The Poet as Celebrity

[This essay appeared previously in The Melic Revie,  VOL. III, ISSUE 4, Winter 2001]

How do we reconcile the inexplicable popularity of many mediocre poets with the relative obscurity of seemingly gifted ones? A journeyman poet myself, I don’t want anyone construing this as a sour grapes piece or even a back-handed way to suggest that I am languishing in anonymity for anything other than the mediocrity of my verse. Okay? Just so we understand ourselves. No, the term itself –“celebrity poet”– is a disquieting amalgam to many as it suggests a weird cocktail of two mutually exclusive sensibilities. These two worlds operate under a number of battle-weary monikers: sacred vs. profane, literati vs. philistine. Pick your poison.

In his recent essay collection, Nobrow, John Seabrook suggests that the high brow/low brow firewall was obliterated long ago by a sort of meeting-in-the-middle, for which he coins the term, ‘nobrow.’ The real game is to appear High Brow, i.e. don the mantle of “culture” (by now, no more than a marketing designation), cultivate a studied disdain for the vulgarities of the commercial world, and sell as many T-shirts as you can. As the Mephistophelean David Geffen confides to Seabrook about the great counter-culture-warrior-cum-street-poet, Bob Dylan: “I would say [he] is as interested in money as any person I’ve known in my life.” The answer, my friend, is stacking up in the bank vault.

Mind you, celebrity poet status is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, increased notoriety springs from a pre-existing body of reputable work. This represents the healthiest category of poet celebrity, where we find, for example, Poet Laureates enjoying a surge in book sales as a result of their office. Furthermore, the poetry community is blessed (at least at the Laureate level) with eminently sensible representatives. Thus we have little fear of Rita Dove running off to join the circus or Robert Pinsky embarrassing us on celebrity golf tournaments. Can the Screen Actor’s Guild make such a claim? By the way, a surge in sales for a Poet Laureate would be a rounding error to Jewel or John Grisham. A runaway bestseller in poetry circles is probably no more than 50,000 copies, not even semi-stratospheric.

While an authentic poet in every sense, Allen Ginsberg practices a brand of celebrity poetry with his penchant for shameless name-dropping. Ginsberg’s compilation, Collected Poems (1984), for example, includes a massive index of proper names including many of the cultural glitterati of our time. For those who like to keep their circus clowns in the basement, Ginsberg’s cosmological mish-mashing of high and low art figures has contributed much to the blurring of the line.

So much for the anomalous few who can write their celebrity status under the table. By and large, celebrity poets do not further the art of poetry, and for this reason, our sense of fair play can feel betrayed. The false light of celebrity often heaps undeserved acclaim on a “famous” person’s work.

Behind the book tours and lecture circuits there is, in the end, only bad poetry. Nor will posterity be fooled (though you and I won’t be here to enjoy its equilibrating effects.) Worse still, many of us know anonymous, toiling colleagues who consistently write the pants off the celebrated few. So who ever said the big red carpet was fair?

Perhaps the founding father of the celebrity poet movement was the altogether histrionic but completely fascinating Lord Byron who, with the remarkable exception of his work Don Juan, is widely regarded as a pretty mediocre poet. The trouble for poetry is that Byron, besides spawning his very own overheated adjective, “Byronic,” gave birth to a hyper-romanticism which stressed, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “the fashion of deranging [one’s] hair, or of knotting [one’s] neck-handkerchief, or of leaving [one’s] shirt collar unbuttoned.” Gads! More often than not, this risqué fashion statement was accessorized with some pretty bad poetry from his imitators. Compounding Byron’s legitimacy woes is the fact that modern mass culture icons, among them Mick Jagger, routinely cite him as a font of inspiration. So where’s the satisfaction in that?

In Byron, we find a charismatic guy with devilish good looks who combined meager poetic talent with an uncanny knack for self-dramatization. I mean, this guy died trying to free Greece from Ottoman rule! Pretty cool stuff.

Not surprisingly, T. S. “it’s the poetry” Eliot had few nice things to say about Byron, characterizing his poetry as exceedingly ornamental and composed in a “dead or dying language.” But then, Eliot was a priggish poet’s poet, kind of an anti-swashbuckler. I’m sure Byron would have wafted granular particulates in his countenance (for you Modernists that’s “kicked sand in his face”) had they only managed to be contemporaries.

Another thirty-odd years would pass before celebrity’s pernicious influence on literature would really find its legs. The perfect vehicle arrived in the serialized novel of mid-late 18th century England. At Charles Dickens’ commercial height, the magazine carrying A Tale of Two Cities was selling 250,000 weekly copies! And yet in spite of –many would say because of – the growing commercial and popular success of his novels, Dickens’ “vulgar sentimentality” became the subject of increasingly heated attacks from the denizens of culture.

For example, “Saturday Review’s” James Fitzjames Stephen noted huffily (and is it only me who detects the smallest trace of envy?) “To [men of sense and cultivation] Mr. Dickens is nothing more than any other public performer –enjoying an extravagantly high reputation, and rewarded for his labours both in purse and in credit, at an extravagantly high rate.” Yikes! I wonder what Mr. Stephen’s sales figures were.

Dickens’ American speaking tours were the closest analog to today’s rock concerts for their attendant hysteria. Unfortunately for Chuck, scantily clad groupies became accouterments of artistic fame only in the late 20th century. But the point survives: commercial success and its by-product, celebrity, were beginning to exert an irresistible influence on literary tastes and trends. A market-driven fissure was emerging between critical works and popular works of fiction, and with it, a distinction between the artist and the celebrity-writer. There are many reasons why this schism happened when it did: the emergence of a middle class with increasing leisure time and disposable income, near-universal literacy, etc. There is however only one way to explain why it was exploited so thoroughly and succumbed so rapidly to the prurient interest: greed.

Though we tend now to snicker at the moral rectitude of High Culture’s defenders in the 1860-1930 period, had they prevailed in that battle a) we would still be in possession of the requisite decorum and high-mindedness not to snicker and b) we would not be contending today with the likes of Rod McKuen. In her fascinating book, The Repeal of Reticence, Rochelle Gurstein chronicles the culture battle between what she calls the forces of reticence and the forces of exposure, arguing that the battle was largely lost to the latter by the turn of the century.

Elaborating on a quote by the social commentator E. L. Godkin from his 1869 essay “Opinion-Moulding,” Gurstein suggests: “…squandering attention on the unworthy constituted nothing less than a ‘fraud on the public’, giving an obscure person’s ‘opinions and wishes an amount of respect…to which they are not entitled.'” Sounds like a healthy admonition against the cult of celebrity which, by all indications, fell on deaf ears. AOL/Time-Warner, are you listening?!

And then came Chuck Bukowski. A hacking shadow of Ginsberg, Bukowski nonetheless originated in the outer circle of the Beats where an outside-the-academy, gesticulating poetry was central to the movement (Kerouac’s “bop prosody”). Credit the Beats with bumping bowling league night to Thursday, folks, because Tuesday night now belongs to the Performance Poetry Read-off and even culture mavens can’t be two places at once. Bukowski represents the nadir of poetry’s collaboration with celebrity: poetry kidnapped for the seedy joyride of fame.

Bukowski flaunted celebrity as though it were an ill-gotten gain, miring readers in his own self-loathing. Nor can the Jerry Lewis-is-a-genius-in-France argument save him. Yes, Bukowski had a strong European following which anticipated by many years his renown in the States. But then, Jerry Lewis is a genius in France, so go figure.

Face it. We live in the era of culture crossovers and brand identities where promotional synergies are exploited to sell product: Jewel, Jim Morrison and Art Garfunkel come immediately to mind as representatives of yet another celebrity-poet subspecies, the crossover poet or rock-star-qua-poet. Seamus Heaney recently had some complimentary words for Eminem. But such encouragement is an anomaly (As Mark Strand’s new hip-hop album awaits final studio edits at the time of this writing, I hesitate to include him as crossover poet-qua-musician, though I hear his collaboration with Snoop Doggie Dog is some of his best work.) Indeed the crossover phenomenon, for poetry at least, seems to be uni-directional, that is, poetry inherits many moonlighters but offers few exports of its own. Or have I missed any MFA grads in recent MTV videos?

Today’s celebrity art is all about the cold gray face of business and one of its key maxims: the standard deviation of proven success is vastly preferable to the vagaries of raw innovation. In short, cash-flow begets further cash-flow. “Serious” poets should probably expect more crossover incursions in the future. I note with chagrin hardly a ripple registering with the announcement that Martha Stewart would be rushing her first beige-and-teal Cantos to print in time for the spring sales. K-Mart meets The Paris Review with nary a whimper.

The point here is that even if you’re the learned tradition’s anointed water-carrier in the illustrious line of Whitman-Eliot-Stevens, Jewel’s poetry is going to out-sell you. Period. And is this necessarily a bad thing? It all depends on how well you handle an acoustic guitar. Okay, so maybe the occasional 15-year-old girl skimming Jewel’s book on the store shelf will reach for an Anne Sexton anthology (Sexton sells, right?) Might the lesser celebrity-poets serve as rhinestone gateways to more enduring poetic works? Probably not. But at least Jewel’s A Night Without Armor: Poems gets to brush bar-codes with Sexton’s Transformations for a little while. Perhaps proximity will breed something other than contempt.

But I wouldn’t want to bet my Howard Nemerov decoder ring on it.

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Poetry Has Left the Building for ‘Unreachable Solitudes’

[Previously appeared in The New Orphic Review, Fall 2005]

“For poetry was all written before time was…we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word…and thus miswrite the poem”

–from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, The Poet

The “primal warblings” of Emerson’s first-order Poetry fascinate me. As for poems, well, I can often take them or leave them. I don’t mean that I take “good” poems and leave “bad” poems, although there’s a lot of that too. No, I am more struck by Poetry –where it comes from, the nature of the impulse that renders a poem (when someone could just as easily weave a basket)– than by Poetry’s visible constituents, the poems themselves.

Emerson’s quote is a startling one. I often wonder how many modern poets take it truly to heart. Perhaps they’ve repudiated it entirely. For Emerson appears to be removing some of the creative shine here, relegating poets to a sort of esoteric stenographers’ pool, albeit in the highest Platonic sense. The notion of “poet as water-carrier” runs counter to the modern sensibility with its predilection for personality cults. So many contemporary poets think themselves little progenitors. The idea that a poem (and its poet) is somehow subordinate to something that existed “before all time was” smacks of theism. Somewhere, a post-modern muse must be squirming.

Modern poetry readers are often conditioned to draw all poetic meaning from the poem itself. So they can be forgiven for concluding that the written body of work must define this thing called “Poetry”, as though Poetry is its corpus. In fairness, this is not an outlandish notion: the universe of poetry consists of all existent poems. It’s just contrary to Emerson’s thinking as I read him.

Just as paleontologists cull marvelously extrapolative assumptions from a tiny universe of recovered bones, there is much more to Poetry than meets the written page. It’s no accident that so many poems circle the subject matter of bones, dead leaves, elegies, Fall, Winter, snow and death. Poems are Poetry’s fossilized record, or at least that part to which Poetry has deigned a poetic approach. A T-Rex could traverse the space between most poems and Poetry. Miswriting is the norm. Then on occasion, Poetry rises out of the peaty blackness like the Loch Ness Monster and poses for a snapshot. Just don’t make a habit of coaxing Poetry as it can sense a lakeside tripod from a mile away.

Similarly, if a poem says “I’m a poem” too overtly or with an exceeding self-concern, then there’s too much of the craftsman’s mallet and chisel in it. In this instance, the poem has succeeded in subduing Poetry. A poem that fails to point beyond itself is a poem that fails to avail itself of Poetry. At the risk of semantic demagoguery, I’m not opposed to allowing a failed poem to call itself a poem. I mean, why not and who cares? But if you’d rather call it a mullet, then that’s fine with me too.

In a Platonic sense, poems are, even at their best, murky approximations of Poetry. A specific poem’s “poetic merit” could, in this context, be defined in terms of its proximity or “fealty” to Poetry. It’s often said that even the great poets leave behind a catalog most notable for its failures. From a lifetime of poetic endeavor, Yeats penned perhaps five near-perfect poems, Frost maybe four. While the precise tally is an endless source of MFA cocktail chatter, most would agree that the universe of “thoroughly successful” poems is miniscule. The Platonist would argue that the pantheon of perfectly rendered poems amounts to none at all.

I believe Emerson is suggesting that Poetry can exist quite nicely without poems or poets. But this may be too much for most poets to bear. Indeed as a group, poets may be the least equipped to render an unbiased opinion on Poetry given their vested career interests in poetry books, poetry workshops, poetry readathons, i.e. the benchmarks of tangible poetic production. I am reminded of Kafka’s admonition to the non-writing writer that the latter flirts with madness by not heeding the call of his craft. The salient point here is that a writer is a writer whether or not he takes up the pen. Poetry is even less beholden to pens than are poets.

In fact on a good day, Poetry barely tolerates most poems, resembling more a judicious celebrity autographing an endless line of outstretched playbills. The patience it must have weathering so many failed attempts! I’m convinced Poetry could, if it chose, create a great commotion even in a forest stripped of poets. Poetry would find a way! But if it had a fixed address, would Poetry maintain a subscription to The Paris Review? This would be a good question for Emerson.

Poets are not Prime Movers. What we call a good poet is someone with a knack for coaxing the already-there to the over-here. There is nothing “seminal” about a good poet. His or her ear is simply pressed closer to some wall. But the real action is always happening in the apartment next door. Occasionally, he takes notes of the eavesdropped conversation and passes them to the deaf guy on the futon who reads them with obvious interest. Most of us are the deaf guy. But there’s nothing wrong with our eyes and what we’d really love is a peek next door. Poems are a sketchy report of the Poetry that lives down the hall.

In fact, poets are no more essential to Poetry than radio receivers are to emanating radio waves. For those of you who love radio, this is probably a pointless observation since for you, radio is its programming content. Well, the radio wave says thank you for your intermittent patronage. But it’s really not necessary. Now if you’ll excuse the wave, it’s got a universe to cover.

I find myself reading more books about Poetry than I do poetry books. For some reason, this is a vaguely troubling admission. But like Emerson, I’m confident Poetry is “there” without it having to occasionally poke through in a poem. Every arrow requires a bulls-eye, if only to calibrate its imprecision. Without Poetry, a poem would lose all sense of direction.

I particularly love a well-done poem about Poetry. I think of two mirrors pointed at one another creating an infinity of reflections. When content is deployed to explore its own form, a bottomless abyss is created. Who’s watching the watcher? Well, Poetry is of course. A poem about Poetry makes Poetry either perfectly self-conscious or perfectly invisible. Form can be made to dissolve into a formless totality or a form-obsessed preternaturalness.

It’s no coincidence that many poets suffer from manic-depressive or bipolar disorders. I suspect bipolarity –both for poems and people– involves the ability to traverse two directions simultaneously. Good poems are always pointing at something else. Like an electron in quantum physics that does not “traverse” but instead simply appears in another place simultaneously, the best poems are forging interior journeys even as they journey outwards. Surely we are exploring some trick of time and space? Perhaps physics will one day subsume metaphysics entirely such that Poetry will be fully “explained.” Should that day arrive, physicists promise to become as insufferable as many poets.

For the moment, there remains something fascinating about an inherently referential medium turned in upon itself, self-referencing the referential. I am reminded of the unreachable solitudes Rilke describes in one of his mirror sonnets. Just as a mirror is, at once, impenetrable glass and a medium for bottomless reflection, a good poem is immediately accessible and infinitely withheld.

I’ve learned not to share my Poetry theories with poets as they inevitably misread my intent. Then again, perhaps they read me with perfect clarity. I am not denigrating the vocation of poetry. But as with all vocations, an inevitable guild mentality can spring up to protect the craftsmen, often to the detriment of the craft. I believe poems, at their best, are magnificent failures, while bad poems do not even warrant the accolade of failure. The inherent poignancy of good poetry lies in the a priori hopelessness of the attempt. As Rilke concedes of mirrors: “no one who knows has ever described you…” Nor will they ever.

Even though its practitioners may chafe at this job description, no other vocation measures its success by the momentousness of its failures. In fact, it’s a good thing poets are not carpenters or else they would all have been fired ages ago. We need poets and their errant arrows to remind us of the “unreachable solitudes” of Poetry. Imagine rising every morning to inevitable failure. How many poets fully realize the Sysyphian task they have been allotted? Dear poet, think twice before lifting that pen!

Thus the nearest attempts at Poetry may be poems about Poetry. While this may sound claustrophobic, the walls are not really moving in, folks, but are instead dissolving in a vat of recursive stew! Nonetheless I find it very intriguing how some people absolutely detest Poetry poems. The intensity of their aversion is a certain clue. To me, they are like Wiley Coyote sawing the board off from the wrong end and plummeting into the ravine. The Road Runner is Poetry, maddeningly elusive, laughing at Acme Words and its many capture-contraptions, an asymptote with feathers. No one ever catches Poetry. But we must try. As Emerson might say, “beep beep.”

Arterial Osmosis: The Artist on the Subway

[Previously appeared in the Winter 2015 issue of Ithaca Lit]

The Panopticon has seen us through to a manageable set of social gestures. The elevator warbles a meretricious tune. The gas pump sells us Burpee-Pies. (There’s no profit at the nozzle anymore. All margins are in the convenience store.) The police are militarized and surly. The police are surly because they’re militarized.

Our cats continue to get stuck in familiar trees. Now the cops crouch behind unmanned tanks. Asynchronous mischief beckons on a road once paved with good intentions. Weed-strewn lots are littered with No Trespass signs and dime-store minicams. Journey without economic terminus is a social ill called homelessness. Nothing is unguarded or hospitable. Soon, Kansas will demand travel papers. What would Kerouac say?

Increasingly, you must be on business in order to be on the streets: to and from work, to and from the store. Once the errands of fools, these daily sojourns have morphed into economic duties, if not everyman’s implied purpose. Wall Street bought the NYPD to serve as its Praetorian Guard. Loitering on State Street gets you arrested. There’s no money in gazing suspiciously at the stars. As greed suffocates ambulatory movement, irony remains lost on the Masters of the Universe. Stacked against a $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market, our liberties must strike them as laughably under-capitalized.

Ominously, the Fed has created unprecedented walls of money. Still, the critical velocity fails to manifest. Deflationary depression, the profound cessation of commerce, is a social phenomenon before it is an economic one. Yet try to explain flagging esprit de corps to a banker. The banks are petrified and teetering. Growth has slowed to a trickle. Absent growth, legacy debt cannot be serviced and London Bridge comes tumbling down.

Green-fields are needed to pump the Ponzi: Iran, Ukraine, Libya, Syria. The first thing they set up in Libya before it became a warlord hellhole was a central bank. The first gifts they showered on the ‘liberated’ people of the Ukraine were draconian austerity measures and debt peonage. Assad’s Syria enjoyed economic growth and multicultural equanimity (certainly by Middle Eastern standards; self-reliance, Emerson might have called it). But as this success lay beyond the grasp of the western loan multiplier machine, it served as an abhorrent exemplar of unbowed (and unleveraged) sovereignty.

Now Syria is a hellhole like the others. Given these irrefutable facts, the preparatory narrative is building with an earnestness that requires dollops of cognitive dissonance: Putin is Hitler. So say the handmaidens of Goldman Sachs. Only catastrophic demand destruction (on the scale of a WW III) can cure ailing public sector balance sheets, re-befuddle the masses and heap fresh diversionary chaos upon prior chaos.

Are there any muralists in the house? We need a new Guernica.

*****

I first met Tony Magerrison in a small Italian restaurant at the invitation of a mutual friend. Tony’s work should be selling for much more, my friend insisted. An ardent and astute collector as well as a true appreciator of art, my friend is one of the good guys. She just happened to stumble into a current pet peeve of mine. I bristle at market insinuations which precede conveyance of the work itself. There’s barely a creative pursuit anymore where the price tag doesn’t dangle in front of the object d’art.  Waiving benign introduction and fearing the worst, I launched into an unjustified harangue about how money doesn’t mean jack-shit. Starving artists deliver essential art provided they’re essential artists. I’m baiting this strange new artist, testing his bona fides, his mettle for virtuous poverty. Our mutual friend rolls her eyes. Listening to myself, I can hardly blame her. But I’m trying to make an in extremis argument just to kick the dude’s tires.

Tony offers mildly, “All I want is enough money for coffee, cigarettes, booze and a place to paint.”

He’s passing my test and I haven’t even seen his work yet. I still haven’t, unless iPhones count as gallery exhibitions. I don’t know brush strokes from shit. I’m like a horse whisperer. More idiot-savant than art critic, I can only talk when something talks to me. I find myself warming to the guy. So I decide to ease up a bit on the interrogatory bullshit.

“Sorry Tony. I’m really riffing above and beyond you. What pisses me off is how you can’t read shit about van Gogh anymore without the market’s latest price point appearing in paragraph one. The sports page is no better. Contract signings, salary caps and labor relations. Humanity is becoming a medium of exchange. They’re transacting us away”

Tony nods. God only knows what he’s thinking. “Would you like to see some of my work?”

“Sure.”

He reaches for his phone and dials up a London subway scene, one in a series that includes NYC. Something catches my eye immediately. I’ve been immersed in Jung’s incandescent Red Book of late. So the crimson handrails in this, man’s urban paean to the underworld (the underground), grip me like a Cabiri visitation.

The everyman’s sleepy consent to mechanized conveyance horrifies and fascinates the artist in equal measure. Does deterministic movement repeal organic fate and artistic prerogative? Kierkegaard said (paraphrasing): “All authentic movement occurs at the spot, not from the spot.”  The poets are no strangers to pedestrian instrumentalities. T. S. Eliot memorialized London Bridge in ‘The Waste Land’. Ezra Pound offers this epiphany above the Paris Metro:

“Why are the handrails red?” I blurt out.

“Because that’s the color they were,” he replies, nonplussed.

“I completely believe that. However they are red for other reasons too.” Tony squints at my oracular impudence.

For me, Jungian acausality is an article of faith. I am buffeted daily in my own version of the Quickening. To mangle a Picasso quote, the universe finds the artist at his easel, that is, the macro and micro always turn with prescient simultaneity to confide their burgeoning obsessions to one another. Everything, not least of all paint, drips with parallel meaning. The handrails are a prescient coat of red just as William Carlos Williams’ wheelbarrow was before it left the factory, before it enjoined the poet’s pen. Meaning is a multidimensional immanence, not a bucket brigade. I’ve formed a comfort level with acausality (or synchronicity as some prefer). Though I recognize most still seek a plausible chain of events.

“I’m going to write about this Tony. But I want to really live with the painting for a few days. Can you email me the jpeg?”

“Sure.”

*****

Later in the week, I suggest to our same mutual friend that we meet at the Rosslyn, Virginia Metro to attend a technical confab in DC. I detect the slightest hesitancy over the phone.

“Is something wrong?” I ask.

“Oh it’s nothing. I just have a slight phobia about escalators. Did you know Rosslyn has the second-longest escalator in the world?”

“No I didn’t. But it wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the last stop in Virginia and has to take a deep-dive beneath the Potomac. I’ve used it dozens of times.” I pause on the phone. “Do you have any idea what caused your phobia?”

“Well, two things. Years ago at a black-tie event my evening dress got caught in an escalator and half of it was literally torn from my body. My date for the evening was so mortified he pretended not to know me. He kept looking sideways as though waiting for someone else. Fortunately a gentleman behind me quickly draped his jacket over my shoulders. I ended up dating the nice stranger for two years. I never spoke to my date again.”

I laugh. “Who said chivalry was dead?” There’s a long silence.

“The second story is not so charming. A few years ago, I was attending some massage therapy classes. We had just learned how vulnerable the cervical area of the spine is to neurological damage. There was a beautiful young girl with long blonde hair in the class. While shopping the next day, she became startled by something as she rode the escalator. It caused her to turn abruptly. Her hair got caught in the escalator handrail.”

My friend paused.

“There was nothing anyone could do. It happened so quickly, and yet so slowly. No one had scissors. The worst part is the foreknowledge. Her vertebrae gradually separated as the machine claimed more and more of her beautiful hair. She knew precisely how she was dying.”

Awareness offers its own microcosm of horrors. Black boughs become guillotines. An angel is dragged back screaming to the stone.

*****

While we slept with eyes wide open, the powers-that-be bedecked our isolation with high production values. David Foster Wallace wrote of the inverted TV state e unibus pluram: From one, many. (As DFW defines it, “megametrically many, though most often…alone”.) We watch in blank-faced isolation all together in our TV-lit solitary cells. As morning breaks, we are turned out once again into mass transit arteries (ah, follow that word), physically proximate, though only in the most diminished, primate sense; cell to cell with a tube in the middle.

Magerrison is drawn to these inter-market dead zones where slack TV faces have yet to torque into obsequious idiot grins for insufferable clients and titular superiors. Drained of vitality perhaps, they are unconsciously authentic nonetheless. In a subsequent conversation, Tony admits to a fascination with the nondescript public space and all it can reveal about unrehearsed social man:

“Rather than the forensic examination of an individual – a person separated from others or environment is an abstract – it is more informative to observe the group and the environment as a whole.”

Individuals are an abstraction. This social awareness—group portraiture—corrects for centuries of Lord Mucky Muck sittings where bourgeois puffery—rank, station, privilege—were the only subject.  Who but the rich could afford such things? Today, portraiture perfects itself on Vogue covers where an almost fascistic attention to detail prevails. Photoshop is the new Goebbels, the latter in turn a careful student of Eddie Bernays. The tiniest lies are air-brushed away to render an enforced copacetic while instilling a sense of hopeless inadequacy in the observer. Let the markets have this violent perfection. We, the ragged people, are tired of bulimic paragons. We want frumpy, rumpled art.

Without presuming to know his politics, I surmise that Tony, a Brixton lad of decidedly English working class stock, is a Marxian artist in the vein of poet Anne Winters. In this excerpt from Winter’s poem, ‘The Mill-Race’, proletarian alienation overwhelms the roped rain light of the wet black bough:

Within the steel umbilical connecting TV oblivion and economic locus, we retreat into a tacit social contract: There shall be no human engagement on this hurtling metallic cylinder. Where civitas once lived and breathed, there are only now commercial arteries (that word again) for the perpetually exhausted. The assent, on our part, to no-man’s land purgatory is an utter heartbreak. We’ve consented to keeping the market afloat, one subway token at a time.

Only in the most degraded sense of sociability can The Tube be deemed a social space. It’s certainly not a gregarious space. We must be developing antibodies against pheromones. E unibus pluram leaks like a solipsistic virus into once-robust venues where, properly, we should be plotting against our overlords or hashing out some subversive populist manifesto. However these people are watching TV in their heads. Give them freedom of assembly and they still covet incommunicado. TV has trained the man out of the beast.

Only the blood-red handrails, objects tasked with supporting the unsteady, flash vigor and determinacy. The assistive device has leapt to the center of the train. Metal-machine mutiny has commandeered human prerogative. In sympathy with their plight, the passengers are painted into a corner of ashen, drained light. We are being warned through them. Should they, should we, visit doctors, spiritual guides? The handrails’ exploitation of the canvas is despairingly uncontested.

Later I shared the painting, and my first impressions with prophetically aware fellow intronaut, Australian visual artist, Tanja Stark. Without any equivocation, she said: “The rails are arteries”. As Stark is eerily prescient as an unflagging rule, I make careful note of her insight. Yes of course, arteries pulsing with oxygen if the body politic would only avail their sustenance. But it won’t or it can’t. This soma-drenched dystopia has been too long in the making. We are stultified. But there is hope. One man faces the expanse of the past while the rest plummet sideways into the narrowing aperture of the future (sideways only compounds the cowardly equivocation). This man is a crumpled version of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History:

“A Klee drawing named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.  His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.  This is how one pictures the angel of history.  His face is turned toward the past.  Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

— Walter Benjamin, ‘Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History’

The angel has fled. In his place, a stricken painter holds the line, but sloppily. There’s telltale blood on his hand—or is it implicating paint? He is the disheveled artist returning, bleary-eyed, from a night of weird nocturnal sin. A beleaguered and endangered genus, a night-owl on the back-end of the clock, he belongs to a time the train has permanently left behind. His distress is palpable as, like the mine-shaft’s canary, he has a pulse on humanity’s plight (quite literally—he’s gripping an artery). He cannot bear the present let alone the future. At least the wreckage of the past is decipherable. All the stops ahead are points of bloodless commerce where he will one day be arrested and detained.

TV does shorthand sketch. The movies excel at panoramic epic. The venturesome artist has been driven to the peripheries of rapt attention, those times-between where the unmediated space hangs on with quotidian determination. The artist is salvific. We should root for him as he has the power to lift our world. But that’s art: finding beauty in the unexamined. The Midas curse of TV is that it can’t not see anything. Everyone primps, applies a shit-eating grin. We instinctively greet the camera with bullshit. It’s the monkey in us.

The painter can still see us provided he’s surreptitious enough, and though he may be the most marginalized figure in a world choked with dime-store visuality. “With Usura…no picture is made to endure nor to live with/but it is made to sell and sell quickly” (Cantos XLV, Ezra Pound). Starved for the uninspected moment, he frequents the unsought realm of piss-stunk subway corridors. How hard it’s become to capture us thoroughly disengaged, un-beholden to a screen. When we’re watching, we’re engaging mediated space in a state Wallace called spectation. The artist is the last man competing against the screen. His realm of operation is continually shrinking. Of necessity, Margerrison stalks recumbent towers of somnambulism in a world where the aware no longer report for work.

And what a dispiriting vision it is, observing our stasis between mediated engagements. We can hardly blame the artist for our depleted condition. Margerrison aims his own commute towards the back of the train, where old world observation and intellectual quietism are permanently ensconced. He is not a post-post-structural contortionist. He endeavors to see people, resisting the jealously interior apparitions of neo-impressionism. I recognize these pallid excuses for people. I see them every day on the subway. Bravo, Tony.

*****

The week after meeting Margerrison, my 79-year-old British mother, long a resident of Virginia, takes a minor fall. She asks me to accompany her to the orthopedist. As we sit in the waiting room, she rummages through her purse, extracts a small black billfold for carrying cards and holds it up to me like a picture I must see.

“I never throw anything away”, she beams proudly. There is a London Underground logo on the lower left corner, circa the late 80’s. We learn my mother has a cracked vertebra. My life is a series of ever tightening circles. For reasons unknown, the diameters are closing ranks.

 

*****

 

Let Vogue stage the poseurs. Here, figures inhabit pre-appointed space in the same paradoxical way free will accomplishes destiny. The space is inconceivable without them. This is the weird essence of acausality. We are predestined to freely pursue what the universe intends for us.

The painting’s authenticity thus established, the canvas can be sifted for its socio-political content with the confidence something uncontrived is indeed there, speaking forth. In that regard, there is much to see. While the man and woman’s presence is preordained, that does not mandate comfort in their space. Capitalism compels these strange bedfellows. No doubt bland fabric cubicles await them both at journey’s end. The older woman’s body language is palpable: “I want to be anywhere but here.” She’s deployed her logo-emblazoned book bag like a bulwark against the man’s intrusive proximity. He too sports a logo—on his baseball cap; two human billboards holding the Man up. Though her leg is injured, the woman’s presence on the train is necessitated by pressing bills. Meanwhile the younger guy’s in another world, gripping what I imagine to be a music magazine—and are those ear buds? There’s the suggestion of a wire on his shirt. His sonic subculture and fan mag form their own bulwark. Perhaps he reprises memories of the night before in some smoky club with his crew, his tribe. The social gulf is belied by the fact that mere inches separate both parties. Shoulder to shoulder, but no common ground. Who will awaken the dead to one another? They could launch a revolution. But the Man sells them separate shit. So they think they inhabit different boxes. These people are not driving their own lives. They are alone, together, socially defanged.

Does the quaint Keatsian conceit of soul-making even matter anymore? The public relations guys discovered reptilian levers in the Id, the human substrate and, somewhere in the course of their predations, the building collapsed into horizontal lassitude. Rapture? We can only hurtle forward, strangers on a train, alone together:

“The vertical orientation, when man turned his eyes toward Heaven has gradually been replaced in Europe over the last few centuries by a horizontal longing: the always spatial human imagination has replaced “above” with “ahead”…”

—from ‘The Witness of Poetry’, by Czeslaw Milosz

Today, we swim within a litany of ungovernable desires and flattened aspirations. Appetite, Mammon, the resplendent god of obesity and Super-size has us by the collective gullet. Our gluttony is never sated. Revolution? Much of the underclass couldn’t scale a steep street curb. The American poor may be the most vulnerable population in the history of mankind.

Margerrison chronicles the slack, defeated faces on the way to and from TV empire. Heaven stopped waiting. So the Tube sidled into town. Our lives are bipolar oscilloscopes forever scampering between mindless labor and vacuous TV, modulated at all times by dispiriting exhaustion. They want us wearily receptive and vaguely unsure. As the PR guys will tell you, anxiety sells mouthwash.

Commute, one of its more furtive meanings anyway, is the substitution of one thing for another. The Middle English commuten, is bolder still: ‘to transform’. No commute is scrupulously agnostic. We are altered in the passage. In subsequent conversations, Magerrison offers his own synonym for the modern commute: preemptive passivity, the too-ready assent to mechanized conveyance. Our reductively transformed selves still stagger to work to eke out the paychecks necessary for holding up the telegenic Molochian smiles of the Watched; the latter term a Wallace-ism for the people on the screen who “…are absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched” (from ‘E Unibus Pluram’). We, by contrast, bristle at overt inspection. Seeing us requires artistic stealth.

*****

The mutual friend who introduced me to Tony calls the next day. She is worried.

“Tony’s had a bit of a dust-up down south. His ear is bleeding badly. He’s headed back to New York.”

Arteries and capillaries course cheekily to the surface for a proper blood-letting. Van Gogh’s negotiable ear finds archetypal traction in a Screaming Lord Byron misadventure south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It’s probably good Tony moseyed back north where artistic temperament can still hold its own against college football. The next day he offers his ear on Facebook, the photo anyway. Immediately, I think of Delillo’s White Noise. The plane crash was most assuredly real because it felt just like the one in the movies. Thank God for Facebook. Now we can know with certainty what’s true.

I speak briefly with Tony upon his return to Harlem. He has more to offer in the photo department.

“I often paint from photos. But composites, bits of photos really. You can always tell a painting that completely mirrors a photo. It has a derivative aura as though quite literally a film has been laid across the canvas.”

The artist’s undressed wound recalls something else Stark had pointed out, rather ominously: “There’s a strange apparition in the middle of the canvas.” Indeed, in the absolute heart of things a worrying occlusion greets the eye. This is a psychic blind spot with palpable malevolence (a demon, some might say). Only time will tell whether the indeterminacy resolves itself into light or perfects its darkness.

Canvases are their own jealous universes replete with unbidden images.  Intentionality is hardly the province of the artist. Tony has the vision thing in spades. His gift involves rising to the occasion of the universe’s impartation. However Nietzsche’s admonition is apt here: “when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” Importantly, there is light at the back of the canvas which is the front of the train. I look forward to seeing how Margerrison fleshes out the front-and-center foreground.

Hoops

Purposeful Exaggerations

Every time I read this Curtis quote it hits me with renewed vigor. We made it Mr. Curtis. We finally got there! 

 

 

The Ship Was the Cargo – The Hold was Empty

Americans, easily misled at the best of times, have been kept stalwartly uninformed on the undisclosed purpose of the Mueller Trump-Russia Collusion investigation –and with very good reason. Russia collusion was a dead duck before the Special Counsel was formed. This is clearly documented by the chronology.

People forget that there was a 10-month Crossfire Hurricane FBI Cointel investigation which turned up nothing prior to the Mueller SC being established. We know this from Strzok and Page messages at the time. 

That’s why the Maddow/MSM Rush-ah Rush-ah hyper-ventilation was important, in the manner of Goebbelian repetition. The endless full-pitched sound and fury (that lurched into Nazi racial ideology screeds on the part of Ms. Mad Cow) were the voluminous placeholders of a wannabe storm. Keep the peeps in a froth and they might not notice the absence of beer in the stein.

Not unlike the Grand Jury process, the SC created an institutional obstruction that impeded a Republican Congress’ and POTUS’ access to key witnesses and unredacted documents, while also creating a potential obstruction of justice tweet-trap for Trump, a trap which he obviously managed to evade. What a clever way to squander two years of the Trump insurgency.

(Bush Dynasty consigliere Bob Barr is the quid pro quo custodian sent in to get the collusion dogs off Trump’s back, but at a price. Trump gets to be President for a change. However Barr will conduct a very measured and judicious clean-up. Look for second-tier villains (Comey, Brennan, Clapper, etc.) to be tossed to the wolves. But the existential corruption of the Bush-Clinton crime families will be spared scrutiny. Hey, there’s only so much the System can give up. Assange was nabbed to ensure narrative enforcement. The DNC leak will forever remain a ‘hack’ since to flip that coin brings the whole edifice tumbling down.)

Devin Nunes amplifies that deft bit of Deep State maneuvering below. The Mueller was an obstruction of justice bulwark tasked mainly with coaxing obstruction of justice missteps from the other side. How self-referential. How bullshit.

However when there is no crime (as only the accused would definitively know), the accused can yell and scream all he likes. Justice cannot be obstructed by a falsely accused man. We already know from the summary Barr document that there was no collusion, so…

The SC performed in a manner similar to that described by Tom Cruise (below at 4:25) in The Firm as a ship set sail with instructions never to arrive. Unlike in The Firm however, where boatloads of incriminating information on his Mafia client was indelibly stamped in Attorney Cruise’s mind, Mueller’s hull never housed actionable cargo. The SC was designed to exist, persist, fish and perhaps catch the occasional process offender in the net.

In a desperate Hail Mary attempt as the collusion was so clearly an un-resuscitatable dead end (and fearing the eventuality of Trump firing Mueller), the Michael Cohen portfolio was tossed to SDNY. Additional lives were ruined by Mueller in a Kevin Bacon six-degrees game: Corsi, Stone, et al. These folks were Russian garnishments thrown under the bus to maintain the investigative veneer of Russomania. Those who’d ever uttered the word Russia in their lives and had been proximate to Trump at some point became grist for the collusion mill.

Here’s a riddle: what’s a process crime? It’s a strange sort of fish that you find only in nets, never in the ocean.

Mueller fished until he could fish no more. Barr ordered him to port. Now he’s opening the hold. Apart from some prurient bits and pieces which the Dems hope desperately to spin into political hay, the hold is empty.

Release The Whole Report? That was the latest mantra for people who seem unable to swim without lurching from one red herring to the next, the truly determined fools.

Now we await the press to digest the Mueller report so that talking points can be assembled so that newsfeed chutes can be loaded so that social media outrage can erupt in spontaneous narrative unity.

As I’ve said for over two years, there was no Trump Russia collusion (see below). Yes, the report will contain every crevice of potential obstruction of justice, every tweet and conversation where Trump expressed exasperation and a desire to get on with his Presidency.

In the end you cannot convict a wrongly accused man of railing against the oppressiveness of an investigation hellbent on proving his guilt. How can we say ‘wrongfully accused’? Because they didn’t find any collusion. The wrongfully accused cannot obstruct justice.

So much for the legal forum. What we’re talking about is the political football that the Mueller Report is about to become as the Democrats seek to exploit every innuendo upon which Mueller was unable to build a legal case.

Trump-Russia Collusion SC was about practically everything else but Trump-Russia Collusion. It was a serviceable foot in the Get Trump door. Here is page 2 of the Aug 7, 2017 scope re-baselining. Black space. Does that clarify things? Incredibly, we don’t really know what the investigation was tasked with investigating. However we know from chronological deduction that it was not about Trump-Russia. Call this the Black Sea redaction where the fishing expedition trolled fruitlessly.

There there’s this December 13, 2017 exchange where Congressman Smith has the temerity to ascertain what the hell Mueller is scoped to investigate. An easy question, one might think. Yet Rosenstein manages to blow smoke up all asses in attendance including his own. The tap-dancing starts at 35:27; click the graphic). I cover this issue more extensively here.

Has anybody noticed that while the Democrats continue to fixate on the crime that wasn’t there, the leading Presidential nominee for their party isn’t even a Democrat? The Dems are riding Never Trumpism into irrelevancy. Sanders is the man who really isn’t their man. 

 

 

Gregory Ball

 

Gregory Ball, Self-portrait (2012) Acrylic

 

…and singing Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, same era (about 18).