A poet has no nation – excepting this Glory is not your word The petal shape Of a child’s anxious brow The adumbrate pane of self Sun warm against your arm Leant in that strangely desert face Of the sill’s soft craquelure Lead white and with the dirt Thick in seam and corner A mica fleck where one day (The window left half open) Something small may grow Once we are The long strides of morning Leaving curbs and fences In a shadow’s flicker wake
Politics in Wartime
I whistle in rough kin To a camaraderie of magpies They return trilled warnings in reply As if to say you are no one That we know, a thief of songs Pied and clumsy As any bastard’s fledge We dispute the global south With that stalagmite part of speech You say it depends On which way you uphold the map I say words Are the same in any language Pulling flames like petals from the edge One for love, two for hate, and on Til bare husks are left Black and hard as any rasp Cracked, with a little salt Makes a beggarly repast You say these things are Almost the same I say, halfway home Smoke coiled between my lips They are almost different
Between The Known & The Unknown Is The Eye; Photograph As Document, Photograph As Dream
We are all hostages. Start with an image from critic/philosopher John Berger’s 1973 documentary, Ways Of Seeing, which examined the changing construction, consumption and ideologies of art and image. Faceless selves sit behind a suave and sate young man adhered to by two adoring women. This is desire, glamour, prowess. It could be an ad for anything; here it is the power of credit, the pheromone of wealth. It is enticement and also threat. You can be the young man engorged with the latent force of capital, conversely, you could be nameless, faceless, impotent, with no imago at all.
Flip a coin. Here is cult of personality in the fetishised object of desire. The rose and tannin and bergamot, the compelling trace of decay unconsciously activating the basal ganglia. That death stench of ambergris preserved in oils and aromatics. This Is a warning, a threat, an uncompromising invitation. No need to give the year. The design and intent have not changed in a century. Add to it a label; type written on an aged strip of embossed linen paper.
We are captives. This is a ransom note. What it demands is nothing more than complete subservience to the carefully constructed image of the self.
Tear the page. Here is British photographer Richard Avedon’s 1958 portrait of an ageing Gabrielle Chanel. Grown old disgracefully. In that same iconic paint and couture, become a kind of mockery, a clown. The image torn from its prior state of careful cultivation. Become ragged. The locus of sensuality inviting now only that too thick lavender stench. The ambergris rotten. The exposed throat and chin with that wasting and vulnerable aspect of a beached and capsized cetacean. The behemoth picked at by swarming gulls in joysome, childish laughter. One imagines the entire carcass, roped and dragged like Gulliver, craned and submerged, slowly dissolving in the steel vats of some vast industrial process. This is also a ransom note.
Splashed across the grimed walls and monoxide spewing orifices of urban mass transport systems, leaching euphoric aldehydes from glossy magazine pages, are Barbara Kruger’s slogans. The stratagems of advertising are marshalled to a kind of bland political didacticism, posing as art. What is she selling other than the conventions of a mediocre, bourgeois ideology in the grain and bold of disposable newsprint. Tear it up.
In Barbara Graham’s mugshot, we strike almost the same note; but something more. Here is desperation, and fury, and beauty pared back to a few brute strokes. This Is Barbara Kruger’s ransom note, and obscured by that imprisoning montage, torn from some lost poem, a stray, unwieldy, transformative word; This is Barbara Graham’s love note. “Good people are always so sure they’re right.”
Now, a word from our author – breaking the fourth wall, let me declare; I am quite old. A recent ophthalmograph revealed that I am short-sighted in one eye, long-sighted in the other. Thus, living in the blur not only goes some way to describing my aesthetic, but also my reality. The middle ground is a haze, up close – personal – expect an unrepentant perspicacity; from a far distance, a heightened perspective. I suspect, in this double vision, a deeper aetiology.
Here we focus on our two disparate, concluding images; This Is Barbara Kruger’s Ransom Note, and In The Dawn I Warn Myself Against The Dangerous Moonlight. The first is, although layered in its didacticism, eminently knowable. We know the exact time, the exact place; the stark inhumane light and subjectifying reality of a police station; the woman’s story – one of brutality given and returned – plain as the bruises on her face.
The other is eminently unknowable; we are told it is dawn, but is it? There is an alien, artificial quality to the sourceless light. The streetscape – silhouetted trees and Victorian water-tower – in sharp relief, could be almost anywhere. Montage, as Druckery says, is either discursive or dialectical; “The dialectical mission is to fuse fragments as concentrated form; the discursive one is to create fissures or interruptions in the established order.” (p.4) Where one unmakes the world, the other remakes it.
A hazy figure, by its garb, out of time, follows, but is divorced from itself. In the doppelgänger, Freud finds the returned imago of the self, once a reassurance of immortality, also “becomes the ghastly harbinger of death” (1919, p.9), evoking a sense of terror, of the uncanny.
The uncanny is evoked when the familiar is returned to us not only in unfamiliar guise, but outside of our ability to easily fit what we see into a sensible and apprehensible way of knowing (1919, p.16).
There is indeed something, uncanny, unknowable, something that unhomes us, that unmakes our understanding, between the burgeoning pre-dawn and the disoriented and disorientating figure. Here we have the familiarity and displacement of the dream. Between these two, the crumpled, ransomed woman, a narrative of hard facts and unrelenting sensation, and the unknowable figure haunted by an ungraspable, ersatz satellite, between the known and the unknown, is the eye, the gaze of the viewer.
After John Berger, we may say in one we have the prurience of the real – she “is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.” (1973, p.50) Defiantly returning our gaze, there is nothing like bruises to reveal her in her nakedness – the nakedness the viewer demands. This is an image that serves. It serves the state, the police, it serves systems of measurement, of commerce, of categorisation, of judgement, of plain, calculating reason. The other does not serve. In a kind of unprivileged object oriented ontology, the tower, bold as Tarot, the satellite, both star and moon and emblem, disrupt readily apprehensible meaning. In stark relief, have their own nature, their own irreducible agency, distinct from but intertwined in the fragility of orbit; it is the human, the anthropocentric, that, although originating both, nevertheless is out of place.
The first image, despite fraught sensation and ineluctable consequence (or indeed, because of them), draws us in to an all too human narrative. The second projects a frozen eternity, as philosopher Graham Harman said, such objects define “unified realities – physical or otherwise – that can not be reduced either downwards to their pieces or upwards to their effects.” (2014)
We, with the figure, are trapped in its dream.
Can we really divorce realities from the systems that have made them – think Frankenstein’s creature escaping into the tabula rasa of the arctic wilderness, where the dreams of objects are haunted by the ephemerality of their human originators – or is this just an anthropomorphised projection, a quirk of the ontologies and systems by which we assume, via a self-satisfied and overweening knowledge, a cold and haughty distance?
In pursuit of the self, unless we adhere to those carefully constructed and continuously blazoned parameters propounded by unconscious ideologues and the images and ideas by which we are all held hostage, there is now only a shifting blur of doubt. There are no good people. We are prisoners. With a fishhook mouth, and impotent hands, crumple this up and pin it to the sky. There is no room left for any other conclusion.
References
Berger, J (1973) Ways of seeing, BBC and Penguin Books, London
Druckery, T (1994) From Dada to digital; montage in the twentieth century, Aperture, Aperture Foundation, New York, https://archive.aperture.org/article/1994/3/3/from- dada-to-digital
Freud, S (1919) The uncanny, Strachey, A, trans. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
Harman, G (2014) Art without relations, ArtReview, https://artreview.com/September-2014-graham- harman-relations/
She Shrugs Cloud Shadow
The tv spills a cold, invasive blue I have an impression Of you walking on my spine As if I were an arc and cable bridge And you a monster movie freak Grown so large and petulant that None could help but fall The sea below hard and pliable as new discoloured bruises Tear it down, you say Crush them all beneath your unbound feet As if the stillness Before and after earthquakes Were merely punctuation Wrath is love, you write on the sky The moon moves farther away each year I still abide, calling in that silent way That I have always had She shrugs Cloud shadow, listens
I Gave You Tired Flowers (In The Stained Glass Evening)
You have the wary crackle Of radio in war time Uncertain of whom listens, and Whom exactly speaks In formal pronunciations Desperate and resigned As slowly burning ships What do you recommend For half-life —neither exactly Celebration, nor lament Mostly, perhaps At resolve’s inordinate delay A smirk, exasperated With brown sugar and cinnamon Baby’s breath, aspidistra, nectarines Gone overripe —soft As waning summer— For the intoxicating scent Arranged in a chimera Of cellophane as nauseating as breaking glass Well, we all have something to sell The static hard dismay Just perhaps not quite Drunk as wilted flowers Pretty but The stain indelible
In The Space Between Your Robot Breaths
Still the day, all lantern faced my name is carnival in alien respiration throat coiled and translucent my hollow, ringing accordion machines, and grace when the heart in moments repeats one note beauty in its revocations returns and is still
I lost you on the beach at the end of the world
These are private words It is not for you to know But me to say You turned Under a ragged sun Only then I remembered How the world ends Not with a whimper (As Mr Eliot said) But a shrivelled leaf Almost an hour gone The chink of knives on cups Sour coffee breath In that aching clarity Between wakefulness and sleep I waited while You went on ahead I hate it here you said But we have nowhere left to go Except this curl of beach Tonguing the acid sting Of salt and vinegar on cracked lips That common benediction I will swim Til my ear aches With the conch deep voice Of your chasing echo Ribs a heaving predator Breathing in A swelling tide Breathing out A stitch in time Just like Jesus had No more walking Face a squall Towards the sunpath, wounding The shallow sea now gone Leaving brine and sulphur Wary, scuttling things The day again renews The shape of your shadow thins Over loose corrugations Slips beneath my feet When I turn head on To almost forever In blinding scintillations
A surfeit of nectarines
I have clean earth in my hands You shake, a sea of trees Humpty-dumpty falling I am drunk on nectarines Face half bellyache green The obverse The deep maroon Of summer’s lost eclipse Clouds thin as desperation Where we once bent like ships Buoyant but Never quite losing A carefully layered union There is almost nothing Left up here but sky And your warm-honeyed faced Swollen-cheeked Jack-knife crooked Strung on the limb Turn aside Far away Water breaks, rejoins Curves like swans, dissolving The heat is a churl The unctuousness Of sickly pine Arm in arm we go inside Laugh-collapse On the ricochet linoleum
The Day My Kite Flew High As The World
Caught a blue day On a sharp paper wing Thin throat a-howl Until the looped string Broke with that strange Updrawing weight Of a new jealous wind’s Stray trumpeting Gone almost too high Almost to glass Almost as thin As the last shard In your blue orb’s Sun struck glance No longer you No longer me No longer see Gone paper thin A scrabble of ink Through translucent skin
Arc
Slug trail skies The day in x-ray hurts Where I pull At the blinds To dismiss the shapes of frowning Dust spills a mica race Like promises in the air Far above Rorschach arcs Where jet planes Have cut between We drift in parallelograms Apart But for this too complicated screed That we laud in hailed contexts What in more intimate reflections We dismiss A shell of broken porcelain Once devoid All meaning becomes Tenuous as inconstant praise Your mouth the sun Behind hard clouds slowly spoken Makes the shape of doubt slow forsaken