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’.

Letter from the BART, 15-16 April 2024

I’m on the BART and I’m going to my second day at the office. All of the contradictions here are up to my wildest expectations! Yesterday, friends of friends block the port of Oakland; me, I go to the office. The BART is full of tech workers, badly dressed in yoga clothes, grey light fabrics, and there are fentanyl addicts who pass through. The fentanyl addicts move whereas the tech workers stay still. The tech workers are so badly dressed you think they almost might be poor, save for the tell-tale watch or Apple product. There are many people who are struggling to walk in this town, they walk twisted, physically ravaged, if not they are slowed down by bags, mountains of clothes. 

Oakland, where I’m staying, is a ghost town. There’s no one on the streets. The new builds are huge and all shops and stores are more or less shuttered. Many of the condominiums are inhabited by the tech workers who work remotely. They order in with Ubereats, they work out in the gyms nested in the condominiums, and they move around in vehicles plucked from internal garages. 

In the street, people some times hang out and “bip" cars (i.e. break their windows) in plain daylight, night time, whenever. When I arrived to see my dear friends who I have not seen since Covid it was about 2 p.m., and some people had just bipped a car. People complain that tech workers blame everything on the homeless in San Francisco, and according to them Oakland is really dangerous because it’s empty, because of tech. “I had a gun pulled on me last week”, “it’s actually dangerous”, “it’s full social decomposition”, “it’s really sad”, they say. I have trouble, as a visitor, visualising this but I let them walk me home at night. 

There are night herons that sleep in the trees. The George Floyd rebellion was the last time the streets were full, it seems. Huge murals of black panthers, or the minor stars of Hyphy music, decorate the walls of empty lots, apparently commissioned by NGOs. Elaine Brown, the former leader of the Panthers, suspected of also being the person who paid that dealer to assassinate Huey Newton, is building public housing called The Panther Building with “evil big money”. People talk about that. There were no “sideshows” during my visit, but as a pure tourist, of course I yearn to see such a thing one day.

We went to a CVS pharmacy. It was devoid of stock. Apparently since George Floyd there is a common practice of organized looting. The only products that remained, of little value—make-up wipes for example—were behind a locked glass cabinet. The make-up aisles, everything else, was empty. They cannot be bothered to replace the stock. The empty store is guarded by a security guard. But there is nothing in the store. 

While there is no one in the streets of Oakland, in San Francisco, in the Civic Center, there are crowds—hundreds of people—it’s called the “Open Drug Trade”—who converge to buy drugs. I thought it was a soup kitchen but no. Private cops—employees? volunteers?—belonging to an NGO called “Urban Alchemy” are in the midst of evicting them, gently, with moralistic slogans out of a microphone, which no one is listening to. We can’t hear them anyway. They seem officious, wearing fluorescent gilets. A Christian feeling. 

Next to this, the Tenderloin has also been a centre of the opioids crisis, as well as dispossessed people more generally, since the 2008 mortgage crisis. Tents, people sleeping, people searching, a bit more community. It’s true that one “feels better here” since there are people, despite the public lamentations of tech workers that San Francisco is “dangerous”. Then, another ghost town a block away, the big malls which will soon close down forever since Tech prefers to order online. Macys, for example. I went to buy a lipstick. No shop assistant. Have you ever seen an empty department store? 

We went to the Archimedes Banya, the Russian Baths, Sunday, which was a funny mix of muscly naked Russian men, tech workers without any capacity for relaxing, solitary male geeks, people who seemed to be micro- or macro-dosing psychedelics, overly involved couples, people who talk too much at the sauna, and us (me and my dear friends). An “Aromatherapy Relaxation Session” was led by a woman sporting a microphone, motivating people in an enthusiastic tone to wind down, but with the tone similar to someone announcing the winners of a contest. It felt to me like a ride through a haunted house in a funfair. The Russian felt sauna hats, on the heads of so many overexcited people, looked ineffably hippy and hobbit-like. A sense of totally productive and efficient bathing. Bathing adapted to modern technology. Cashless: a wristband for purchases. Borscht, pierogi, sauna hat.

At the office, I had to give my biometrics to get my visitor pass. They took my photo and my finger prints. I have a card with just my first name and picture on, and to go to the office I pass my hand over a sensor. I don’t even touch it. There’s a green light that takes my prints, and then the word “valid”. It reminds me of the film Gattaca. It’s so smooth I don’t even notice it. I go into the office. From street to office it goes like this: security guard and a closed door, stressed-out desk staff who come out and ask to see my ID, a flurry of anxiety because no one has put in a ticket for my presence, finally a staff member on my team who comes down to get me, weird to see these people in the flesh who I have only peered at through google meets, photo and biometrics, then another door, then the gate. So, to boil it down, security guard, card, door, lobby, fountain, security guards, door and card, lobby, kitchen, coffee, gates like on a subway, finger prints, real office. 

The real office is four floors. I arrive at my desk and they take me to the IT desk. They give me whatever I want (“need”): mac products, mouse pad, new Bose headphones, anything I want. In the toilets there’s an abundance of things: toothbrushes made of recycled plastic in brown paper packets, eyedrops, stain remover. Everything so you could stay over. There are velvet couches everywhere, fig trees, basket chairs—Airbnb aesthetic. It is the CEO of the company who insisted on the décor, they tell me. There are rooms for videoconferencing, there are private booths for being alone, there are rooms decorated like someone’s living room. There is a library. Each new full-time worker must put in an order for their favourite book, although now it’s getting too full, they’ve abandoned this policy. I perceive a copy of Infinite Jest. This is what mainly sticks out to me. Every room is behind glass for full transparency. 

There are pastries and cakes that arrive at particular times and days of the week, there’s lunch, there’s a kitchen on each floor with drip coffee, pour over, espresso, decaf, tea, fruits, snacks, chocolate, cereal. A fridge full of kombucha, soda La Croix, half and half, Oatly, Coca Cola that’s constantly being refilled by a discreet, almost invisible, Latin worker. I’ve been here only two days but in that time I’ve developed needs I didn’t know I had—I like this guava rose Kombucha for a healthier gut. Don’t forget to recycle! Here’s another mac product! I love these dried pineapple slices! I think I will come have a red velvet cookie or some pastries from Tartine bakery (a bakery well known for firing its striking staff). 

Outside, here, like in LA, it’s poverty or otherwise great wealth. A low-key dinner for two costs 140$, a croissant and a café times two is 25$, but in this office, everything is free. Going outside I saw this Tesla truck; when you see one it’s truly bizarre, rather like a kind of insect, and it gives me the repulsed feeling of seeing a cockroach in my house. I walked to Mission street. I saw a church turned private school for CEOs of big tech called La Scuola. On the corner of this street, someone gave me a flyer inviting me to a demonstration against the company I’m working at as a contractor. This morning, my manager told me not to use this or that entrance, and to stay safe. In any case I walked to Mission street, which is another world altogether—people selling hoodies, strong smell of weed, tamales, bars. I went to Bolerian books where my friend is an archivist. I almost had a kind of panic attack, the contrast was so intense, and knowing that tech was infringing on this dusty world of struggle. And perhaps the prevalence of all this struggle and left-culture is also what made the bay so suitable for tech. There’s the whole history of the bay area in there, American labour history, gay magazines, smut. Everything is old and material. You can touch it. 

Today the same, except I was writing to you on the BART while going past the docks of Oakland, and the weather was good. Now I’m in Oakland. The special transport police earn between 1-200,000$ a year, advertise the posters on the wall. Apparently they are having trouble recruiting. My friends are struggling on adjunct professor salaries of about 60k, and the salary advertised for the cops matches that of an engineer. On the BART you can’t really tell who’s who but there are little signs: Airpods, Apple watch. Other signs: dirty hands, walking twisted, talking to people (at all). The BART functions exclusively on the sale of tickets ($5 upwards, depending on how far you go), so police arrest people for not paying. The fine is $300 but they tend to arrest people, and so on. 

I’m getting off now, at 16^th street, sending you what I wrote today and yesterday, please excuse this bad writing.

Two Reports (RL)

Report 1 

Last night I read poems out loud for the first time in I think two years. The reading was at the Cité des Arts, an international art residency, in Montmartre, and it was so well organized, by J, a new friend. Each reader had 5 minutes each, and there were about 11 readers, plus one or two who spontaneously volunteered to read. There were only a couple of things that I didn’t like and that didn’t matter, I shall nonetheless try to articulate why. One was a series of short texts, each numbered pretentiously, that were painful to listen to because of the amount of leftist jargon, such as ‘collective life’, ‘solidarity’, neatly tied up with more clichés about love, in still neater rhyme; and the other, a poem, also of clichés, which was as if a rewrite of the concept of all Survivor- or I Will Survive-type songs, but without much distance. Both of these poems, sets of poems, had the quality of total earnestness, and set free something other than what their highly controlling authors seemed to have hoped for, whereas with other people's readings, I didn’t have the same impression. In short, the texts I didn’t like were sheerly embarrassing, because their authors’ let some kind of painful unconscious hang out, without knowing so, whereas, in other texts I heard, I either felt there was a self-conscious use of this, or a more sincere taking of risks. Otherwise, it was very mixed. The French poetry was characteristically prose-y and ironic, closer to stand up, because of the collective unease about taking on the role of poet. This, I have observed, often happens in general with artists who become poets. The international poetry included an angry rap about Schengen in French and Spanish, an amazing meditation on an unanswered letter from Brazil, a Korean poem about grandmothers and demonic spirits. There was a lot that was funny. The five minute space de-dramatised the fact of reading. There were candles instead of electric lights. There were crisps, cheese, pickles, tea, non alcoholic beer, carrot juice and also wine. As well as people's own works, someone recited from memory a poem by Mallarme that seemed so racist, no one knew if they should applaud, and someone else read erotic poems in Persian and had someone else read the translation. I read three poems.

 

We spoke to the artist who had read from the Persian poet’s book – we is three of us, all friends -- at the end of the reading when all the lights had come back on, and the intimate space had become again a common room. We asked her some questions and she began to describe her practice, by which she has a ‘partnership’ with ‘scientists’ who build ‘robots’. She builds sorts of sculpture organs, and has an exhibition soon. She is going to be making some organs with real blood. We asked what kind of blood and she said human blood, via donation, even though personally, she is phobic of blood herself. So she doesn’t know why she’s doing this. I said, well that’s why, you want to find out about your phobia. She then said, no but actually it’s because, I’ve had enough, the last few years, all we hear about is War War War, et j’en ai marre, et en fait, on a tous le meme sang, et en fait je vais prendre un gout de sang Iranienne, Palestinienne, Israelienne… (She wants to take a drop of blood from people of difference ‘races’, and put them all together in the same organ, to show that we all have the same blood).

 

This reminds me that a few days ago a friend described going to see a play in Paris put on by the company of some friends of his, and that he got in a disagreement with everyone there. The play is about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, how the latter wasn’t the successor of the former, that the two species co-existed, and about the scientists in the 1990s who led this discovery. If you look on the website of the piece it says something like “DNA is an encyclopedia”. And, for the grand finale, where did these Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexist? Indeed, in the land that is now Israel-Palestine. A well intended humanism, with biological and racialist underpinnings. My friend got in a fight with everyone about the subventions that will soon be cut, saying well maybe it’s not such a bad idea, look what state funding gets us to. And was met with, but outreach in the provinces! 

Report 2

I have 25 minutes to write this, before my biweekly 1-1 with one manager (online) and another weekly with my manager who is my ‘direct report’ (weekly), which are back to back. I wanted to go to the café at the end of the road and write this and somehow instead I ended up shopping for dinner. Not only shopping, but being fussy. Buying about one ingredient per shop. These 1-1s are inconvenient 15 minute slots that hang my week together. I spend most of my time trying to pretend I’m working, or trying to work. Last week I couldn’t work that much. I had to generate prompts which would prompt a set of instructions for a discussion, using my company’s own program. But as it turns out they hadn’t signed me up to an unlimited account, and I was stuck on the free one. I could only generate 10 at a time before getting locked out for several hours. I had a hundred to turn in. The gaps were at least 5 hours long. Kismet. I went out and had lunch. Tried to enjoy the ‘weather’. As of last week, according to a blurb screenshotted from Instagram that a friend sent me, this city had not had 3 consecutive days of sunshine since September, causing mass lack of vitamin D and sporadic depression. At the poetry reading I spoke about in my last report, a girl mocked the general climate with the phrase “I dream of a burnout”. A few weeks back, I kept getting locked out of my company laptop, so I had a few days where I just couldn’t work. In any case the weather was not nice, it was grey.

 

Anyway, I spent the rest of the day doing this impossible task of generating prompts. Then, that evening, rushing out of my 1-1, we had decided to go and see The Brutalist. Apparently the director says he spent 8 years writing it. It is a film that should have been written and made in a shorter time and it should also have be cut to a shorter running time. We are living in an epoch of cinema that has been allowed to take on epic proportions in length, without any demand on the content of the film being worthy of such a length. It is formless, its only quality being just that it is long. I blame Netflix, and the rise of the mini series, which means that films are now like a long episode (which, in the case of for example Dune, only guarantees a sequel). There is little at stake, but it is said over a long time. I have seen some truly awful long long films this and last year – Megalopolis, Nosferatu, and now The Brutalist, and they have this quality. 

 

With the Brutalist, the opening shot announces the carnage, the tenor, doing what the film will do all the way through. In a shot which tempts us to think – camera d’epaule, following Adrien Brody -- we think we are following him out of the camps. But no! A clever feint, it is the boat. Here is the statue of Liberty! Welcome to America. This is the strategy of the whole film, beginning to end. We think the film will talk about the experience of the camp survivor, but no – the familiar fetish of “silence”. Except that this silence is full of on the nose images, on the nose dialogue. 

 

As for the rest of the film, I found myself extremely anxious watching it. That is because, like with the tendency of our times, there is nothing there. It looks like its something but it isn’t. It sounds like language, but it’s not. There is an uncanniness we are living through. You watch it gaslighting yourself and unconsciously straining to find the thing, but there is nothing there. Perhaps the scenario was written by AI, or perhaps modern writing is now the same as LLMs. There is are disconcerting moments in which the dialogue sound is entirely isolated from any ambient noise. There is background music all the time. We are in a permanent and hellish elevator. Everything is smooth, shot like a drone. As for the dialogue -- why does it “feel AI”? Because everything, which could be suggested by the cunning combination of image, sound, motion, is explicated in speech. Everything is on the nose. There is no space in the film that isn’t being explained to us, whether in vulgarized pop-psychoanalysis (as the crippled Erzebet tells him I wanted you so badly, it made me sick), or the smorgasbord of maux, cynically put together as a tasting menu of all the possible things a modern viewer might find objectionable -- sodomy, rape, chemsex… The #metoo moment eyerollable. I found the niece’s articulation of her decision to make Aliyah much more of today’s discourse than what I imagine of New York in the 70s (I don’t know). And still, it all suddenly neatly leads to the architect’s enunciation of the words “they don’t want us here”, which I also questioned, thought was irresponsible and also anachronistic. In any case, the conclusion of the film – the beginning of postmodernism at the Venice Biennale -- is equally grave, it is indeed the wrong way around. In the end it is not the architect who makes his building despite the camp, but the camp that has dreamed the building. The building is a prison. I found this the most shocking, as if Nazis can be congratulated, in the end, for modern architecture, rather than what we know – that Nazis hate flat roofs, and it was the Bauhaus and ‘degenerate art’ that was so much of a threat to National Socialism that Bauhaus architects such as Gropius ended up in America. 

 

I cried when I got home, or had a panic attack, finding the conclusions or implications of the film so terrible and historically dire, and also in shock or cognitive dissonance after having spent the day generating AI scenarios, and then finding myself in one. I don’t want to contribute to this world, the destruction of something I love which is cinema, and I find it startling and horrific how bad and ugly the films of our moment are, how historically revisionist.