaza--where one is guilty for being Palestinian--because of course one day you wil be a terrorist--if not already being one at a few weeks old--
Is this not what "Homeland Security" is really about?
Securing language and minds so that
"seldom is heard a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy al day."
Home Homeland on the Range!--
The "fear of Poetry " then is actually cherished by an elite as it designates them as above such toxic situations, and thinking themselves immune, they do not notice that in fact they are among the traffic cops directing the flow of persons thoughts words al into one direction, the one that knows it is "Home Wa/ord Bound"--bound and gagged--
Instead of Fear of Poetry what one is manufacturing is the Poetry of Fear and the Poetry For Fear.
A Poetics can be seen as an "attacking entity" like a virus, or parasite as it seeks to attach itself to the body of the subject, and from there to work the way INWO/ARDS--and to create as it travels a wake behind it in which everything previously present "vanishes amid the white froth--"
a present absentee-
-
is now become what it needs to be to fullfll its destiny (as the Israeli reporters are trained to write and speak of a Palestinian killed by the IOF--"they met, or walked into, their destiny"--which came about naturally , and via Kismet, rather than by any human agency which might be forced to take respsonsibality some day.
And because one is not supposed to acknowledge that this is happening, , these events, this closing of poetry festivals, Apartheid Walls, denial of 700 students in Gaza to attend the schools and universities including in the us that they have fellowships and grants for--o
because of the immense and immensely contradictory, surreal and horrifying gaps between words and things, words and events, words and peoples,--one is ever more constrained to interiorize the imperatives of the society and culture to "remain silent," or
to learn, like Winston Smith that Peace is War, 2 +2=5
that is--that loving Big brother one now understands that seeming Opposites are equal, thus ruling out the possibility of the previous elements of the equation ever having existed--
one learns the ineffable joys of denying that one knew ever existed an alternative , or that one ever thought even thought and so, eventually one cannot recall at all what it was that one forgot--
the complete expunging of those irksome questionings doubts, those impure words ideas and actions which are the obstacles between one and Big Brother--
and demonstrating this ineffable joy in the Truth by joining in the attacking bray as loudly and long as one can ,along with the ever more numerous and exactly like minded right thinking crowd,
for the longer and more loudly the Big Lie is repeated, the more solid and real and unquestionable is its Truith--
Take for example Frank Geary-designed Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Israel--
which tolerates not a single shred of a thread that would give any evidence that the Palestinians ever existed right there for centuries., and continue to exist right outside the building.
The Museum of Tolerance however is a proof that, as Golda Meier said, "There never was such aa thing as a Palestinian."
The attempts to close down the Palfest 2009 is perfectly consistent with these attempts to make --"never existing"--be the state of anything Palestinian..
In fact, the Palestinians living inside Israel--who are steadily having al their rights taken away--
are called "present absentees."
This is a remarkable phrase--truly a poetic one--
In that a person who is a present absentee--is a reverse refugee, a reverse engineered ghost from the future--
To be an absentee who is "present'__wel isn't that the way that soldiers and prisoners are "hailed" as the man said.'
"present," "absent"--
already the prison routine has set in for these beings present awaiting their absentee status to be fulfilled.
of course al humans as transient beings on earth are "present absentees" from the point of view of Death--
the efficacy of the phrase is to designate specific persons as already dead--
and being present only by being absentees--
whose time has not yet quite come-
don't you see --
like the Indians of the Americas-
are very much in the way--
and so their presence needs to be absented as they walk out one day and "meet their destiny" which comes not due to the rocket that kills them and 14 others, but was simply the action of their personal private Kismet--
If one examines the current situations in the US and Israel, and everywhere where the things which words --via difficult poetry--no longer refer to or have any repsonability for--
is it not so that in order to believe in them unquestioningly , one must treat language itself
not as a present absentee--
but as an absent present--
a "not there" meaning a never was there--
which however the Govt State sees as "not yet there" whose "indefinite detention" is an effort to ensure--Securely-- that the not yet there never wil be so that the absent present functions even more smoothly than does the present absentee--
and so even in the future--the past and p[resent never were there-are there-and this means that it wilnever happen
there never wi be any change from this Steady State of Equilibrium of the Law of Entropy--the Second law of Thermodynamics--again, donning an sense of rationality and normality and happening as though completely "naturally" --so that it never is a there--and no, there never was such a thing--nor wi thever be--
and so like Klaus Kinski's completely Mad Conquistador Arch Fiend of the Most Great Treaons-- Don Lope de Aguirre "The Wrath of God"-- in Werner Herzog's film, --the present has dropped away like al the dead aboard Aguirre's disintegrating raft overrun b small monkeys
and in its place is that "difficult poetry " of making absent reality and --creating not an ambiguity of appearance but instead a complete splitting between the appearances and language, appearnces and things, persons--
a splitting in which it is "obvious" that one, in order to believe in the Big Lie now TRUTH which one of Aguirre's men struggles with--a boat in a tree indicating not there is ahaluciontation but instead that there is the new meaning of t"that is not a shoip, that is not a tree, --"the seeing of a doubled world now split asunder and collapsing into that empty space in which al things rare a smooth opacity, a surface of appearances from which
never is heard
a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day--
a discouraging word
is seldom heard
and the skies are not cloudy al day--
the search for that perfect El Dorado--
made possible by Mallarme's "purifying of the language of the tribe"
which may be taken to mean also by some wags as the
purifying of the tribe from language--
hurling any contradictory being thing object word name into that ayss in which there never was such a thing as a Palestinian, in which 2+ 2=5
and in which the US Black President is a supporter of Apartheid.
In the forced denial of reality --the Museum of Tolerance and its non present present absentees, who are treated as not even ever having been present let alone absent--that is, they never existed, such things--
in there, the ridding oneself of the contradictions of language creates poetry not difficult but one in which difficulty or ease are no longer questions--
al that is left now is that self same appearing of oneself to oneself as oneself purified in language and tribe into that ultimate trasncendence of the fusion of oneself with Big Brother--
the final closing down of the being of being-and the birth of the
empty vessel of the new conceptualsm , which gives i the empty vessel tasks to perform-- copying to be done-- data to be moved about--filed--
and so--
dreaming that absent present is this hallucinatory Virtuality of detached things , detached words sheltering in the Difficult Poem and Museums of Tolerance--
where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day