The best way to combat fascism is to expand one's vocabulary. I agree with Wittgenstein: The limits of my language are the limits of my world. I have never understood the tendency in the American mindset to reduce a given situation or experience to its most basic terms. I suspect it has something to do with the insanely disproportionate obsession with profit and survival at the expense of consciousness and thought. The current anti-intellectual trend among right-wing populists and the Woke left reflects this, and is, in large measure, what has led to this current flare-up of fascism. It’s always been there. Poetry, especially its wilder manifestations in poets like Emily Dickinson, Clark Coolidge and Gertrude Stein, exists as a highly effective antidote. It’s a strong intoxicant with the paradoxical effect of counteracting the inherent toxins of capitalism. To intoxicate means to induce a toxin; poetry is an anti-toxin toxin. It would be a mistake to cite Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” in one’s resumé. Unless, of course, you were applying for a job as wilderness guide in the annals of surrealism or Finnegans Wake.
In some of the more intellectual quarters poetry
occupies a status similar to the mindfulness movement and meditation retreats
which cater to the wealthier sector of the western demographic. It excludes
working class populations saddled with long working hours and little – if any –
leisure for developing one’s more spiritual appetites.
According to Heidegger, we’re all homeless. We’re
thrown into this world – into existence – with little understanding of what
we’re doing here. In his Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger describes our
dilemma as a fundamental ontological struggle between authentic existence and
falling into a trance-like state of inauthentic debasement, of social
superficialities and soul-deadening routines. Authentic existence requires an
awakened acceptance of our mortality, of taking ownership of our life and
choosing to cultivate and pursue our own possibilities rather than conform to
the everydayness of the herd mentality. An ethos quite similar to this was
prominent in the 60s. Not surprisingly, the 60s was also a time of tremendous
creativity. Some reports indicate that Heidegger was sympathetic to the
movements during the 60s, though it would be a mistake to assume any
substantial linkage. That said, the break from societal conventions was quite
dramatic, and lingered in a decidedly more diluted form throughout the 70s. There
was a dramatic pivot toward consumerism in the 80s during the emergence of
Reagan and Thatcher and neoliberal economics; the 60s became trivialized as a
time of frivolity and little else, its psychedelic pathfinders such as Alan
Watts and Timothy Leary mocked in sitcoms like Taxi in characters like the
drug-addled Jim Ignatowski, played by Christopher Lloyd.
The situation is far worse now. The zeitgeist has
completely and resolutely gone in the direction of market-driven profiteering
and grueling work schedules with very little margin left for spiritual
development, except among the very wealthy, tech oligarchs and corporate
overlords of the financial industry and asset management sector. They favor
high end spiritual retreats such as Ananda in the Himalayas and Golden Door in
California, a highly exclusive, $10,000-per-week, Japanese-inspired spa beloved
by CEOs and celebrities.
To inhabit the world poetically has become a spa
cliché, remarked the late French poet Michel Deguy in a podcast interview about
the practice of poetry and – more specifically - Friedrich Holderlin’s exhortation to inhabit
the world poetically. Deguy cautions that the full meaning of this words has
been cheapened by marketing ploys designed to lure bobo money into the coffers
of the wellness industry and corporate training centers. Commercialization has
tarnished its initial luster. It now sounds like a glib bromide coopted by the
bourgeoisie. Our ecological situation is far more grave. Capitalism, along with
its evil bride colonialism, has so polluted, exploited, vulgarized and
subjugated the world that the sublimity once sought by the romantics has been
trashed beyond recognition, crushed by the juggernaut of consumerism and pissed
on by tech giants. Intervention is crucial, and it must be an intervention of
the poetic spirit, a transcendent imaginative force immune to the seductions of
capitalism, and powerful enough to blow a hole in the cybersphere.
The average data center uses 300,00 gallons of water
per day, with larger facilities potentially using between 1 million and 5
million gallons daily for cooling purposes. The mountains of plastic and
electronic waste contaminating the shores of poorer countries – the former
Edens of earthly paradise - with decomposing plastics and harmful chemicals are
symptoms of the decrepitude of every virtue that inspires a quality of life
higher than the unmanageable obesity of the rich.
Ergo, Deguy’s ecopoetics has been spawned by a world
in crisis and provides an antidote that has more to do with the way we inhabit
our lives, inhabit our histories, and inhabit the planet, than the bogus
alternatives enriching the coffers of the green movement.
I’m not a champion of the oil industry, but nor am I a
champion of windmills, each of which requires an estimated 260–300 tonnes of
steel, which requires significant mining, production, and transportation energy.
Maintenance involves regular servicing, and in some cases, the use of gear oil
and, for some, diesel engines to assist in operation. Windmills last
approximately 20 to 30 years, meaning they’re in constant production, burning
diesel in transportation and using electricity to manufacture steel, fiberglass,
resins, aluminum and copper.
I wish had a dollar for every cable leading to an
electric car I’ve nearly tripped over while out running. Are electric cars
better for the planet than cars using gasoline? I don’t know. You be the judge.
Global lithium production reached roughly 100,000 to 180,000 metric tons
recently.
As a poet, I feel that any diatribe or prescription or
screed I contribute to the global debate surrounding our planetary crisis will
be as effective as throwing paint on the Mona Lisa. To be fair, anything I
wrote – however futile its mission – would not be as imbecilic. But the deep
feeling of impotence is real. People don’t read much of anything in this
current social malaise, much less poetry. And yet here I am, writing out of a
sense of crisis. Why? It’s all I’ve got.
“And what are poets for in a destitute time,” asks
Hölderlin’s elegy “Bread and Wine.” Hölderlin held a very high position in
Heidegger’s philosophy. In his essay “What Are Poets For,” Heidegger provides
some answers. We need poets because they resist the technologies of war and
exploitation with the technologies of transcendence, the Technologies of the
Sacred, to borrow the title of Jerome Rothenberg’s foundational anthology of
multicultural poetry. Poets, such as they inhabit the hyper-technological, profit-driven
dystopia of the modern world, resist the banalities of the marketplace with a
strong sense of duende, a Promethean rebellion against the banalities of the
bureaucrat, what Hannah Arendt famously termed the banality of evil. Suffice it
to say, this is not an easy path. The cost of living is extremely high, and
poetry does not pay well, to say the least. Most poets that I know make a
living teaching at universities, which also lend a great deal of support in
publications and conferences. Outside academia, it’s another story. Without the
institutional visibility of universities, and lack of grants and awards, it’s
extremely difficult to grow an audience for one’s work. Which also means very
little influence, thereby negating the kind of role Heidegger describes for the
poet. It’s a problem. A very big problem.
It’s a slightly different story in France. I was
amazed at the number of bookstores in Paris when my wife and I visited in 2013
and 2015. I was also astonished at how many different titles and subjects were
offered covering an extremely broad spectrum of ideas and interests.
My wife and I met poet Michel Deguy for coffee one
morning in the square of Saint-Sulpice in Paris’s 6th
arrondissement. We sat outside at one of the tables in front of the Café de la
Mairie. It was a beautiful, sunny August morning. Michel arrived on a bicycle,
smoking a cigarette. He seemed quite cheerful. I waited while he finished his
cigarette. When he was done, he tossed it on the ground and said ‘salut,’ with
a mischievous grin. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was having me on.
‘Salut,’ which can mean either hello or goodbye, depending on the context, had
a far deeper meaning, which I didn’t discover until some years later, while
reading an essay by Jacques Derrida focusing on a poem by Michel Deguy called
“Apparition of the Name.” Derrida’s essay, titled “How to Name,” explores the
bivocality of Salut, which he sees as signifying a salutation and a salvation, an
act of maintaining the other as "intact" and inviolable in
the present, even as that act is "contaminated" by the inevitable
reality of finitude and departure. Which, in this particular situation, we
did. We left the poor cigarette to its fate, wisps of smoke fading into
non-existence, and found a table outside on the ground near the café.
In an essay devoted to explicating Michel Deguy’s
philosophy concerning ecopoetics and the different ways in which it manifests
in his poetry - Pensée écopoétique de Michel Deguy - Julia Holter
writes: “The poem, for its part, does not define, but it makes us see,
crystallizing "its thought" in an instant. Proceeding metonymically,
it shows the ‘whole’ through the particular, the example ‘rises to the
paradigm,’ while infinitely extending its enigma. For the poet, this ‘paradigmatic’
vision is a way of life, a mode of dwelling. With ecology, which means the
study of oikos, the study of the dwelling place, poetic dwelling acquires a new
urgency in Deguy's work, its most radical vector.”
Deguy’s The End of the World (La fin dans la monde), a prose poem in five parts published in 2009, is a work of profound poetic and philosophical reflection, what Deguy calls “philopoetry.” “Neither lamentation nor preaching,” writes Gisèle Berkman in an essay titled “Giving Voice to Infinity” (Donner parole à l'infini), “The End in the World is above all a meditation on the intertwining of finitude and infinity that constitutes our condition, or, if you prefer, that composes our existential structure. The central theme here would be Pascal's famous statement: ‘Man infinitely surpasses man,’ reinterpreted, in a Heideggerian mode, as that which represents the very torsion of Dasein, or the existential weaving of the infinite and the finite. Deguy leads us to consider infinity at the heart of finitude, the distension or internal disjunction of a finitude as if transfixed by infinity. Analysis with an end, analysis without end.”
The End of the World,
Berkman continues, “implicitly confronts the triple Kantian question: what can
I know? what should I do? what may I hope for? And that the ‘ongoing mutation’
constitutes a paradigm. What can I know? Nothing other than what the
intelligence of the overall process offers me, always to be meditated upon,
analyzed, and understood. What should I do? What am I permitted to hope for?
Here, the two Kantian questions are intertwined, forming a program of critical
resistance, a truly po-ethical one. For it is no longer a matter of hoping, the
poet and thinker reiterates, but rather, by relinquishing hope, of implementing
the salutary awareness of what has been lost, reviving the active sense of loss
in the very places where it occurred. Not ‘to mourn’ (a refrain with which
Deguy soberly settles accounts) but to reinscribe what has been lost: ‘To be in
mourning so as to never be done with it; neither with it, nor with what it
reveals in its tone.’ (Let us mention in passing: The End in the World is also,
even if not solely, a book of mourning, reinscribing the names of living, indelible
loss, and a book working to metabolize mourning, to actively perpetuate it—the
energy of despair.”
Our modern apparatus, or Gestell, Heidegger’s
term for the essence of modern technology, has had a sterilizing effect on the
human imagination. Deguy sees it as an ongoing mutation carrying us further
away from the Logos, the Greek term meaning word, reason, or principle, and
which is fundamental to philosophy and theology. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, it
refers to persuasion through logic and data, and in Christianity, specifically
John’s Gospel, it signifies Jesus Christ as the divine Word made flesh.
So if one asks, what are poets for, this may serve as
a partial answer. The poet – fueled by the energy of despair – is an antidote
to the juggernaut of computer technology and surveillance eroding our deeper
connections to the planet we inhabit with such grotesque negligence, such
uncaring ignorance. Of course, you can’t force people against their will to sit in a room listening to a poet’s verbal acrobatics do everything it can to
liberate the mind from the technologically conceived panopticon in trajectories
of verbal panache. But you can keep trying, you can keep putting it out there. It
is this unwavering faith in the logos that presents a path of lucid resistance,
the love of thought expressed in poetry, the universe in a swarm of words.
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