Report on Meeting at Mayday Rooms, 30th Jan 2023

Readings: 

*Galina Rymbu, “Gates of the Body”:

https://granta.com/summer-gates-of-the-body/

 

*Bill Griffiths, “Starfish Jail” & excerpt from this interview: https://www.invisiblebooks.co.uk/archive/bill-griffiths/

 

*Stephen Hastings-King, “Parallax: Four Perspectives on Russia”:

https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2022/04/06/parallax-four-perspectives-on-russia/

 

[bullet points represent 'minutes' of individual contributions; names have been left out, but the Report represents the flow of a group conversation]

 

- Some general questions to begin. We've been through several years that have been politically dislocating. They have been literally dislocating, in that the pandemic for a long time prevented us from talking and sharing thoughts in the same physical spaces, but they have also been conceptually dislocating, in that what has happened has created new difficulties for our ways of thinking and acting politically – and also for our writing. Is it possible to confront this. Even naming the problem can be difficult, as each of us will experience it differently. 

 

- Griffiths in “Starfish Jail” as destroying or destituting social discourse

 

- amid much conversation / discourse / thinking of the historical form of the individual, it still feels as if those of us who would wish to substantially alter this form, - and in flashes perhaps succeed at this - still remain largely inside some version of it, in our lives. How to jar this?

 

- speaker in “Starfish” interpellates himself into a sectioning in prison – what makes a self do that to themselves before being done to

 

- Likes / feels closer to the one page of the Griffiths interview than the Hastings-King: Grifffiths says it all non-theoretically—it is down to earth (though of course there’s plenty of information and analysis in the Hastings-King)

 

- where the ending is not already closed to us – still open – for example, how to escalate the ongoing strikes today so they can be successful? Possibly with poetry, how?

 

- unsure about intensification, both politically and in poetry. What would intensification in poetry be? In “Starfish”, the repeated colons an instance of intensification: as if everything that follows after the colon is a proposition

 

- to what extent is “Starfish” co-authored? (With Bill Griffiths’s name signifying on the cover.) This feels different than poetry writing workshops held in jails, but is there also some relation?

 

- Griffiths intentionally left Delvan’s name off the cover to protect him, as those in jail could be penalized for publishing. In subsequent editions once Delvan was out of jail his name was on the cover

 

- The poem of Rymbu, as of Griffiths, seem to be in a collective voice already—spoken from a whole range of positions where those distinctions [between individual / collective] are melted away

 

- avoiding dissonance is how people forget – a common thing in all three texts. Can dissonance be individual? Is it already collective?

 

- the spiraling alienation of joining collectives being a part of collectives. It’s become a very commonly expressed desire on the left, to be a part of some collective. But there are also the difficulties involved in this

 

- the need to be an individual in some ways in order to be effective within a collective

 

- the voice in poems, don’t tend to think of it as collective, or individual, but the place one can sometimes speak from, stripped of ego, where whatever’s left to speak speaks something in common—but this could also be a kind of collective—the desire to not remain confined to previous imaginings of ‘collective’

 

- don’t feel at ease with any definitions -in general-, and specifically, neither of the individual, nor of the collective, but some liquid medium in between. Previous comment about the collective voice in Rymbu and Griffiths was said as a kind of shorthand, it’s not to be defined that way either

 

- ‘the new sociality of suicide’. There are so many collectivities, and collectivities that overlap. I want to reverse the question of how to form a collectivity: what collectivities are we already in we want to opt out of? Being part of a collectivity can perhaps be instantaneous, sudden, or completely unconscious. We already in multiple collectives. 

 

- The way that some communists did not (& do not) want to take responsibility for what happened in the Soviet Union

 

- The Syrian website (which published the Hastings-King piece) includes real physical derangement and trauma and thus connects with Griffiths’s text. It’s impossible to take world politics into account without taking mass incarceration into consideration.

 

- the photographers Chris Killip and Markéta Luscacová: each in different circumstances, very consciously, were able to take photographs of people at work without those people posing, by allowing time for people to think of the outsider (at first) with a camera, differently

 

- having recently read Walter Rodney and thought about problems of extraction, of people as well as resources, and the scale of this – not a question of scaling up, of collectivities getting larger, but perhaps the opposite, a kind of world-wide de-industrializing

 

- In Rymbu’s poems, much language of the ‘natural’ world, in a country (Russia) of massive extraction of resources

- a general impression of an intensely physical poetry, in which time often flows backwards 

 

 

 

Potential readings for next time:

 

- Photographs of Chris Killip and / or Markéta Luscacová

- Chuang, Social Contagion, https://chuangcn.org/2021/09/state-of-the-plague/ 

 

 

 

A note on ideological decay (4 June) (RB)

 ...5. The point about all of this which I feel most close to is the redrawing of the political spectrum. For me the pandemic and the war have this in common, I’m constantly caught out by what left and right mean, by what they mean in different countries where good friends and comrades live, and by the decisions that people I know take. I find it all very unpredictable, and while class (or class prospects) clearly remains a factor, the place of mysticism and secrecy, of how you connect the dots, shift all over the place. There’s an example of this I keep returning to, which is how my yoga-practising friends in Palermo became libertarian anti-vaxxers over the span of a year. Antiracist and culture-loving, they’ve been brought up in a weak Italian state that guarantees them little, and so the top-down medical solidarity of the state with their suffering seemed like untrustworthy imposition. These are the same people who now circulate pro-Russian propaganda about Nato-backing Nazis and so on; there is no class basis to this lot, and their economic prospects are all over the place. But there is a real ideological shift going on. I don’t know how to express this well, but it makes me think of Jesi’s comments about Secret Germany, and also about psychic breaks and revolution; maybe the argument goes like this: revolutionary moments are the outcome of war, of mass slaughter; revolutionary thought is the name we give to those absurd and psychically broken ideologies that arise out of that level of violence and horror; the energy wars of central Asia are birthing such ideologies, from Isis to Kurdish revolution through to Ukrainian battalions and Egyptian movementists… and it's the residue of that madness that lives on in our strange ideological shifts here in Europe; it’s like a nuclear bomb went off in the castle, and we’re the peasants in the fields around, picking up pieces of the wreckage (or are we kings in the mud?). This is what I mean by unstoppable redrawing of the spectrum, that living in a constant crisis, in an age when you never get to go back to square one, means not being able to cling to anything other than the residue of our own European revolutions, the century-old wreckage of other people’s psychic breaks. And I don’t really know how sane that is; I want something like a compass to find my way through today’s mysticisms, a tool that allows me to see past individual narcissisms and the ideology whirling underneath the skin. But I feel like I don’t have a vocabulary for that anymore.

(RB)

From a letter to a friend (on 'emergencies') (DH)

One more note. I have an idea now of what you think an emergency is. But the more that I think about what it means to me the more I feel that it’s something that relates to my conception of other people. I feel myself to be in emergency. That means for me that I feel responsible for my friends and comrades who are not keeping their shit together. The feeling of responsibility builds up and accumulates in my head into a kind of metallic grating, a monotonous drone. An alarm. “Your phone rings all the time. You are only thinking about the people, it gets worse, so you stay to help. You don’t think about the people you have helped, only the ones you haven’t, the things you didn’t have time to do.” For several years now I’ve lost the ability to think. Or, it’s as though throughout everything I did and at the core of every one of my ‘ideas’ a phone was ringing, shrilly and unanswerably, and the noise of that phone were somehow the ‘meaning’ of whatever it is that I’m trying to conceive of or say. That’s what the ‘emergency’ is for me. You see? And it’s only when I see this and understand it that I begin to understand another desire that I’ve felt for almost as long, which is this bewildering need to find in poetry a counterforce of irresponsibility, the fractions-of-a-second inversion when the ringing becomes so loud and so vile that consciousness seems to buckle and split off from itself and watch with powerless unperturbed serenity as a new voice emerges and spits itself out from my body and its words flash with hilarity and a pure physical sensation somewhere between astonishment and relief. Like mania. Like thin rain falling between buildings. In an empty street. 

Do you feel it too? There’s been times in the last months when I’ve remonstrated with myself and thought of this need as the same will-to-transgression that defines the worst culture of our period. Groyper will-to-power… I’ve come up with all kinds of formulae. But it’s not true. The point is that poetry needs to be a response to this terrible noise or pressure in our heads, this sensation building up inside of language that doesn’t mean what the words mean. Clearly it follows from this that we can call it whatever we want. Seizure. 'Political art'. Spheares Musick. Cream cake. It’s all the same. The only thing that characterises it is you know it when you hear it.

(DH)