Tranquil Labyrinth

 In a world which seems to be spinning further off its axis every time you turn on the news and the fabric of our society feels like its coming apart at the seams, with many high streets degenerating into rows of charity shops, thrift stores and boarded-up facades (to the colossal indifference of our equally derelict MPs), one takes refuge in simple, tactile pleasures. 
    What a relief, for example, to come across an independent bookshop on a high-street in Hertfordshire which not only has new, discounted and secondhand books but also an adjoining record shop on one side and its own separate coffee shop on the other side: the amazing David's in Letchworth Garden City. I had been there twice before and had been impressed enough without realising that there's also an upstairs to the bookshop, a tranquil labyrinth of well-stocked secondhand shelves that could restore the sanity of the most Brexit-fatigued, world-weary soul.

Neo-Nietzschean Clatter: The Neophyte as the Letter N

  The best projects find us, rather than we finding them. I've always believed in that Ballard line "Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences". I spent much of last year engaged in writing a book on Nietzsche, a journey of rediscovery which turned into the opening of a whole new area of enquiry and fascination.
  Nietzsche has been a key member of my personal pantheon for as long as I remember; perhaps for nearly as long as I began discovering books for myself around the age of 16, encouraged by a particularly imaginative teacher and the creative exploration of poems on my A-Level English syllabus she initiated.  It may have been the mention of "übermensch" in the opening chapter of Ulysses, or the strange phrase "neo-Nietzschean clatter" in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or even, a little later, the line  "Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool" in Wallace Stevens's 'Description without Place' which sent me to the library (unbelievably there were no one-click Google searches in those days) to research this often-invoked forerunner of many of the Modernist writers I was voraciously absorbing at the time. 
    Equally, to unearth the fact in the briefest of biographical accounts that Nietzsche had "gone mad" at the height of his writing career and never recovered seemed to align him with the lineage of doomed 19th century Romantics and bohemians I was also obsessively drawn to, the sicker, more unhinged and more thwarted in their personal life the better.
   The first book of Nietzsche's I chanced across in the secondhand bookshop in Horsham where I acquired almost all of my reading matter was Ecce Homo. This bizarre experiment in tangential autobiography (written, as I now know, on the brink of mental collapse and scattered with sentences betraying delusion, megalomania and a generally shaky grasp of reality) cemented the overlap between N's life and his philosophy in my callow mind, a blurring which in spite of my later immersion in critical theory and the Intentionalist Fallacy, has always seemed to me inescapable. 
    Most philosophers, as Nietzsche spent a good deal of time wittily deploring, are dry academics so deluded by systems of baseless abstractions and the "will to truth" that they take whole books proving - through the counter-intuitive circumlocutions of reductive logic and the lumbering shire-horse of syllogistic prose - that they themselves exist, a ludicrously muddle-headed example of the "falsification of the evidence of one's own senses". By aligning themselves with mathematicians, believing they were delineating objective truths through the factual, transparent medium of language, these metaphysicians merely compounded their own errors. Apart from Plato - wise enough to use the dramatic framework of Socratic dialogue to problematise any simplistic interpretations of his wisdom - Nietzsche was the first philosopher to grasp that philosophy is writing, first and foremost, and that the form and style of its language are what constitute its claim to the truth, no longer by the 19th century a monolithic, God-bestowed tablet of laws and more a writhing, many-headed Hydra. 
    Trained as an academic philologist in the historical analysis of words and steeped from an early age in music and literature, Nietzsche saw all too clearly the need to develop a new way of writing philosophy that - like poetry - prized concision, ambivalence and multi-sidedness rather than the long-winded, dogmatic expositions of the German idealist tradition he was heir to. Equally, as part of this rejection of academic philosophy, he replaced the serious, supercilious tone of Hegelian sturm und drang with a playful, self-mocking spezzatura, embracing the sense of cosmic irony Kierkegaard (in 1841) had identified as "the absolute infinite negativity". If the initial part of Nietzsche's project is deconstructive, "philosophy with a hammer", acerbically debunking the entire history of western metaphysics, Christianity and nearly all of western culture along the way (particularly German culture, in fact), the second, complementary aspect is a "revaluation of all values", a dauntingly ambitious endeavour to single-handedly replace this toppling tradition with his own ecstatically affirmative vision of human potential, summed up in the figure of the übermensch and the cosmic driving force he called "will to power".

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the book in which Nietzsche most cogently embodied these central concepts of his mature philosophy, both his Sermon on the Mount and an allegorical gospel dramatising his struggle to communicate his message to a largely unresponsive world. To go back to my own engagement with N.'s work, Zarathustra did turn into a kind of Bible for me when - as an almost Aspergically bookish and insular 23-year old -  I read into its rhapsodic pseudo-poetry the key to my own "self-overcoming", the highly-changed narrative of how I too could come out of my solitary cave and through sheer will and determination turn myself into a positive, empowered new version of myself, if not quite a Superman then perhaps at least the successful writer I knew I had it within me to become. 

   A dog-eared Penguin edition of Zarathustra was lodged into my small, Army Surplus rucksack that summer (almost entirely crammed with books and notebooks rather than spare clothes) when I went off travelling across France with my brother Laurence, starting off in Paris (busking on the Metro, staying in a squat, scribbling some half-baked translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and then hitching down to the south to do grape-picking. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the porch of the church at Libourne, near Bordeaux, where I think we ended up sleeping that night. It was the end of the summer and the sky was the most incredibly intense, deep, vertiginous blue. We were drinking cheap red wine from the bottle and smoking horrible throat-grating Gitane Jaunes (horrible to me even at the time but all part of the bohemian "deregulation of all the senses" I was bent on). Caught up in the moment we began taking it in turns to recite passages from the book, joining in to intone the phrase "Thus spoke Zarathustra" after each paragraph as though we were members of a religious order conducting a strange, illicit ceremony. 
    You could attribute this to the naive follies of youth and I would be the first to agree, but at the time it felt enormously inspiring and almost revelatory to do so, as though the words of the book perfectly embodied the sense of exploratory liberation our travels in France had emboldened us with, as though somehow Nietzsche's writing and our experiences had fused in what felt like a transformative new synthesis.
   Who the Hell is Friedrich Nietzsche? is available here.

Stays Against Bloviation: Ian Hamilton and Minimalism in Poetry

In revisiting Ian Hamilton's work in the form of the Faber Collected Poems (2009), I find I'm pulled in several directions. Such a sense of critical torque can be more propulsive than mere liking, though liking certainly comes into it. Hamilton's poems are 'famous for being small in size and few in number': Alan Jenkins has added only eighteen 'unpublished and uncollected' pieces to the Sixty Poems this edition replaces so that with an introduction, notes and appendices this must still be the slimmest Collected - and with the lowest word-count - of any English poet who lived into old age.

   Which is a virtue, above all, it must be said. At a time when we can all post as many of what we deem to be poems worthy of reading on the internet as we like, and the graduate Creative Writing industry sends forth a fresh battalion of would-be poets each year to chance their tyro-manuscripts in an increasingly over-subscribed market, a lifetime's gathering of brief poems that's only slightly longer than most single volumes is surely something to treasure. Amid the deluge of largely otiose verbiage we are now unremittingly swamped with, the millions of words per second that are dashed off unthinkingly on social media in a way that can only result in semantic devaluation, the concerted brevity of poems makes them (to paraphrase Frost) one of our few momentary stays against bloviation, the stock jibber-jabber of a mechanised consumer-algorithm talking to itself about nothing.

    It's almost as though Hamilton has pre-empted our short attention-spans and done the work of reducing his work to the thumbnails which a web-editor might be tempted to do, except that there are no more expansive or lucid ur-texts to refer back to. That its brevity, in terms both of number of poems and concision of form, should dominate critical responses towards Hamilton's work draws up issues around readerly expectation and publishing practices which are finally questions of historical context out of which telling corollaries reverberate through to us now.

   One way to look at it is through the lens of minimalism. It's an overused term, of course, with disciplines such as music, art, architecture and design each having their own conceptualisation and with a more recent colloquial usage to denote a life-style choice, an austerity-driven attempt to convince us that we don't really need the things we can no longer afford and doesn't it feel spiritually uplifting to do without them. Fine, as long as those things aren't food, or our homes.

    Locating a theoretical context for minimalism within poetry is more tricky - its most recent specific application seems to have been to the 70's concrete/visual poetry of Aram Saroyan, Robert Grenier and others, whose single word and even single letter poems, while passingly interesting, you might call (excuse the pun) limited. My use of the term here is admittedly laxer and more impressionistic, meaning any strain of poetry which employs extreme condenseness as a conscious aesthetic strategy, a consistent restriction of formal means. Where this is problematic is in deciding where the marker for what constitutes a minimalist poem should be, since brevity is a defining characteristic of most poetry, at least of the "lyric" type which most of us read and compose on the model of. Ten lines? Four? Perhaps it boils down to "consistent": plenty of poets throw in a very short poem from time to time but not many make this their main method of working, endemic to their engagement with language and with form.

    According to Pound in The ABC of Reading, it was Basil Bunting who came across the definition "dichtung (ie.poetry) = condensare" while flicking through a German-Italian dictionary. I note (although I know nothing about German etymology) that the word for condensation used by Freud is Verdichtung. Freud, of course, posited that condensation was one of the formative principles of the "dreamwork" conducted by the unconscious, a way of collapsing several images, references or even time-frames (whose hidden interrelatedness might only become apparent in later analysis) down into one. The comparison is in fact explicitly drawn in Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams: the primary process, "working as a poet does", "aims at reducing the separate dream-thoughts to the most economical and unified expression possible in the dream." On the same page, Freud suggests that words themselves can undergo the same condensation: "the entire field of verbal punning is available for the dreamwork to use...the word, being the point of convergence for many kinds of ideas, is predestined for ambiguity". 

    This, of course, became the germinal inspiration for Joyce's portmanteau-ing of words into the pluralised night-language of Finnegans Wake, which despite its apparent maximalism could be read as a work of condensation hypertrophied and run amok, since it attempts to telescope as many languages and as much of history and literature as it can into its macaronic "collideorscape", to the point of an omnivalent semi-opacity, almost as though Joyce were some Despicable Me-like megalomaniac (or rather, bibliomaniac) using the giant shrink-ray of his genius to reduce the whole world down to fit between the covers of a book.

    It might seem something of a quantum leap to take us from Freud, Finnegans Wake (and Despicable Me) back to the terse, tight-lipped lyrics of Ian Hamilton but bear with me. In the impetus behind minimalism in poetry can perhaps be seen a similar desire to "extend the chain of associations" as Freud located in dream-condensation, to excise causal and contextual materials unnecessary to a polysemous hub otherwise irreducible to consecutive, rational language. If, in the field of dreams, a further motive for this compression was the ego's scrambling of hermeneutic codes in the interests of repression, ie. messages that get past or outwit what Ted Hughes called "the writer's own inner police system", this might make us think of kinds of 20th century minimalist poetry in the Modernist tradition where giving very little away, or concealing what one has to say even in the act of disclosing it, are key attributes.

   I'm thinking of the early, pre-Pound Imagism of HD, whose fragments of adaptation from the Greek Anthology cut across the rhetorical impedimenta of male-dominated Edwardian/Georgian effusion; of the Hermeticism of Ungaretti, Montale and Quasimodo - at least in the 1930's a deliberately clipped and codified response to the heavy-handed state censorship of Fascism -; of Paul Celan's clastic imploding of German language-elements the Holocaust had rendered barbaric, and of the slightly later American-Jewish Objectivists like George Oppen, whose leftist political affiliations in the climate of McCarthyism lead him in the direction of long self-suppression and a trickle of beautiful, pared-to-the bone lyrics which make a virtue and theme of formal/spiritual economy. 

   If we could see Hamilton's brief poems within this context, as self-checking avoidances of any kind of facile expressiveness (examples of which, in his other work as a famously exacting critic and editor, must have been all too apparent to him) we can also read into them a very British response to some of the same impulses behind minimalism: a holding back and disinclination to commit, combined with a faintly post-Romantic aspiration not to leave out (or, to go back to Freud, repress) the difficult emotional materials from which lasting poems arise - as the Movement poets had sought to do, to their cost. 

     What this leads to in the best of Hamilton's poems - 'The Storm', say, or 'Metaphor' - is a moving and recognisable sense of not knowing how to articulate or deal with powerful emotions, a reticence about bringing them into focus and thereby - as we say - opening the floodgates of suffering or worse at a time when the narrator needs to remain strong because he is addressing a "you" figure who is in need of his support. Inference and displacement become strategies of keeping precarious control over the situation. The "holding back" of minimalism, then, can also be a holding it all together. As Coleridge had characterised poetry itself (in a formula which Alavarez quoted approvingly in his Intro to The New Poetry) "a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order".