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’.