Letter to DH, October 2025 (WR)

I’ve been wanting to reply to your letter of April this year. Each time I have re-read it I’ve come up against the difficulty of saying as a writer of poetry how my attitude to language has changed. A brief history would start with love for Keats and entanglement in Larkin, the latter presenting a hard landing into postwar Britain. Whitsun Weddings (lectures on that book by Donald Davie at Cambridge, claiming it’s central to what can be written), etc, the sour eye and the protection it offered. Latin American ‘social poetry’ was an exit, because it expressed without hedging an actual desire for change. For many years I was translating Latin American poets, writing nothing of my own. At first a runnel then a wider stream of my own writing took shape, although impeded by the circumspect knowingness which the linguistic dexterity of the university environment offered. I abandoned that dexterity and its implication of knowing in Incisions, which I wrote in around 2015, the time of the Poetry and Revolution conference and the subsequent Militant Poetics gathering. Incisions allows the self to fall out of what it’s supposed to know and to sink into uneducated and sometimes incorrect use of the language. (‘Uneducated’ in quote marks).

The difficulty now, in what I want to call the epoch of permission for genocide, is my implication in destructions that I can’t extricate myself from. I come to Mira Mattar’s impulse to stop being a speaking being, given the complicity of language in ‘what they have done to my people’. She wants language to be buried beneath the surface of the earth. I don’t know where to go from there except to say that this would be the destruction of language inside language (Scalapino). But that gets me essentially nowhere. For Scalapino in her book New Time, and others, that kind of destruction was a way to exist alongside real bodies in time, but it doesn’t work any more.

A few weeks ago I saw suddenly the image of a boy around eight years old wearing a home-made suit made of felt, image that belongs to older genocides. The boy was looking past me at what must have been his death—where he will die again? Other times, those of early morning anxiety, there are images which quite rapidly become void, their power to empty all representations producing vertigo.

I wrote in an earlier unsent reply to you, One element of the death drive would include its being a force of de-coding—(partial) erasure of the social-psychic coding inside which we live. I used to think that was a threshold at which something different might be accomplished, a radical break, but the word radical seems to have gone dead, and the caesura that’s in operation has facilitated a death cult. Caesura that permits the crusades, the American genocide of the Indian wars, despotic kingship, etc to cut into present time. And fascist utopias of permission for everyday violence.

Complicity of language, as I wrote early. But am suspicious of that totalisation of language. Maybe the spectre of linguistic totalisation is the desire of social media, something you wrote about in Wound Building.

For reasons I don’t understand, I think of these lines from Verity’s Coronelles: ‘the spider’s knotted hairs / protecting empty space’ –the hairs are deafening—

 

Report on 'The Trieste Mental Health Ecology: beyond "models"' (LH)

 This is the event I’m talking about.

Read this by Han Dee.

Lately I’ve been stressed and full of shame, fearful that I’m guilty of political betrayal. Emails sent too quickly, without enough thought. At worst this reminds me of the firm belief I had in March 2022 that I needed to kill myself because I had at that point been guilty of betrayal. Denise Riley begins the best poem in her collection Say Something Back, ‘Lines starting with La Rouchefoucauld’, ‘It is more shameful to distrust your friends / than be deceived by them’.

The brevity of ‘Or without.’ The experience of being sectioned means I’ve lost a lot of trust. The trust of people who believed it was in my best interests to withhold my phone and later replace it with a burner. Perhaps they were right. I placed this burner, white hospital ID sticker on the back, name and NHS number, a spiral added to it drawn by me in biro, on the red fabric with sex worker history affixed near the ceiling and draping into the centre of a room around which the assembled people from Trieste, the Mental Health and Social Justice Network (MHSJN) and elsewhere (‘survivors’, friends and family members of people damaged by the mental health system in the UK, NHS workers including psychiatrists, people traumatised by their work on acute wards here – E was rendered mute and cried explaining this in a workshop, trainee psychotherapists, interested artists, etc.) sat on chairs. Other objects on the red fabric: a copy of Sense and Sensibility, James Baldwin’s Another Country, keys, medication blister packs, writing about a psychiatrist who threatened the patient ‘you’ll be back’ because they were refusing medication and how the psychiatrist herself subsequently suffered a breakdown, a photo of a cell in Broadmoor accompanied by some words, a red umbrella, vape packaging, a spiky ball…

The first person I met was R and we got talking right away. R wasn’t sure how long he’d manage to stay, had heard about the MHSJN event at a recent MedAct gathering. Long years of depression, many days of staying indoors. He stayed the whole day. Told me about a suicide attempt at the age of 21 while at university studying a pharmacy degree. Took his exams in September as he’d been intubated in intensive care and missed the remainder of the final term following his attempt. Regretted not bringing for the red fabric a stuffed toy hedgehog offered by his mother while intubated: it had calmed his stress through its tactility and familiarity, perhaps saved his life. Both of us diagnosed with bipolar. Exchanged details of hospital admissions, physical complications, hypomania, the desire to find a place of consistency, the lack of continuity in the kind of ‘care’ we’d accessed through the NHS. Talked about medication. Talked about the US and the tendency to overmedicate. A lot more. A crutch laid on the table behind. Kidney problems making lithium a poorly suited treatment. We both wrote ‘continuity’ on the pieces of brown cardboard offered to us by someone running an art workshop in the afternoon. Neither of us joined this workshop, preferring to attend the one on the open door policy and no restraint as it operates in Trieste.

Some comparisons between the way things work in Trieste and in the UK:

– Risk model and an emphasis on the clinical (UK)

– Attention model and an emphasis on the psychosocial and on helping the person change their life (Trieste)

Throughout the day I was thinking about Iran. One person who had been due to attend was absent because the attacks made participation impossible. Someone joined the final plenary and not the preceding presentations and workshops because of the emergency protest in central. The event was catered generously by Hiba Express, a local Palestinian kitchen. I messaged S who sent back a voice note about having watched Dr Strangelove just the other day. Didn’t know what else to say for now. I messaged L who said at least it’s sunny, that they’d been at the protest in central too and that there’d be another one in the week. E said that Netanyahu’s plane had landed in Athens and that nobody but Greeks seemed to be aware of this. Firework-like images on the FT news app. Han announcing solidarity with Palestine. Seeing H during the day and in the no restraint workshop. Comparing notes about how organising is going and about my attendance at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office blockade last summer, where we’d been kettled and I’d been afraid and subsequently wondered if I wasn’t best placed in these kinds of situations. 

Things that came up at Birkbeck on 14 June. The Stop SIM campaign, Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition (I tried to find out if Mad Pride is taking place this year, it seems not to have been announced), Red Therapy. How ‘we keep each other safe’ but do we? The four times greater likelihood of Black people to be sectioned in the UK and the much higher frequency and severity of police involvement. The legacy of people of colour and especially Black Caribbean people with regards the rebuilding of the NHS. That these campaigns and issues were raised should be attributed to Micha Frazer Carroll who spoke via video link from Sweden. I think of the way Derica Shields brings some of these issues home, with steadfast force, in A Heavy Nonpresence, perhaps the most important body of work to emerge in years with regards UK state violence and the willed invisibilising of Black people. Cassandra followed Micha with a pre-recorded video message about the way people work in mental health in the UK, as if performing a play but each person with a different version of the script. The problem of patients/service users telling the same story over and over because so many interactions are with a different person each time. How some appointments are only ten minutes long. At the end of the day I met a psychiatrist who mentioned working in Hackney. I asked if she was familiar with Vivienne Cohen House and yes, ‘unfortunately’ she had worked there. I told her about the Google review I’d left and how a receptionist scolded me that this was a bad thing to have done and made it more likely that their existing funding would be withdrawn. The psychiatrist was sorry that I had an upcoming appointment, in two days time from the time of writing this ‘report’. I think momentarily of Can Xue’s ‘Train Dreams’ and how there are many clocks, often telling the same time. How a man who sleeps with a woman who keeps many clocks at her bedside struggles to relax around the omnipresent pressure they exert.

***

Europe’s largest rose garden is in Trieste. A collective project of gardening. Han mentioned Ruth Wilson-Gilmore’s idea of abolition geography as the attempt to combine people and land, wondering at this being somehow borne out in Trieste and in the rose garden in particular. The significance of 1971 in the history of Trieste and the admission of Han’s uncle to Broadmoor for 30 years as of the same date.

Pantxo spoke about the context of fascism in Italy. How Franco Basaglia placed the clinical question in parentheses because the problem of rights was more pressing. Basaglia was expelled in the early sixties from university because of his critique of psychiatry. About the need to destroy the reproduction of roles, of the psych and the patient, through the introduction of other objects and energies. 

The huge rise in mental health detentions in the UK since the 80s. Mad liberation movements.

A film I want to see: Fit to be Untied, 1975, about the challenge to the mental asylum system in Parma in the sixties.

The need to connect the struggle for health to the same struggle in the workplace, in the home and the hospital. 

Self-organisation. Self-realisation.

Basaglia, Laing and Tosquelles had many disagreements but they united on the principle of the dignity of people being at stake.

Trieste established the ecology as it exists today (not without many flaws and ongoing struggles and the presence of some assholes and right-wing people, not without police still issuing compulsory orders for treatment sometimes, killing people in this process in other parts of Italy) thanks to a leftist occupation of the system from within and from without. Thanks to an attempt to break up the institution of madness. 

In 1973, a lifesize papier-mâché horse was painted sky blue and broken out of the asylum in Trieste for a procession. Art as a relational process (minus Tirvanija, Bourriaud, Sehgal, none of whom were mentioned or in any way missed). The horse as part of a spectacle and means of communication. 

The renunciation of authority. 

From 1972-73 Basaglia bought cars for the workers to help them move to and from different neighbourhoods. The mobility of workers and the need to be where the people are.

The Chernobyl explosion of 1986 and Triete’s position on the edge of the Western Bloc, in close proximity to Ukraine. They made a machine to block the cloud.  

Sustenance. The invention of new ways of doing. Responsibility that needs to be affirmed every day.

I asked a question of a delegate about how migrants in Trieste interact with the mental health system. Mental health workers don’t report to immigration authorities. Fuck Prevent in the NHS. Fuck Palantir and Wes Streeting. Come to this day, Abolishing Prevent on 29 June maybe. 

In the gathering back together at the end of the day I found the NHS worker who had already spoken at some length about feelings of complicity with the system as it exists to be taking up quite a bit of space. Perpetuation of harm. History as a keyholder and locker of doors. Every speaker was met with applause. I struggled to bring my hands together in time as I was making notes as a father spoke about a son sectioned seven or eight times. Forced on nasty medications. Denial of harm. Fed up of joining care groups. The desire to keep the son away from care workers who say he lacks insight with regards to his medication. The podcasting and radio workshop he’d attended suggested there was a place for people to speak freely without judgement. Escuchame – the name of Radio Fragola’s programme. There’d be a community event the next day 15 June with Asylum magazine, the father said. He spoke of the desire to set up a house. I forgot to speak with this person about the Philadelphia Association’s community houses which I understand they are presently struggling to fill. A woman who described her pandemic breakdown described The Tuesday Club and how people often don’t really want to talk about mental health. There’s so much else. 

Quality of life does not get spoken about often enough in the UK, if at all, a practitioner of sorts said from the further end of the room. There is space in Trieste for a human to human relationship whereas here there are always risk assessments first, burnout, case loads, class and racism. So many things get in the way of the possibility of a relationship. In Trieste there had been a laboratory that allowed for the suspension of class relations. Art (in communities/with some kind of therapeutic aim) in the UK is often funded by charities and there’s a lot of gatekeeping and people not talking to one another, as well as the burden of constant grant applications. M spoke of the idiocy of the DSM and how the bio psychosocial model had some time ago turned into the bio bio bio model. These were not M’s words but someone else’s from a now quite old article. I thought of the usefulness of ‘bipolar’ for the conversation I’d had in the early part of the day. How I’ve been listening to the very American ‘Inside Bipolar’ podcast and how it's been useful, even if I have many reservations and the way the psych Nicole refers to her patients’ ‘wives’ as noticing everything is lol. Someone with experience in Brazil pointed out how the logic of the British Empire persists – in the idea that some people (especially those historically subjected to colonial forms of exploitation – loop back to Micha’s reference to the rebuilding of the NHS by Black Caribbean people in particular) might be ‘taking’ from NHS services. I think of the logic of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ that NELMA and other groups set out to challenge’. 

***

It’s funny what you repress. In the no restraint workshop we began with each person in attendance saying something about themselves and why they’d chosen to attend. I mentioned my completion earlier that week of the Philadelphia Association’s introductory course and how it had been hard as an inpatient aged 15 to not be allowed outside during part of the five months of my admission. The same in the month of March 2022. I forgot to even think that I’d also been held down on my bed and injected at 15. There were others who crossed the line of former patient now thinking to train. I learned that a specialist service operates in Brixton, run by a charity, uniquely for people of colour. 

Meanwhile I have in mind my lack of attempted contact with S since February. The worry about the ‘revolving door’. 

One of the many parts of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt I visited on Friday 13th in the afternoon carried a message attributed to Patrick White, remembering Peter Andrew Ryan 19.10.51–12.4.94: ‘THE WAY WE FILL OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE SICK IS A MARK OF OUR CAPACITY TO LOVE’. Capacity again, that word I often hate for its application to people, recalled by Riley’s idea that ‘things in themselves do hold – a pot, a jug, a jar’. 

KNEECAP Lehrstück (anon)

KNEECAP Lehrstück [9-5-2025]

ACCUSERS:
Kneecap!
You said Up Hamas!
You said Up Hezbollah!
You called for blood!
You support terror!
You invite terror!
You make music —
but music cannot be a shield for this!

KNEECAP:
What did we say?

ACCUSERS:
Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!

KNEECAP:
Oh.

ACCUSERS:
These are proscribed organization! To invite support of them is illegal!

KNEECAP:
We don’t support attacks on civilians.
We condemn violence.
We’re performers. We perform.
Our statements are part of the act.

ACCUSERS:
The performance is over
only law remains. 

AUDIENCE:
We were there – we cheered because —
Finally, someone said it!
We cheered for the break in the lie.

ACCUSERS:
Words have weight.
And weight breaks the back.
Will you stand by your words?
Will you go to prison?
[sneeringly] Will you become the next Bobby Sands?

KNEECAP:
Those who help the downtrodden
are the scum of the earth.
We are the scum of the earth,
we must not be found. We play the game.
We pull back the words,
The law is a net,
but we are small fish. Smaller even than Netanyahu.

AUDIENCE (splintered, some uncertain, some defiant):
But weren’t you brave?
Didn’t you mean it?
We believed you meant it.
We wanted you to mean it.

ACCUSERS:
They didn’t mean it.
They never meant it.
They’re cowards, they sell rebellion like merchandise. They’re capitalists!

KNEECAP (to audience):
Do you want us jailed?
Or do you want us here,
shamelessly playing in Republicanism, which is our sandpit,
Making music in the wreckage?
Bobby Sands: we inherit him
or we profit from him
or we betray him. Sure. But we don’t become him. His revenge is our laughter. We’re different.

AUDIENCE:
You won’t go down for the cause?

KNEECAP:
We are more likely to simply be prisoners than political prisoners. This too is a kind of progress – solidarity between criminal and political prisoners!

AUDIENCE:
We cheered. Then we watched them retreat.
We also know
that jail or prison
is not desirable.
But this spectacle is sad, because it shows how unsayable reality has become!
And we know
the real story is not this,
not these words, or retreats in meaning or intent.
The real story is that Israel pummels a defenceless Gaza,
starving the population, whole families buried under rubble.
The open-air prison is now a death camp. Indescribable brutality, and an almost cosmic indifference in the collective commentariat and ruling classes.

KNEECAP:
On stage, the performance was a statement. Offstage, we made a statement that implied that statement was a performance, but that was the real performance. We can only say this here, in a play which is essentially fanfiction.
We are not free,
but we will play free. FREE FREE

AUDIENCE:
PALESTINE

KNEECAP:
FREE FREE

AUDIENCE:
PALESTINE

Mourning to the Left of Me, Mourning to the Right (N)

It was nice to have you and Hannah around for a moment in Vilnius. I didn’t manage to jot down any notes after our conversations so what follows might need some refreshing, but here we go.

Well I’m gonna try to triangulate a few conversations I’ve been involved with lately. It's one of those periods where there a lot of concepts and newish points of emphasis and priority appearing and I struggle to place them all as words—it will definitely take some time.

Alongside our gathering on militancy and mourning, I’ve been talking with some friends in Armenia, the Anti-Denialist Coalition, about the idea of sacrifice as a framework by which the community of the living, variously, justifies and disavows death and dying. For the ADC, the Zionist avowal of the Holocaust as a practice of sacrifice of millions of lives deemed threatening or unworthy for the European community of the living, was approached as an opportunity. The dead were sublated as a groundwork for the building of a new subject: the Israeli Jew. As they ask: “Who and what have been and are being Holocausted, after all, at the hands of European Nazis, fascists, national capitalists, avowed anti-communists and white supremacists? For what superior motive? In order to maintain or preserve what?” This sacrifice, for the pure community, and its resistance by a forms of life who refuse to be ‘one’, continues by way of the Palestinian today. The holocaust as ‘sacrifice’ disavows the life taken in order to maximally avow the life to come—it turns death into a project, a means, for the fulfilment of community as a dealienated communion. As Nancy will nicely put it:

Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the States have imagined their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community, yet to come, that would attain immanence.* […] The modern age has conceived the justification of death only in the guise of salvation or the dialectical sublation of history.

Against this fascist logic of sacrifice and salvation, Nancy notes another justification of death. The death of those who revolt from the intolerable conditions of life under oppression. Yet these deaths are not sublated as projects: “no dialectic, no salvation leads these deaths to any other immanence than that of… death (cessation, or decomposition, which forms only the parody or reverse of immanence).”

*Nancy uses immanence in a peculiar way here to express the non-mediated, a kind of social organicism, an ontological purity that only a subject transfigured into the deathly oblivion of a pure symbol of life can effectively perform but never achieve.

What I take this passage to mean is: the death of those that rebel against oppression does not resolve incompleteness, the ceaseless movement and contradiction of being-in-a-finite-world. These deaths rather stay with us as the unresolved struggles and co-extensive potentials of the living. We live together with the dead but only within the parameters of the affects they imparted and what the imparted impart. There is no sublation of the comrade as immortal symbol, only interminable loss and its inheritance. Such deaths also surmount the liberal order's paradigm of the individual whom, in negating tradition’s temporal continuum, turns death and dying into an unbearable task and insignificant burden—the privatization of time.

Yet within the fascist logic of sacrifice and salvation, we also find a left-wing tendency. The horizonal, futuritive, vitalist politics that makes death into a project for the yet to come. Once again disavowing the sacrificed in light of an avowed community of the living/dead. The needs of the sacrificed are disavowed and their inheritances only acknowledged to the extent they can be put to use in some instrumental, future-building, project.

A scene: The Soviet planners in post-war Vilna’s decision to build the Palace of Cultural Workers on top of a graveyard and use the graves, many of which were Jewish, as the stones for the steps leading up the big hill. The dead as defaced stepping stones and foundations for the wellbeing of the living and the yet to come. You could imagine a short story by Platonov detailing this scene.

Here the dead are not immortalized symbols but crudely materialized tools: stripped of context, culture, hopes, and finite needs and turned into a cement-like mixture, put to use by socialism whose needs are freed of the burden of the past as tradition. We could add to Hannah’s comments on the death denying slogan of the left: “don’t mourn organize” / don’t organize build.

And this is where mourning and militancy, or as you formulate ‘the militant death-drive’ come in, as a necessary corrective. You begin by nicely conceptualizing Freudian mourning in your letter to Will, so let's start there: “To withdraw your ‘libido’ from the world of the living, according to Freud, is what it means to be ‘in’ mourning; but it also means prioritising the claims of the dead over those of the living.” And while mourning is seen to be a necessary step in retreating the object of loss—its eventual overcoming through a reinvestment of libidinal attachment—melancholy as the stubborn endurance of this attachment and attendance to the demands of the dead is found to be pathological.

The death-drive, as you note, interrupts this vitalism in its avowal of the irreversibility of loss. For Crimp, the struggles of the living continue after this recognition of our finitude, but “the claims of the living are necessarily attenuated, diminished, or interrupted by the ‘canalizing’ of feeling towards those that are no longer ‘there’, and who cannot benefit from any victories that we might win.” The militancy of the death drive, as this intransigent bearing of loss within the community of life, goes further than simply allocating a distributed space for mourning, it demands the vitalism of the healthy be rethought. Death-drive-militancy interrupts vitalism, with its denial and erasure of death and dying; neither instrumentalizing nor immortalizing the dead. It is a demand the dying and dead be avowed in their own right in the conversation instead of simply used as its resource or horizon.

Returning to the Coalition's thesis, if the avowed and disavowed holocausts of modernity are two modes of justifying death as a project and means of the living and of those to come, we need to ask what it would mean to rencounter death as this non-sublated, co-extensive, Mitsein with the living and what concepts could be introduced to re-articulate our notions of life in the aftermath of this event?

  

Letter to a friend (Kyle Lovell)

Dear,

Did I tell you that I wrote an entire pamphlet because I never came to terms with the hell of all these bleak enclosed spaces, or bring myself to love this country that drinks from the puddle to prove it isn’t gay, & I’ve found that three times is too many to do the same reading & four ends up melodramatic when this depression is fundamentally ontological & clouds the heart, which is why I promised myself I’d never write like this again, that I’d be generally affirmative to the whole of things in spite of my commute & tendency to bicker, that I would write kinder work emails & gossip a little less, as this errata isn’t cute & flagellation isn’t my link to a life well-lived but it is duct tape, piecing together every critique I’ve voiced to you across these last few years which includes how I’ve been well-shielded against grief by distance but still think the world would be a better place if Callie and Sean were still around & our friends do too, so that’s keeping us together & I didn’t realise how much of these last few years were marked out by absences & Ian says that apocalypse doesn’t rest easy on the tongue but it’s still there, in everything I write, the dull gaping maw of the sun & the itinerant need to imagine a life that isn’t blacked out by bad faith philosophers & who the fuck made Lionel Shriver one of those, did I miss that, I was kept busy drinking & trying to find a way to outline a theory of metaphor that was generative & I have Ricoeur to thank for that, him and the UCU strikes were a big help in tearing me away from a career that would have killed me.

& in those poems, I quote John Berger, that handsome bastard who disappeared to the countryside & wrote that single portraits of love do not exist but they do so either I’ve misunderstood what he meant or he was wrong & I know what I’d bet on, because there’s an open, weeping scratch at the core of this last year & it began like all good love poems, in a dark cafe when I was off-centre & skint & willing to be charmed by anyone & did I tell you that I know exorcisms don’t work, like that time I was blessed by a drunk priest as a kid for €50 & I’m still exhausted, so all of this is still unexorcised. London & how I built this one feeling into a brutal monument & when I wrote to Danny with these poems I said a little about my fear of unmooring from the world, though more than that, my fear of how comfortable that fear felt, how I had built a limbo system of nursed distance, of writing to cover the silence, of how it then became a position about whatever we mean when we say ‘community & communication’, so reading them again & again feels softly indulgent to a catastrophic selfishness that does nobody any good but then maybe something will still come of it, maybe there’s a metaphor or two, a line that someone reads to someone in bed, maybe that is enough for me. You once told me that at my worst, I’m a romantic & that’s still true I guess.

& I’m not writing this to you as an explanation or manifesto, just speaking to the mania felt after a pandemic & Danny said that the poetry community is a terrifying or terrible community, in the sense that the things that we offer to one another are often the signs or sigils of our own inability to exist in it & I did cry when I read his email, sitting in Birmingham with these poems that didn’t feel like they did much but he kindly disagreed & everyone has disagreed so kindly these last few weeks, but I’ve been slipping back into old habits & no-one can afford self-destructive tendencies in this economy, with so many people dead & when I wrote that Berryman had one right idea, I meant that he found that bridge in 1972 but that’s too bleak to say in a poem & I don’t know if I ever believed it, but it was one of those sigils of how I couldn’t exist without a cruel streak & a signifier to my general feeling of collapsing ideation that had been accumulating like poetry pamphlets & that dull fear of useless adoration, so when I ran into an old friend we laughed about the way we used to fall in love with everyone we met, in a constant state of infatuation that pissed folks off & we were always a little too sad to keep it together, because I’ve found that laughing at yourself with a friend is always a tonic to the worst infections of self-pity & like I said before, I agree with Hill that the poetry better not be in the pity, no-one is saved by it & nothing is borne from it, & then last week in Birmingham I told Alex about how I had once printed off all eight pages of Denise Riley & Wendy Mulford’s 1979 pamphlet No Fee & put it on my wall, a decade ago in a different city & how a lovely art historian I was not quite dating said I must be a hit with the Tumblr girlies & we laughed because who reads Denise & Wendy to be a hit with anyone, which I suppose is what I mean with all this, that the inability to exist coherently & the joy found in the cracks of miscomprehending the social are all related in small ways & I gave up on philosophy because everything I wrote felt like a private mythology rather than a framework but sometimes that’s all you need, & I’ve always done this because I can’t imagine a life where I don’t fall in love again & again or read your poems & cry, or offer up a some half-posture & half-charming devastation at my own coping mechanisms for the abscesses of the dead, or expect too much & give too little, & these small ways in which I lived, exhausted & loving, are perhaps why you still sound so happy to hear from me even if I ramble a little & I have always loved to hear from you. Please do write me back, when you can.

With care & care,
Kyle

Reply to Will R (DH)

A reply to this

***

Dear Will,
 

I’m sorry to have taken so long to reply to you. This morning when I got up I listened to the German news. There was an item on the decision by the Berlin Senate to deport four non-German citizens from Germany, for participating in Palestine solidarity politics. None of them has been convicted of a crime; the deportations are justified purely on the grounds of ‘security’. The news anchor asked, is this comparable to the Trump government’s decision to deport Mahmoud Khalil (etc.)? A guest was then called on, who said, no, experts say that it is not comparable to the decision by the Trump government to deport Mahmoud Khalil. That was that. The programme continued.

So the day started with this knot of rage in me. 27 people were killed overnight in Gaza in a school shelter. The German news programme reports that the Israeli government says this is necessary, so that they can get their 26 living hostages back. Etc. The sick magic of numbers.

So all of this relates to ‘denial’, as you have been discussing it, and the question of voids that have come up in our shared exchange around Verity’s recent poetry and Alberto’s fascism book. The assertion of non-comparability by the guest on the German news show is a very pure form of denial. The liberalism that she defends by that denial, is a void. Fascism per liberalism is pure outside, pure evil, pure other, we cannot be like that, q.e.d. But the repudiation of similitude is the means of denial, and so it is an instrument of fascism in the purest sense. Once language has been perfectly stripped of meaning, of sense, of physical reference, of bodily implication, of feeling, of thought, the assertion of concepts becomes a pure exercise of power, the pure power to command assent. It is sadism, a Sadean mechanism in which language only seems to be the medium and really it is just one body, dominating another and the intervening element could just as easily be a brick. No, the liberal European state is not ‘comparable’ to the fascist US one, not even when it does exactly the same thing: this is a game of domination, played out in language; an exercise in voiding and a denial and a pretense of dissimilarity.

I’ve been thinking for a long time now about the poem that you quote at the end of your letter: ‘The world is always complete. But things get lost’. The flatness of that contradiction, the simplicity and plainness of it. For some weeks after you wrote, I was reading some of the theoretical documents around ACT UP. At one point I read Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘Mourning and Militancy’, which I first encountered via a discussion at the end of Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout. Crimp also raises the question of the usefulness of the Freudian approach to mourning as something limited in time and subject to correction by ‘reality’. If death and loss becomes the inevitable accompaniment to all of your political activity, as for AIDS activists in the early 1990s it did, then mourning clearly becomes interminable. But what is interesting for me about Crimp’s essay is what ‘mournful militancy’ means. In some ways the coinage seems like a euphemism. At one point, Crimp talks about the necessity of acknowledging in our politics a kind of ‘death drive’, which he defines in terms of a violence which is internal to us and ineliminable: an internal, unchangeable violence which accompanies the external, changeable violence that is done to us and that we struggle against. The question of the relation of the ‘death drive’ to ‘mourning’ is never explicitly discussed in his article, but the question about what it means to be ‘identified with the dead’ (the dead lovers and friends and comrades of the AIDS crisis, hundreds of them) perhaps answers it implicitly. To withdraw your ‘libido’ from the world of the living, according to Freud, is what it means to be ‘in’ mourning; but it also means prioritising the claims of the dead over those of the living. Crimp’s idea that this is a death drive expresses the fact that it is a response to a violence that has already been inflicted, which is internally felt, and is irreversible. The struggle for the living continues, on his account, but the claims that that struggle makes on us are necessarily attenuated, diminished or interrupted by the ‘canalising’ of feeling towards those who are no longer ‘there’ (who are missing), and who cannot benefit from any victories that we might win.

There is something starred out and pixelated in these formulations. They suggest two distinct ideas without clearly identifying them as such. ‘To mourn’ implies nothing except a ‘retraction’ of desire from the living. A death drive implies negativity, the internalisation of violence and its reproduction as an internal energy or wish. A ‘death-drive militancy’ would suggest something different to a ‘mournful’ one, but Crimp allows the latter formula to stand for both. The slightly inhibited or evasive quality of that theoretical conflation becomes visible in a film that I think in some ways grew out of his theoretical work, Gregg Bordowitz’ Fast Trip, Long Drop, which I watched on UBUweb a few weeks ago. In the Bordowitz film, the purpose of the intervention is different. It’s no longer simply to ‘hold open a space’ for mourning, or even smoothly to integrate mourning with activism, but to give expression to an active conflict. Bordowitz: ‘I became preoccupied with the burdens that sick people bear on behalf of those around them who are well. I wanted to get a handle on despair and put it out there as a political problem. To be recognized and discussed. If we couldn't do this, then it all seemed like bullshit.’

The final sentence expresses the truth of the first. ‘Militancy’ is bullshit if it can’t ‘get a handle on despair’. People who are ‘well’ don’t want to hear about despair because they aren’t ready to accept the implications. For them, despair is only a sign of defeat. They don’t understand that for others it’s the only thing that remains to be achieved, that articulated despair is already a triumph over muteness and silence and that for someone who finds themselves in this situation the ‘optimism’ of the healthy is itself a hostile force, a form of violence that has to be struggled against, a repressive power. In a radical conception, the role of the ‘death drive’ would be to advance the recognition that there is no movement for emancipation that doesn’t contain this tendency to silence or deny; it would be the means of struggle of the dying against the living, a way of transforming the coercively presumptive vocabulary of what constitutes success and what defeat.

‘The real = nothing is missing’.

I guess I wanted to describe here something more personal in order to try to explain what it is that I’m getting at, ‘in memory of my feelings’. It will feel like a long digression. 

When I first started to write poetry, I did so in some kind of fidelity to the idea of militancy. I wanted to write a poetry in which everything could change, where everything could be altered, but my basic political vocabularly was something ‘I really meant’. This idea about ‘real’ meaning---about what I literally believed---introduced a kind of split in my sense of what happened to language when it ‘entered’ poetry. On the one hand, there was everything meaningless in my experience, everything cruel or reality-denying and absurd, everything cliched and idiotic and worn out and wrong. All of this had to be messed up, inverted, distorted, dissolved, undone; and poetry was the means or instrument for this because it imposed no constraints on what, or how, I wrote.

On the other hand there was the language of my political beliefs, or the language in which I politically believed. The separation of those two ‘areas’ of language led, at first, to something that at one level you could say looked like ‘satire’: the language that I tortured and distorted was the language of the society I rejected and despised. The language that I believed in and cherished, was the language of ‘my political tradition’: the movement I devoted myself to. Later on, all of this started to change. I remember really clearly how it felt, at the threshold, at the threshold of my discovery that all of my language could be treated indifferently as material, that all of my language, the language of militant conviction and material economic reality, as well as the scraps and fragments of everyday language, stupefied language, dead language, the language of a repressive and brutal liberal society, could be dissolved in the same poetic space. I felt, at the threshold of that movement, as if I was committing an act of betrayal, I remember really well and clearly how distractingly painful it was, to decide that all language could be subject to transformation in the same way. I think you could map this moment onto what Crimp calls ‘mourning’ in a Freudian sense: the withdrawal of ‘libido’ from a set of concepts that previously I had idealised, to the point that I could not bear to change them, could not alter them, could not touch them other than to reassert the undying validity of the aspirations that they contained and represented and made expressible in my life, if there was such a thing and without aspirations how could there be. It took me such a long time, so many years, to make this step, to accept that in order not to produce bullshit, the bullshit Bordowitz talks about, the bullshit of silence or denial, it was necessary to withdraw my love from the words that that poetry is made of; and then once I’d done it I was free again, poetry became again a living practice for me, a means of being alive in the world and in politics too, that dead reification, something started moving again.

That was one stage in a sequence. And then after Marina died I experienced another kind of shock in my relation to language, or my relation to time... maybe it’s the same thing. I felt like every moment in my life had suddenly become unalterable and fixed. The sense I’d previously had, that I was changing and developing, and that in changing and developing I also altered my relation to all of the earlier moments of my ‘own’ life, basically imploded, and I started to see my ‘biography’ instead as this endless sequence of discrete and fixed moments, a long list of items in which each one counted for itself, was bounded, and unalterable. After no longer had any bearing on before, there was a just a sum or total: the total of my life and all of its failures and successes. All of the moments drifted apart, like the debris from an explosion taking place in a void.

I have no map for this feeling. I don’t know how to say it related to ‘mourning’, or ‘the death drive’, it was just another way of being, and insofar as I wanted to keep on writing poetry I had to register this reality as well, meaning not only the mutability and the repressiveness of the language that I loved, but also the limits to my own ability to change anything, to change really anything and the history of my life was just suddenly there as a brute fact, laid out in front of me, as clearly as the body of the person who I loved and who was ‘gone’ had been laid out in front of me: and it was as if my inability to prevent Marina’s death had metamorphosed and expanded into this much more general inability, to change anything at all, really anything at all about my own experience; the failures and the omissions and the absences of love and the violence and the insecurity were as unalterable as the self-transformations they gave rise to, and existed alongside of them. ‘The real = nothing is missing’. These are the things I cannot change. I wanted to express this as completely as I could before the force of the recognition was gone. I cannot change them. If I could get there, I knew this would be something belonging to ‘the real’ for me, perhaps to what you call the non-symbolised, as something that breaks through language into thought, though I am still struggling with this concept and I hope we can keep on talking about it. There is this thing that I cannot change, but in expressing it I feel that it can push its way up out of language like a bone through skin and that this too is a way of bringing us back to ourselves, to the reality of our being which is also the reality of the struggles in which we participate and our desire, fucked up and limited and scoliated and confused as it is, that we wake up with somehow, sometimes, in spite of everything.

‘These memories, visions, dreams, reveries – or what you will – are different’, writes H. D. ‘Their texture is different, the effect they have on mind and body is different. They are healing. They are real. The are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the case around the walls’.

‘They are healing. They are real’. And all of this is why I’m so preoccupied with the question of resemblance. It hurts to resemble something you’ve told yourself you’re not, something you shouldn’t like, something you shouldn’t want. It hurts to see sometimes how you resemble a fascist in your own relation to language and not to be able to say why you are different but just to feel it, weakly and sincerely, and to rely on others to believe you. Vice versa, it hurts some of our friends to resemble liberals, even to the point that they would rather make excuses for fascist states than lose their own sense of identity. It hurts to lose your sense of identity, your sense of self, it hurts to feel who you are push up through it like a bone through skin, while others watch, it hurts to feel your own sense of identity and your need for language come into conflict with one another, it hurts to to fall into a void, to become one, it hurts to admit you’re confused. It probably hurt Gregg Bordowitz to feel that the compulsory optimism of the movement he’d given his life to was bullshit. Does this have anything to do with a ‘death drive’? It feels like it has something to do with weakness to me, not ‘strength’ or ‘muscle’ so much as a weakness that has to be endured, or with a power to endure, to endure the rendering visible of your own weakness, as a person without even the minimal property of a stable identity. It works the other way round, too. Liberals can’t endure what they aren’t able to describe; this is a form of hatred of weakness, the weakness implied by resembling something that you’re not. It comes back to the lines from the poem that you translated:

I knew I had lost something

and that nothing was missing

It hurts to live like this, because it is confusing; you can hear the pain of the confusion in these lines I think: the everyday, undialectical bewilderment. I still think an anti-fascist art begins with the ability to endure the specific weakness of no longer being able to distinguish ourselves from what we oppose; of no longer being able to resemble what we defend.

Much love,
Danny


 ***
 ***

An afterthought:

So it's Sunday now and as I suspected a few things have sunk a bit deeper in. I just walked to the general hospital and sat for an hour in the staff changing area, where a year ago Marina and I sat and I bought her a ricemilk that she wanted to eat (she wasn't supposed to eat; she wanted to eat; what did they expect us to do?). What I wrote on my phone while I was there:

'The assumption that there is a thing called history, or a thing called class, or a thing called wealth, which can be "understood", controlled. Which exists outside of language. Which is independent of poetic language and its heraclitean disturbances. The power of this wish. Of the wish for one thing that would be real and independent of our own mind and its symbolic resources, that would be "outside", that would escape the endless uncertainties of historical process, or of our own changing moods. I find myself right  now in a situation in which I am struggling to feel very much about anything, after a year in which feeling has often felt as natural as breathing. I try to accept this fact, to acknowledge that it is out of my control. All of this has more to do with the ebbs and flows of emotion, with how I'm doing today, than it does with "linguistics" or "linguistic epistemology"---tired academic debates of half a century ago about whether anything is outside of the symbolic order, now mostly used as grist for a fascist conspiracy theory about gender. I love what you say, Will, about "a particular type of knowing that depends on making history into something you can draw lessons from". I just don't think anyone can be torn open as a subject and still think like that, that "history" is there like a corpse on a table and the task is to ask "what went wrong". In my own life, by this means, in being torn open, I also came to feel as if it were possible to recover my own damaged idiosyncrasies of perception, as a way of acting on the world, and no longer as simply "distortions" and errors to be overcome. And I cannot not see this within the framework of illness and recovery; even if what we recover from is more like cognitive health than anything that would typically be defined as "illness". The sick, healthy desperation to hold on to something "real" is itself something I want to describe more clearly, to show how it governed me, how it dominated me for years, and how the realisation of that need in my life itself has a biography, a narrative, and is not just, or even mainly, a "position", like a machine-gun emplacement on the strategic map of a battlefield. Perhaps the main project of my poetry in the last years has been to describe this confusing, specific difficulty, of placing myself outside of that position, having once allowed myself to be brought there: "[A]n unhinging experience".'

(To my right a grey-haired Turkish cleaner with a Fila bumbag, to my left a small tree twitching in the freezing wind.)'

So I'm back in my flat now. There's a risk of simply endorsing something that looks like mysticism. I've been reading Fanny Howe and thinking of how that plays out in the scene of contemporary poetics. Unknowing, negative capability; what Howe calls 'bewilderment'. But here's another way out (not the only one): to abandon a political vocabulary as an object of belief, and then return to it as an object of fantasy, as something cartoonish and laughable and garishly overblown, but for that reason perversely dreamlike and shapeshifting as well, vibrantly, vividly painless: no longer as an object of agonised 'rational' doubt. Verity's relation to 'Marxism' (/Maoism) sometimes strikes me as working in something like this way.

This brings me back to the discussion of fascism and voids one more time. I find myself only half-interested in Guattari's claim that fascism is 'in' us. That's true, of course; but it only takes us so far. At worst, he makes an inert general claim that mirrors the inert, general claim that fascism is a form of populist conservativism involving extra-state militias. It's not the end-state but the process that interests me: the endless process of hollowing out, of emptying, of voiding, that fascism *is*, alongside the equally never-ending capitalist process of spectacularisation, glamourisation, recuperation: all the 'phase shifts ... latencies, delays' described by Didi-Huberman, the contrary forces, the shearing and sliding, all the metamorphoses through which distinct tendencies come to seem identical at the level of appearance. I've thought for a long time about the Situationist concept of 'the spectacle', about why it is that that concept seems at once so vital for understanding our reality and at the same time so helpless, so useless and so out of date. I think the answer is perhaps that Debord thought that what existed beneath the spectacle, or what emitted it, was 'the commodity', and the commodity was something that the Situationists believed, via Western Marxism, Lukács, etc., that they understood, just as Trotskyists thought that they understood "history"---that ‘particular type of knowing’ again. By this path they arrive at a marxist version of Traditionalism, the idea of the pristine religion and the elitism of the illuminated. A conspiracy of the dead, end. 

To want to see it all means seeing less than all of it. I meant to write this more quickly than I have: I have to try to sell some furniture on the internet. I try to hold on to 'understanding', rational insight, as something that happens on occasion and in bursts. Right now there are days or even weeks in which I'm able to feel almost nothing at all, in which I move like an emotional sleepwalker through my own life, and the things I have experienced make no more impression on me than the suffering that I watch at a safe remove on my devices, along with everyone else. But that doesn't mean that I am incapable of feeling; only that I exist in time.

Perhaps that's a little clearer than my last message.

D xx   

Letter to Danny (WR)

Dear Danny

I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s Another Country: actually wanting, and the self-betrayals it’s subject to. Giovanni’s Room even more … You write, ‘I sometimes think that poetry might be a kind of training in how to want things without justification . . . I need to be able to want things that I am myself likely to think about or treat with scorn.’ Not the world as it’s supposed-to-be, which I come back to later in this letter.

That communism should be how we ordinarily are…. see Vallejo in 1930s: “In the socialist poet, the poem is not a spectacular trance, provoked deliberately and in the preconceived service of some political credo or propaganda, it’s a natural and simply human function of sensibility/the senses”.

I have been reading earlier work of mine through a friend’s commentary, and noticing that I had an attitude to language which I feel no longer holds. She writes of my attention to the non-symbolised which can enter poetry, which was my main concern when I proposed we read Zurita’s ‘Green Areas’ at the Mayday sessions. I noticed—with a bit of surprise—that some people were reading the cows and cowboys in a historical key (as represented objects) when for me they have a de-symbolising function. At the time, I thought, ok, it’s ordinary for people who mostly read novels to read poetry in that way. But now I have a different sense of what’s at stake. A book by Leslie Scalapino on the bookshelf above me just caught my eye: in an abandoned section of an essay on Sean I experimented with the possibility that there might be a surprising intersection between their poems, where this would show that Sean’s work had passed through a similar suspension of ordinarily symbolised space. The proposition seemed to work ok but in the end I got rid of those pages of the essay because what Sean does with the relation between language and space doesn’t need that detour to be understood. I would still stand by the assertion that Sean has traversed the terrain that “language” poets were concerned with, but he does it more like one of Blanqui’s meteors, impelled by the relation between space and political desolation, than like Scalapino, who hollows language out so that there might be actual occurrence of events, and whose work I still like a lot. There’s a force of desolation in her work too, taking desolation to instantiate in feeling the destitutions of, say, 2012-2019. All that is a way of getting to how ‘the non-symbolized’ doesn’t any more have the validity and force that it used to have for me. When Jacob writes that what Sean makes are symbols, or you that what he produces are definitions, that summarises how I’ve come to a different position.

I realise I have left that term, the non-symbolised, undefined. In some ways, it relates to what Alain Badiou, in his book The Century, calls the real. I was—for quite a few years—confident that what’s excluded by the ordinary usages of language could, through the work of poetry, enter it. My points of reference were Paul Celan, César Vallejo and Raúl Zurita, especially. I don’t have that confidence any more. I’m not sure I can say exactly what happened, but I want to try.

It’s above all—that change in my attitude to language—concerned with the way that—I was going to say the way that pure destruction has failed, something I try to write about in essays on Sean’s two final books. But that’s not it. To say destruction as such has failed is to put oneself on the side of history, i.e. to place oneself inside a particular type of knowing that depends on making history into something you can draw lessons from. Experience of Trotskyism in the 70s and my gradual exit from it comes in here. Now I read Sean writing ‘the Bonnot gang were right’ and I don’t think any more of failure of destruction.

My change of attitude has something to do with Sean’s sense that space has been closed down or, better, utterly solidified by something like metallic hydrogen. Every time I take the Overground (now the Windrush line) eastwards from Shadwell, I look out of the window at night when it passes through Heron Quays, the station that comes after Canary Wharf: what I see seems to be not so much a premonition as a confirmation that the spatial controls of Capital as currently constituted really have become the substance of space, i.e. there’s no outside.

You have written of ‘an incurable wound’ that has no outside, in the face of which the outside is a metaphor. That corresponds with what I want to say here, and it seems important to say that Sean, in his early book Poisons Their Antidotes had already been inside that particular way in which the destituted city has got into language. (Perhaps I should add that I mean language as expression rather than language as instrument, a distinction that Pasolini makes). It’s not psychogeography, as Sean himself said. The linguistic self can’t function simply as a sounding-board but only as a site of wounding. Is that accurate? Sean says in the Letters that we are ‘vivisected mice’.

Some of this thinking has been brought into focus by reading your Training Exercises. I remembered Tom Raworth’s line, ‘imperative is the index / of a knowing discourse.’ And I like the attitude of experiment in the first part, as you go with the 15 minute entry into the circle of destruction. I find myself seeking confirmation of present perception in past thought. You avoid that. You suggest that the questions I point to in the reply to your report as defining our situation, that they are already their answers. Incidentally I didn’t take that badly. I am very glad you included me in your book.

My confidence that, to say it in a kind of shorthand, the real can enter a poem: how to understand that historically and geopolitically? For a start where did that begin for me, what I first came across in Lacan’s SVII, called the real. The idea of the non-symbolized did take shape when reading Lacan, but it was already there in a dream I had quite a few years before, where I heard Vallejo saying ‘my poems are pre-ideological.’ The thought of the non-symbolised was already a move away from materialism, though not incompatible with volume 1 of Capital. But the feeling you describe, of being stymied before we start, goes further. The fifteen minutes of smashing an ATM, or of what Catherine Malabou calls ‘destructive plasticity’.

My instinct, i.e. the past, is to take the sense of present destitution back to political conditions, but hadn’t Sean already done that, in ‘Letter on the language’ and other poems/letters? I had not intended when I began this letter to refer so extensively to Sean, but it’s still necessary.

I’ve been strongly affected by a poem I’m translating, especially the part of it that goes like this:

I knew I had lost something

and that nothing was missing. In its moment, the idea that

nothing is ever lost or that what we think is lost

was never part of the world was an unhinging experience.

The world is always complete. But things get lost

This feels to me not like mourning as in Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholy’ essay, the movement from fantasy of loss to the real object lost, but more like a demand addressed to language that it not be bound to the world that’s supposed-to-be, that against which we measure things to have been lost, the moral and metaphysical haunting. The real = that in which ‘nothing is missing’.