New Year's letter to R, R, J ('Paper is my weakness')

R, I'm writing back to you on my penultimate day in London, it's just past 6 p.m. and I've been staring at a blank screen for more than an hour. I'm not sure whether or not I'll have time to finish. Thinking in broad or abstract terms has felt painful for me during the last months, and over the last three weeks, during this end-of-year 'holiday', the feeling has gotten worse: everything seems out of sorts, out of sync, the contrast between the enforced celebrations of the season and the knowledge of what continues to unfold is jarring, hurtful; the thoughts in my head seem sterile and dry.

I feel as if we've been talking about myths a lot. Sometimes it feels like the entire media space is filling up with nothing but them: the myth of Israel as the lonely liberal democracy in the shatter space of the 'authoritarian Middle East', the myth of immemorial Biblical Judea and Samaria, of Romantic Palestinian peasant indigeneity, of armed liberation struggle and Fanon and Algeria and the 1950s, a kaleidoscope of myths, the snake and the eagle wreathed in flight, Shelleyan Good and Evil, Violence and Non-violence, Meaning A and Meaning B. All of these culminate in the conflict between the ideology of zionism (/liberal democracy) and the ideology of anti-zionism (/national liberation), which confront one another not as a history and a counter-history but as mass communication spectacle, a thing that has never existed before that is played out in a language already brought to perfection more than a century ago. Here's a passage from Yeats that I just came across, from 1909:

 

It's a good description of Twitter isn't it. I've been reading Yeats during this whole Xmas period. He's an interesting case study on 'myth'. His work exists in the empty grey undefined space between anti-imperial nationalism and National Socialism: the 'myths' that he chose in place of the 'machine logic' of political argument are self-consciously *racial* myths, his images are racial images, the dream of another reality becomes the febrile anti-Semitism of volkish nationalism, fears that the abstract Jews are behind it all, 'pulling the strings': YOU THROW YOUR MONEY ON THE TABLE AND YOU RECEIVE SO MUCH CHANGE. The poetry is important to me but it also suddenly reminds me of Adorno, the idea of the dialectic as the anti-image, the imageless image of words and things that transform into their opposites: images that emerge silently out of the practice of abstraction itself, Schoenberg and 12-tone, Beckett, the Bildverbot, all those philosophy seminar room words that I haven't thought about in years. And I read Yeats' Irish mythography and I see the motives for that movement of aesthetic thought in a new light, as a poetic problem, not just as a hostile reaction to Jung, the 'collective unconscious' etc. The question Yeats poses to himself is: where do images come from? His answer is, from the 'blood' of a specific national tradition, rooted in a landscape, geography, social formation. The problem with this as a concept of the visual in language is of course principally that it is wrong; images can come from anywhere, the identification of the diasporic with the 'abstract' and 'logical' is obviously false, or so it seems to me; and the limitations of the inversion of this wrong idea can be seen in the existence of a veritable miniature culture industry in the German-speaking world, the entire reason for existence of which is to re-hash, in increasingly lurid and hierophantic terms, the essential elements of Adorno's own polemic against the mythical element in art and politics: as the aesthetic expression of a form of racial nationalism (see: anti-German criticisms of the 'post-colonial'). Is it a measure of my confusion that I think Yeats' comment about 'political questions' at the 'Arts Club' is prescient and true, and that Adorno's suspicion about mythical images is true also? At this point both tendencies, or both elementary programmes, are equally politically untenable, equally artistically incoherent. Can the incoherence of both somehow become a virtue? When I think about public political speech, I think about Shelley's snake and eagle wreathed in flight: a dramatic and significant clash of ideologies that nevertheless takes place many miles above the heads of actual speakers; a hypostatisation, or a spectacle of estrangement. I also think about the word 'structuralism'. As we know, the structure defines what can and cannot be said. It feels kind of sick to try to talk about this, while people are being wiped out 30 or 50 at a time, every day, as a result of targeted aerial bombardment, but isn't this also the implied reality in the old cliche about moving deckchairs around on the deck of the Titanic? The deckchairs are possible positions within a structure. The deck is the structure itself, or perhaps it is conceptual language as such, the entire static ensemble of available moods and registers in language as we live within and perceive it. The ship is the unperceived or imperceptible: the catastrophe as noumenon, or vice versa. (The only difference between this and the standard idea of the numinous as an object of poetic or 'artistic' knowledge is that, in this case, the numinous is *sinking*.)

Yesterday I went with M to the Anna Mendelssohn exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. The exhibition is all in one small room on the third floor. Blue walls, three vitrines in the middle of the room, which is divided in two by a glass screen, on one side of which is the Whitechapel Gallery reading room. It felt a little bit like walking into Mendelssohn's head. I mean it feels intrusive to access the work like this, which is so private and often so anguished, a corpus that existed for decades only in holograph manuscripts that no one except Mendelssohn herself ever opened, and people wander in and out of it and take a quick look round and then walk back down the stairs to the bookshop or the cafe, or the blockbuster Nicole Eisenman exhibition for which you have to pay £15 or something to get in. No one really cared about Anna Mendelssohn's work while she was alive, but now at the Whitechapel Gallery you can just stroll right into her skull, no one even asks you for a ticket, the door is open and then it's just blurs of yellow and red watercolours, confusions and disappointments, and yearning, angry little line drawings that feel like polemics about something, perhaps about space itself, perhaps about -- it's really impossible to tell, because the drawings don't have any words in them, because they're just frameworks for words that didn't come, because the community that would have had to exist in order for them to have done so never arrived; and so everything exists in a state of incompletion, as a 'framework' in more or less the way that Yeats's fifteen apparitions -- 'the worst a coat upon a coat hanger' -- were a framework. They are like sketches for statements in a language that hasn't been invented yet.

There are also at least two or three actual invented alphabets, one of them filling up an entire sheet of paper with tiny a-semantic ideograms, spilling out to the far limit of the page: a private language.

I feel as if two spaces face into one another. One is the space of 'a debate in the Arts Club on a political question': a structure in which every imaginable position 'was just used by somebody or other', and in which the language speaks the speaker *and not the other way round*, and the other is a blue room in the Whitechapel Gallery, containing the inside of the head of the dead poet and visual artist Anna Mendelssohn, slightly simplified to fit within a space approximately 60 sqm, in three glass boxes and on three walls. The first space is compulsion, intellectual aridity. The second relies on a sort of prurient psychic taxidermy. 'yet i'll tell you something' (this is Mendelssohn speaking) 'when i slept over in the spare room in newnham, the hell on the right side of my brain disappeared, last night, i heard cello music'. So that to walk into that blue room and to peer into the glass boxes at the hell on the right side of the brain amounts to a kind of complicity in human experimentation, in sadism, even as walking around the hell in Anna Mendelssohn's brain makes the hell disappear in my own, so that suddenly for the first time in weeks I can see clearly the hold that the 'first' space had over me, the days spent arguing in an Arts Club debate in my own mind fade to black, and it's only because Mendelssohn's brain has been preserved and displayed like this that I am able to write to you about being in a blue room in the Whitechapel Arts Club ('Art Gallery') on 2 January 2024: that I am delivered back into my own life as a reality of colour and perception and not only of abstract analysis.

*

I spent a lot of time at the whitechapel gallery looking at the first mendelssohn poem, which is printed on the wall next to the door to the exhibition. 'you who had a lady in your house / priding yourself on your distant discontent'. the poem is surrounded by an enormous amount of white wallspace. her words compete with that space: 

you who had a lady in your house
priding yourself on your distant discontent
are not going to be satisfied by me
not now as then you will not be given
the pleasure of the power of your deceit
on oath or affirming

it's a poem of accusation written about a male poet, a judge of her work ('on oath': trials of the seventies), almost a curse or a prophecy. this is obvious, right? the grammar is clear until the beginning of fourth line: 'not now as then'. this is obvious. 

but the abundance of white space on the wall is respectful, auratic, a crown of unused possibility. mendelssohn herself is like yeats: she is obsessed with possibility as negative wealth, negative crown, negative aura. the work says: this is the art that takes the place of the art that i would have made *if* my life hadn't been ruined. and that i am a ruined version of myself, that i stare out at myself as i would have been, into the empty space that surrounds my work as the annulled possibility of who I am, which is always pushing its way back into me with its webbed feet like some monotonous, Yeatsian swan, a predator in the guise of who I was (to be), is itself the central lesson of the work: a lesson that its situation here automatically annuls. when i went to sleep in your spare room, the hell in the right side of my head went away (white space, dead palestinian poet, respectful silence, rain outside the whitechapel gallery, quick bus ride to the vietnamese restaurants on the kingsland road, street, light, awkward fumbling conversation, hell) 

the phrase ambiguously suspended. the paintings and poems she wanted to paint and to write (and that she might have painted and written) occupy the empty space around the poems and the paintings that she did. when a.m. draws the characters of an imaginary alphabet, she makes sure that the characters go all the way to the furthest margins: the existence of auratic empty space is pushed away, fought off, kicked against, -- 'you ... are not going to be satisfied by me' is the dialogue of this ruined self speaking in ambivalent tones of acquiesence and defiance to the annulled and perfect self it couldn't be, growing together with predatory empty space like leda with the beautiful swan, tasteful, annihilating, we are reliant on the philanthropy of our family of donors, 

'... when i slept over in the spare room in newnham, the hell on the right side of my brain disappeared, last night, i heard cello music. when this happens, as it has done with both piano and orchestra, the space filled amounts to /' then the manuscript breaks off. 

imagine a wall in a different kind of exhibition space, call it the MEANING of the first one. the empty space is not white and auratic, but instead has been somehow siphoned out of you. 'possibility' here is not WEALTH but terror, predation, dereliction; not who you can become, or what you might make (which could both filter back into substance of what you have made, and are), but the threatening encroachment of what you could have done and might have been. as this 'auratic' space expands, so too do you dwindle and decrease, you fold up into ever smaller and smaller versions of yourself, a sheet of A4, a postage stamp, a fingernail, nothing, pure possibility, an empty exhibition blazing into a head: its title: *this is the language of a person who is not what they were meant to be*. worthless nugatory scum, having sustained damage here, here and here, having been irreversibly and irretrievably delayed. having wasted years in a prison during what should have been your twenties. black blot, spilt ink, 

let me step back a bit. In his email from a few weeks ago, R. said, about the symbolic dimension of the global palestinian solidarity movement, that 'there’s been a long, very long investment in education, in symbolism, in weaponization of this conflict; because there’s been decades of encouraging people to read it as their struggle, as an infinite number of struggles'. this is one reason, though not the only one, why the attack on gaza has a different resonance 'in the west' to the civil war in ethiopia, or in sudan. 

The first way of opening this statement up is to say that the investment has to be an investment *of* something. We can talk about this investment using the conventional 'Marxist' vocabulary, in terms of expenditure of human labour, or the conventional mythological one, in terms of expenditure of blood:

For Patrick Pearse had said
That in every generation
Must Ireland's blood be shed.

Which is Yeats again. In either case, we're moving away from a language in which 'meanings' can be adjudicated by means of logic. The words scab over and rot and grow evil flowers: political statements are no longer capable of being limited to a fixed number of logically permissible 'ideas', which can then be organised (as we habitually organise them) on a neat spectrum, with a centre and two opposite 'extremes'. language no longer suggests a closed system of reference: this is what R. indicates when he says that Palestine 'has a MEANING', that we are entering into a new system of signification, different to the one that we usually inhabit.

 
And this is close to what I meant earlier, when I said that being in the whitechapel exhibition space is like being in mendelssohn's skull. anna mendelssohn is sacrificed and inside of her dead head with its blue walls her works are put on display. the works go from being private manuscripts to the furnishings of a kind of mausoleum. and as death grows over their surfaces everything that was not lived + not expressed + not achieved in them is changed, poem by poem, by means of a kind of mutant alchemy, into MEANING. 'The question' (R. asks) 'then becomes what we do with that, with the knowledge that truly the masses are on the streets because palestine has MEANING, i.e. it’s been imbued very deliberately with a weight of a thousand incontrollable signifiers'. and for me the answer is about potential in this specific sense. if you treat the potential as a possession whose 'symbol' is a gratuitous expanse of auratic white wallspace, then the WHITECHAPEL goes back to being the whitechapel, the terrifying space around and within a.m.'s poems goes back to being the kind of sentimental deadzone that its Arts Council funders want it to be, our own irreversible ruination disappears as a creative element of the work and the mausoleum becomes an art exhibition again, a beautiful and respectful one, an act of love performed by the living for the dead; and it seems to me that palestine and PALESTINE have a connection that could be thought of in almost the same way:

'we all know implicitly that our 'private thoughts' are only half inside of us, half a spectacle of violent mythological conflict taking place in the sky above our heads. This is what most of my recent writing has been about, my poems as well as my garbled contribution to this discussion: just a basic an attempt to come to terms with this reality, to admit it to myself. MEANING is not something fenced off in a little garden of 'literature' that we go to water, after we've gotten back from work at the rational explanation factory. It is the rational explanation itself.'

anna mendelssohn is refaat alareer. 'not now as then you will not be given', but in another sense. until we see what isn't meant and what can't be as a part of what is,

happy new year,
Danny