PLR vol.2, no.1 (February 2004)

P L R

volume 2

issue 1

PRAGUE LITERARY REVIEW

february

2004

row along the facing curb, cabmen reading papers, horses snorting. Behind them at the entrance to a park old men are talking on a bench. Around the corner comes a group of schoolgirls carrying croquet hoops and mallets. The girls wear sky-blue sailor shirts: the Legion of Honour uniform. Their voices drop to whispers as they pass him.

“I’ve seen him in a poster! He’s that dancer!”

“He’s not a dancer! He’s an actor. He’s that one in Faust. He’s Mephistopheles!”

His gold-flecked eyes narrow into slits: F.F. is smiling. _______

As a child he founds The Society of Easy Death. “You have to be like death, invisible,” he tells his fellow conspirators.

Elie the schoolboy paddles a wooden kayak through the mists along the Saône marshland waterways, pushing back the reeds. He slides into a large pool, climbs onto the bank and ties the kayak to a willow tree. Crossing his arms he pulls his sweater up over his head, then takes his shoes and trousers off. He stands beneath the willow branches naked with his feet apart, thin blue veins showing clearly through the goose-pimpled skin.

The water of the pool is still and black. Elie lowers himself in and kicks off from the bank.

The cold water tightens around his testicles and ribs; he feels his breathing deep inside his chest. After a while he stops swimming, turns around and treads water. The bank, the kayak and the willow tree have disappeared in the mist. Elie closes his eyes and turns on the spot a few more times, then swims off in the direction he now finds himself facing.

Monsieur Clandel has called Elie into his study at the Lycée Lamartine. The shelves are lined with leather-bound books and photographs of sporting teams.

“Fénéon. Your first name’s Félix, is it not?”

“My mother calls me Elie, sir.”

“A Swiss name, Elie?”

“Burgundian, sir. My father is Italian.”

“Elie, your teachers speak well of you. I’ve put you down for the baccalaureate. You might like to sit the Civil Service examination afterwards. A clerical post, perhaps.”

Shouts and whistles drift in from the playing fields and die along the Lycée’s long, clean corridors. _______

Cane swinging, F.F. strides out of the War Office onto the Boulevard St. Germain. It’s late afternoon, a Friday and the last day of January 1886: pay day. He crosses the boulevard’s stream of cabs and applecarts and steps into the Brasserie Gambrinus, where the barmaid brings him a glass of absinthe. She smiles at him as she turns to leave.

F.F. slides out of his right suit pocket an uncrumpled sheet of War Office paper and lays it on the table by his glass. It’s the outline of a psychological novel entitled The Muzzled Woman: 1st Part: Uh! 2 nd Part: Two purplish butterflies alight on Jacqueline’s zygomatic muscle. 3rd Part: Paul’s Sa’s bed. 4th Part: The menacing eye of the lewd druggist.

Photograph by Marc Atkins, Pylon, 2001

Mission(s) of Art Lev Kreft Every “Age of Enlightenment” proceeds from an unlimited optimism of the reason—always associated with the type of the megalopolitan—to an equally unqualified scepticism. —Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

With the contemporary atmosphere of moralising about art and its responsibilities on my mind, I wish to examine how the ethical dimension of art developed within European modernity. This brings forward a central aspect of modernist ethics: its concentration on

Art

causa finalis, final end of all human actions, the ultimate purpose which is to guide all our earthly existence.

Art as a differentiated, special and strictly defined branch of human abilities, productive forces and activities has been invented in modernity and by modernity. With this differentiation, the question “What is art good for?” emerged as well. Compared with sciences, it did not possess the exact knowledge needed for progressive human mastering of nature; compared with crafts and industry, it lacked usefulness and did not produce necessary wealth of nations. But, as fine arts belonged to

Literature

(continued on page 6)

Hombre Tom McCarthy He’s most at home in public spaces: F.F. gliding down a tree-lined boulevard, his shoulders dappled by the branches’ candelabra. F.F. in smoky night cafés, his face reflected in a glass of absinthe. F.F. seeing in his generation’s springtime on the Rue Condé, shattering glass and masonry with a flower.

He leans against a lamppost. Beneath the silk top hat his face is angular; a goatee drops from the chin and then curls upwards, tapering to a fine point at the end. Cabs are standing in a

Philosophy

Theatre

F.F. sips his absinthe, smiles. He has no intention of writing the novel.

He’s twenty-five years old and goes by many names. Lautrec calls him the Yankee Magician because of his goatee; he sketches him melting, disappearing in a wisp of cigarette smoke.

Pisarro calls him The Question Mark and draws his blank face hanging from a wallpeg on a curved hook. Lallamont at the War Office calls him “Finion”—a sharp, metallic bark. Longhaired Jarry calls him “L’homme qui silence”: the Silent One, the one who silences. Or is it “L’homme qui s’y lance?”—the one who (continued on page 9)

Poetics 1

Contents 1 1 2 2 10 11 11 12

Mission(s) of Art Lev Kreft Hombre Tom McCarthy Letter from Ausland J.C., T.J. & L.A. Writing and Thinking Gordon Teskey Possible Stories Sebastian Gurciullo Plough Play John Kinsella a crater Tatjana Lukic Against His Name the Waves Go Larry Sawyer Nile Tomaž Šalamun his favourite ride Tomaž Šalamun I Unsubscribe John Kinsella Sunday Anzhelina Polonskaya

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16 16 17 18 18 15 20

To the Memory of B... (A Dream) Anzhelina Polonskaya Penumbra Sudeep Sen What do I Suspect Lina Ramona Vitkauskas Ouevre Dennis Cooper Silverchair, Diorama Dennis Cooper Hotel Keys and Dirty Weekends Drew Milne The Xeque1Mate de Duchamp Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna “Balkan Art” Srdja Pavlovic Designer Playtime McKenzie Wark Fluxions Louis Armand Remus on Art Uncle Remus Letter from E.H. Adrian Hornsby

Letter from Ausland

Writing and Thinking

T.J., J.C. & L.A.

Gordon Teskey

for A.H.

‘La parole a été donnée a l’homme pour cacher sa pensée’ —R.P. Malagrida (via Stendhal)

—I am writing for A.H. Ghostwriting. Expecting H is making me horny. Here in Ausland, listening to L who sings the body eclectic and we’re waiting for a letter to arrive to ensure us T didn’t drown after all. A woman with a black dog walks into the room like a camellia and then she frowns. S thought Vadim would show up. Who’s Vadim? she says. Love is a shoestring budgeted for a footless man. And we, yes, all of us, come to Shakespeare not as a last resort but as a realisation of something immanent in the scheme of things. Come to Shakespeare at the tail end of a language down in the dumps. Come to Shakespeare as a father figure once forsaken, twice sly. To shake spears, as they say in the classics. T thinks this is all a Parisian parlour game. Every night it’s the same old thing. A parlance game, Mr H. Banging away in his cold closet. Though I couldn’t know because I’ve never met him.

None of us have. Godot. No, never met him, not even fucked him, not even casually in a dark room. No. Or been fucked by him. Not at all. Though not to imply distaste! Everything here is fine, mother. A brought the dope which L isn’t smoking, but the prognostications are looking up nonetheless. A cliché well delivered, well spoken for, is worth its weight in Goldstuckers. R is owner of this place, not an imperialist, despite voguishness of above. He owns much. L is writing a letter to the Corinthians. He just came from a wedding, soft shoe shuffle of the Pharisees. Nights marry and someone ate the ring. The mail service, as they say, isn’t what it used to be. From Russia with Love, registered post only. Where are you H when we need you? Come to mummydaddy.

Instead we sit neck deep in bullshit shooting craps over James Brown’s dog’s body’s bitchbody. Lick the stamp, Mr H, in the future. Send us letters from the indistinguishable other Susan Sontag didn’t define. Inquiring minds want to know.

—What am I going to do with myself? The shrivelled brown olive felt tough in my hand.

It was unexpected, after having stared through the delicatessen window for half the afternoon contemplating its ripeness. Now, juiceless and sinewed, the fruit’s meat grazes my tongue, recalling thoughts of Chateaubriand and Harrow-on-the-Hill (fictional of course). Keats, at my age, was eight years dead. Dear H, now is the winter of our discontent. Blah blah. Send olives, urgently. “We’re getting out of (it) here.” Who said that? For the modest price of $590 you could become the proud owner of a half-kilo tin of Beluga. Caviar. The photograph wasn’t what it could have been. Too little ethnic contrast, too much cheese. Chateaubriand, of course. Or just another T.S. Eliot pontificating over an underdone slab of imported Stilton. Well!

Photograph by Markéta Othová, 2002

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PLR ..... volume 2 issue 1

PRAGUE LITERARY REVIEW Publisher Editor Associate Editors Editorial Assistance Design Technical Support Distribution

february 2004

Vrsovicky Ezop Louis Armand Aleš Debeljak, Drew Milne, Howard Sidenberg Clare Wallace, Joshua Cohen lazarus Radim Ševčík Shapesphere plc

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—We got a glimpse of the stars that night before we fell asleep. Through the fog, they appeared shrouded in a blue haze, the colour of aspirin, strychnine or a room illuminated by black light. Seen through a lens, it affected a schizoid deluge of inhibitions (conflicting), the usual thing clouding our insight with elastic wiring … Wiring? Yes, wiring. Linking perception to cognition, as they say, elastically.

We ate the berries we’d found on the trail that day (you remember that trail, don’t you?), and wondered aloud what we’d been doing there to begin with. Apologised to the old bag for our behaviour and agreed to resume our supposed consumption of said berries at a more propitious date. Oh, and the telescope you sent was hurled into the river as we pretended to take our clothes off. “I don’t want to hear about the fucked up disorder in my head either. Be rigorous,” she said. Her teeth, H, were stained with blood or wine, and her breath smelled like chitlins. She ate too much beet and spoke like a dying engine. When I looked in her eyes, I saw a tiny animal shitting. It frightened me. I thought I was seeing a reflection; then I realised it was inside her head.

Prague 23 November, 2003

What does it mean to think in words? Are words—written words—the reflective medium in which thinking, coming from elsewhere, discloses itself? Or are words the medium in which we think and the written page the site of that thinking? In a time of deep, anti-platonic bias, I suspect most would choose the second alternative: writing and thinking happen together on the page. This commonplace conception about thinking has at least one thing to recommend it: it is easy to picture in terms of what we do. We have first thoughts, keyed to certain words, which we write down; we put the thoughts into sentences and rearrange those sentences such that, linked end to end, they resemble what we call a train of thought; we throw away the seductive, irrelevant detours; we write more and revise, glancing over all the words—or is it all the thoughts?—which are there on the pages, in the course of which a drift in thinking sets in as what was once peripheral moves to the centre; and so we start again, gleaning more rudimentary thoughts, which we write down, arrange, and cast into sentences. Gradually, several trains of thought come together in a structure of thought, which seems to rise up of its own accord out of this mutually immanent exchange between writing and thinking. Writing is done with the hands, thinking with the brain, but one does not write for long without feeling how implicated in each other’s functions they are. The word with which we designate that feeling is style.

Gerald L. Bruns has suggestively termed the two dominant conceptions of the relationship between writing and thinking the Orphic and Hermetic ideas of language. These are associated with Platonism and sophism respectively. In Orphism language has power over things, which are separate from it, as the song of Orpheus had the power to move rocks and trees.

Hermeticism is named after the god Hermes, who is associated with writing, messages, trickery, boundaries, and thieves—in short, with mediation in general. In Hermeticism, language becomes a power in itself. Either we use written words to represent a thinking that is other with respect to words, or we use words in writing to think because words are the very substance, and writing the scene, of our thoughts. I have made a case for the second, Hermetic alternative, because it currently seems instinctive. Why else would the idea of revision, a process of revision, be regarded as unambiguously good? What is wrong with getting it right the first time? But I have also made a case for the current, commonplace view of writing and thinking as substantially the same because I think it is wrong. That does not mean I think the Orphic alternative is right and am now representing that truth—which comes from elsewhere—on the page I write here. I might acknowledge a strong preference were the two not suspiciously symmetrical, and perhaps derived from a common mistake. But the Platonic idea of language as a window on the other, though a little crude in this form, points back to a view of thinking—a genuinely Platonic one—that has a certain wise humility to recommend it. It does not assume that we are thinking when we are writing things down. For we do assume too readily that writing has at least a synecdochical relationship with thinking, so that if we write reasonably well, along professionally approved lines, we will perforce think. (By a synecdochical relationship I mean one wherein thinking is a part of a whole, which is writing.) We speak of looking forward to the summer when we will have more time to write, not more time to think, as if the thinking took no time in addition to the time it takes to write because the thinking is immanent in the writing. If writing and thinking exist in a synecdochical relationship, then to say you are doing the one is to say you are doing the other: you can choose whichever term you prefer to describe what you do. It may then be simple modesty that prompts us to speak of what we do as writing rather than as thinking.

Or it may be the truth. It may be that the few think, the maîtres penseurs, while the rest of

us scribble sequaciously. Or it may be that Heidegger was right in the more extreme claim that the task of thinking lies ahead of us still, that we have not yet begun to think and need to find out what thinking is. Whether or not this claim is true (and I don’t think it is possible to make up one’s mind quickly), it is important to understand what it does and does not mean. It does not mean that people are not yet engaged in intellectual activity of a high order, some of it—mostly in the natural sciences—of the highest order ever attained. Nor does it mean that no one has ever thought.

Heidegger says that poets, or some of them, have done so in the past and are doing so now.

By the ‘we’ who are not thinking, or who at least do not know exactly when we are really thinking, Heidegger means those who are professionally concerned precisely with thinking, chiefly philosophers. With mild disingenuousness he includes himself in this statement: one is reminded of the Nietzsche of ‘We Philologists.’ But in this sense his claim is outrageous.

How can he say that those who have been professionally concerned with thinking—who have worked within a metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Hegel and Nietzsche, and who continue to work within that tradition—are practicing philosophy but not thinking? It is the distinction of philosophy from thinking that is particularly outrageous to anyone who supposes that the philosophers are pre-eminent, and the most self-conscious of thinkers. Nowhere does Heidegger’s radicalness gall more than in his claim that philosophers may have been thinking sometimes, unbeknownst to themselves, but that when they have it has been despite of their philosophising, which is a kind of dreaming.

Yet we have heard something like this before—that philosophy is a kind of dreaming— and are likely to hear it whenever we have to do with the absolutely strange, for example, when we have to do with the gods or, as in Hamlet, with the dead. When Hamlet says, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ the thrust of his remark is not that philosophy fails to get everything in—that there are more things for philosophy to consider than it has hitherto. That banal reading offers no threat to philosophy whatever. Only the threatening philosophers—Hegel, Nieztsche, Heidegger, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus— claim that the work of philosophy is complete.

The thrust of the remark is that philosophy itself, in its entirety, is a kind of dreaming: Horatio dreams when he philosophises, but Hamlet and Horatio are wide awake when they encounter the ghost. Hamlet’s well-known retort is preceded by an exchange that deserves to be just as well known. When the ghost, which is now underneath them, cries from the earth, ‘Swear by his sword,’ Horatio quite naturally says, ‘O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!’ To which Hamlet replies, ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. / There are more things in heaven and earth … Than are dreamt of in you philosophy.’ This is the best indication I can find for what Heidegger means: thinking is a kind of hospitality extended to the absolutely strange. Thinking does not welcome the strange by making it heimlich, one of the family, appropriating the strange to established principles. Thinking welcomes and shelters the strange as such, without attempting to make it less strange: ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.’

The claim that logical discourse and thinking are at odds with each other obviously relies on a special sense of thinking, one which Heidegger invites us to consider in such phrases as ‘openness to the mystery’ (Offenheit für das Geheimnis) and ‘releasement towards things’ (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen). However obscure these phrases may seem initially, they exhort us to welcome the strange as the strange, refusing to extinguish, in the logic with which philosophy proceeds, the wonder in which philosophy begins. ‘Opennness to the mystery’ and ‘releasement towards things’ clearly are set against the demand for logical closure in systematic philosophical reflection.

The closure is achieved by abstracting two principles from things, the first being necessary to mathematics, the second to the physical sciences: 1) the principle that declares things to be ‘things,’ and hence units in the first place,

subject to number, and 2) the principle that declares things to belong to a single class— the class of all things—the members of which are united by being subject to laws. ‘Releasement toward things’ opposes the understanding of things as ‘things’ in terms of abstract principles of composition, such as matter and form; and ‘openness to the mystery’ opposes the understanding of the relations between things as governed by abstract, scientific laws deriving from the principle of law itself, the logos, which is the operator of closure in the system as a whole. Science and technology manipulate and transform the world by working within the closure supplied by the system of units and laws; and all work within this system is, as Heidegger says, calculative or ‘reckoning’ knowledge, but not thinking. This is not to say that the knowledge attained by modern, mathematical science is not true or that the intelligence and labour required to attain it is not immense, is not the human mind’s most impressive constructive achievement. But for Heidegger it is not thinking because it cannot welcome the absolutely strange as a stranger: all strangeness is instead made a part of the system by being understood through number and subjected to law.

Now to claim that the task of thinking lies ahead of us still and that we cannot define thinking itself is not the sort of claim that can be defended logically, according to a principle of closure; it is more of the nature of a proposition to be explored in the open. But the proposition is not randomly chosen. It has a purpose, which is to place thinking in the realm of the historical, as an historical event. Like revolution or war, thinking is impelled by the free actions of individuals but is not at all reducible to them; it is something that can happen only at moments of historical opportunity.

This means that Heidegger’s proposition about thinking cannot be stated in purely conceptual terms but must also be related by means of an historical narrative, in particular one about the end of philosophy and the beginning of thinking. I turn to that narrative now.

It is not the first such narrative. The first, and the more familiar, is Hegel’s, where the end of philosophy is the beginning of wisdom.

For Heidegger it is Nietzsche who brings western philosophy to its conclusion by reducing the problem of being to the will-to-power and by reducing the problem of change within a closed system to the doctrine of the eternal return. But because the will remained for Nietzsche in the position of an ontological substratum, the will-to-power was not a new beginning for thought but the last possible stage in the history of western metaphysics.

According to Heidegger we are moving into a post-philosophical age in which a more radical questioning—thinking—comes to the fore, its first question being that of its own nature.

For the early Heidegger such questioning must being with the methodical Destruktion (whence ‘deconstruction’) of being-as-presence, the cornerstone of western metaphysics, the thought-categories of which prevent us from thinking in the more radical sense Heidegger means. For the later Heidegger, who is more concerned with recovering the primordial understanding of truth as an unveiling, the act of thoughtful questioning is conceived under a different metaphor—that of listening for something almost imperceptibly faint—and works by what is more poetic than a philosophical method. It also works by communion with singularly powerful acts of attention achieved by poets, especially Hölderlin.

The poetic method may be distinguished from the philosophical in its becoming engaged with the Other, the strange, not as a principle or a system but as a living intelligence and will—in poetic terms, as a god. The implications of this notion are more important than the notion itself, as is almost always the case when we approach the realm of the theological. We do not exist to think spontaneously, out of our own nature, about an external world that is merely there to be studied; we are called to think from beyond what we are. The gods, or the muses, to whom we call, are only mirror images of this truth, which informs the poetic act as the answering of a call from beyond what we are. Through the poets, who speak, as Heidegger would say, allegorically (allo ‘other’ + agoreuo ‘to speak’), we enter into dia-

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logue with an Other that calls us to think. Thinking thus becomes something that is historical, appearing in epochs—moments of ‘seizing,’ as Heidegger calls them (epi-echein)—when mental activity occurs in response to a call, giving a new understanding of humanity in the world.

After such moments normal or paradigmatic reflection occurs, a working out from within of the implications of the epochal encounter with the other. For Heidegger, thinking becomes possible in an epochal sense in the confrontation between modern man and planetary technology. Such thinking begins with the recognition that we live in a manner that assumes nature to be continued within culture, rather than the other way round, as the Greeks thought. But the culture within which we experience nature as being contained is neither ethical nor religious in essence: it is technological through and through. As the destiny and essence of modern humanity, technology is the final stage, the full realisation, of a metaphysical project that began with the Greeks. In confronting our technological destiny fully, thinking cannot draw its conceptual resources, or even its motive, from the very tradition that fulfils itself in that destiny. Thinking must look elsewhere—to poetry and art, for example—for its conceptual resources; and thinking must find its motive not in our own nature, our human essence, which is technological, but rather, as I said earlier, in response to a call from beyond what we are.

It is too easy to dismiss this narrative as romantic schematising in the manner of Spengler or Yeats. Heidegger’s argument emerges from a deep, painstaking, if often (to philologists) perverse reading of the original Greek texts, a reading that shows an extraordinary sensitivity to nuances of language which have profound and unexpected implications— and not only to the already-existing nuances but to the possibilities of language when stretched by thought to the point of deformity. Heidegger has taught us all to read. His argument also emerges from a remarkable insight into the significance of modern technology (nothing in Walter Ong or Marshall McLuhan would have surprised Heidegger greatly), although he expressed this insight occasionally in tactless, easily misunderstood or tooquotable ways. The insight is that technology has begun to be recognised as more than a convenience, as something that is merely added to Man. Technology has become a destiny and an essence, the human way of being in the world; as such it replaces the metaphysical self, the immortal soul, with a limitlessly malleable subjectivity; and it replaces the divine Creator of nature with the human power to transform nature into an instrument of will, a tool. The perfect illustration of the latter is the notion of the earth as a spaceship. Heidegger saw planetary technology as a radically new mode of human being in the world, but also as the last stage of western metaphysics, in which the rational and the real, or the technological and the natural, coincide because the second term is absorbed in the first. But he also saw the elimination of the numinous that this entailed—the otherness of the gods and the soul—as an impoverishment that opens the way for a new encounter with otherness, an otherness that ‘calls’ us to thinking.

By insisting on the historicality of thinking Heidegger was not just steering towards a mark but was also, as is often the case with strong thinkers, steering away from a hazard. For behind his attack on the idea of thinking as a perennial human activity—one by which Man is defined as animale rationale—lies the suspicion that such a notion must inevitably re-

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duce thinking to an evolved, biological function, like flight in birds, thus destroying the essential character of thinking as freedom. To assume we are thinking at all times and in all periods just because we are human, and just because humans are intelligent, is biologism; and if intelligence is biological, thinking is not.

Separating thinking from biological determinism has three consequences: it makes thinking historical; it makes thinking free (we can choose to think); and it makes the nature of thinking a question of what we decide it shall be. The first two consequences are synthesised in the third. The historicality of thinking makes its nature only partly a question of what we decide it shall be: one cannot think outside one’s historical context. But the freedom displayed in choosing to think (birds do not choose to fly) makes the essence of thinking something that can also be decided by us, though the decision will be historical. The de-

Martin Heidegger

cision as to what thinking shall be is a free decision, but one that cannot be subjective: we are not each of us free to decide for ourselves.

Hence for Heidegger we are at best on the way toward thinking, part of that movement being an inquiry into what thinking is and what its task may be.

Yet to ask what thinking is, is for us to come near to supposing that thinking, as a faculty natural to man, or to human biology, has the character of a thing like all the other things we analyse philosophically or manipulate technically. What stands outside the reduction of reality to a collection of things having magnitude and existing in space? Since Descartes it is the consciousness, or subjectivity, that thinks, cogitating those others as things. Subjectivity, as the word implies, ‘lies beneath’ things, bearing them up as things standing below them. To ‘understand’ thinking, therefore, is improperly to move it out of the realm of the subject and to make it an object, a thing borne up in consciousness for contemplation. Heidegger avoids this objectification by refusing to consider thinking as a thing or a process (a process is also a thing); instead, he considers thinking in terms of the communicative events between consciousnesses, in particular the call and the response. Hence thinking is to be ex-

perienced by us as a call to thinking, a call from a source that by its nature withdraws before our ordinary categories of understanding—inviting us to probe through them into what is at present beyond them. Thinking welcomes the stranger as a stranger.

When, therefore, we think even a little we have the feeling of breaking a rule, of behaving illogically, of questioning in a way that will shock, bewilder, or appear ridiculous. But we do so in answer to something that seems like a call from afar. At such times thinking does not seem to be immanent in but rather opposed to good writing. I mean good writing with its implicit categories of understanding, which are in agreement between subject and object, stylistic perpetuity and ease, and legitimate inference—in short, grammar, rhetoric, and logic.

Good writing is now, at best, something we do on the way towards thinking, or a discipline we submit to because we care about thinking; but is no longer the idol itself: thinking that is immanent in the words that we use and apparent on the pages we write.

When thinking is no longer conceived of as immanent in writing, thinking itself becomes a mystery to which we are at best drawing near when we are opening ourselves to the otherness of its demands. It is not in writing, therefore, but in the resistance to skilful, facile writing, that we draw towards the possibility of thinking.

Such resistance is conducted by questioning in a state of openness. So far as I can tell, when I think—or when I try to—I am neither representing thought in words nor building thought with words.

I am attempting an inquiry, a probing outwards, a continual questioning that must occur independently of words, even if it is eventually conducted through words.

I am persisting. Persisting is not a means to an end—the well-defended thesis-statement—but is rather a way of keeping oneself balanced in the experience of the strangeness of truth. By truth I mean the experience of continual discovery sustained by continual questioning at the boundaries of what we understand. It was Heidegger who first emphasised the archaic understanding of truth as dynamic unconcealing, a-letheia, the experience of continual revelation in the presence of an otherness that calls one to think.

Contemplating art is one of the most direct ways to listen for the call of that otherness.

The work of Damien Hirst, which (in October 1999) was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it incited a political row in New York, displayed cows severed lengthwise and in cross section preserved in tanks of formaldehyde. One was shocked simply by the use of real animals instead of representations or models: the artist showing, revealing, instead of representing. One was shocked by the violence of the act juxtaposed to the sterile, pseudo-scientific presentation. But as one waited through the shock one became fascinated by one’s own fascination with the hidden interiority of bodies, a fascination that is witnessed in one of our oldest works of literary art, the Iliad, which shows remarkably detailed knowledge of human internal anatomy. That knowledge must have constituted no small part of the poem’s early fascination. At the annual open house of the Cornell College of Agriculture, one can put one’s arm into a long plastic sleeve that reaches far into the interior of a living, and apparently unperturbed, cow’s body. Why is this display not a work of art whereas the Hirst display is? Is it just a matter of institutional context? Or can we make it a work of art with our

minds? It seems to come down in the end to whether we are being invited to join with the artist in thinking about something, where thinking is understood in a more fundamental sense as wondering, astonishment, thauma. We came to view the experience of shock as a particular experience of time, an anticipation of bodily trauma, producing a congeries of physiological effects (shortness of breath, rising heart rate, perspiration) that requires discipline simply to wait out. Wounding and wondering, trauma and thauma, seem curiously involved in each other. It is usually after waiting through the experience of shock or of satiety that a flood of new perceptions come and—more importantly—that something vitally present, and often very simple, in the artist’s vision is disclosed. Artists, after all, have to hang around what they make for a long time: the work of making the art forces them to. To come into a shared reflective space with the artist the viewer must interpret viewing as a kind of artistic work, a persistence analogous to the persistence of the artist who creates. This fundamental persistence is thinking.

Works of art are created by artists whom we can think of as the intending sources of a call, making the work of art itself an act of communication. But it does not take long experience of art and of artists to learn that we are not so much hearing a call the artist has made through the work as joining the artist in hearing a call.

I recently read an account, by the painter Merlin James of the still life painter Giorgio Morandi. James’s description of the meditative experience Morandi’s paintings demand is an example of thinking as dynamic revelation in response to a call. All good pictures give up their secrets reluctantly, over time and in response to an assiduous, seductive attention.

James arrives only late in his text at what we might otherwise mistake for a thesis but which is in truth the unveiling of the question that the painter has asked through his paintings— or that the paintings themselves, guided by the painter, have been brought to ask: ‘What is it that constitutes active content in painting— content, that is, and not the conceptualisation that attaches to some contingent point of reference in the work? The final, bafflingly reflexive achievement of Morandi’s paintings is to seem to address this very question. Content, containment, continence, contentment.’

This apparently conclusive, thesis-like statement is kept open by considering—in a manner that can seem frivolous to the logically-minded—the relations between content, containment, continence, contentment, and, in the next sentence, interiority. The apparent non-sequitur is then followed (again, non-logically) by reflections on the light in Morandi, which ‘falls coolly, almost always from the left, quite horizontally.’ Now light has little, if anything, to do with containing; rather than enclosing, it opens by illuminating surfaces. But James’s apparently inconsequential remarks on the lighting of surfaces occasion further remarks on the shadows, whence the subject of darkness comes in, as that which the empty jugs and vases contain: ‘what the empty jugs and vases contain: ‘what the empty jugs and vases contain, we realise, is darkness—the absence of light. While they cast a shadow, it often appears to trickle from the base, as if leaking out.’ This a moment of genuine revelation about Morandi, which one has felt for some time in the magic of his paintings but been unable to articulate precisely: Morandi is about the cherishing of the obscure as the dark. His symbol for the mystery of existence, the mystery that saturates things, is the darkness inside them, a darkness that leaks out at their bases and gives them their peculiarly questioning aura.

James leaves this mostly unexpressed, going on instead—and again without apparent logical order—to talk about spaces and forms, until he unexpectedly mentions box lids, which are ‘tantalisingly ajar.’ Suddenly we recognise that what has been said about spaces and forms is startlingly relevant to what has been said about the cherishing of darkness that Morandi’s paintings perform. After a series of questions about content, James concludes with the statement that ‘a good Morandi anticipates—internalises—all the relevant questions about its own artistic content.’ But of the various contents James mentions it is darkness that

he writes about most powerfully because it is darkness he has thought about most fully. But this is not thinking in any standard sense. By those standards, the essay seems disorganised, even illogical. James has not so much thought about darkness in Morandi—he comes upon it casually, and drops it farther on—as he has kept himself in readiness for its call. And even as his attention moves elsewhere it is to the call of that darkness—a call that comes out of what Morandi has made—that James has most attentively listened. In other words, James is never fully in control of what he says about Morandi, if ‘control’ means a logical sequence of statements supporting a thesis, or a valid inference, a ‘carrying across,’ from premises to a conclusion. He is instead exploring the Morandi experience and continually inquiring into its nature and form. Reading him one knows he has spent many hours contemplating these pictures without any aim of writing about them. It is this apparently unproductive, dilatory contemplation, this hanging around, that is for me the very scene of thinking. It leads from one revelation to the next with a dynamism one knows will never be completed in the possession of a singular truth.

Such a truth would make it pointless to look at a Morandi thereafter. Morandi’s paintings are experiences, not things, and as experiences they keep the quest for truth perpetually open.

This is thinking in its most exalted mood.

The experience of hanging around a Morandi is precisely the subject with which James is concerned; the various aperçus are just markers registering the stages in that experience. It is sometimes regretted by writers about science that a similar experience in scientific research is concealed when the research is presented in the logical form demanded by scientific journals. But the regret here is only a nostalgic or sentimental one: the logical form in which scientific discovery is presented is essential to the truth of the discovery; the logical form is essentially truer to science than is the experience of discovery. But when speaking of art the good critic is not reporting ‘results,’ in a pale imitation of science. The critic is inviting us to join in listening to the call that is heard in the work. If the experience of hearing that call is re-presented in familiar, logical form it loses the character of being a call and becomes inaudible. We can hear the call to thinking only when we welcome the call as a stranger.

This is to say that the call is too primordial to be concerned with, or ready for, the organised procedures of logic: with the making of theses (things that are ‘set up’), with the ‘placing first’ of premises, and with the rules of inference, or ‘carrying across.’ Logical operations are preoccupied with their own coherence, having already decided—a word that means ‘cutting off’—what they are about. To master such operations is exceedingly demanding, and to be ignorant of them is to be in an important sense uneducated. But to submit to the operations of logic entirely, to assume their absolute inclusiveness of things, is to place oneself in danger of forgetting their foundation not in the ideal closure that logical coherence must strive to attain but rather in the openness of questioning. For questioning, as Heidegger also said, in a phrase capable of being misunderstood, is the piety of thought. We are inclined to separate piety and thinking instinctively and immediately, supposing piety to be a sort of willed stupidity or, at best, a suspension of thought. Such unthinking decisiveness cuts thinking off from its roots.

This leads us to ask what piety, pietas is.

From the columns of Lewis and Short there emerges an almost Confucian sense of relationship to parents, friends, the state, the earth, and the gods. The pious life is lived within an envelope of rites observed and duties performed. The derivation of pius from Greek tio and timao ‘to estimate’ ‘to honour,’ is pronounced dubious; but the derivation is worth nothing here because it gives a clue to how the ancients understood the term. The most famous instance of impiety in heroic literature, and the one the Romans doubtless called to mind when reflecting on the opposite character of the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid, pius Aenaeas, is Agammenon’s dishonouring Chryses, the priest of Apollo. The rootedness of Latin pietas, in Greek time is heard in the eleventh line of the Iliad,

when we learn that the god was enraged ‘because the song ofAtreus impiously dishonoured (etimasen) the priest Chryses.’ All these senses of pietas point towards right action with respect to tradition, that is, to obligations and standards that are already known. Yet there seems to be a further sense of pietas indicating respectful, attentive openness to what is unprecedented and even unknown, and this too seems to be present in Virgil, who gives his hero something like the strangeness and power of a shaman. Latin scholars teach us that this key word is Virgil, pius, is untranslatable into any modern European language. One reason for this may be simply that the word had greater breadth then. Aeneas shows traditional piety to his father Anchises, bearing him on his shoulders out of burning Troy. But he also has a sense of pious wonder and openness to what is unknown, and of this unknown only one dimension is the future. This darker sense of pietas is reconciled to the first when, in the underworld, it is Aeneas’s father who shows him the future. It is precisely this reassuring encounter with the father, and hence with traditional piety, that covers over the strangeness of Aeneas’s fabulous journey to the underworld, aided by the magic, golden bough; but it is an entirely typical shaman’s journey, involving an encounter with the absolutely strange. Nor is that journey altogether different from Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost, although Hamlet proves to be an unsuccessful shaman. That is his tragedy: he is unable to transform the world with what he has learned from the dead.

Perhaps pius is untranslatable now because the modern thoughtways are saturated in a kind of thinking that sees cleverness, ingenium, as the essence of thinking and things associated with pietas—religion, for example, or daydreaming, or meditation, or communion with one’s soul, or communion with the dead, or simply long reflection on art—as a sort of stupor from which cleverness becomes clever by separating itself. Ingenium implies not only cleverness but inborn, spontaneous talent, swift, unreflecting ability.

Where ingenium comes from within, and remains attuned only to itself, pietas is an attunement of the self to what lies absolutely without, to the strange.

Where ingenium is spontaneous and rapid, pietas is stubbornly slow. It is perhaps only in listening to music that something like the ancient pietas, an openness to the mystery, can continue in our lives uninfected by the disdain of the competently clever. For the competently clever are too busy writing, hurrying to get it all down, to consider that they might not be thinking at all, if thinking is that which begins in astonishment and wonder. To return then to the question with which I began, does the choice between the Orphic and Hermetic ideas of language get beyond the most commonplace assumptions about writing and thinking?

Cleverness, ingenium, the spontaneous invention and manipulation of things, can suppose it is capable of thinking not by any positive evidence of doing so—except evidence that is circular—but only by the negative evidence of what it places outside itself and dismisses as stupidity. Cleverness would be incapable, for example, of saying that in inquiring after thinking we acknowledge that we have not even begun to think. Thinking is understood to have nothing to do anymore, if it ever did, with balance atttained in the self through an astonished wondering at the world. Thinking is concerned rather with the invention and manipulation— that is, the technical handling—of things. Stupor is the Latin counterpart of the Greek thauma, the trancelike state of wondering astonishment in which Aristotle said philosophy

begins. As wonder and astonishment, stupor is not the antithesis of ingenium or cleverness; it is itself the origin of cleverness, although one that cleverness must continually abuse and deny if it is to sustain its narrow view of the truth as whatever works with the respect to the invention and manipulation of things. The Greeks spoke of mastering the techniques for the invention and manipulation of things technically —‘epi technei mathein ti’—and they spoke of it admiringly. But they opposed this way of learning something to a way of learning that lacks such rigour only because the learning is directed to, rather than away from, the individual, and is part of the individual’s general culture: ‘epi paideiai mathein ti.’ Yet it is this knowing something—or rather knowing many somethings—in an amateurish way that is recommended to the philosopher. The competent professional regards the possibility of thinking as being circumscribed by expertise in that professional’s field, or by analogies of that expertise in other fields; and this thinking knows itself as such by contrast with the wonderment, the stupor, that is prior to training.

Another way to say this is that thinking must be sought after not in education but in culture.

Culture has been sheltered in universities for centuries, but one must look beyond universities to find out what it is; for one can only recognise culture in universities when one has seen it outside them.

An education is the next best thing to a culture, and its usual substitute. This distinction does not separate the terms absolutely but shows how the one, education, can stand on its own while the other, culture, almost always contains education within it. Cleverness’s view of the truth is that of correctness, the adequation of data, of ‘things given,’ to a thing that is invented, a thesis, for a thesis is a thing that is ‘set up’ like an idol; it is statable in words and must be supportable by words. A thesis is a thing set apart from the self by being set up for inspection from all sides, raised up on its ped-

Giorgio Morandi

estal of words in the temple of the mind. Stupor does not have any view of the truth as a single thing, a model, or an icon. Strictly speaking, it is nothing but its own state of wonder. I am not going to persist in referring to this state of centred openness in questioning either as stupor or as piety: the obstacles thrown up by those words are insuperable. And anyhow I have a better word: attention.

The modern sense of this word is derived from Enlightenment psychology, where an idea, having been taken notice of, is registered or impressed in the mind. But its most familiar, commonsense definition will largely coincide with the one quoted in the O.E.D. from William Hamilton’s Logic (1838): ‘Attention is voluntary direction of the mind upon an object, with the intention of fully apprehending it.’ When we consider how much this definition takes for granted, however, it becomes much less clear than it may at first seem. Every important word in it raises problems. Is attention voluntary, an act of the will, or is it a releasing of the will? Does attention imply a separation of mind from object, requring the direction of one towards the other, or is it not rather a temporary loss of the sense of separation, and hence more like a circling within than a directing towards? If attention is a temporary loss of the sense of separation of mind and

object, what is the difference between intention and attention, a swelling or bending within and a swelling or bending towards? Lastly, does not the final term of the definition, apprehension, which is supposed to make everything clear, merely reinvigorate the metaphor of seizing and handling underlying all the other terms?

The metaphor of seizing and handling goes back to the Greek philosophical term for attention, prosecheia, the Latin translation of which is the term with which Hamilton’s definition concludes, ad-praehensio, a violent seizing or grasping. Characteristic uses in Latin include the apprehension of criminals, the capture of defended places, and the seizing of someone by the cloak in the street, to get his attention. Attention is in this sense movementtoward-a-seizing; and its fulfilment is in a kind of stasis—a standing still, a fixity, a condition of being grasped and rendered motionless— following this movement. Indeed it is in metaphors of standing still, of being fixed in one place, and even of making a stand in a battle, that Aristotle understands the knowledge achieved in the soul by attention. Aristotle continually activates the metaphor of standing in the word episteme ‘knowledge.’ Mental states in which we grasp the truth—conditions of standing, or arrest—follow from the movement or flow of perception, or aisthesis; they ‘come about from perception—as in a battle when a rout occurs, if one man takes a stand and then another does and then another, until a position of strength is achieved. And the soul is such as to be capable of undergoing this.’

This passage is from the Posterior Analytics. The contrast with Ovid’s Amores is instructive, if only because the poems of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria give ironically didactic instruction in erotic pursuit. Ovid’s poems are as much about ars as they are about amor, in that they undermine the assumption that all things can be achieved by technique, or science, ars being the Latin translation of techne. There can be no science of eroticism because eros is not a bounded, definable process or thing. Hence to attain the beloved involves more than attention in the familiar sense: the mind’s voluntary directing itself towards an object, with the intention of apprehending it. Erotic desire demands instead that if there is an intention to apprehend or seize it must not appear as such but must instead become almost the opposite of seizing, in a mode indicated by some other senses of the word attention: politeness, courtesy, heedful yet unobtrusive care. That is the sort of attention I would suggest is the beginning of thinking. It hangs about and is unobtrusively heedful, as lovers are; it does not try to seize on what concerns it but instead moves into a kind of nearness, submitting to the weather, the radiated pressure, of its concern; it is willing to wait (another sense of attention) without knowing what it is waiting for, except that what it waits for is a gesture; and it listens (yet another sense of attention) for the faintest call. To think is to move about patiently and unobtrusively in the presence of a concern—and to wait for a sign of recognition.

Yet it can be more dramatic than that. In a well-known episode in Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, the author tells how he had been observing through a telescope, over several days, a family of wolves that had made its den in the side of an esker. One day the wolves were not there and their observer wondered where they had gone. He then heard a sound behind him, turned, and saw them a short distance off, observing him as he was trying to observe them. The surprise he experienced is itself part of the act of attention, which extends through his considering the wolves as an object, his discovery of that ‘object’ considering him, and the heedful, unobtrusive awareness of each other—of wolves and man—that occurs over the following weeks. Attention, which is the ground of thoughtfulness, is an opening of the self in the presence of what is other than the self, so that each of these othernesses is disclosed by, and may be seen through, the rift opening between them.

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Mission(s) of Art (from page 1)

persons of fine taste and higher social rank, they should represent something more than just a civilised pleasure. There were two possibilities to find a secure place for art in eighteen century’s systems of enlightenment: a necessary, if lower level of knowledge, or the highest level of harmonic unity inaccessible to scientific clear and distinct knowledge. Following Leibniz’s ideas, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced aesthetics as the logic of lower perceptual knowledge, which could be very useful for higher conceptual discourse as well.

That was the beginning, but not enough.

Connected to the “beautiful soul” or correct morality, as in Shaftesbury, Hutchison, Diderot and others, it still could not gain higher ethical importance. Art should have a decisive role at the heart of the modernist project, or it would become an activity of no consequence. Of course it should have a moral stance, but does it have a mission? An ethics of modernity is not about moral life and the implementation of moral rules, it is about an ultimate end of the whole of world history. Such an end exceeds all moral rules and makes use of these, including otherwise immoral and evil means when necessary, as means to the highest end.

What is the highest end, though? To name and define it as a paradise on earth, utopia, freedom and liberty, unending progress towards perfection, is merely to employ different formulations for a basic progressivism which puts, with a Copernican shift, man in the central place, the place of God, at least on the mortal side of creation.

There are many reasons for the inclusion of art in the circle of those activities which have a function in human progress, but it seems that two main reasons were: the necessity to promote controlled sensuality and pleasure, and the need of cultural elites to include their civilised pleasure among respectable and highly important activities. Still, in the enlightened court of reason, art has been introduced quite humbly. Baumgarten defined poetic language as perfectly sensitive (“oratio sensitiva perfecta”), which means that it enables us to see an individual object in light of as many of its particular sides and characteristics as possible. His aesthetics, the first of its kind, was a science of inferior knowledge, but it already had greater ambitions.

Charles Batteux subsequently distinguished art and science, pleasure and knowledge in our soul: “Knowledge is a light spread throughout our soul; sentiment is a movement which agitates. The one illuminates, the other heats. The one makes us see an object, the other draws us to it or turns us from it.” Knowledge and art work hand in hand, unisono, as art is, even as a sentiment, in obedience to reason. But how to explain this pre-stabilised harmony between reason and sentiment? We should not accept a new theology of nature, of course: “But what good would it do us to know if we did not enjoy? Nature was too wise not to separate these two parts, and, in giving us the faculty of knowing, she could not refuse that of feeling—the relation of the object known with its usefulness to us—and to be drawn to it by sentiment.

It is sentiment that one calls natural taste because it is nature which has given it to us.”

Baumgarten’s aesthetics from 1735 was humble, being science of a lower knowledge, and Batteux’s art of the beautiful went cautiously around hand in hand with science.

While expected to behave according to moral principles, and thus express the difference between civilised man’s pleasures and those of vulgar multitude, aesthetics did not possess autonomous ethical importance. Nowadays, we suspect them both to have some hidden ambitions, but on the court of the highest being of reason one does not show one’s ambitions too openly and too early. Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller revealed these ambitions.

The motive for Kant’s chef-de-oeuvre consisted of three critiques quite similar in motive to Descartes’s radical methodical scepticism. As Descartes had to build his case for the ability of reason to reach reliable truth, fighting sceptics and relativists who ceased to trust the human faculties, Kant had to support enlightenment’s project with solid foundations

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of radical criticism. But Descartes’s reason functioned in a dark room only, with “Do not disturb!” hanged on the doorknob. It’s only job was to find the certainty of truth. The Enlightenment called upon all previous beliefs to defend successfully their truth in front of the tribunal of reason, or step away forever, and demanded that all ways of human life have to change if they are not founded upon reason. It was a movement which disturbed all and everybody, and demanded to ascend the throne, so it had to be asked about its genealogy, prerogatives and reach. That was Kant’s work.

Within certain limits, Kant proved that men are capable of finding truth, and that they are able to follow the highest good of all mankind.

But are we entitled to hope for anything better, perhaps even some kind of perfect world: a heaven-on-earth?

This is what the Critique of Judgement is an argument of and for: the possibility of perfecting humanity, which obliges us to follow the enlightened way of progress. Are we capable of acting in such a way that our actions are consequences of our nature as it is, and at the

By creating an artwork, he gives rules to art as such, without any previous concept that could be learned or imitated, and even his own example should not be imitated—it can only be followed.

The most important difference between natural and artistic beauty is that “for estimating beautiful objects, as such, what is required is taste; but for fine art, i.e., the production of such objects, one needs genius.” The beauty of nature is a beautiful thing, the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing. To estimate a natural beauty, I do not need any previous concept of the finality or end of such a material thing, as we know from the Analytics of Beauty. To estimate an artwork, i.e. a beautiful representation of a thing which in itself does not need to be beautiful, “always presupposes an end in the cause (and its causality).”

Of course, this end is not any kind of common utility which is just a surrogate of finality; it is “the agreement of the manifold in a thing with an inner character belonging to it,” i.e.—perfection. Perfection, as genius, has to be explained on the basis of theology and phi-

Immanuel Kant

same time aimed towards the highest end? In this way the Biblical story became a Faustian story: we lost our place in Paradise in order to be thrown into this world, and to find out that this world of punishment can be developed into Paradise itself, if we use our powers rightly.

To deserve redemption in another world, we have to built Paradise here and now with our own hands and from those natural elements which are already here and handy. Is this possible? For such an end, it is not enough to be clever and to be good. To develop a perfect world out of this one, and perfect humanity out of its present conditions, we have to be capable of creation. The artistic field would seem to give proof of such ability, and aesthetics, as the philosophy of art, is more or less a project devoted to it.

This ability is called genius, a descendant of Baumgarten’s poet-creator (factor sive creator). Genius is a talent for producing something for which no definite rule can be given, so that its product, an artwork, shines with “the exemplary originality of the natural endowments of an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.” We are influenced too much by the romantic idea of genius, and tend to see the germ of it in Kant, but his genius is still more akin to the God of theology.

losophy again; it is something divine in creation, and a sign of Leibinz’s pre-stabilised harmony. Dealing with human genius, with a God-like creature but not with God, this perfection found by genius in artworks does not belong to theology. It belongs to teleology, a discipline of philosophy which questions the ends and finality of human existence: not the ontological basics of why there is something instead of nothing, but the existential question of why we are born and who we are and what we are born for. We may judge natural beauty as an artistic one, but this requires that it “is art, though superhuman art,” i.e. an artwork created by Nature, or God. To judge nature, human nature included, as art, presupposes a teleological judgement: “the teleological judgement serves as a basis and condition of the aesthetic.” We judge the finality, and not causality of nature, if we judge its creations as artworks; in artworks made and estimated by human genius, therefore, their perfection is not a sign of the creator’s skill only, it is a sign of an overall and universal human finality. In an aesthetical sense, spirit (Geist) is what animates soul (Seele) with finality. Animated with finality, and not causality, the soul is in play. “Now my proposition is,” says Kant, “that this principle is nothing

else than the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas,” which is the imagination, the productive faculty of cognition. The material for imagination “can be borrowed by us from nature in accordance with that law, but be worked up by us into something else—namely, what surpasses nature.”

Genius, then, is a talent for creating and estimating arts in a way that presupposes a definite concept of the product: not of its causality or utility, which we would usually expect as an answer to the question “What is this good for?” The concept required in genius is a concept of an end, of the finality of artwork. To give imagination some restrictions in its flying freedom, genius requires taste “so that it may preserve its character of finality.” This is a categorical imperative of art and genius: “It introduces a clearness and order into the plenitude of thought, and in so doing gives stability to the ideas, and qualifies them at once for permanent and universal approval, for being followed by others, and for a continually progressive culture.”

The genius of enlightenment, quite different from romantic genius, calls upon everyone of us to follow a way of unending progress of culture as our common human end and destiny: to create perfection from the material provided by nature. The connection between the two parts of Kant’s third critique is crucial for understanding the purpose of “judgement” and “completeness” within his criticism. Pure reason is incomplete without the possibility of recognising the presence of causal relations in judgements which put knowledge and concreteness into a relation with one another. Practical reason is abstract and incomplete without connection to any possible act that might represent the highest possible end of human (historical) existence. In §83, we can read an example of how pure reason and moral imperative can find a necessary link between each other on the grounds of judgement, which subsumes the particular under the universal in a way that affects a teleological system that makes the idea of an ultimate finality within nature possible.

As man is the highest purpose of nature, however, we have to look for this final end in human being alone. There are two possible final causes of human existence, the first, happiness, being the purpose given by nature itself, and the second, culture, belonging to man as master of nature. But happiness cannot be the right way, because we are unable to reach it, as our desire never ceases to demand new and greater pleasures. So, culture, understood as human possibility (to establish its own ends by itself for itself, using nature as a means), presents itself as the only possible final cause.

To follow this way, man has to free himself from the despotism of desire. This can only happen in civil society. Kant’s, the Enlightenment’s, and modernity’s Protestant ethics, even pietism, are clearly visible here. We are not born to enjoy life. We are born to fulfil our duty, which is to act as a means for creating a possible perfection. Civilisation, fine arts and sciences included, is not something directly good according to a moral cause, but it helps to extend the human capacity to undermine the influence of desire. Civilisation means submitting oneself to this highest cause.

Friedrich Schiller, who did not keep from the addressee of his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) that “the assertions which follow rest chiefly upon Kantian principles,” went well beyond Kant, insisting on the unique importance of aesthetic education, and on the inevitable need for happiness as a basis for culture. We know about the three progressive stages of the development of the human race according to Enlightenment standards of the 18th century: savagery, barbarity and civilisation. What is interesting is Schillers definition of these stages: “Now, man can be opposed to himself in a twofold manner: either as a savage, when his feelings rule over his principles; or as a barbarian, when his principles destroy his feelings.” Not only might this make Kant a barbarian; Schiller claims that the lower classes of a newly emerging society based upon money and interest are savages, while the higher classes, the new elites of this society, are barbarians. You cannot expect a balanced society of free men where they are either servants to desire or adherents of pure

principles. There should be pleasure in acting in accordance with moral right, and there should be principle in sensuous pleasure. The only power capable of bringing them both together is aesthetic pleasure, and what modern society needs for to secure the balancing of human powers, without the risk of destroying everything, is—aesthetic education: “the most pressing need of the present time is to educate the sensibility, because it is the means, not only to render efficacious in practice the improvement of ideas, but to call this improvement into existence.”

Schiller is proposing what Kant’s pure duty (Pflicht) could not allow, namely, that pleasure and duty should go hand in hand, and that happiness and culture should be the same thing.

This “same thing” is beauty and is embodied in art. Art is the instrument for the improvement of human existence. The improvement of human existence follows: “The way to divinity—if the word ‘way’ can be applied to what never leads to its end,” so that human personality is “the pure virtuality of a possible infinite manifestation,” and it “must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him.”

Without aesthetic education the idea of humanity cannot develop. “‘Accordingly, as soon as reason issues the mandate, ‘a humanity shall exist,’ it proclaims at the same time the law, ‘there shall be beauty.’” The realm of the aesthetic, once again, helps to bridge the fundamental duality between the rational and the sensual, cultivating the sensual and embodying the rational. “The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of thought and of will can be affected only by the intermediary state of aesthetic liberty … In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being out of a sensuous man than by making him first aesthetic.” The aesthetic is the only way to make the ethical real: “The dynamic state can only make society simply possible by subduing nature through nature; the moral (ethical) state can only make it morally necessary by submitting the will of the individual to the general will. The aesthetic state can alone make it real, because it carries out the will of all through the nature of the individual.”

Schiller did not want to subdue man to infinite progress, and to moral duty, just for the sake of divine perfection, because such a construct cannot work in practice. Instead, he proposed beauty as an intermediary which makes duty pleasurable, and turns the culture of infinite progress into a culture of unending happiness. The fragmented modern subject, torn between the binarities and dualities of modernity, should find its happiness and balance in a progressive state of culturised happiness, happily playing in culture.

The final result of the Enlightenment within the sphere of ethics is a duality that cannot be bridged by reason alone, and the mission of aesthetics and art is to build these bridges in order to pacify human sensuality and transport the powers of human desire to sublime ends.

Without this ultimate finality of realised happiness and culture, without such divine and infinite ends, ethical strategies and moral structures remain merely a system of control over the individual, and without a higher mission, the ethical purpose of art gets lost in aesthetic repression over the sensual. Whenever this historical activity directed at the perfection of humanity is in doubt and in crisis, the whole construction breaks. This has happened quite often, but the mission of the aesthetic and of art has not been dismissed. Rather, it turns from being a supportive notion of unending progress, to a creative criticism of actual human conditions.

This duality of mission is already present in Schiller’s propositions, and that is how we can understand (as Terry Eagleton in The Ideology of the Aesthetic argues) that “Schiller’s aesthetic thought provides some of the vital constituents of a new theory of bourgeois hegemony; but it also protests with magnificent passion against the spiritual devastation which that emergent social order is wreaking …” The problem with such a critique of modernity, capitalism or bourgeois society, is that it still persists in art’s mission and the mission of the aesthetic of progress, and thus insists on the Enlightenment principles of Western European modernity and its destructive as much as constructive and creative global function.

The first instance of such criticism, beside the well known philosophical discourses of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and especially Nietzsche, is the relation of art to industry and its products. The impact of industry goes well beyond cheap and easily accessible commodities and reaches the realm of fragmented modern life in the factory as a working place, and in the metropolis as a living place. Consequently Enlightenment ideologies were attacked and set aside by the so-called Romantics. Romanticism was not a unique style. It was divided politically, and not just artistically or aesthetically, between conservative, liberal-progressive, and black romanticism. Conservative romanticism proposed a return to a type of premodernism as a remedy for modernity’s troubles, or, at least, represented pre-modern ideals and institutions as humanity’s lost virginity.

Liberal and progressive romanticism defended revolutionary political and cultural ideas, with an accent on nationalist and bourgeois values. Black romanticism belonged to radical bohemic circles, and was aimed against both pre-modern and modern society, and

tion within an emerging global market, with France close behind, ought to have brought welfare for all, as Adam Smith (more) and David Ricardo (less) optimistically expected.

Productive results and wealth, if compared with those before the industrial revolution, were enormous, but before 1848 this new giant productive force had to face the first of many periodical crises, arising from the fact that the newest and most numerous class of society, the industrial working class, lived in such desperate conditions that there was increasing nostalgia for the good old feudal times of guilds and serfdom.

Enlightened visions, and the new bourgeois reality, conflicted with one another, and it was the object of aesthetic criticism to affect a resolution of sorts. Many of the proposed solutions to this problem criticised enlightenment utopianism in the name of a reality which has to be accepted as it is. Others criticised the idea of such a reality, stressing that it represents just a partial and contradictory step towards the final end of humanity. And there were those of a third kind who criticised all ends and all

Friedrich Schiller

against bourgeois life-style.

European societies, as Pierre Francastel said, marked “the debut of the modern world” around the 1850s, when awareness that life will never be the same again installed the machine as the symbol of a condition of “novelty” which is here to stay. Two revolutionary novelties were accepted at a time when they were both already in trouble: political and industrial revolution. The first is usually treated in terms of the French revolution, but it actual impetus came from the civil war in England and its outcomes, and subsequently continued with the American and French revolutions and achieved its apotheosis with the “springtime of nations” in 1848, when more or less the whole European continent was on fire.

That the result of the most liberal of all liberal revolutions was the dictatorship of Napoleon III, was a scandal of its own, while the results of so many national liberal revolutions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland and elsewhere were so many defeats. The industrial revolution which positioned Great Britain as the dominant force of modernisa-

possible realities altogether, demanding that humanity, by means of a new revolution or some other more sophisticated means, throw out the secular religion of progress together with the false activisms and cynical claims upon “reality”: under the umbrella of disillusionment with progress and reality they preached an autonomous illusory world of spirituality, free of all inauthentic ends and means.

It was not a time of total disillusionment, though. There were new fascinations, typical amongst them being a fascination with nation, and a fascination with the machine. That nation is an authentic framework of culture and civilisation is an idea already present in the Enlightenment, and German classical philosophy is the German national(ist) philosophy of enlightenment. The subsequent view of modernity strengthened and broadened this nationalist charge to such an extent that the nineteenth century, sometimes called the century of nationalisms, often subordinated general enlightened and liberal ideas to nationalist ends. Nation-building processes brought culture, with language and arts, into the centre of

modernisation. Nation became, and today still is, an end in itself. On the other hand, it seems that the cult of reason, which failed so absurdly during the Jacobean phase of the French revolution, finally found its golden calf: the Machine.

After 1850, the machine began to symbolise the ultimate power of man and humanity, and the conclusive proof of humanity’s ability to achieve a state of perfection. It was promoted as a model for the dynamic, functional structure and mobility of the individual and of society as a whole. Both nation and machine as modern idols had great impact on art and aesthetics. To build and promote nationhood and its cultural and political institutions, became the ethical duty and raison d’ętre of artists and art. To create and promote art and fulfil its mission under the conditions produced by the machine and its products, became the central problem of art.

The outcome of political and industrial revolutions was agonistic and antagonistic. So were the new fascinations of modernity, nation and machine. How to pacify the antagonisms of modernity? The nineteenth century was a century of possible and impossible, reasonable and irrational, utopian and distopian, enthusiastic and depressive proposals, visions and ideologies. Many of them included art and its mission, and many artists believed art to be the unique and universal redeemer and pacifier of the human race anyway. “The debut of the modern world,” if we may repeat Francastel’s expression for the period after 1850, caused at least as much hissing and booing, as it did applauding.

The first international exhibition of industry and industrial products organised in London in 1851 is the crucial event which promoted these fascinations in a public spectacle. It attracted visitors in thousands and tens of thousands, from all parts of Europe, and became the first major tourist event in history. As an answer to the continental revolutions of 1848, it was initiated to demonstrate the achievements of the British economic and political system.

It aimed to exhibit the grandeur of the British nation and its position as the first-comer of modernity. The machine and its mass products were exhibited for the first time not just within a framework of science and engineering: they were put on display as something parallel and akin to artworks, to be admired as products of human skill with artistic and aesthetic, not just utilitarian, value.

The exhibition stimulated all kinds of discussions and disputes about the character of the times, about the future of humanity, about culture and civilisation, about competition between nations and their modernisation processes, and about art and industry, or the relationship between artwork and manufacture.

The great historical mission of humanity, still understood in terms of mankind only, was handed over from scientists, philosophers and artists, to engineers and industrialists. Or was it? “Here again, the rivalry between France and England takes centre stage,” argues Francastel, and states that “a new ideology developed, giving rise to the ideas of the mechanisation of the modern world and the conflict between art and industry.” Previously, art was required to prove itself to be reasonable and progressive, now, it had to add that it can be as productive and efficient, and at least as attractive and useful, as engineering and machinary.

Francastel records three kinds of response to this new relation: Laborde’s, Cole’s and Ruskin’s.

Comte de Laborde was a member of the French delegation to the London Exhibition, and provided a report in a tone of aristocratically inspired liberalism. From his point of view, industrial production was a necessary foundation of modernity, but it was deprived of spirit and higher purpose. These could be found in aristocratic tradition which, if embraced by a new ruling class, might reconcile “art, the ideal, and religion” with industry, in a French national framework. He “celebrated the final union between arts and industry in the form of a quasi-mystical holy marriage of the new divinity,” expressing the will to build a new spiritual hegemony by strengthening the ties between culture and civilisation, vulgarity and aristocracy, spirit and carnality, art and industry, with the intention of creating a new

7

teleology for modern social structures and their discontents. This kind of teleology was one of the starting points for the ideology of artistic autonomy and pure art. In a utilitarian, industrial world, art, being good for nothing of interest, symbolised higher and ultimate ends inaccessible to the industrial mind, while artwork, based on its definition in the eighteenth century as something different from scientific truth and useful products, became a sign of the existence of a sacred world beyond terrestrial interests. In the view of those worldly utilitarian interests which had created machinist efficiency and promoted human selfishness, art’s mission was to be a sentinel and a guardian of eternal ends which justify these utilitarian means, and secure the privileged hegemonic position of aristocratic elites in culture.

Henry Cole was the organiser of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and a pioneering spirit of the new age. He believed that traditional principles of taste would soon be abolished. He “formulated the fundamental principles of functionalism.” This relativisation of the supposedly eternal foundations of Western aesthetic values and models lead him to formulate new artistic principles of creative originality, unbounded by any tradition and “expressing a new, universal mastery of action.” Being ahead of his time, he embraced Far Eastern arts and aesthetics, and predicted that America, free of traditional European dogmas, was on its way to overtaking Europe both in industry and in the arts. What he had in mind was different from Laborde’s conclusions, namely, that the progressive and irreversible industrialisation of all nations, together with outburst of new, universal and modern artistic spirit, would open radically novel perspectives of culture.

The third author presented by Francastel, John Ruskin, is well known. If there ever was one, he was an aesthete by definition. His influence and fame largely surpassed those of Laborde and Cole, perhaps being comparable to the later fame and influence of William Morris and Count Piotr Kropotkin only. As Matthew Arnold, who stated that in secular culture art will become a new religion, Ruskin himself professed a religion of Beauty and the mysterious cult of Art. This mystery had its source in the unity of nature and culture, body and soul, the spirituality and carnality of the human being, and enters art so that its greatness “is not a teachable nor gainable thing, but the expression of a mind of a God-made great man …” Painting, or any other work of great art, is great for its difference from reality, without denying its mimetic character, and this difference is “the expression of the power and intelligence of a companionable human soul,” but in a way that enables us to “recognise a supernatural operation, and perceive, not merely the landscape or incident as in a mirror; but, besides, the presence of what, after all, may perhaps be the most wonderful piece of divine work in the whole matter—the great human spirit through which it is manifested to us.”

In Ruskin’s interpretation, the mission of art is not just in its functional part within the broader context of progress and perfection of humanity: art is the truth, the spirit and the beauty of progress and perfection embodied in artworks. To find out, and Ruskin did find out, that all the highest achievements of human spirit and divinity are directly connected with the hell in which the working majority of humanity has to live their lives, is something of a terrible scandal. With the same noble insistence, John Ruskin consequently devoted himself to social criticism: we might comment that he did so for art’s sake as well, to defend its sublimity against wrongdoings and the troubles of the world. His own career, from artistic to social criticism, reveals both sides of his religion of artistic autonomy: art as something divine in humanity is put on such a lofty pedestal that the distance between its high position and the reality of life becomes unbearable.

At first sight contradictory, such an unearthly cult of art may be at the same time a source of aristocratic hegemony of pure taste, and of radical protest against all kinds of hegemony and oppression. In this version, the ethical function of beauty and of art is to demonstrate the highest capacities of humanity, and to denounce human reality for the desperate disparity between itself and its ideal image.

Rivalry for the position of leadership in cul-

8

tural and civilisational progress between England and France demanded that France had to formulate an answer. From the French point of view it had to be the staging of a universal exhibition, not merely an industrial one, in order to demonstrate the universal spiritual prestige of culture against the vulgar materialism of industrial civilisation. As with its British predecessor, the exhibition of 1855 in Paris had a direct political objective as well: the dictatorial regime of Napoleon III yearned for international recognition. Of course, artistic exhibitions and other events of the cultural programme here, in Paris, had to accompany a spectacular show of science and industry. It was part of French and Continental ideology.

This made the tension between the arts and machinisation even more visible, especially because in France lartpourlartisme, as the continental version of an artistic religion, was a recognisable and established stream, with radical criticism of all possible non-artistic ethical ends, or external moral obligations of art.

Théophile Gautier’s Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin from 1835 is like a sign-post on a crossroad where the enlightenment embrace of all human activities relaxed and gave way to total differentiation between art and all other human activities. The absolute sovereignty of

er purposes that an artist and his or her public can embrace which would give broader meaning to their sensual and/or spiritual expression and experience.

At the same time and for the same occasion, Maxime du Camp promoted a quite different idea of modern art. Considering art to have been in crisis, his proposals for a remedy demanded that the arts accept a new idea of civilisation. Painters should turn to the modern city and modern industry, and discover the cathedrals of modernity in railway stations, industrial halls and other modern surroundings. All investments in such systems and buildings should equally involve the arts. Industry with its machines, the marketplace with its mass products, railways with their speed and symbolic networks, the modern city with its complex life—these were the novel and necessary surroundings that called for an artistic mission to register what amounted to a new way of life, not only to beautify these new spaces, but to give an aesthetic touch to new products.

Art, formerly the servant of religious cults, then of secular cults, now demanded from its admirers pure and concentrated devotion without any external reasons, interests or ends beside art as such, and its aesthetic power and value. This prevailing accent was not power-

Paxton’s Crystal Palace, during the Great Exhibition in London, 1851

art was announced, and all kinds of morality had to leave this new state of pure form immediately, as foreign and hostile subversive elements. Gautier did not spare religious moralists, bourgeois lovers of humanity, industrial utilitarianists nor socialists with their utopias: they were all expelled from the sacred land where the church of holy art cannot tolerate any other cults practicing their idolatry. Gautier preached an ‘ethic cleansing’ of art with full voice and fervour.

It is no surprise then that the exhibition of 1855 stimulated diametrically opposed reactions. Charles Baudelaire, a poet who in his “Salon de 1846” glorified Delacroix’s paintings, comparing them to well oiled machines, now stood up not only against machines but against rational progress as well, and spoke in favour of art as something magical. There is no history, if by history we have in mind unending progress, and its guaranteed future continuity. To add insult to injury, he claimed that technical novelties of science and industry cannot be taken as signs of progress anyway. Even with art, confronted with its highest points in different nations, we can conclude that the greatest achievements tend to migrate from one nation to another, and that art within a nation has its cyclical life of birth, flourishing and decline. Gauthier established an impassable borderline between art and ethics on one side, and utility and morality on the other. Baudelaire insisted that on this or that side, there is no progress at all. This is more than just a form of cultural pessimism. It represents an ethic of artistic survival without the placebo of grand narratives viz. progressive history, divine humanity, or any other sublime end. Art for art’s sake must be taken literally: there are no high-

ful enough to assure common and united positions of artistic ideology. We can nevertheless reduce many of the different tendencies in art to one or more of the positions outlined above viz. Laborde, Cole, Ruskin, Morris, Gautier, Baudelaire, du Camp and others who discussed the fate and purpose of artistic culture within the new industrial civilisation. With their criticism of progress, art is presented as something existing alongside but nevertheless distinct in many cases from developments in science, engineering, industry, politics, or morals.

These ideas, even when they deny any link between art with morality, progress, production, politics etc., still remain typically modernist ideologies, i.e., missionary, progressive, productive and politically reformist, or even radical and revolutionary. They criticise, but they do not step outside, as Oswald Spengler would say, the bounds of the Faustian project of Western modernity. Nevertheless, there remain at least three distinct moments within this critique: that of aristocracy of the spirit which puts art on a pedestal for the purpose of distinguishing elitist, progressive, civilised ways of life from the ordinary democratic and industrial vulgarity; that of a necessary marriage between art and industry which aims at aestheticising everyday life by the means of beautified industrial products and by means of a culturisation of the working class (as well as all the other “savages” and “barbarians” of the world); and that of the radical art-for-art’s sake which denies moral or any other criteria for art, putting in its place a quasi-religion of art, art being the only terrestrial activity that belongs to some higher or future order.

In all of these, art was seen as a remedy for the troubles of modern society; in its most rad-

ical formulations, art itself assumed the position of reason, because rationality was found to be too weak to sustain the further progress of civilisation; while in its most revolutionary formulations, art became the negation of the existing idea of civilisation, its negative counter-part and its accusing mirror, demanding that in the name of artistic beauty and following the criteria of aesthetic judgement this new industrial and democratic word be destroyed. In all three versions, if compared with the ideas of the Enlightenment, the world as human construct and the world as history of human progress had fallen apart, and there was no system of universal values for which the Enlightenment project could still vouch and guarantee.

In turn, the various avant-gardes attacked the isolation of art from life. They developed a new ethics of artistic production: that its artistic activity may be seen as anti-artistic, and its ethical position as anti-ethical and especially immoral, cannot change this fact. In its most radical appearances, the avant-garde constituted a universal and total rejection of all traditional values and institutions—but again in the name of progress, perhaps in the name of progress as final destruction of all previous Western culture and civilisation (which were diagnosed as decadent). But this rejection, radical or more moderate, offered at least three kinds of ethical attitude: utopia, optimal projection, and ironical negativity. All three have in common a kind of tension.

Renato Poggioli, the early theoretician of avant-garde art, speaks about four characteristics: activism, antagonism, nihilism and agonism, and all four testify to some kind of tension which has to be relieved. Peter Bürger defines his historical avant-garde as a movement that sought to bring art back into life, contrary to aestheticism which incarcerated art on the other side of the process of life. Boris Groys speaks of a “will to power” which connects political and artistic avant-gardes in a form of totalitarianism.

This tension which dictates that art has to act and to produce something beyond artwork and its experience, is the tension of a decline and decadence: all avant-gardisms, and not just Futurism, stood up against passatismo, and fought for futurismo. They wanted to save the artistic mission of progress from both the institutionalisation of art and aesthetic seclusion from life, and they attacked life itself wherever it was seen to embrace unprogressive attitudes. These avant-gardes constituted the forefront of a movement insofar as they planned to bring about a re-juvenation of the ethics of progressivism. The utopian version of this “universal futurism” is in truth totalitarian because it wants to create new life, new human being, new nation, and new art from a zero point. To clear the way for that cause, it proclaims destruction of all tradition; it believes in the artistic capacity to bring about what is necessary to build a new utopian world.

What we call utopian projection, following Aleksandar Flaker’s characterisation of the avant-garde, is not an ideal topos of future life, rather it is a movement which succeeded in making the best choice between possible ways out of the previous (present) state of affairs.

In his libretto for the opera Victory over the Sun, Alexei J. Kruchonich begins its first act with the verse “All is well which begins well,” favouring the idea of a good start to a pre-supposed final triumph. These two versions are not far apart, but they lead to very different artistic ethics: the first one always exploiting the present reality as material for constructing a final end; and the second one exploiting the structure of “progress” less from any orientation towards an end than from a gratuitous pursuit of novelty. With the first, redemption awaits at the end of a process of struggle, with the second, redemption gives way to movement and the deferral of any end-structure.

The third element of avant-garde ethics is, perhaps, the most devoted to gratuitousness of all, and puts “pleasure” above all other possible ends. To combat the decay, decline and decadence of rational civilisation by means of sensuality; to confront the progressive mission of culture with vulgar plebeian mockery; to spit in the face of aesthetic elitism: all of that might not bring renewal of hope and faith in modernism back to life again, but it is perhaps

the most properly artistic reaction. And this kind of avant-garde art, in love at the time with popular entertainment, with the circus, with Charlie Chaplin and vaudeville, was not just an ironisation of past ideologies and institutions. It contained a destructive humour aimed at the erstwhile revolutionary movements of fascism, nazism and communism, and also constituted an ironisation of (anti)artistic messianism itself. Georg Grosz, for instance, was one of the first Western artists to visit the USSR after the revolution and Mehring asked him mockingly after his return: “What was it like over there, Böff? Did you see him, the old fellow in the Kremlin?” Grosz growled: “There was once a chemist in Stolp, in East Pomerania, his name was Voeltzke. Neat little goatee beard, frock-coat, upright bearing, a real honest bourgeois, like this… ! He had a cure for everything: ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’ve got a weak feeling in the pit of my stomach.’

‘Effervescent powder. Next?’

‘I am desperately in love with Liberty!’

‘Blue packet: one dessertspoonful before retiring. And you?’

‘I’ve got a funny rash on my chest.’

‘The syphilis, you swine. Red capsules.’

Three patent medicines for everything. Lenin? A little chemist.’”

This kind of avant-gardism was perhaps most outspokenly and outstandingly developed in Prague, with a multisensual poetism which later became Surrealism of the Czech kind. At first impression quite harmless, it was ethically the most radical of all. It ceased to nourish any form of progressive messianism in art, and because of its inherent irony, cynicism and laughter could not embrace any vision nor belong to any ideology for long. With Dada, ironic laughter was inaugurated as a weapon, with the Russian avant-garde, it was the consolation of the final phase, with the Czechs, it was the prevailing tone. This form of plebeian expression, always present but always despised because of its roughness and because of its sensuality, has an ethics of its own. But because of its lack of sublime transcendent ends, this form of “aesthetic pleasure” is still not something exclusively sensual.

In artistic sensuality, you get what you never get in life: not just pleasure but satisfaction as well. Satisfaction may mean that Your good always gets rewarded and Your evil always gets punished, or, it may mean that the structure of this world where high standards of morality go hand in hand with hegemonic power, gets exposed in fiction, so that the triumph, finally, belongs to those who laugh last, and not to those who always win in practice. The avantgarde adored Charlie Chaplin because it needed this kind of ethics: the sublime moral enthusiasm of plebeians, ordinary people, the perennial losers of history. How to survive progress and its missionaries? Expose them to public laughter, by the most radical means, as Oberdada Baader, the first ought-to-be president of the German Republic and the first President of the Globe, did. This ethics of total immorality, this stepping out of the sacred circle of polite civility, is what the Russian Futurist slogan “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was designed to express.

Throughout modernity, as we have seen, there have been two patterns of establishing art’s ethics as proposed guideline for its moral mission. The first one is involved with modernist progressivism. It starts from art’s more humble involvement, develops through a more sublime ideology of historical progressivism, and arrives at an autonomous position which puts art in place of religion, and which claims utopian projection as the remedy for the decadence of Western civilisation. The second commences with a scepticism about this grand narrative of modernity from the very beginning, and first emerged at the beginning of 19th century, as part of romanticism and lartpourlartisme, culminating in the recent vogue of post-modernist ideologies. This is an ethics of artistic non-involvement in history. History is a project which is seen as necessarily failing, with or without the involvement of art. t the same time, art must remain on the side of a critique of progress, on the side of those who always lose in history and suffer from its violent promotion of ultimate causes. This kind

of ethics of art, if and when developed to its consequences, denies any linear model of history. That is why it brings up, against the idea of ultimate ends, an counter-image of the end of ideology, history, science, and art as well. It may be nostalgic and even pessimistically inclined towards decadent sophisticated enjoyment, or plebeian and even popular humour, irony, laughter and even cynicism.

At the beginning of the third millennium, art is seen to be fed up with the ethics of unending progress and its future perspectives. It has been said that the image of a progressive history of mankind towards perfection, assuming for art a more or less central role, is merely a wishful construct. But the cyclical model of history, with its fatal ups and downs, time and time again repeating itself from one culture to another, and its linear representation along the lines of “Nothing ever happens, everything is always the same,” are nevertheless constructions of the same kind. As with everything else, “art” can make a choice as to which model of history to embrace, and define its part in it. On the other side of all ideological constructions, there is always a need to take a position. After three hundred years of Western modernity, with its violent progressivism, with globalisation as the dubiously vic-

Hombre

(from page 1)

throws himself into … into what?

He has even more names for himself. His articles in Libre Revue he signs Félix Fénéon; by, escorting perfumed ladies to a dance upstairs, but he can hardly hear the dance’s music for the din of the street swarming with cabs and people, the cries of program hawkers on the steps of a nearby theatre. Two pimps wander by: “She made ten francs pal.” F.F. pays the barmaid and drifts out onto the boulevard, drifts past prostitutes and shop windows, more and more pedestrians, alleyways incessantly vomiting and devouring people. Covered in a warm green absinthe cloak, F.F. feels contented, in his element. His patent leather shoe-soles sand and tap the cobblestones.

He boards an omnibus and rides up to Montmartre, past the half-completed Moulin Rouge, flags flying high above the wooden scaffolding. Outside the Cabaret Chat Noir a slim woman standing on a platform in black leggings plays a trombone; behind her the Cabaret’s doorman calls out to passing gentlemen. He nods at F.F., who touches the rim of his top hat in return.

Inside the Cabaret smoke curls around the flowers on the wall and around the mingling

Exploding from a pinpoint on the upper left come orbital whirls of burgundy and convoluted arabesques of gold on violet. Yellow stars cascade across a blue strip that darkens as it moves out from the centre; beside it rises a light red streak studded with petals, while planets dance around a wave of yellow.

Signac is putting into practice Henry’s Theory of Colours and the Nervous System. On the floor beside the easel lies a list of formulae: 50 carmine violet + 50 Prussian blue = 47 cv + 4 black (pigments) (light)

“… isolated on the canvas recombine … isolated colours recom- No, this is it: Colours, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina. Colours, isolated on the canvas, recombine on the retina.” Signac intones it every two minutes, but it slips away each time. “Isolated canvases …”

The title of the painting is: Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Measures and Angles, Tones and Hues, the Portrait of M. F.F. in 1890. “I know it’s long; I’ll write it small,” says Signac. F.F. stands in profile in the foreground, staring out beyond the frame, his goatee tickling a planet. He holds his cane and top hat in his left hand, the hat turned upwards like a conjuror’s, the cane a magic wand; in his right hand, pinched between the thumb and forefinger, he holds a cyclamen, its petals waving like an octopus’ tentacles. “… coloured retinas—no: isolated—hell and damnation! We’ll take a break now Fénéon.

You must be tired. Hey Félix! You can put your arm down now.”

“Oh!” says F.F. “I was thinking of something else.” _______

It’s February, 1894. F.F. is sitting in the office of Zo d’Axa’s L’Endehors, a dingy little basement where anarchists come to practice fencing. He’s finishing an entry for his Symbolist Directory: Degas,

he writes, Paul Signac, Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon, 1890

torious outcome of such progressivism, and with no certainty as to what all this is good for, what kind of ethics is emerging in art today?

The usual historical activism, founded on an ethics of the necessary part of art in progress, is still here, sometimes as criticism of progress after avant-garde manner, and sometimes as an affirmation of this or that form of social hegemony. But, in spite of the predictions of radical modernism and the avant-garde, the eternal human values of art which are independent of any historical turn are making a resurgence in current forms of aesthetic ideology.

This should not be a surprise. What is new is that this eternity has more to do with preserving a confabulated past than with progressing towards a utopian future. “Eternal values of art,” in this or that formulation, are becoming part of those “traditions” which seem increasingly immune to critique, and which increasingly situate “post-modernism,” among other things, as reactionary and neo-conservative.

While this can be useful in combating an increased institutionalisation of avant-gardist discourse, it does so merely against the simulation of risk, insecurity and chaos (the paradoxical tendency, in other words, of neo-conservativism towards the critical and aesthetic strategies of post-modernism). Art, in this perspective, is the last resort of those values which are seen, from one point of view or another, as having to be “sustained” in spite of all developments and eventualities.

Degas: a thigh, a flower, a chignon, ballerinas convoluted in the flurry of the tutu

arms and collars of the spectators. A dancer in a light-green dress holds her right foot in her left hand level with her head; the faces of the players in the pits are turned up towards her skirts, her legs.

“It’s Uncle Sam! Hey Fénéon!” Maurin weaves towards him, flanked by a tall woman with brown hair. “You got the review of the Independents show?”

F.F. draws from his right suit pocket a shoemaker’s bill. He dips his hand again and pulls out a sheet of War Office paper. Maurin yanks it open; he’s drunk. “‘… whines and stammerings of the bourgeois gents in front of Seurat’s industrial riverscapes sound like a chamberpot under a sick man’s arse.’ Ha ha! A chamberpot beneath a sick man’s arse! You’re a devil Félix! He’s a devil Marie! A chamberpot! Ah! Fénéon, I’d like to introduce you to Marie-Félicie Jacquin.”

F.F. bows. “My mother’s maiden name.”

“You’re also from Valle d’Aosta?” asks Marie-Félicie.

“From Burgundy.” A turbaned Moor is banging a set of drums at the back of the stage; the diamonds around the dancer’s neck are flashing in the artificial light.

“We’re both Celts, then, Monsieur Fénéon.”

The words and rhythms fall into place around the clash and twang of swords.

It’s dawn when F.F. leaves the flat above Marie-Félicie’s laundry shop. He wanders past closed bookstalls on the Quai Malaquais and, finding an open café at Les Halles, sits and watches farm wagons unloading. Eventually he buys a dozen irises for his mother and walks home.

After Vaillant’s execution the net comes down.

Zo d’Axa flees to London. F.F. escapes the first wave of mass arrests but notices that two men in bowler hats are following him. They make no secret of it, shadowing him in cafés, on the omnibuses, in the street—but not, being good Christian, family men, on Sundays.

a boozer’s face

‘nose’ would be better— a boozer’s nose, the hand of a milliner amidst a fluttering of feathers and ribbons. The expression of Modernity. The tricks of

Zo d’Axa runs in red-faced pushing back the blades. “The Deputy Chamber Fénéon! Forty-seven politicians maimed!” He throws a newspaper across the table.

It seems that a man named Vaillant has thrown a bomb into the crowded parliament building—and this not more than a month after Ravachol’s bombing of the Advocate General’s home. Lying side by side, the papers on the table merge together: … this outrageous act of … ballerinas convoluted in the flurry of … the expression of … actions of political desperadoes who prey on innocent … appalling carnage … fluttering of feathers and ribbons … the tricks of … the expression of … the carnage of … a thigh, a flower …

_______

9

On a crisp, bright afternoon in February, 1894, F.F. jumps off the omnibus at Montmartre and turns into the Passage Tourlaque. With him is Emile Henri, the handsome young man whose bomb has recently taken out the Carmaux Mining Company’s headquarters. Henri carries a case of lock-picking equipment. The old concierge scowls as they enter number four and climb the stairs.

F.F.’s mother rises from an armchair to greet Emile, then goes to prepare tisane while F.F. pokes the fire. When she brings the tray she looks at Emile’s open case and smiles. “You didn’t tell me he was an artisan Elie!”

In F.F.’s study F.F. dresses Emile in an old dress of his mother’s and steps back to look at him. “The hands are wrong Emile. I have just the stuff.”

“I rather think it came from the Café Foyot,” says F.F.. “Another absinthe here, my good man.”

It’s the dress that does it for Emile. Chased by two waiters after hurling his bomb among the tables of the Café Terminus, he trips on the hem outside the Gare St. Lazare, and is executed.

In the workroom of the Mazas Prison lines of men sit huddled over trestle-tables mending trousers under dim electric lamps. Unconvicted and therefore not required to work, F.F. moves through the narrow prison yard whose walls admit the sunlight for an hour each day; he enters his cell, hangs his top hat on a wallpeg and sits down on a chair that’s chained to the floor.

He’s been charged under the new Association Law—Liasing With and Abetting Malefactors. In addition the police have found a vial of mercury and eleven three-centimetre detonators in his desk at the War Office and are slapping an Intent to Construct Explosives charge on him. He told them it was fishing tackle and they hit him: just once, suddenly, when he said ‘fishing tackle’.

A warder marches into the cell accompanied

by Misia Godebska, who is carrying a basket full of fruit. The warder remains throughout the visit and the conversation is stifled. Misia tells him that Mallarmé will testify for him at the trial and asks if there’s anything he needs.

F.F. thinks for a while and tells her: shoe polish.

He’s tried alongside twenty-nine others. The courtroom is packed with reporters and with friends. Of the thirty defendants it’s F.F. who attracts the most attention. Le Figaro’s correspondent writes: “Rigid as justice and straight as a soldier at arms. M. Fénéon has the air of an adroit diplomat.” “He looked bored during the interrogation,” notes La République’s scribe. The courtroom artist sketches F.F.’s face in profile, no neck beneath it, no back to the head, a mask.

Judge Dayras is bald and red-faced. When the defence summons its first witness he calls a recess: “I must go and wash my hands. It will interest the jury to know that a group of anarchists pushed shit beneath my door last night.”

He cross-examines F.F. himself: “Are you an anarchist, M. Fénéon?”

“I am a Burgundian born in Turin.”

“Your police file extends to one hundred and seventy pages. It is documented that you were intimate with the German terrorist Kampfmeyer.”

“The intimacy cannot have been great as I do not speak German and he does not speak French.” (Laughter in courtroom).

“It has been established that you surrounded yourself with Cohen and Ortoz.”

“One can hardly be surrounded by two persons; you need at least three.” (More laughter).

“You were seen conferring with them behind a lamppost!”

“A lamppost is round. Can Your Honour tell me where behind a lamppost is?” (Loud, prolonged laughter. Judge calls for order).

The jury acquits all thirty defendants. F.F. slips away from the celebrations to visit Suzanne Alazet des Meules, an actress. She winds a sheet around his body like a Roman toga and tells him of the women she’s seduced. “I licked Blanche, the virgin, yesterday.”

_______

He chooses dinitrobenzene with a charge of ammonium nitrate, a recipe he found in the National Library. For the container, a flowerpot—his own touch, that, gives it a pleasant symbolic dimension and, of course, it’s very convenient: the fuse leading down through the hollow stalk of a single hyacinth, the clay pot tightly packed with bullets beneath a shallow layer of earth …

F.F. strolls through the Luxembourg Gardens. It’s the first Sunday of April; streaks of colour are moving across the flowerbeds. Beside the palace children dressed in hats and frocks sit on benches watching a puppet show.

F.F. sets his hyacinth on the gravel, reaches into his right coat pocket and takes out a pack of cigarettes. He places one in an ivory holder, then flicks open a silver lighter. Smoking, he watches the puppet show: a puppet-king is shouting at his puppet-general while behind the king a large black puppet-bear looms up.

The puppet-general runs away. The children laugh. F.F. dips his hand again into his pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper. Unfolding it, he reads: At 11:45 p.m. on Sunday, 25 March 25, 1894: a boy, Félix Patrique, to Marie-Félicie Jacquin. Recognised M. Félix Fénéon.

The children are shouting at the king now: “A Be-eear!” they shout. “What’s that?” shouts the king, cupping his hand to his ear. “A Beeeaa-r! Be-Hind you!” shout the children. F.F. slips the paper back into his pocket, picks up his hyacinth and strolls on.

The Café Foyot’s four back windows open onto the Rue Condé, presenting to the clientele a side-view of the opera house. F.F. lights another cigarette and looks in on the café. The room is filled with men in dining suits. Through the hum of conversation and the piano music waiters weave around the tables carrying glasses and champagne bottles. At one table a highclass tart with dark, thin eyebrows is kissing the greasy chin of a fat man with a balding head. The tart wears a black lace garter around her neck. Thick black hairs are spilling from the man’s large ears. His hand upsets a champagne glass. Through the open window F.F. hears the ping of the glass on the marble tabletop, watches the bubbly yellow liquid dribbling onto the floor.

F.F. sets his flowerpot on the windowsill.

With a long, polished fingernail he taps his cigarette holder, knocking a column of ash to the ground. Then, touching the cigarette’s glowing end to the hyacinth’s stalk, he lights the fuse.

When the bomb goes off he’s sitting at a table outside the Café de l’Odéon. The explosion rocks the boulevard; gentlemen and ladies jump up from their tables and run into the street as a column of blue smoke rises above the Luxembourg Palace.

“Anarchist vermin!” snarls the waiter. “It came from the Opera House.”

10

_______

Lallamont has called F.F. into his bureau at the War Office. Standing behind Lallamont is a man F.F. recognises as Clément, chief of antiterrorist operations; behind Clément stand the two bowler hats.

“Probably the result of some misunderstanding, Monsieur Fénéon, but you would oblige me by coming down to the Prefecture.” Clément nods at bowler number one, who handcuffs F.F. Bowler number two’s lips wrinkle in a malicious smile.

ed the three-line news Haiku: It was his turn at nine-pins when a cerebral haemorrage felled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was rolling, he ceased to be.

His wife, Fanny, is mad on the flicks. He sells the painting Seurat gave him twenty years ago and buys her a picture house. Together they spend whole evenings when the house is closed threading film after film around the spools and sprockets. Sometimes they set two projectors side by side and watch cowboys riding across the sky above the Alps or trains hurtling through the palace of a Tsar. His favourite part’s when hairs and speckles jump around the screen as each reel starts, then the first unsteady picture, empty canvas springing into life.

At weekends F.F. and Fanny visit Alfred Jarry, who lives in a stilted house on the banks of the Seine. Jarry’s into bicycling: “Just hold the bars and pedal with your feet now Félix.

Point them straight! Straight! Félix!”

One Sunday afternoon the women set up a croquet game on the lawn and the men row out to fish for carp. “No detonators now, eh Félix. Give the little sods a sporting chance.”

In a pool they see a round, black mass too large to be a fish; an oildrum maybe. Pushing back the reeds they ease the boat towards it and find the body of a drowned man, bloated, the face half decomposed.

In the evening, after the police have left and the women have gone to bed, the two men sit on the verandah drinking wine while moths and mosquitoes swarm around the oil lamp.

They sit in silence, looking out across the river. After a while F.F. says: “That’s what death is, Alfred.”

“What’s what death is?”

“A black lake, like that, where you get lost.” _______

In the grey morning, lamps are still lit along the Quai d’Ivry. In front of the wooden shacks the cranes stand stiff-jointed and crooked, like insects reared up in the throes of some death agony. Smoke is drifting from the funnels of the barges moored side by side, three deep in places, moving off the river with the clearing mist.

The German guns could be heard from Paris yesterday, then they stopped and loudspeakers were set up in the streets. The Germans told the citizens to stay indoors and offer no resistance when they marched in, an event anticipated for some time around noon today, 8 February, 1940.

F.F. is dying of cancer, slowly, painfully.

Throughout the night the dockers have been loading a barge with documents: the Paris police files 1890-1940, over a million pages bound haphazardly with string and tape and stuffed into orange crates, banana boxes, clothes trunks. An hour ago the barge pulled out from the bank, then keeled over and sank until only the stern remained above water.

Papers are slowly floating up from the submerged hull now, lurking murkily an inch below the surface of the placid river. As the texts blot and run the papers darken, like photographs of night, the final night, developing.

_______

Paris is changing. Now automobiles chug along the boulevards beside the horses, chauffeurs wearing hats and uniforms. The Eiffel Tower stands like a spread-legged whore above the city. F.F. writes for Le Figaro. He’s invent-

Sebastian Gurciullo, Possible Stories, 2003

John Kinsella

Plough Play Plough Boy The old machinery still does the job, makes lines, upends the clods.

Come on out and see: my ol’ man owns the paddocks that surround the town: come out and see what he and I have done.

Round and round we’ve gone!

All Come and see what they’ve done: round and round they’ve gone; up and down, up and down, turning the burnt stubble into the earth.

Saint George Caught the young boy out there, teetering on the seat of the John Deere, stereo raging, a five-paper joint arced up like a bushfire, and my perfect lines wrecked: I had to go back over to get them perfect.

Who’s selling my boy that shit? Own up, and face the music!

All Woe, woe betide the fool who sold Saint George’s boy his stash, fuel for his spliff!

Plough Boy It was a stranger, father: shifty-eyed, from a long way out of town. He came to me when the sun was on the clavicle of the valley, its fire all messed up, a messy pink.

Come out and see what we’ve done!

Round and round we’ve gone.

Forgive me father, I’ve done wrong.

All Woe, woe betide the fool who sold Saint George’s boy his stash, fuel for his spliff!

Saint George I own all the land that surrounds the town: nothing gets in or out without me knowing.

I’d guess it’s that foreigner who’s staying in the auto motel, trying to offload his never-rust stay-sharp knife sets.

I’ll slit his throat with them!

Plough Boy Come out and see what we’ve done!

Round and round we’ve gone.

Forgive me father, I’ve done wrong.

All Woe, woe betide the fool who sold Saint George’s boy his stash, fuel for his spliff!

Look, look, the commotion’s attracted the outsider: interloper, pervert, crook.

Saint George You! Mate! You! Put down those knives!

I don’t care if they stay sharp

until after the Apocalypse.

Turn out your pockets, pull down your trousers: I know where you blokes hide your grass!

All Watch them struggle.

That foreigner has pulled a knife, we’re sure. No, it’s Saint George that has it by the handle, pulling the blade through the hand of the dealer. The blood is the colour of upturned earth, it will tarnish the ground.

It will flow into Saint George’s paddocks and taint his harvest.

Stop, Saint George!

Stop, you’ll kill him.

So much blood is flowing.

Plough Boy Dad! Dad! I grew the dope down on the creek, in cut-off 44 gallon drums with an intricate water system, you never go down there so I knew it could be done.

The best heads in the district: I bought a set of knives from the bloke you’ve just killed: I was going to surprise you on your birthday!

I will help the plough boy in his enterprise.

I will work to keep out foreigners!

All Hear! Hear!

He’s one of us already!

Sow the crops, encircle the town.

Plough Boy The old machinery still does the job, makes lines, upends the clods.

Come on out and see: my ol’ man owns the paddocks that surround the town: come out and see what he and I have done.

Round and round we’ve gone!

All Come and see what they’ve done: round and round they’ve gone; up and down, up and down, turning the burnt stubble into the earth.

All Woe, woe betide the fool who thought the foreigner had sold Saint George’s boy that dope!

Saint George What have I done?

Now my land will be blighted!

All Hark! Hark The quack is in town.

The old drunk we wouldn’t trust with a splinter: he’ll bargain with Saint George to call the foreigner’s spirit back before it completes its journey.

Quack Saint George, you’re a proud bastard: I’ll call him back if you pay my tab at the pub for a year!

All He’ll drink Saint George out of his mansion!

Quack You look as if you’re ebbing, George. Tell you what, keep me in drink for a week and we’ll call it quits.

Saint George Revive him!

All The quack is dressing the wound, pouring a liquid into his mouth, it runs the colour of dry wheat-ears down his chin; look, look he is reviving. The concoction has replaced the blood that’s drenched the firebreaks, the fields!

Tatjana Lukic

a crater for mtc cronin, maleny, queensland

they all read neruda, turning fourteen, rosy and tender, each monday falling in love for ever, still dreaming first kiss, saddest poem was a hit on their sticky lips, i read him too, of course, but how could i possibly love what everyone does, i was on my way, running fast out of dusty ohs and ahs, stubborn and busy looking for the guys unknown to them, always for the guys nobody else would dare to touch, and it was at that age … poetry arrived/ in search of me/ i don’t know, i don’t know where/ it came from, it was pushing me stiffly to the hidden shelves, i couldn’t fly, so what, i climbed to the top slopes, nobody ever borrowed this tome? i will, and i will fall in love with these oddballs and dudes, a moment i turned to my side of a bed, my russian lovers were shooting themselves in a head, quiet french men, holding me like a champagne glass and sucking my tongue, gazed at the time past behind my neck, my old and newborn german blokes taught me to think, think, think while laying on my back, all shady souls were watching me undressing bit by bit at the front of a window in my free lines, and pencilling my first curse, and running away along breathless running lines, loony mates recorded the speed and time, the world was down there to stick a tongue out at it, nothing to rhyme or write an ode about, not a sonnet of a birdie, but a wild manifest of a roaring cat, left, but marching left, sometimes slipping down of the crack on the right, between the shelves

Saint George Forgive me, foreigner!

It seems the sin was closer to home.

Stay on in our town. I’ll buy your knives—I can vouch they’re sharp! Stay on and wish my crops well.

turning fourteen for ever, here i am, racing in a late hour after songs of despairs, left on the shelf, leafing through the pages, as they are life—whisper the ladies grey and harsh, hush, life is whatever hits a soft surface of my chest, the meteorites, men and other particles, dreamed or touched, written or read, they all jab and hollow up a mine of me, a crater

Foreigner This is the place for me!

It came like a revelation!

Your community needs new blood.

I will fertilise and increase the birth rate.

I will increase the paddock’s yields.

i would still prefer to become a star and lights up a lamp when we circle around babies or cure our scares, but i signed it anyway, margie, the petition for a crater on mercury to be named after neruda, go there and check the link i am attaching, what do you think?

11

Larry Sawyer

John Kinsella

Against His Name the Waves Go

I Unsubscribe

Abracadabra, dunce. Sh! here he comes olive-skinned prisoner—skeletal lunch whistling pity, I see him through a pinhole where he naps upon the afternoon in-between breezes, some say he is resolute assassinating newlyweds, his coup, lunch— treads on a deuce slope. No one knows his name, not even me. Platinum stranger he conjugates turbans and launches a boat full of evening on unforeseen breezes. Why not fill his days full of torpor and accept his invitation to the be the only one laughing?

A beautiful woman suffers in his tangle, through another dull explanation he roams

mis demean our refuse topped sub due, a lawn and stippled verb, test ice-top, signifiosis stranger in private proprietory cased in language replies unrequested, requiet paced across sharp grassblades, hypo, and where locate geno flex ion buddings, where petit declasse testamental cultures, columnular scroll, temples and feathers parsed odour, outré

Tomaž Šalamun

Nile Anzhelina Polonskaya The Nile is made of red and black iron. The faces of the Nile are as smooth as a water-smooth plain and as steep as a hill. The Nile is cut from the sea by Helwan, from Helwan by El Minya, from El Minya by Karnak, from Karnak by Daka, from Daka by Wad Medani, from Wad Medani by Malakal. It is as polished as a body as the body of the plane. When they carry it away on trucks the grass is lighter. The Nile is water. Sand rolls along the bottom. It flows day and night at six miles per hours. When it reaches the Delta it forms many branches and all of them flow to the sea.

The surfaces of the planes are smoothly finished.

The height is the same. When I saw it for the first time I stopped and looked at it for a long time.

The police force was lying in the bush. It wore a green uniform and a green ribbon around its hips.

Sunday Sunday market. Stalls set out like crumpled tinfoil, pig’s heads blinded by sudden death groan in search of gutters, god observes.

My pockets are empty.

I lose you amidst the motley shop windows, the salesmen’s aprons from raspberry to russet, flecked like the cheeks of an apple; A melon’s flesh like the body of a starfish, counter-weight anchors tossed on the scales.

A bell, torn by the ear from the distance (where are you? Where is your hand?).

I’m stunned by the hypocritical foreheads, submissive to the church on Sunday.

Perhaps it’s my nerves, perhaps the bare poplars as at Dachau….

And by the roadside, spilled from a shopping bag, some potatoes are strewn about.

—translated from the Slovenian by Elliot Anderson & the author

Anzhelina Polonskaya

To the Memory of B... (A Dream) Tomaž Šalamun

his favourite ride what is your favourite ride to ride on a steamboat why you can see all around you what do you see the sea what else the sky are you ever afraid of storms no the boat stays in the harbour if there’s a storm what if the storm rises while you’re at sea then I’m afraid you can’t swim why are you afraid then I’m afraid of getting water in my mouth what animals do you like the best puppydogs what about lions I don’t like lions why not because puppy’s are scared of them what do you like most of all the “catalogue” magazine what’s happening with it now it fell apart sadly how come people don’t like us how come they don’t like you because Marko wrote “the prick’s head” and what did you write “kitten fucks” why are you so mean because we’re sad didn’t you once say you were cheerful and glad to be alive I did say I was cheerful and glad to be alive but as it turns out I’m sad really what are you up to now we’re going to have a revolution are you white no black when do you feel best when I’m naked why because I feel free then because I’m naked Tomaž Šalamun is naked and a proletarian —translated from the Slovenian by Anselm Hollo & the author

12

The traitorous colour of mica in apertures of yellow, On the windowsill the wrong flowers, And the smell of ground pepper instead of tobacco.

A shaking hand with a cigarette Mixed up a portion of cake, And the woman smoked seriously.

The smoke deepened exhaustion, Searching out the cataract of nighttime emptiness, And the cat-patterned curtains flapped As always, - Years had passed.

Strangers were happy to shuffle their slippers, The poor little girl had found another place.

Four silent corners—honey, brother, Fences, eternity—stuffed Into 40 square feet.

Sudeep Sen

Penumbra The sun came back out from behind the deep-folded rain clouds after many days of ruffled uncertain light.

It emerged robed in tethered linen, just the way I held the sky in my hand like a piece of crumpled paper.

Bands of deep blue didn’t seem to interfere with the whites, and the cotton patches which were so transient, moved at the slightest hint of breeze.

I released the paper from my fist, tried to iron out the creases, but couldn’t.

The folds had created a new terrain, just as the clouds in the sky never repeat the same pattern over, ever.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

Gwendolyn Albert

What do I Suspect

Bukowski’s Daughter

Fancy Whimsy Caper Prank

My geometric daughter chews love beads under the young man’s umbrella.

Who is Bukowski’s daughter?

She could be working at a bus station right now, taking tickets for people bound for L.A., or a mother of six, or a landlady shaking her fists—failing herself.

human ugliness is so harsh the angel child surrounded by satyrs, body builders and mannequins

Opening her yarrow lips she is a birch being cut to the starfish core for Kepler’s examination.

What does it all have to do with the universe, if cartographers lift lamps above thousands, securing destinations?

In the schoolyard, the electrocution of lively girls ensue.

All expect the snap of grim Bavarian cream under their chins, brief interludes of their lives, “A great gift from God,” they say.

Little red poison berries.

I’m just a pistol pulled out of the puddle.

I am not Serpico.

I am not from Siam.

That is my plaster complexion, my wallpaper, equalising the tears of violet milk Williams once said, “They are just apples, Just let them be apples.”

(Did he actually use “apples”?)

Nothing is sadder than a practical minx.

Dennis Cooper

Ouevre for Joe Brainard

So you’re it. That’s okay if it outlasts your life. It’s so shy, it’ll always be loved.

That’s not true. It’ll beat around book shelves forever, I hope.

It’s more loved than you knew. It’s less read than it was. Its reticence will endear it forever, or maybe not.

But it’ll always be shy around me. I just wish you were too, too far away, but okay.

Dennis Cooper

Silverchair, Diorama Daniel Johns, you’re a genius, but you used to sound like Pearl Jam so America says no. You were cool. You had our jizz. Now we want to fuck The Vines. We did genius once.

We had critics who described it.

Now we’re into feeling horny.

You aren’t helping us. You’re a what? We’ve forgotten how to write about you. We’re with The Vines now. They make us write unbelievable copy. America really loves to fuck. You’re a what? Okay, you are. One star.

She could be working in an office, staring out a ten-story window, wondering why her dreams consist solely of her being Bukowski’s daughter, standing in line for her own book signing. She could be wondering, at this point, what much else a girl could add to the endless, penetrating, alcohol-infused biography, if she indeed were to write about her role as Bukowski’s daughter, in the grand scheme of him?

That she existed?

One dream begins with her standing in line at the book signing, as all the others begin.

She is Bukowski’s daughter at this point in the dream, then suddenly becomes who she really is, a waitress who lingered a bit too long. She faces a woman portraying Bukowski’s daughter at the table at the front of the gymnasium. Bukowski’s daughter has the brown eyes of the waitress’s husband, eyes that mutate periodically into her own blue schemes of vision.

The waitress in line tells Bukowski’s daughter, “I just had a dream last night that there was to be some secret book signing, the identity of the author withheld.

I knew this book signing would be a perfect time to tell everyone that I was really Bukowski’s daughter.

But here you are, signing a book called Ruma, your autobiographical tell-all.

This is really about my father, you know.”

“Please,” Bukowski’s daughter weeps. “I can’t tell anyone but you about what happened in Wichita,” she begins to sob, her head burrowed into the waitress’s lap.

“That is where he really died and no one knows!”

Who is her mother?

Bukowski’s daughter wants to know.

Furiously.

The waitress thinks of a joke just then, where the wife buries the husband in his casket upside-down so he can keep digging himself deeper into the earth.

Bukowski’s daughter wails/slumps/moans in the waitress’s lap— a mysterious cat. The waitress strokes her curly mane of brown hair.

A young woman pipes up in the book-signing line.

“I personally thought he was just a German, you know, a reverse Übermensch, a tired tyrant like me.

Which means I am really Bukowski’s daughter.

My real father was even born in Memmingen.

How is that for coincidences? My grandmother never spat on a soldier’s shoes, but my great-grandmother told a Nazi to move over for her on the train. ‘Platz mächen,’ she’d said.

She even told a priest to take off his hat in church once.”

Bukowski’s daughter cries harder, trying to sell and sign copies of Ruma.

A huge line still forms in the old school gymnasium until there are only a few stragglers. The waitress and Bukowski’s daughter, her tears now dried and her mouth curling into a tiny smile, talk about where they’d been and where they’ll go for a drink later. A man approaches the waitress just then, telling her he has pictures of her, pictures he could sell.

She asks if they are nudes. He shakes his head “no.”

She does not believe him.

Shy and unswerving but successful at her sell-out, the Ruma booth closes. What was the story of her life?

Where had she been conceived and surviving all these years?

The horsetrack? Did she live as Bukowski’s daughter should, recounting hung-over days, making bleak but noble observations?

Who roamed the streets of L.A. anymore that wasn’t already famous for doing it?

After everything subsides, Bukowski’s daughter asks the waitress anyway who she really was. And she tells her: “I was the whore that took his poems.”

cheap dyed hair and piggish eyes, tight lips and worn down heels poor people of Prague tiptoeing through the dog shit The President turns off the radio. Click. and here is a photo of his new toy some nobody frames the newspaper clipping pictures himself on the balcony of the ages televised colors of circus bingo patter of handsome men poor people of Prague clapping out under the arc lights all around Prague fall the blank fields a private reserve a desert to history dogs and children so well behaved they fill the squares on command and the prisons they hop in and out under various banners this time is already passing into a myth of those days into which like a zygotic Forrest Gump the next smiling leader will painlessly be edited peace and quiet forgetfulness one crumb at a time two rolls each morning a spotless desk prim leaves of houseplants knickknack shelf of bribes, small drinks of water, coffee, sediment rings on porcelain a Prague eerie bureaucrat silence gravel grotesquely ornate facades the beauty contest is over and the crown of roses unpleasant with mold tell me, pearl of ignorance, sassy face of Prague in love is there an ending to this opera that’s not trivial?

13

The St Vitus Dance

It never rains, as the saying goes, but it pours.

Or it just doesn’t rain. It’s August already, and the heat and humidity have become a state of mind, a type of consciousness. Everything adjusted to what will not happen. Like the Zen novice keeping silent vigil over the stone which a doubtful certainty insists will not fly up into the air. You might just as well say that the earth will not fall away from the stone, but what difference would that make, unless consciousness where attached not to the novice, but to the stone?

The sky is gunmetal, leaden and everything the complexion of wax effigies. I stand outside that picture as one who imagines seeing himself, as in a dream. For a long moment the

the image remains intact, nothing which must not be remade and unmade, compulsively, as if I were to say now that “to love you” I must forget you and go on forgetting you … And then, in the same breath, that nothing is ever reinstated through memory, or in memory. You said that yourself. Who? I am forgetting. I go on writing the others so that I will not lose you wholly to this fiction. And in forgetting, in loving you, do I recall me to myself, to my “purpose,” to my end?

It is true, that despite everything said, everything avowed, man is always seeking exemption from the task at hand. The elevated figure of a Laocoön locked in the struggle of contraries; “an immortal and fecund suffering,” or a mere bag of wind twisted by its own flatulent convulsions? To be laughable and able to laugh, as Montaigne says, is perhaps the only salvation from the tragic view of history, of

world becomes still. It is merely this image I am holding in my hands; in my mind’s eye.

One image at random among all the others, vaguely scrutinising it for some trace of memory. The idea of vagueness, of scrutiny; as though I were to say, “he was vaguely aware of watching himself.” That object, that objectpronoun, “he,” by means of which I fictionalise myself. In whom I imagine myself seeing myself. Him. Or rather “it.” Both perhaps. The novice and the stone. Or something equally as trivial but at the same time undeniable (I have actually begun to think this way; or, I have caught myself in the process of thinking this thought). And then, if I were to begin writing this down?

Nothing moves in this dream, the picture is static, lined with fracture marks like the faces aged within it. What good are their names now?

There is still the hopeless task of recovering them in words; their names alone are not enough, no matter how often one repeats them, invokes them. Aleš, Lukaš, Chaim, Jean-Michel. A canticle, an introit, a catechism in which the respondent always remains silent; a figment, a cipher, the blank of a word not yet spoken not yet written down or written out.

Who are we but the negligent custodians of these fragments? Watching over the silences, tending them, speaking on behalf or in place of them, if merely for the sake of comfort or company. “All those dispersed now in time and circumstance, the circuit broken forever …”

The picture is always a provisional one. Even after so much waste and ceremony, not even

humanity. All that fatuous wind and catharsis, discharged like voluble prayer echoed in the mouths of false gods. False objects. The discharge of weak desires … City of idolaters …

Dressed up in doom-laden garments, rendered specious and naked before such unconstrained, unconstrainable laughter. The gut laughter that breaks the stone-like inaudible ransom of complicity … Complicity with what? With everything that diminishes and demeans us.

Through the unwashed half-transparent glass of this window, between consciousness and perception, the visible world is clear enough. Somewhere, at some ultimately immeasurable distance, war is taking place, or is about to take place. Like a game of chess that goes on with neither purpose nor consciousness even, but merely a dumb mechanical persistence, shifting the pieces back and forth, black square, white square … “The world is a set of finite limits,” as Aleš used to say. “Within which …” Well, what does it matter after all?

All those “infinite possibilities” occurring in their own void. Aleš, old mentor, old antagonist. Where are you now? How easy it is to picture him sitting in his expansive and yet somehow tiny room in Vinohrady, surrounded by walls of books; sitting there with his mock gravity, saying: “The world is a set of limits.

The more stringent the limits—the ‘rules of the game’—the more radical the possibilities with regard to them. The world, too, is a type of game. And its outcome, however long deferred, is only ‘inevitable’ for as long as the game is played …”

Adam Roulins

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But the reality of which we speak is changed, is different from all we have imagined. And you too are changed, divided, paralysed. I barely recognise you. How much easier to speak in abstractions, to say “history,” “class consciousness,” “war,” “vested interests” … What are we in the end but the leftovers of such “vested interests”? Mere human weakness invents the strings that make of this life such a sham of puppetry … To be in the hands of others, to be powerless, an instrument acting out the will of some ineffable force in the universe. Each man with his reflex dependency, his stock-intrade Nüremburg defence.

It is pointless to speak of such “vested interests” as though they were somehow to embody themselves in a rational sequence of events or actions. Such interests are not rational, are not even rational. It is only too clear that the history of power will never win out against sham,

Inria Rocquencourt, Prague Factory, 2003

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against the ridiculous. History is the finger plugging the hole in the dyke and perhaps one day the fat little child to whom it belongs will want to scratch himself or pick his nose, and then the world really will have something to laugh about.

But what of us, of our role in this drama, this comédie humaine?

What use in agonising over history? History that is neither ours to inherit, nor to redeem, not atone for, nor denounce? Severed from that comforting umbilicus of privilege or privation, we are left as mere spectators to the gradual inoculation of all points of resistance, beyond the dumb accession of the ego to its own mirage. Consumed with a desire solely for the present, the instrumental reason flees from conscience as from the ghost of a dead father; symbolising the malevolence of all that endures.

“I am dissolved, not dismembered.” Swept away by the reverberations an instant might provoke. A craving to be “engulfed” as if by the sea. That ubiquitous image of the sea, beating down on the coasts of Bohemia. To dissolve, as one dissolves the boundaries of a map, of nationality, of identity. A form of amorous suicide? The “lure” of unlikelihood, between doubt and improbability. Or was it implausibility? Aleš: “The ordinary is often the least likely succession of events.” Or not events themselves, but their relations. Violence, for example, which attends upon the most banal of actions. In the hesitation of a glance, the flicker of an eyelid bidding against unforeseen

stakes. A hand raised to a mouth conceals, adjusts, diverts. The same hand, lowered, reveals a weapon, a signal, an inability to comprehend.

Each gesture sets in train innumerable scenarios of consequence or inconsequence. An infinite series of possible worlds in which everything hinges upon a simple movement of the hand. Hinges, but is not resolved. For who is to say that any of those possible worlds must relate to “this” one? That all those possible worlds do not persist, evolving and sustaining one another or themselves independently of our suspicion of them? Or that “this” world is nothing but the set of coincidental events common to all of those others, or equally of the set of possible outcomes excluded by them? “We are that we are and that we shall not be. We are not that we will have become.” The rest is, what? Both more and less than silence.

Standing, as though at what seems like an end point, a prominence almost, from which to cast a backwards glance, to survey “what we have been”—now, more than ever before, we are in the dark. And so, to make our ignorance a triviality also … you say: “It’s dark,” yet what’s that but the absence of light? A commonplace, a nothing. I say it’s dark. What is?

A nothing describing the absence of a subject (“it”), another nothing. A tautology. “The propositions of logic are tautologies.” In the land of tautology it has grown dark. Somewhere, who knows, a finger may be twitching against a switch ready to turn on the light. Any light.

Some sort of light; a whole conflagration. The flames lapping the shore of the Bodensee, receding from the ghostly form of Jan Hus …

And what if it were simply a lie. For example, when I say that I want to understand (what’s happening to me). And this, too, a kind of pretence. A false promise. The bad faith of the supposedly all-encompassing intellect. As though perceiving all of these episodes as a single knot of inexplicable reasons and impaired solutions. And thereby to place within a kind of parentheses of the unthinkable any motive that might point back at me …

The darkest place, as they say, is under the lamp.

But what am I doing there, in that image, “under the lamp”? It isn’t me, evidently, only a figure of speech. As when I ask myself, or someone asks me, “what are you doing here?”

Meaning, presumably, what are you doing in this place, this particular place, Prague for example. A question which it is impossible to answer, unless we give in to the false rationale of circumstance with its gloss of causation.

One thing leading, as though inexorably, to another, and so on, up to our current “state of affairs.” Life has for so long been held up to us (by whom?) in the trivial image of a forked and forking road. Or a series of roads. And from each of these, on one side or another, other routes diverge, split off, form deviations, doubling back or running parallel—those which may be taken, which cannot avoid being taken, and those which we are not permitted to take. The succession of turnings and detours describes a topography of imminence.

It’s not possible, it’s far too late, to say that this is a road I do not wish to go down. Such determinations precede you, in every case.

Awareness is a condition after the fact. The instant comes before the measure, the count.

Time marks the end point of a duration that has no present.

How many lifetimes do you think we must have already lived through? In an instant, everything is transformed. The simplest act of the imagination. I cross a street, any street, this one perhaps, Kaprova, or Karpfengasse as it used to be called, and my attention is momentarily arrested by someone crossing ahead of me. Someone leaving or entering a metro station. Hailing a taxi. Pausing to adjust a coat or a jacket or the shoulder strap of a bag. The heal of a shoe caught in a grate. Whole fathoms of intimate knowledge pass between us without our ever having shared a look. For all intents and purposes, that person is a figment.

And yet his or her life goes on within me. It multiplies, engenders others, fades, returns.

How can I say that it is not real, this inner life, when I have responded to it, have nurtured and nourished it, have cast it aside even, but knowingly cast it aside as something which has been in my possession, or in my care? Has its existence, however vague and fleeting, not im-

pressed itself upon me? And leaving its impression, doesn’t it even now bear upon me just as much if not more than those so-called real lives which hardly ever touch us though we are virtually tied to them?

Waiting in the metro I start to wonder about the nature of living underground. It’s almost eight in the evening and despite the heat I’m feeling restless. There’s still an hour to kill before I need to be anywhere, so I decide to get some bread and go and sit by the river and feed the swans. But as I was saying, while I’m waiting for the train I start thinking about a form of troglodyte existence, right down in the bowels of the earth and how, in a strange sort of way, the world would (in this perverse daydream of mine) become smaller and at the same time more three-dimensional, less flattened out and so more complex; smaller but more exten-

whose grey dead waters swell the underground passages, the escalators, the exits, spilling into the street and spreading out, soaking into the very fabric of the city. And for a moment I experience that seeming impossibility of an empty mind. The sun is beating down from a leaden sky. I look up, blink. Someone brushes against me. We’re all human after all. Or so we think we are. Aleš is right, our loss of spirit is not about some mysterious entity that inhabits the body and leaves it at death, but the failure of humanity. “The failure to fulfil our destiny as Human beings.”

It is at least a human failure, for all that’s worth. The thought that everything can be so easily reduced by, if not to, a form of contempt leaves me feeling at a loss even to make sense of the act of “crossing the street.” Only a moment ago I was fit to laugh. Only a moment ago I was a hollow vessel from which the echo

“To live in a vacuum of the wind,” Aleš confided to me, so long ago, “is to live ‘this side of Paradise.’ But so thoroughly, so completely, that even the rigour of death seems like a Saint Vitus’s Dance.” And in my mind’s eye I see him, also, hanging there before me like one of those marionettes in the tourist stalls on Karlová, jerking at the end of their strings with eyes grimly staring from Archimboldo heads.

He seemed to be smiling, an agonised, distressing smile, exposing a row of uneven yellowed teeth and the yellowed underside of his lips.

But what does it mean? I walk towards the river with this image before me, as another one overtakes it. A crowd of people slowly coursing over the bridge, blank faces turned up towards Hradčany …

What good would it do to fictionalise events?

As if it were possible. I speak. I write. What takes place occurs in its own time, its own

textbase www.textbase.net

new from TEXTBASE available www.shakes.cz

The 1st Prague International Poetry Festival 16"22 May, 2004 Supported by the PLR, Shakespeare & Sons Bookstore, Twisted Spoon Press & the InterCultural Studies Programme, Charles University. www.geocities.com/ praguepoetryfestival praguepoetryfestival@yahoo.co.uk

Inria Rocquencourt, ČKD Factory, Prague, 2003

sive (I mean its populated “surface area”). All those post-apocalyptic underworlds folding in on themselves like a baroque horror. You can think of rats down a hole but the world doesn’t seem any way changed as a consequence. It’s always a question of perspective.

I read somewhere, where was it? “It’s almost impossible to give up the idea of living in a straight line.” One sort of line or another, what difference does it make? All those rats chasing one another by the tail or chasing their own tails. “Man,” said Aleš once, “is programmatic, a creature of circumstances. If he’s the slightest bit intelligent, he looks at the world and sees X, which leads to Y, and requires Z. X, Y and Z are points on a line. He begins at X and ends at Z. He’s born, he dies. What more does he need to know?”

Zarathustra says: “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” “Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star.”

I look around at the faces on the crowded platform and don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The world has indeed become small. A mere walnut. Everything slowly collapsing inwards upon itself under the strain of inertia.

The train shudders into the station, its mouths open. Once again we are masticated and spat out. “We are lapsing into the nihilism of the Last Man,” laughs Zarathustra’s ghost in my ear.

Born along in that tide of human flesh, I lose that laughter and find myself becoming like a hollow vessel, buoyed on the wake of a flood

of a laughter had departed. As one says of the departed spirit. Utterly.

I walk aimlessly, doubting all the time that any of us will ever truly escape this tyranny of reason and desire that makes such a mockery of “free will.” There is chaos only in the order of our leaving. Perhaps. What is true, in any case, is that we leave and in doing so we swell the population of the catacombs, the graveyards, the ash pits, the storm water drains and sewers. For Jules Verne the centre of the earth may just as well have been the place our great ancestors buried their God, the world being nothing more than the external glorification of His death, an elaborate funereal monument …

I pass the squat, fume-blackened mausoleum of the Philosophy Faculty and cross the street towards the river. Beneath the Faculty portico, the moribund figures of the intellectually maimed seem momentarily to ignite in the setting sun. Brief candles briefly illuminating the maw of an open tomb. And across the way, the hallowed names engraved on the façade of the Arts Academy: Visher, Holbein, Dvrer, Rvbens, Tizian, Michangelo, Rafael, Lionardo, Skreta, Brandl, Brokov. What are all those characters doing here and why do we need them? The dusk-burnished Rudolfinum.

The bronze statues of Dvořák, Mánes. In Jan Palach square a monumental ventilation duct reminds of that parallel world below. The subterranean labyrinth of passageways between the secret and the knowable. A mechanical Golem howling in the artificial night, in the room with no windows, in the mind’s dark cell.

duration. How can I communicate this? Above all, how do I communicate this to you, who, after all, are the reason for everything. But this is foolish, you might say. Even if you weren’t to exist, or not yet to exist, a mere figure, nameless; for all that, you are indelibly there …

Perhaps one day, long after I am gone—long after the events described here have passed from all living memory—you will come upon this and recognise yourself, somehow, in these words. Or, having suspected it all along, you will come here to reprimand or deny me. Upbraiding these same words even as, in your mind, despite yourself, and in spite of me, you give voice to them …

Yes, like a ventriloquist’s puppet.

After all, each of us is a ghost. An anima, inflated with words. Words that we eat and breathe. That summon and abandon us. A halo of words in which we glimpse the figures of those who have ceased to exist and those who have yet to take their place, like shadows rising and falling beneath a surface of water …

From the quay I watch empty-handed as the swans pass by the further shore. I’ve lost my own hunger. Standing there, sweating, shaking, half out of breath for no good reason, I turn back to the crowd, the continuous flow of humanity whose will has been given up to the blind current of flesh. So many. “I had not thought death had undone so many.” And there, above the wake, poised between the spires of Saint Vitus’s cathedral, the dancing skeleton from the old astronomical clock, beating time on his borrowed tin drum.

Victims by Travis Jeppesen www.akashicbooks.com

In recent issues of the PLR you will find work by Marjorie Perloff, Gregory Ulmer, Simon Critchley, Karen Mac Cormack, McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, MTC Cronin, Ales Debeljak, Allen Fisher, Emmanuelle Pireyre, Drew Milne, Ron Silliman, D.J. Huppatz, Sandra Miller, Bruce Andrews, Tom McCarthy, Pierre Daguin, Steve McCaffery, Kate Fagan, Travis Jeppesen, Nicole Tomlinson, Ethan Gilsdorf, Anselm Hollo, Kevin Nolan, Larry Sawyer, Bob Perelman, Petr Borkovec, John Kinsella and many more ...

The PLR Prague’s international literary review www.shakes.cz/plr Krymská 12, 101 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic

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Hotel Keys and Dirty Weekends Drew Milne From bar-codes to the double helix of DNA, and from biometrics to weapons of mass destruction, the powers of mathematical reason reach ever further into the conditions of human possibility. Reference back to our eyes as a principal means of perception comes to seem naive, almost pre-modern. In Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the mathematical sublime in Kritik der Urteilskraft (The Critique of Judgment), for example, it was still possible to refer to the extensions of perception made possible by the telescope and the microscope. For Kant, the dispositions of soul evoked by representations pointed beyond such analogical tools, revealing the power of aesthetic judgment. Radiotelescopes and electronic microscopes have since transformed analogies of seeing into digital representations. The triumphal march of digital code becomes the unseen condition of more and more features of everyday life. This, in turn, affects our ideas of infinity and the monstrosity of magnitudes which stretch the limits of imagination. Where towering mountains or Egyptian pyramids might once have stirred thoughts of sublimity, modernity stares into the giddying and apocalyptic abyss represented by the digitilisation of life itself. Just distrust of mathematicians playing god echoes in popular dissent at the prospects of genetically modified food, human cloning, nuclear fission and the world of the cyborg.

However satisfying, useful, beautiful even, it is as well to remember that the history of mathematical forms is humanly produced rather than god-given. In this sense, mathematics is a form of biological tyranny, a regime of power inflicted by humans on our own conditions of possibility.

In the face of the challenges to aesthetic perception presented by our increasing reliance on digital code, art has all too often pitched its formal tents on the battlefields of mathematical reason. The great temptation is to reduce art to some kind of mathematical alchemy, making art that is resistant to the stains of sentiment while triumphantly ordering the inherent smudginess and materiality of oil, carbon, wood or linen. Cubism still represents perhaps the most recognisable attempt at a heroic shift in spatial geometry. By analogy with children’s colouring books, experiments in what might be called painting by numbers extend through op art, minimalism and conceptual art to the current crises of form as such. In the face of digital codes, anything so plastic as work in paint or acrylic comes to seem retrograde, suggesting an almost luddite preference for media that are not digitally reproduced. There is an alternative reaction to the tyranny of mathematical form which rages against the machine in a variety of expressive postures, often seeking to animate the inner child of action painting, abstract expressionism or splashy sensationalism. It is perhaps Paul Klee who most explicitly entertains the twin perils of mathematical formalism and the art of doodling.

If these seem like overly elaborate ways of orientating perceptions of Jo Milne’s recent artworks, they are nevertheless necessary to avoid too quickly imagining a mutually sympathetic reciprocity between art and technology, or between painting and science. A first glance at these works might intuit affinities with mathematical forms, such as the images generated

by Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry, while at the same time sensing some painterly affinities with the recent work of Bridget Riley. The apparent conditions of regularity and digital dancing are deceptive, however. Jo Milne’s artworks play with more domestic and concrete conditions of human coding than the mathematical fantasies of chaos theory or the overly resolved distillations of colour and form in Riley’s paintings. In the work of Mandelbrot and Riley the claims of mathematical perception are too Olympian. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977), for example, Mandelbrot claims that scientists will be surprised and delighted ‘to find that not a few shapes they had to call grainy, hydralike, in between, pimply, pocky, ramified, seaweedy, strange, tangled, tortuous, wiggly, wispy, wrinkled, and the like, can henceforth be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.’ The attack on

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human idiom and the program to reduce aesthetic quality to mathematical quantity could not be clearer. Riley has claimed affinities with Paul Klee, but for all Klee’s dalliance with the geometry of nature, Riley lacks Klee’s persistence with all the humanly grainy, tangled and wrinkled terms Mandelbrot seeks to overcome.

In Milne’s work, despite the initial impression of a formally calm and optically resolved surface, I find something closer to the spirit of Klee’s witty difference from mathematical sublimity.

The impulse to play with apparently technological principles of form can be traced back through Milne’s earlier works, which play variously with architectural perceptions and technological tools such as the paper scrolls used to program mechanical pianos. One key to the work is the way the painterly surface appears almost as if it were digitally produced and yet relies on techniques of analogic transfer. In these recent works, for example, the starting point is not the rococo effect of some monstrous Mandelbrot dragon or chaos-generating algorithm, but that more humdrum object, the hotel key. This form of the modern hotel key deals with the human tendency to forget keys by allowing for an anal o g i c mechanism to be reprogrammed.

These keys then have a curious function which generates processes of repetition in their everyday life. This is refracted once these hotel keys are perceived as keys for aesthetic perception rather than as tools for the commercial convenience of hotel security.

Each painting works out a merry dance of variations using two of these hotel keys. The human figurative play of dance is relevant because the modes of variation are not mathematically programmed. If it is maths at work, it is something more like cottage industry maths, a way of working that produces a curiously muddy and translucent sense of the mathematical sublime at work in the keys we might otherwise take for granted. The restraints of working with keys from the doors of hotel perception involve specific limitations, and it is possible to perceive spirals and helix formations, but it is almost impossible to perceive a finally ordered sequence or pattern. Klee’s art of taking a line for a walk here becomes the art of taking a hotel key on a holiday in paint, squeezing out some of the pleasures of dirty weekends and all the geometrical estrangements of unfamiliar rooms.

The square framing of the canvas disorients distinctions between landscape and portrait formats. The framing of each painting also makes it hard to perceive the edges of the painting as the limits of the conceptual field, at once too ramified to isolate focal points while also seeming like details cut out from an even larger canvas of spatio-temporal plasticity, as if each square were a snap-shot fragment of space or a screen from some alternative mode of perception. Photographic reproduction domesticates some of the painterly qualities of scale, along with diplopic qualities, patterns of relief and illusions of depth in the perceptual field. What is perhaps even more important to recognise is the way that photographic reproduction domesticates the way these paintings negotiate the difference between mathematical aura and the grainy, pimply, pocky, seaweedy, tangled, wiggly and wispy qualities of drawn paint.

The Xeque6Mate de Duchamp Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna I am standing in the Louvre in front of one of the versions of La Tour’s painting Le tricheur (The Cheat). In it a woman is playing cards with two men, while the maid pours her a glass of wine. One of the players, with his hand behind his back, exhibits to the viewer of the painting two hidden cards, which will bring him victory. This painting is a reworking of a theme that was earlier handled masterfully by Caravaggio (1594), which I saw in 1999 in an exhibit in Rome. Except that the title, which is the same, is in the plural: Les tricheurs. Here a man is watching the cards that a woman is holding, while his confederate exhibits two cards held behind his back that will guarantee he will win the game.

Marcel Duchamp preferred to play chess instead of card games. He reached the point of giving up painting for some 20 years in order to keep on participating in chess championships. His fixation on the game reached the point that he redesigned the chess pieces.

Jo Milne, 2003

Duchamp, besides being a player, was also a cheat. A magnificent cheat. Like the personages of Caravaggio and La Tour, he had the audacity to display the cards with which he played and with which he would rig the game.

Like those personages, he looks the public in the eye while denouncing himself. You only need to decode his “letters,” that is to say, texts and works.

Indeed, gamesmanship is structurally present in the work of Duchamp, and, strangely, this has not been analysed. Strange that the correlations between games and the structure of his work have not been observed. I am not referring to the generalised view, which is to see the art work as a huge game played with itself, with the market, with the public, with the museums. Let’s take, specifically, two concrete examples: the ready-made of 1964, which is a coupon from the “Monte Carlo roulette” that Duchamp appropriated by inserting his name; likewise the check that he himself fabricated in the amount of $115,00 to settle a debt and which ended up becoming real currency, which he bought back in order to raise its value. Here are two palpable metaphors of gaming as a theme and as a practice in his work. Furthermore, let us consider another obsessive concern with play, the word-play that he in fascination performed by constructing puns.

In his “Notes” he recorded 288 puns, which amused him. And thus, more and more delighted with mental slight-of-hand he decided to step away from painters and to go to work at the Santa Genoveva Library, devoting himself, for a long period, to thought, to the Logos, and to the play of conceits.

In the game of chess there is a move known as check-mate. The check-mate situation is one

in which the king, under attack, can no longer escape or defend himself. In truth, as Maurice Lever (Le sceptre et la marotte, Ed. Fayard) would say: “the echec et mat does not signify either the death or the capture of the king, but rather his imprisonment in a net of impossible alternatives, which makes of chess the only game that finds its solution in the unsolvable.”

Marcel Duchamp declared check-mate in art almost a hundred years ago. Since then it has remained imprisoned, paralysed, dependent upon a solution that would have to undergo the deconstruction of the impasse that he created. Duchamp corralled the art style of the epoch, when he convinced his listeners that everything was art, from the moment someone declared it so, from the moment that the artist affixed, on whatsoever object, whether modified or not, his signature. From the instant that his astonished interlocutors, and later generations to come, fell for this trick, like the King art remained immobilised in an oxymoron as well as a tautology, for if everything is art, then nothing is art.

Duchamp, meanwhile, stood, like the personages in the paintings of La Tour and Caravaggio, practicing deception and showing off his deception (for whoever can read and see). He displayed his deception, at times cynically, as when he would say that, under the noses of the bourgeois, he had palmed off a series of non-sense objects, and they had believed in it.

But it is the analysis of Duchamp’s theoretical practice that we find the signs of skulduggery, which turn him anthropologically into the great trickster of modern art.

Lacan has an analysis of Poe’s well known story titled “The Purloined Letter” (a carta roubada). It tells the story in which, as in the game of chess, there are a queen and king. And the plot unfolds around a compromising letter, which seems to be hidden and, meanwhile, is the whole time visible on the king’s table. Why is that letter in such plain sight not seen? Curiously, Lacan uses the same terms that we are emphasising and speaks to us of “cheating,” of ostrich-like behaviour, and of the feat of the “illusionist,” which performs in its display of the cards to the public its first ostensibly deceptive move. And the supreme art of the illusionist is “to make of us a creature of his fiction.” Exactly as happened in that legend of the “king with no clothes” by Anderson, recalled, recidivistically, in relation to the art of our time.

Symptomatically, as if providing more semiological data for our interpretation, Duchamp, in 1958, took part in the exposition “Design in Magical Art,” with his Boite em valise (Box as valise), in intentional imitation of the magicians’ valises.

An illusionist in concepts, Duchamp succeeded in convincing many that anything that anyone says is art is art. Further: if we put a bicycle wheel or a urinal in a museum this becomes art. In this way time went by, almost a hundred years, in which many people beheld these objects almost in ecstasy. So, in the circus ring of misunderstandings, I am sorry to inform this distinguished company that this bicycle wheel is only a bicycle wheel, and that famous urinal is just a urinal. The letter is on the table (for those who want to read it).

So-called postmodernity had much to say about “deconstructionism” and branded Duchamp a “deconstructionist.” So, using the same insidious poison as a remedy (similia similibus curantur), I will tell you: Duchamp must be deconstructed. The best homage we can pay to the master challengers of yesterday, is to challenge them today. Not in order for art to go back to the past, but so that it makes the future possible.

—translated from the Portuguese by Fred Ellison

“Balkan Art”: Location and the Dangers of Self6Recognition Srdja Pavlovic Looking east from the North American shores of the Atlantic Ocean, it seems that the contemporary western European cultural scene is slowly becoming flooded with cultural products originating from the Balkans. Art exhibitions in Paris, London, Salzburg, Rome, and Amsterdam, and theatre performances in Vienna, Edinburgh, and the Venice Biennale have been gradually shaping (reshaping?) western European sensibilities of modern artistic expressions coming from the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. The organisers of these exhibitions and shows have announced urbi et orbi that what Europe is witnessing is nothing short of a birth of Balkan Art: art that is a powerful visualisation of suffering and alienation, and an attempt to search for new meanings and new identities.

It appears that many western European scholars and intellectuals, as well as theatre and art critics interpret Balkan Art as a vivid and emotionally charged account of life in a land of historical uncertainties, but most of all they talk about it in terms of homogeneity, thus resorting to the old, easily understandable Eurocentric categorisation of a lesser known geopolitical and cultural space. Within the parameters of such categorisation, all cultural creations coming from the Balkans are seen as manifestations of a somewhat exotic and distant entity. These creations radiate with passion and blood, and while deep down melancholic, their contents are nevertheless visually aggressive and captivating. However, while the Balkans has once again embraced Europe through its galleries and on the stages of its theatres and the big screens of its cinemas articulated its pain and the absurdity of its geography and politics, and spelled out uncertainties regarding its multiple identities, and even though these artistic expressions emanate from individuality and diversity, it would seem that western Europeans continue to interpret them in much the same manner the French Consul from Ivo Andrić’s novel Bosnian Chronicle interpreted Ottoman Bosnia.

Considering the fact that cultural contents (film, fine arts, theatre, music) of societies and peoples living in the Balkans were, until very recently, only a blip on the wide European horizon, and were seen as manifestations of an overall unhealthy atmosphere in the “zone of uncertainty,” this sudden and overwhelming interest of Europe in its long-overlooked backyard begs a few questions. Is there such a thing as Balkan Art and if there is, what are its main features? Can the Balkans be considered a homogeneous space, either cultural or otherwise? How legitimate is such a categorisation? To answer these questions even partially, it is necessary to first revisit the issue of western European stereotypes of the Balkans, and only then, and through the magnifying glass of such stereotypes, attempt to analyse recent western European curiosity.

In 1881, after travelling through Montenegro and Albania as a member of the International Commission to settle the boundaries in the region, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant wrote: “All these countries, not far from us, were then, and are still, unlike Europe, more widely separated from her than Europe from America.” This sweeping generalisation seems to have remained for many people the point of departure in defining the Balkans. For many western Europeans, the Balkans was not a landscape “painted with tea,” as the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić portrayed it, but a land criss-crossed with borders and scarred with innumerable twisted mountain roads of armies and caravan trails. These misconceptions were the product of an adherence to canonised western European historical discourse about the oriental other, and of the insufficient understanding of the regional specificities and the internal dynamics of historical processes in the Balkans.

Throughout the turbulent history of the region, the political elites in the various Balkan countries only reinforced this stereotypical European vista, and more recent events in the region did not bring about any positive changes in this respect. The end of the twentieth century in the former Yugoslavia was the time

when the manipulated passions of ethnic nationalism awakened, and old stereotypes of Balkan tribalism and bloodthirsty highlanders became reinforced once again. The region was seen as a rough, rugged landscape of grief. For many westerners the Balkans mark the European border of audibility. From this land of fratricidal murders, blood and belonging, and atavistic tribal passions, western Europeans listened at a distance to the whispers of many voices of “disabled nations.”

However, the Balkans is not only a territory, a mountainous peninsula in southeastern Europe, lacking natural borders with western Europe. Over the last two centuries of war and of borders violently shifting under the pressure of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, amply assisted by the Western powers, the Balkans also came to serve as a convenient metaphor. It became a metaphor for a particular forma mentis, for a savage and primeval mentality, not subjected to the sway of modern reason, a mentality whose metastases can infest “healthy” civilisation in the world of global capitalism. Balkanisation is today predominantly a slur, suggesting as it does the narcissistic fragmentation of large collectives into ever smaller splinter groups that assert themselves in bloodshed and cruel hatred, in the cunning moralism of purity and in the ritual evocation of ancient hatreds. “European” habits of life and mind are not immediately

westernisation of the local cultural scene could be explained in more ways than one and analysed accordingly. It could be approached as a symbolic distancing from a traditional notion of homeland. Names of restaurants, cafés and clubs, such as City Hall, Piccadilly, Soul to Soul, Mr. Good, Irish Pub, and many others, seem for young Montenegrins to be a way of stepping out and away from their parochial local framework. These, and the many other examples of linguistic borrowings from the English language used to “grace” various local cultural events, seem to also manifest a desire to be recognised as a full-fledged member of the “European family.” However, the visibility of these contemporary points of contact between the “two worlds” constitutes the outer limits of their modifying function.

On the other hand, the exchange of meanings and impressions with western European audiences that Montenegrin artists desire seems, more often than not, to end up in a culde-sac of cultural miscommunication. The thematic clusters depicted in the works of art from Montenegro often serve to reinforce existing western European stereotypes about the cultural content in Montenegro. It is the content and not the form that simultaneously attracts and alienates western audiences because it is visually aggressive and demands full attention and an emotional investment on the part of a viewing public. The content is unavoidably

Mare Milin, nama, 2003

available in the Balkans.

This marker, which sets stable and orderly society apart from tribal passions, is but an imaginary one. It can be moved around to meet the changing needs of communities, to help make sense of their fluctuating identities, though the consequences of these shifts affect all sides of the divides. The artistic and cultural endeavours created in Montenegro are important elements that are slowly reshaping the aforementioned marker of separation. Their role in this process is twofold: they act as both modifiers of past misconceptions and as restorers of margins—and the end result is therefore often a curious contradiction. They are modifiers because, as far as materials, composition, structures, and performance techniques are concerned, such creations hardly differ from those presented throughout the western European art scene. Their multilayered structure, semantics, adherence to multiple reference points, and, above all, usage of contemporary artistic techniques indeed westernised such expressions in the region, thus partially diluting some of the earlier misconceptions about Montenegrin highlanders and the South Slavs in general.

There are numerous examples of western influence on the Montenegrin cultural scene, such as the extensive use of Internet, video, installations, and performances, and the Western colouring of the Montenegrin cultural space is also clearly visible on the more general level of popular culture. Among many rather curious artistic mixtures, the most interesting is a group of young musicians who call themselves The Books of Knjige. Aside from composing songs and performing them in front of live audiences, members of this band are prominent video-artists. Naturally, this

pregnant with dark memories of exodus, ethnic cleansing, borders and boundaries, exclusion and inclusion, identity and self-recognition. For the most part, western Europeans do not concern themselves with such issues, except when it is absolutely necessary for them to display proverbial compassion with victims of unfortunate historical or political circumstances. It is necessary, however, to recognise and give due credit to western European foundations and non-governmental organisations for their activities in helping to keep open the lines of communication between local artists and the outside world. Such efforts indicate that creative artists in Montenegro and in the Balkans in general are not, after all, the lost citizens of an imaginary country.

This is not to deny that many Montenegrin artists view western Europe and a chance to exhibit their artwork or perform their plays there as the ultimate proof of the artistic value of their work. Being included in recent exhibitions at galleries and places such as Arte in Guerra, at the Palazzo Reale in Naples, Blood and Honey and TransArt in Vienna, Venice’s Biennale, Le Monde de l’Art Gallery in Paris, and participating in the Edinburgh Thearer Festival carry more weight than any hometown exhibition or theatre performance. Such a notion is undoubtedly anchored in reality, but it becomes problematic when the validity of western European artistic judgment is overemphasised and taken at face value.

There is another dimension to this urge to be seen and recognised by Europe. The reality of harsh economic conditions in Montenegro and the possibility of selling one’s art abroad often results in various compromises in terms of thematic frameworks offered to the view-

ing public. Since the viewing public in western Europe is accustomed to approaching the South Slavs and the Balkans with the aforementioned stereotypes and expect to see more of the same, Montenegrin artists, musicians, film and theatre directors are inclined to provide in their works at least a hint of what is expected of them. To put it more specifically, local artists are aware that cleverly manipulated images of bloodthirsty tribal chiefs, the high resonance of the patriarchal logic of life in their plays, and the fascination with the mythologised past in their songs have acquired significant market value throughout western Europe.

A successful local artist inevitably reinforces western misconceptions.

In the contemporary world of instant gratification (cultural and otherwise), making an emotional investment vis-a-vis a work of art created in Montenegro, and the Balkans in general, is seen by many western Europeans as somewhat of an imposition rather than an invitation to a dialogue, and as an opportunity to decipher the meaning of one’s melancholy and passion. Given such sentiment, the growing number of exhibitions of so-called Balkan Art only reinforces the demarcation line between “us” and “them.”

Since the potency of local artistic imagery and its regional and/or ethnic specificities is difficult to avoid, organisers often resort to misconstrued generalisations, such as the one about the Balkans as a homogeneous entity, at least as far as art is concerned. The most recent example of such a perception of the Balkans is an art exhibition put together by the museum in Kassel (Germany). In the Balkan Gorges features the works of 88 artists from twelve countries of eastern and southeastern Europe. It is noteworthy that the exhibits selected in cooperation with a number of artists, art critics and museum directors from various Balkan countries, including Serbia and Montenegro. Aside from the Montenegrin Petar Ćuković, an advisory committee responsible for selecting the works of art included, among others, Škeljzen Maliqi from Kosovo, Dunja Blažević from Zagreb, and Branislav Dimitrijević from Belgrade. The exhibition prospectus emphasises some of the features all 88 artists share, such as the application of new techniques and technological innovations in their works and their effort to addressing anew questions about the status of the artist in a given society. According to the organisers, these elements show that artists from southeastern Europe are fully integrated in a global artistic discourse. Those who adhere to postcolonial discourse would say that the European fascination with Balkan Art represents a polished version of the old colonial attitude.

Thematic clusters such as war, exodus, displacement, identity, alienation, and transition are mistaken as the common denominators of almost all works of art created in the Balkans.

Two important characteristics are overlooked: a strong sense of regional and local specificities with regard to content, and the position of the individual artist with respect to the work of art. Local specificities indeed dissolve any thesis about the homogeneity of the Balkans as an artistic and geographic space (not to mention numerous other levels of heterogeneity that characterise this region). Even though an individual artist might not be visible in a particular work of art at first glance, it is the power of her absence that is often misinterpreted as a lack of individuality. The artist is indeed present but his presence is shrouded by the broader context of social change expressed through his /her work. This is the point where, in the minds of many westerners, art and politics meet and political or economic traumas (or a combination of the two) of many peoples from the Balkans merge with individual artistic expressions. Naturally, artists’ immediate political, economic and social environments are usually their first source of inspiration, but it would be a mistake to consider it the only or the exclusive one.

For a western European observer, it seems much easier to glance from a distance at these multicoloured and vivid expressions of angst and then categorise them as confirmations of one’s earlier views about eastern exoticism of the ‘other’ than to engage in a potent encounter with the reality of others’ lives and participate fully in cultural and social exchange.

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Designer Playtime McKenzie Wark Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press, 670 pages, €50.00, Kč 1,638.00 This is not the first book on game design but it is the best. It is comprehensive yet comprehensible. Salen and Zimmerman break game design down in a logical manner and present to the reader step by step. It is not a book about coding electronic games. It is about the design principles of all games, whether they are played with bits, bats, chips or checkers. It is about games as a cultural code.

The book is organised into four sections. The first gives the basic concepts. The three chapters that follow break game design down into three ‘primary schemas’: Rules, Play and Culture. This analytic approach to games has the virtue of clear organisation and logical progression, although as we shall see it does introduce a quite particular perspective into the book’s thinking about games.

The Rules, Salen and Zimmerman propose, are a formal schema for thinking about games, while Play provides an experiential schema and Culture a contextual one. The logic of the book radiates out from the proposition that the rulebased nature of games is what is distinctive to them as a phenomenon.

Games have an inner formal logic. Without it there may be ‘play,’ but there isn’t a game. “‘Real Life’ is full of ambiguities and partially known information, but that is one of the reasons why games as designed systems are artificial and distinct from daily existence. In ordinary life it is rare to inhabit a context with such a high degree of artificial clarity.” (123) Which might explain the desire for games, if not whether that is a good or bad desire.

Games have constitutive rules, which are formal mathematical logics, but also operational rules, which direct the player’s behaviour.

There are also implicit rules of etiquette that govern game play in general. Interestingly, games can’t function without these implicit rules, and yet they are not really internal to the game. They point toward the limits of the organisation of this book, which wants to treat rules as a formal system, which then generates play as an effect, which in turn takes place within a cultural context. The formal attributes of games, in this analysis, are removed from culture. And yet the implicit rules of the game point toward the close relation between the formal and cultural aspects of games.

The ‘Rules’ section of the book explores questions of complexity, uncertainty, probability and redundancy. Salen and Zimmerman explore the difference between games with perfect information such as chess, and of imperfect information, such as poker. This latter line of analysis is particularly useful for computer games, which can hide and reveal information to the player in complex and interesting ways.

Game theory also gets a brief chapter. Salen and Zimmerman find it of limited use: “It is not a general theory of games or of game design.” (245) The set of games to which it can be applied is too limited. Competition and cooperation get an interesting chapter, in which the authors show how all games require both qualities.

The section on rules concludes by looking at rule-breaking. “Game designers need to recognise that rule-breaking is a common phenomenon in gaming and incorporate it into their game design thinking.” (285) Breaking rules can lead to new rules—but only if a game has a culture of changing the rules in the interest of developing play, as Dave Hickey famously argued in his book Air Guitar is the case with the history of basketball. Rule breaking might also point to a certain limitation in thinking of play within the context of the game.

Is the rule breaker still playing the game? Or has the rule breaker discovered that play can exceed the game?

“Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.” (304) For Salen and Zimmerman, play is both created by, and in opposition to, some limit or rule. “When play occurs, it can overflow and overwhelm the more rigid structure in which it is taking place, generating

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emergent unpredictable results.” (305) This is a robust definition, and well argued in this book, but it depends in the end on a particular kind of metaphysics.

If one takes the line of thought that runs from Heraclitus via Nietzsche to Deleuze and Derrida, one might rather say that play is a free movement that can engender more rigid structures. It is not the game that is the precondition of play, in other words, but play that is the condition of possibility of the game. Brian Massumi argues this most cogently in his book Parables of the Virtual.

Salen and Zimmerman pay particular attention to Culture—it is their third schema. But the conceptual organisation of their book has cut the formal attributes of games off from culture, rendering them neutral. They are sensitive to the different values that games can embody. There is a fascinating section on the origins of the game Monopoly in the Landlord’s Game. The latter was a critique of the evils of land monopoly, but by the time it becomes Parker Brother’s commercial hit Monopoly, its values have, to say the least, changed.

There is a limit to how far Salen and Zimmerman can take this embedding of games in the cultural context. They can see particular

they set themselves was a textbook on game design, and here they have succeeded admirably. But they do the reader an additional service by laying out in a systematic way the intellectual grounding of game culture in a metaphysics that puts the formal structure first and the movement of play second. As a consequence, the book thinks the formal and structural aspects of games much better than the aleatory movement of play. It is a book for a culture that has forgotten how to play other than in the game.

And yet, at the same time, it might point toward tools for re-imagining play. German playwright Friedrich Schiller thought that play could be the exploratory, collaborative practice by which a society alienated from itself by its formal structures, its division of labour, could re-imagine and reintegrate itself. That thought lies behind the whole critical tradition.

By putting games in the context of culture, Salen and Zimmerman also put back on the agenda the bigger questions of how, through play, the good life might yet be imagined, and if not built in bricks and mortar, then built at least in bits and bytes. A radical ‘open source’ play culture may already be on the horizon.

Alison Knowles, Philip Corner, Larry Miller, Eric Andersen, Ben Patterson & Ben Vautier interpret Silent Music by Takako Saito (February 2002). Photo by Claudia Clavez.

kinds of formal game structures as privileging certain kinds of play and hence certain kinds of cultural value. What they can’t quite open the door to is a critique of the formal organisation of play within the game in general.

There is a great section on games as cultural resistance—something you just don’t find in many game books of any stripe. The authors offer an account of ‘Doom’ as a version of the punk DIY ethos. There’s great stories about ‘frag queens’—female skins designed for ‘Quake,’ and Los Disneys, a patch for ‘Marathon Infinity’ that turns the happiest kingdom of them all into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

But all these stories take place within the formal construction of the game as the necessary condition for play.

While there’s a nod toward the take-up of game culture within the art world, what’s missing here, and also in the art world craze for game themed stuff, is that utopian tradition that tried to think play outside the realm of the game, and tried to construct landscapes within which play could find its own form. From the Situationists to Constant’s ‘New Babylon,’ or Richard Neville’s Play Power, there was once a much wider—and wilder—ambition.

Would it be possible to create tools that would allow people to construct their own spaces for play, in which the rules would emerge out of the act of play, in which there would be no need for the structuring repetition of formal design? The ‘playing’ with games in the art world might look like the next big thing, but perhaps it’s really an admission of failure. The aesthetic, which was once the domain of play as something prior to and greater than the game, collapses back into formal structures of repetition.

It was not the intention of Salen and Zimmerman to write a critique of games. The task

Fluxions Louis Armand The Fluxus Performance Workbook, eds. Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn.

Performance Research e-publication; digital supplement to Performance Research Vol. 7, No. 3 “On Fluxus,” September 2002 (London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2002). ISSN 1352-8165. ISBN 0-415-28942-[4]. 117pp. http://www.performance-research.net/pages/epublications.html “The first examples of what were to become Fluxus event scores,” according to Ken Freidman and Owen Smith’s introduction to The Fluxus Performance Workbook, “date back to John Cage’s famous class at The New School, where artists such as George Brecht, Al Hansen, Allen Kaprow and Alison Knowles began to create art works and performances in musical form. One of these forms,” they explain, “was the event. Events tend to be scored in brief verbal notations. These notes are known as event scores. In a general sense, they are proposals, propositions and instructions.”

In effect, The Fluxus Performance Workbook is a collection of precisely such “proposals, propositions and instructions,” spanning the work of the founding figures of the Fluxus movement (Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Bengt af Klintberg, Yoko Ono, Jackson Mac Low) and many of those either belonging to later incarnations of Fluxus or whose work is held to be a continuation of it, including such an unlikely figure as Milan Knižák (whose recent career as Director of the National Gallery in Prague has tended to overshadow his work as an artist from the 60s and 70s). Importantly, it is the only freely available publication devoted to the Fluxus event scores, and one of

the very few since 1980 to be published at all.

Linked to the emergence of “Conceptual” and “Minimalist” art, Fluxus performance scores shift between the purely conceptual, the extremely minimal, and the elaborately comic. A typical score might be George Brecht’s “Concerto for Orchestra, Fluxversion 3”: “The orchestra is divided into two teams, winds and strings, sitting in opposite rows. Wind instruments must be prepared so as to be able to shoot out peas. This can be accomplished by inserting a long narrow tube into wind instruments.

String instruments are strung with rubber bands which are used to shoot paper missiles. Performers must hit a member of the opposite team with a missile. A performer hit three times must leave the stage. Missiles are exchanged until all performers on one side are gone. Conductor acts as referee. [1962]” Or “Entrance-Exit”: “A smooth linear transition from white noise to sinus wave tone is broadcast. Title is announced at beginning and at end, but at end, title is announced by a tape played backward.

[1962]” Or “Concerto for Orchestra, Fluxversion 1 + 2”: “Orchestra members exchange their instruments” and “Orchestra members exchange their scores. [1962]” Jean Dupuy’s “Bye Bye [Date Unknown]” demonstrates a more directly subversive strain in Fluxus events: “With the use of a vacuum cleaner, which on this occasion blows out instead of sucking in, a performer smothers the audience with a large cloud made from one pound of very finely ground pepper. (Provisions: Nostrils stinging, eyes streaming, peppery tempers rising, the people will flee the house in less than 3 minutes flat.)”

Many of these pieces read like make-overs of Dadaist sight-gags of Laurel and Hardy style slapstick. Others, like several of Klintberg’s pieces, assume a more “constrained” character, in their exploration and critique of social relations and conventions of behaviour. “Dog Event [April 1966]” is a good example: “This piece can be performed in places where many persons have gathered, such as openings of art exhibitions, cocktail parties or—preferably— dog exhibitions. The performers are divided into four groups and circulate in the room.

Their activities take place abruptly, without any simultaneity, and do not last longer than ten seconds. Afterwards they remain passive for at least on minute before the activities are repeated. Group A lick people on their faces.

Group B smell people in their crotches. Group C lie down in front of people and whine. Group D bite down on their legs.”

While event projects like Jackson Mac Low’s 1961 “Tree Movie” (a potentially unending film of a tree—anticipating Warhol’s Empire by almost four years) affect a cool minimalist tone (though still focusing on “nature”), other Fluxpieces are overtly politicised or engagé, such as Mac Low’s “Social Project 2”: “Find a way to end war. Make it work.

[1963]” The minimal economy of such proposals belies, in equal parts, the tragic and absurd aspects of the “human condition,” overly complexified on the one hand by vested interests and cross-purposed agendas, and exasperatingly simplistic on the other hand. The point being that it isn’t for lack of solutions that the world is in the state it is in, but rather the ongoing desire for obfuscation—the profitability, expedience and ultimate desirability of maintaining a problem-driven and problemorientated status quo.

Effectively, however, there is no constraint employed to determine the limits of what a Fluxus event might be. Consciousness-raising may well be the only consistent formula, depending, of course, on how you understand that phrase. Whether involving a tenor of absurdity (as in two people communicating verbally with one another from opposite shores of a lake), or of the utterly subjective (“Dream.

Don’t dream”), the underlying intention—and intentionality is the key issue here, in an art which apparently eschews the claims of intentionality while nonetheless insisting upon its role as art—is that of critique, of bringing to the fore otherwise suppressed, unconscious, or overlooked significance of even the most banal or trivial or ridiculous aspects of “institutionalised” human activity. Larry Miller’s 1989 piece “Only You” dryly sums this up with the exhortation to “Copyright your genetic code.”

Remus on Art “Perfect Tense: Painting Today” Until 14 March, Prague Castle Riding Hall “Today’s painting is expected to be spiritually uplifting and physically beautiful, satisfying both the eye and the mind, legible at first glance as well as at a closer look, understandable to the layman as well as the seasoned critic. Irony and paraphrase seem to be mandatory. The painting in 2003 is a painting after the [sic] painting, something that returns to classical form while bearing the ‘alien-like’ intruding presence of modern media inside it.”

This quotation, with which the catalogue for the current major exhibition of Czech painting entitled Perfect Tense commences, does its best to cover all its bases. In tone, it is the sort of commentary that one might expect of an anthropologist, confronted with some sort of cultural curiosity which he, or she, does not wish the world to imagine that he, or she, cannot quite comprehend. In order not to appear ignorant, the anthropologist throws a little of everything into the mix, and in the process gives the game away. For indeed, Olga Malá and Karel Srp, the curators of this latest exhibition of Czech painterly curiosities, are precisely that species of anthropologist, caught out in the game of trying to wink in the direction of every (pre-1989) Czech art theoretical discourse while in fact saying nothing at all about the current state of painting.

The first thing that a layman or a seasoned critic will probably notice when they view the Perfect Tense installation, is that evidence of a century-and-a-half of the influence of “modern media” (as the curators so quaintly call it) has been almost entirely suppressed. The consequence, as they themselves remark (with a detachment which is supposed to mask the fact that they alone are responsible for all facets of this show) is something which suggests, as the curators themselves say: “that painting is a baby that has survived an abortion.”

It really is rather hard to appreciate the selfcongratulatory discoveries of “painting” by precisely those who have set about excluding exactly that genre from shows they themselves have curated during the last decade (the Prague Biennale of Young Artists and designing installations for the “Golden Ring House,” etc.)! And then to do so in such a way as they have in Perfect Tense—excluding all but “pure” painting, suppressing in the utmost any indication that the technics of painting has advanced since the Impressionists … with a gender demographic that also harks back to the 1860s (4 female artists out of a selection of 25, which for a survey of this kind is hardly credible).

At a time when contemporary artists in the Czech Republic are struggling against chronic under-investment, Malá and Srp have seen fit to dissipate a massive amount of public funds on a charade around the idea of contemporary painting in this country ... The Perfect Tense catalogue, too, is an index of clichés about the so-called “elitism” of painting and its negative relationship to “modern media.”

(Despite quotations from Duchamp and Warhol in the work of Filip Černý, the legacies of these artists is CONSPICUOUSLY suppressed.

Once again we are in the realm of the 19th century artifice of concealed techne.)

The catalogue itself reflects the general incoherence of the exhibition and its lack of any critical or intellectual foundation, other than the desire to pre-empt any attempt by other Prague-based curators at a more thoughtful, cohesive and critical survey of recent works on canvas, or of “painting” however defined.

At best, the catalogue is merely descriptive.

At worst, it is completely devoid of any analytical content, beyond the repitition of worn out jargon and generalisations about the place of painting within the contemporary arts (unsatisfactorily defined as relating primarily to “modern media”: whatever that means at this point in history). This, however, does little more than to reflect the curators’ selection of works for installation.

Most of the artists on show as part of the Perfect Tense extravaganza, have made names for themselves on the basis of a diverse and already substantial body of work, despite the fact that most of the artists emerged in the

1990s. Had they been exclusively painters during that period, confronted with curators like Malá and Srp, they would not have got very far.

Not surprising then that, despite the exhibition promo, many of the artists are NOT primarily painters. Jiří Černický is the best example here—mostly known for his sculptural/conceptual installations. At the same time, ALL of the artists in the show have produced far superior work to that on display—a fact painfully clear to any who care to consult the individual artists’ catalogues. Of particular note is the excluded work of Lubomír Typlt (industrial assemblage paintings), Jakub Špaňhel (serial silkscreens like “100 Flowerpots” and “Sailing Boats” 2001-2), and Jiří Petrbok (e.g. his sex store installations and “Innocent Urban Wear” exhibited at NoD).

One measure of the absurdity of Srp and Malá claiming to preside over the rediscovery of painting in the Czech Republic, is their abject failure to have included the work of last year’s Chalupecký Prize winner, Michal Pěhouček, or the work of high profile younger artists like Veronika Drahotová. Even in the act of a trumped-up rediscovery the curators have managed to perpetuate the state of ne-

of foreground/background, and so on. One feels, however, that in a greater degree, these problems have already been worked through by an earlier generation of minimalists—but if retrogression is the fashion of the day, then Šerych’s brand of it has an intelligence and critical force which is almost entirely lacking in any of the other work included in this exhibition.

In room three we find Filip Kudrnáč, who at Tvrdohlaví Gallery last year reportedly refused to be exhibited next to a painting depicting a Ku Klux Klan member sodomising a young boy. The offending work was consequently removed to the gallery’s back office, so as not to offend Kudrnáč, whose series of 1980s Jeff Koons-style kitsch Elle magazine compositions are again exhibited here, with Duran Duran cupids firing arrows at whatever sky-blue-underwear fetishists happen to find these paintings interesting.

Next door there are three large format topographical paintings by Milan Salák, which prove that the artist learnt how to transpose receding photographical images onto a grid correctly at art school. Aleš Daněk’s 1950s magazine illustration art presents yet further dilemmas to anyone trying to locate the con-

Filip Černý, Reflection, 2000 glect in painting that they themselves had been instrumental in bringing about in the first place.

One must ask what the motives and rationale could be for such an exhibition as this, which in context appears a form of special pleading on behalf of a medium which can apparently no longer command attention in its own right.

Of the work actually on display, little stands out as representative of a resurgence of painting in the Czech Republic (or anywhere else for that matter). While curators in London and New York have heralded the “new painting” at various times over the last ten years, this show seems more an attempt to prove that there is no such thing—and perhaps this has been the motive of the curators all along. Indeed, the first pieces one encounters upon entering the exhibition space are Petr Mala’s three large format renderings of scenes photographed at London’s ICA. We know this, because Mala thoughtfully includes an oversize ICA badge on the shirt of one of the gallery attendants pictured, proving just what a man of the art world he really is. Perhaps we should go to the ICA, too, and see where it’s really at, because it certainly isn’t here.

In the next room, we encounter Jiří Petrbok’s allegorical figures of little girls with big heads and genital anxiety (still a favourite theme among various male painters represented here).

Next we find Filip Černý’s series of airbrushed nods and winks to Duchamp, Warhol and Monet—the tired end of a belated postmodernism. Alongside these works, Jan Šerých’s grey-black linear abstractions are outstanding. Šerých, among the finalist’s of the 2003 Chalupecký Prize, is probably the most interesting of the artists exhibited here. His work presents a sustained critique of symmetry, symbolic form and pictorial (or geometrical) illusionism

temporaneity of this exhibition, while Zdeněk Daněk’s series depicting naked women (of course) in soft-core bondage tableaux, en plein air, are almost as gratuitously masturbatory as the semi-nudes of Kudrnáč (for some reason only the cupids are entirely nude).

In Room 4, Jiří Černický’s psychedelic linear paintings with optically encoded figures dominate—although it is hard to see why a female figure with tail plumes should be called “Tigress.” Roman Franta’s beetles, apples, oranges and chillis are among the exceptions to the rule here, and deserve a far better context in which to be exhibited. I can’t imagine what Černický and Franta must have thought when they saw this show, but I can’t believe they were overly impressed. Daniel Hanzlík’s horizontal, linear, retro-70s abstractions pale in comparison.

Martin Kuriš is represented here by a series of Bohemian “regionalist gothic”—lush, comic, ironic, etc. These paintings are dominated by figures of busty melancholic angels, mermaids (inexplicably joined at the ankles), comic-strip bats, as well as seaside domestic horrors. In his previous work, Kuriš has pursued figure compositions strongly reminiscent of Sydney Nolan and William Dobel—usually with a heavy allegorical content.

Pavel Šmíd’s evangelic humour and visual gags (a mad gardener disappearing naked into an overgrown flower-pot) play with forms of tromp-l’oeil in a light, though rather mannered way that contrasts with the heavy-handedness of Kuriš. Aleš Havlíček is represented here by a series of works that might best be described, paradoxically, as “pastel Flemish” (still lives with skulls against a pastel monochrome field).

Lubomír Typlt found a dead cat while he was in Germany studying art and has been paint-

ing it ever since …

Eliška Jakubíčková is included here despite the fact that the catalogue claims Kateřina Štenclová as the only Czech “woman” artists to be working with pure abstraction. Jakubíčková’s work might best be described as a synthesis of Kline and de Kooning, and probably belongs more to a footnote on the history of Art Brut than to “contemporary painting.” The artist known as KW presents 1960s style faux naif figure compositions—most of which are strangely recognisable.

Jakub Špaňhel has received an increasing amount of attention over the last couple of years, rightly or wrongly. Here he is represented by a signature series of gold on black semiAbEx renderings of Prague’s ecclesiastic landmarks. Very angst. Very Kierkegaard. Dita Štěpánová, whose work was included in last year’s Prague Biennale 1, presents three large figure compositions set against a hot red monochrome field. Each painting includes the figure of a pregnant woman and in the third (one can’t help being struck by the aptness of it all) a large male figure conspicuously yawning.

Further along we come to Kateřina Štenclová’s series of geometrical abstractions, very much in the tradition of Josef Albers. It is difficult to determine whether or not the poor execution of Štenclová’s line work is meant to be intentional or not, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be.

Roman Trabura is vastly over-represented in this show, and for no obvious good reason either. His cartoon landscapes, featuring grotesque figure silhouettes, merely perpetuate a strand of folk art that has lost both its comic force and its internal logic, and without ever having exercised anything like a postmodern critique has simply become quaint. Michael Nesázal’s fantasy “Jell-O” landscapes, to the contrary, achieve a timelessness that situates them both as futuristic and pre-lapsarian; both within the landscape tradition and on the edge of pure formal abstraction, in a way that seems to demand accounting for. On the other hand, Jaroslav Valečka’s lurid nightscapes (in the style of Edvard Munch) seem merely content to repeat the ideas of their Scandinavian originator.

In the midst of so much landscape, Katerína Szanylova’s femme erotica of upskirts, crotch-shots and handguns, all painted in a sheen of pastel “fade out” (like so much Vaseline smeared over a camera lens), seem both bizarre and infantile. I say infantile, not as a criticism, but because the context of Trabura, Nesázal, Valečka seems to demand such an interpretation—along the lines, that is, of “infantile” “feminine” sexuality. Given an equal amount of space to her male companions, Szanylova’s work might obtain the presence it deserves (all three paintings are positioned, above one another, up the back wall of the gallery’s end room—while the landscape artists dominate the horizontal visual field … the irony is evident enough, with Szanylova assuming an almost “masculine” verticality, like some “maternal phallus,” as Kristeva might say, towering above a series of recumbent, almost “emasculated” landscapes—if only such metaphors weren’t so tedious).

If one were tempted to essay a final thought on this exhibition, it might be along the lines that at least we have cause for a certain degree of optimism, as what is demonstrated here is nothing the actual condition of painting—its validity, vitality, or otherwise—but rather that the life of contemporary art in Prague exists where it should: in the artist-run and commercial art galleries, and NOT inside the museums. If anything, Srp and Malá’s programme of largely excluding local contemporary painting from the major museum exhibitions of the last ten years, has probably saved it from precisely the fate the curators attempt to foist upon it here. What that fate is may be summed up by the exhibition name, an attempt, no doubt, to draw a line under “painting” as something which has somehow been finished up, completed, closed off. What this also implies, quite correctly as it turns out, is that outside the museum culture of Prague, painting and the arts in general exist in a very much “continuous tense.” The only thing definitive about Perfect Tense is its irrelevance to what it claims to represent: “Painting Today.”

See http://www.hrad.cz/perfect_tense/

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Letter From E.H. A.H. THE CHRISTMAS OF THAT YEAR The Christmas of that year we spent in a house in a village with views through trees to the windmills, and beyond an open prospect of sea.

The roads were empty and the houses too but shielded by evergreens, which made movement easy. There were many bare branches which tossed at the skies, and a weeping beech. Hannah had friends here and parents in the house so that was safe. We would go out at night to the beach where the sand was cold and locked with footprints from before the frost. The wind was strong but riderless and the ground tight and the air too gone with winter for anything more than stars. Once we went to watch the sun set off Montauk. Then there was light from the moon and inland electric fairies stippled the sails of windmills. In town it was a festive season.

GRANDMA HITS 101!

So Grandma Flack was born on Christmas Day, but is too Jewish to believe that that is why she has lived so long or that she is being preserved for some Second Coming. She maintains rather that longevity is to do with the early demise of a husband and subsequent abstention from sex. The significance here is one of health not of morals, as her own moral scorecard is more than mottled by compulsive gambling up to and some suspect beyond her confinement to a bed in the East Bay Nursing Home. She remains game at one hundred and one, knocks back a chocolate drop and shows the company her rings. Howzabout a hand on that one Grandma? all manage not to ask. I am here to be presented as Hannah’s friend which it is thought will please the old girl and maybe does, but you know that pokered inscrutability of older ladies … Karen still (still!) isn’t married but subvents the argument that Raymond the dog is the handsomest male she knows. I can see Grandma Flack’s mind here she wants them all married and widowed quicksharp. Ho-hum I speculate. She then sings a song of her own composition: Lucky in Love—I’m no good with the games but I’ve a hand for the dames … it’s a good little tune.

When the party’s over and it’s time to leave we’re singing it all down the corridors to wackoids and veggies on either side—the whole company this is, cutting out rhythm with our plastic cake-forks. Yes I’m lucky—so lucky— in love. It’s just so swooney they damn near fall out their wheelchairs clapping and Raymond old Raymond he howls with the pack.

Grandma Flack remains seated in state, happy as a clementine.

DELUSIONS OF KINGSHIP Raymond gets treats around Christmas; he understands that a large pack gathering means good hunting and so an excellent meal. Something like a hamburger patty he will eat delightedly and then lumber about with a slow submissive glow. He is Love Satisfied. But if

he is given something too incredible, something altogether too mind-blowingly beyond dry meal pellets, like perhaps a peppercorn steak, or a fillet of wild salmon, he suffers delusions of kingship. He will eat it, then strut about in absolute command and piss all over the house. This means the crate, analogous to jail, for two to six hours, where he gets very penitent. Long before parole he will have confessed to himself and to any who care to stop by that he was wrong about that king idea.

AND AREN’T YOU JUST THE LONELIEST THING? (SUNSET IN MONTAUK) the United States of America ends in the east in a rubble of wan hills and decapitated bluffs and a stony collar of their own wrecked past and it’s called Park Hero because out here even the sunset has something to prove and Christ you only have to look at it Hannah it goes down like an overpaid actress calling for makeup only it’s even more ridiculous more like a prostitute dying into the arms of Bohemia or rather the like the opera written for her in lipstick by precious but mediocre nineteen year-olds in the light of their electric faux-candles and Christ look doesn’t the sun go down shrill in its huge rouge tragedy and even the clouds outdid themselves this afternoon Mother I swear I thought they were about to throw themselves into the sea they looked so burnt and sad well what is it in us makes every age seem so ripe for an apocalypse and all the people in it such stuck colloids of guilt and grief and sin and haven’t we maybe some kind of rarefied quantum consciousness of how all our existence is lived out while falling into a giant black hole at the centre of the galaxy or maybe better still they say now actually accelerating away ever faster into more and more isolated zones of space and it seems that in the end we won’t all come together in some gross ash-pit at the bottom of the universe well that’s alright there’s time for one last cigarette before the lights go out and another look at that ocean and there you see it happening the change which shocked you so that first night when you broke out running from between two hedges and suddenly landfulness vanished from about your shoulders and the ocean looked like death just black and cold and very very heavy with stinging winds and the blood draws back all away to the bones and you were frightened then because you couldn’t understand where all your splendid blue had gone but here it is, leaving, up at Montauk sunset at the change from day to night where froth turns mauve and cold mean and the heads of waves are caulled in tar and when death comes this time it’s no longer a character but just a blunt occurrence among people you don’t know so you look at your girlfriend full of Christmas rhetoric and realise what you want most is to be healed where you hurt and clothed where you are naked and to have someone put something on your tongue while telling you you are whole now and hell maybe we’ll all go get healed and be well even that parakeet who had his legs pecked off by Audrey’s Isis will rise in glory from the dust

or dung or polythene bag in which he’s spent the last four years and that old bird in the East Bay Nursing home too she’ll bounce right out of bed denouncing chastity and throw her knickers at the Italian janitor who played so handsome a G harmonica at her party and is known to play out on his F# wife too while that whole crowd that congregation of kneeling devotees gathered about the hallowed bed to her one seemingly interminable life all the while all of them each eyeing death with a bargepole of their own and telling each other really they couldn’t believe how young they looked! and could Macy really be eighty three! or Audrey seventy four! or Karen steering up to sixty! no! and did you know grandma still does arithmetic and names the capital of any state you care to call her on and you can’t say that for young Marcus who seems to be taking his twos rather easy to all of us here and to you out there too I’d dare to superpose and perhaps even to her who has felt all or none of this and neither way does it matter much because you both want to go now back to the car back and find two dim windows to drink behind before this dinner at Rita’s and maybe that after all is how to get healed and be well or fixed at least or as little as find something anodyne enough to keep those old tomorrows spilling on out though the glass seems empty and your life too and your head and your soul and your sycophants a fortiori but if dinner drinks and dancing under all the stars East Hampton’s cruet of night can offer won’t feel festive to you then maybe you’ve a sickness operating somewhere the Holy Ghost can’t reach and neither way does any of it matter at all because really what it is has nothing to do with here or all that whorish sunset but is going on in a pew in an Anglican Church in your head where you shudder beside ghosts of your mother your father your sister your brother your mother your father your mother your mother who you deserted again this year and always will and if only all the guilty as they gather together for one hour once a year once again with that one wonder in their utterly lovely noodles being whether or not the pastor will tear a stripe off wide enough this time to assuage their lost Protestant thirst for suffering or if they will have to do it for themselves again and they stand there turning this question over and sucking at boiled sweets with a menthol notion of benefaction while the teeth rot right back into the brain and those innocent innocent innocent eyes just aswirl with goodness and well aren’t we all little lambs of god huddled against the storm and bleating senselessly and maybe if that pastor had something more than a slurry of watered curds and apologies for quite how fucking godless this world is then we’d all go hurl ourselves into that big black bastard of an ocean and what could be more Christmas Day than to be sent home salted, in a tin with your name on it, and the New Brunswick Cannery logo replete with seasonal singing robin, and you inside just like a little swaddled stone?

THE BRITS AND THE JEWS We are leaving. Hannah has gone upstairs to say goodbye to her mother. I am standing in the hallway with her father and a little time goes by. Then he speaks he says without opening his mouth do you know Adrian what they say about the Brits and the Jews and so I reply out loud no Bob what do they say about the Brits and the Jews and he tells me. He says without opening his mouth the Brits always leave without saying goodbye and the Jews are always saying goodbye but never leave. Goodbye Bob I say and stand there hoping Hannah will be a long long time.

UNTITLED NO. 11937 The Hamptons, being to the very east of the continent, were among the first to be roamed and ruled at a time when the palace whence they draw their name was still rude with youth and its courts still privy to matters more politic than an exclusive game of tennis. But just as the dour industry of those Puritan settlers would bear them into annals of history far removed from royal gates, so it would carry them in ceaselessly reiterated waves across the land, with the scourge of God about their necks and a host of plagues in their blankets, until a country was amassed and Long Island left all but forgotten in their wake. And so it would stay, a pinnacle of woodlands and impecunious farmers, for almost three centuries, while fishermen tacked and gloried in its vicissitudes of rare Atlantic light. It would be these qualities, and their own radical indigence, that both drew and drove those artists who were to become the foremost practitioners of Abstract Expressionism to East Hampton. In 1945 Pollock bought a shed out here with Lee Krasner. De Kooning was soon to follow suit, and thereafter James Brooks, Roy Lichtenstein and a whole cavalcade of genii capable of transforming richness of vision to power in realty: a true Renaissance alchemy for a truly Newer World.

A half shed now costs a half a million. Hannah’s parents bought their property while fractions still bubbled low in the alembic and it was in witness of this process that she spent her teenage summers. To her the land is loose scripts of adolescent language and the garden, that tree, the windowcast of light upon the stair all whisper confusions at once both nascent and long gone into her adult ear. For me and most others the land belts out East Beverly Hills. Eating here at Christmas is fairly silly— I had sushi with Eli Wallach (who most famously failed to win Marilyn Monroe’s love either for his character or for life itself in her final movie The Misfits), was served hummus by an old flame of Bill Clinton (now stridently campaigning to customers and country alike for Wesley Clark), and coaxed Raymond into crapping artfully (a former fillet of wild salmon) on Martha Stewart’s lawn.

Adrian Hornsby 29 December 2003, East Hampton

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