A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week my serialized novel, Major Arcana, premiered for paid subscribers. The link is above. Of the brief and catastrophic proem or prologue or Chapter 0, an anonymous commenter writes in to say,
Fantastic intro to Major Arcana, suitably tense and enigmatic. Reminded me in an odd way of the Stencil sections of [Thomas Pynchon’s] V.
The first chapter proper will appear tomorrow, introducing the novel’s resident mage. Chapters appear in both text and audio format; paid subscribers who are also subscribed to the Grand Podcast Abyss should find the audio in their feeds. Please email me if you’d like a free subscription in exchange for publicity—feel free to take the Pynchon comparison above as your model.
This week’s essay began with a few comments I made over on Tumblr about a recent essay on Anne Carson as “Tumblr’s Poet Laureate,” reproduced below; this then quite literally flowered into a more expansive rumination on Anne Carson but also everything else.
Flowers for Aletheia: Literature after the Logic of Form
In an intriguingly ambivalent essay in Dirt magazine, Terry Nguyễn crowns Anne Carson Tumblr’s poet laureate, a figure uniquely suited not only to the age of hybridized fragmentary prose-poetic forms but also to the ethos of that platform.
Carson’s work embodies Tumblr’s bloggy, scrapbook-like ethos, and resonates with the intertextual instincts of its young users. She has, to no surprise, an ardent and active fan base on the platform. […] Tumblr is technically a social media site, though it functions more like a socially-driven thought network. Users aren’t pushed to prefer one form of content over another. Their feeds are also not as algorithmically driven, but curated by certain tags and accounts that users choose to follow. Since Tumblr is quite non-discriminatory with how posts are formatted, text remains essential to the platform. Image and language go hand in hand. This has given rise to all sorts of mixed media compilations, including a practice called “web-weaving,” where users cobble together cultural ephemera under a common theme. These posts are compiled in a similar spirit to Carson’s process, and her poetry can be found under many such tags.1
It’s hard to remember now that when Carson arrived she was obscure in all senses and heralded as a genius by Guy Davenport, Susan Sontag, and Harold Bloom; today, as our Tumblr ethnographer points out, she bears mentioning in the same sentence about online pop-poetry as Rupi Kaur.
I myself found Carson through Bloom, who called her one of the few living geniuses in Genius. Before Tumblr existed, I remember posting a review of The Beauty of the Husband on Livejournal circa summer 2003. I used to enjoy teaching her works where appropriate: “The Glass Essay” as the hinge between the poetry and narrative sections of the class called Textual Analysis, between The Waste Land and Wuthering Heights; and Grief Lessons, the Euripides translations, in the drama section of Introduction to Literature. Grief Lessons has its own unforgettable introduction; Carson borrows a theory of tragedy from the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo reflecting on the death of his wife vis-à-vis Ilongot headhunting:
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He’ll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victims head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mothers funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.
Grief and rage—you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
Except for the extravagance of the head going out the window, this, though it has elements of Aristotle and Nietzsche, has scarcely been said better.
In graduate school, I and a few other students hung out for an hour with Carson when she came to deliver a lecture; all I’ll say about that is what you see on the page is not an act.
She’s a writer I’ve definitely gotten away from, though, I suspect for the reasons Nguyễn enumerates. I never left Tumblr because I enjoy what Nguyễn calls its scrapbook quality and its refusal to privilege one medium over another. I was never quite of Tumblr’s most characteristic demographic, however, so I feel an accusation against me for my abandonment of Carson gathering force, the accusation implied by the conclusion of Carson’s essay on “The Gender of Sound” in Glass, Irony, and God:
Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
The other human essence than the self, post-patriarchal as it is post-historical, is presumably that which becomes materialized on the timeline or dashboard. Grant Morrison, whom I’ve had occasion to mention before on Substack, foresaw this external distribution of sensibility and affect, the decanting of the formerly inner life into the datastream where it may be augmented and transfigured, as the “MeMePLEX” at the end of The Invisibles around the same time Carson was writing her most notable works. The footnote to a learned essay on Morrison explains:
In the narrative of The Invisibles, this transcendence of the individual paves the way to what is termed the MeMePLEX, defined as “access to multiple self-images and potentials, a menu selection of faces, contradictory personas … or multiple personality disorder as a lifestyle option”
What kind of a rotten bastard am I that I am still capable of mourning what this displaced? Sure, I’m a man, more or less—but am I wrong?2
I posted the paragraphs above to Tumblr, in slightly different form, two days ago. Yesterday, I was wandering aimlessly in a library when I found my eyes alighting on the colors of a magazine cover, as if I were the pollinator its flowers flushed themselves that shade of purple to attract.3 Then I saw Anne Carson’s name at the top: second billing, alas, to Lydia Davis, whose cutesy little ironies I can’t stand at all, in distinction to my relative ambivalence about Anne Carson.
The magazine as a whole is—how can I say this?—not for me. Its indicia bears a land acknowledgement (I’ve said what I had to say about the ethnical frivolity and political menace of this practice elsewhere and don’t care to renew the argument today). For an organ pledged to “nature and culture,” it is multicultural in that monocultural way inevitable to progressivism, given progress’s inherent will-to-totality: everything is torn up by the roots and put on display as a sign of itself, obsolesced in the very act of being preserved, what Carson’s beloved anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called “imperialist nostalgia,” or “mourning for what one has destroyed.”
This may in fact be an inevitability of the modern cultural process, but it’s better when the text perpetuating it conveys an inner awareness of the process’s brutality, rather than the outward show of legitimating piety that is something like the land acknowledgement. Beauty unaccompanied by an equally sensuous reminder of death is just kitsch; in that sense, all great art is “decadent,” none of it “healthy,” to the despair of the classicists of all sects, whether the conservative hoping for “traditional values” or the liberal seeking “positive representations.”
Somebody asked the other day on Twitter who served as Lana Del Rey for men. In the same way that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, as Ta-Nehisi Coates quoting Ralph Wiley used to say, so Lana Del Rey is Lana Del Rey for men. Still, as far as social media is concerned, Cormac McCarthy is probably Anne Carson for men. He wrote, in All the Pretty Horses,
He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
Anyway, while this magazine of “nature and culture” bears all the fraudulence of its self-congratulation, which is after all by now an easy enough Adorno-style point to score and thus itself somewhat kitschified, the paper stock is glossily pleasurable and smells good, and I do admire the essay (not online) by Sumana Roy about plants, childlessness, and Jagadish Chandra Bose, the man who demonstrated the potential sentience of plants (and who was also, I learn, from Wikipedia rather than from Roy’s essay, the founder of Bengali science fiction).
The main event, though, Lydia Davis be damned, is a brief epic by who but Anne Carson: “The Monk and the Mermaid” (also not online). The titular water-nymph sprouts legs and gets counseled by her boxing trainer to travel to a mountain to study Dōgen with a Buddhist monk; the monk, in turn, wishes to study Jane Eyre with her. (I am reminded of the old Onion headline: “Tibetan Teen Getting into Western Philosophy,” though, as jokes go, it’s less funny when you remember what Mao and Pol Pot learned from western philosophers.) I suspect Carson intends to suggest some likeness between Zen Buddhism and Protestant Christianity—a similar will to nothingness, a similar paranoid inwardness, betrayed, always betrayed, by worldly attachments.
Though I do love Jane Eyre, I know nothing of Dōgen; I am not by birth and temperament a Protestant attracted to Buddhism but rather by birth and temperament a Catholic attracted to Judaism. I am accordingly at peace with the inevitability of my worldly attachments and my consequent suffering. If you will suffer a far-flung allusion, I believe Star Trek V: The Final Frontier allegorizes a showdown between Judaism and Buddhism, or perhaps between Freud and Jung, when Kirk tells Spock’s guru brother, who promises to heal the pain of the Enterprise crew,
You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with the wave of a magic wand! They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken away, I need my pain!
I say “The Monk and the Mermaid” is a “brief epic”—an epyllion, it’s called, all the journeying sans all the furnishing. I think of the implied censure of Homer in the remarkable preface to Carson’s 1998 novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. Carson writes damningly that Homer uses established adjectives as immovable epithets and so “fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption.”
Of the poet Stesichoros, upon whose lost poem about Geryon and Herakles Carson bases her own latter-day epic, she writes, in the verse-novel’s famous first sentence, “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.” This is the interval, one surmises, of what the theorists used to call “the metaphysics of presence,” when signification and identity were grounded in transcendent truth, the truth of God or the gods.
After this long epoch of transcendental delusion—after modernism, after Stein—language became untethered to putative truth and poetry could consequently speak difference rather than sameness. Apparently thinking about Heidegger’s definition of truth as aletheia, that which unconceals beings, Carson writes of her incipiently Steinian poet, “Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up.”
This unmooring seemed so right, so radical, so necessary at the turn of the century! We didn’t know then that it would become a prison in itself, a floating world-system mandating an epic consumption all its own, transgression become compulsory and so oppressive again, a panopticon not jeweled with emancipated art but littered with kitsch full of tedious injunctions. Marking a narrative transition in the poem, Carson writes, “To speed things up here,” and just immediately arranges the story without apology for her convenience. You have no idea how much I—deep in the throes of a novel, developing and justifying everything—envy this and, yes, resent it. I am, still, coming “after Homer and before Gertrude Stein.”
I’m not suggesting we go back to Homer, and we probably can’t even if we want to. I am suggesting we tell the truth about what it costs. I read this week a conversation between Emmalea Russo and Masha Tupitsyn at Asphalte magazine. (Tupitsyn, also a Tumblr alum, has had one of the more interesting ideological journeys among thinkers of our era.) Tupitsyn tells Russo,
Counterpoints create an ethical tug of war that can lead us to a life of virtue, meaning, and divinity. But if the binary is eradicated and everything takes on the same flat value and meaning, the logos of doublethink sets in; a radical subjective reality that no one can share. In simple terms, what the digital has taken away…is precisely the phenomenology of the binary of day and night. Once we lost the binary, we lost dialectics. We lost the coherent and sublimative logic of form. Without the combined charge of positive and negative, we also lose the cosmic.
Once everything turns into everything else, nothing is anything anymore. When transformation is ceaseless, transformation, paradoxically, becomes impossible. Art no longer has any real content to work with, just a formless flux to gesture toward with its own chaos. That or kitsch and cliché. Nothing in Autobiography of Red is so fascinating as the theoretical preface justifying the performance. The actual novel-in-verse part—and there is nothing in its arbitrarily lineated prose you’d call “verse” as opposed to the more expansively defined “poetry”4—may be an academic-boutique version of straight women’s YA about gay boys, western shōnen-ai. Which ungenerous observation doesn’t mean it’s bad, nor even that it’s not, in the aforementioned expansive sense, poetry, just that it’s less original—less a work of originary “genius” disclosing or remaking being—than it may have looked before we became more familiar with the tropes it plucks from the floating world.
Carson’s customarily sparse author biography at the end of “The Monk and the Mermaid” reveals that she “now lives partly in Iceland,” a strange turn of phrase. Where else? Which part? My heart is in Iceland, my heart is not here. I once intended to go to Iceland, but the entire world conspired to stop me. Someday, because everything is always working out for me, I expect the entire world to conspire to get me there anyway. As Tumblr’s other poet laureate, aforementioned above, recently told us, twice, in fact: “When you know, you know.”
I’m fascinated by the way platforms, because of both their technoaesthetics and their putative ideological color, frame the content that appears on them. For example: I have at times written the exact same thing about the topic of gender on Tumblr and on Substack, and people on Tumblr with bios like “xe/xir | ace-aro | TERFS fuck off” liked it, even as people on Substack with paid subscriptions to Graham Linehan, Jesse Singal, and Kathleen Stock also clicked the little heart. Granted that my own attitudes align perfectly with neither side and that I think some careful ambiguity on the most complex topics can be tonic in a polarized and over-explicit age, I still wonder if we’re reading the posts or reading the platforms.
I am happy to report that efforts to break art out of its politicized and moralized social-media prison are intensifying in all quarters. In the progressive aboveground, Garth Greenwell writes beautifully about Sabbath’s Theater and the moral work of “filth” as against the left-liberal Twitterati’s demand for absolute moral legibility, while in the reactionary underground, the pseudonymous Fischerking praises the “mature vitality” of Goethe as against the equally Tweeted puerility and purism of the online right. Of interest is the parallel complaint about social-media politics found in legitimized progressive and stigmatized reactionary alike; I draw no other equivalence since I suspect the reactionary would regard Roth as a Jewish pornographer no less than the progressive regards him as a misogynist relic, but the authors of Sabbath’s Theater and of Faust, Part Two have more in common aesthetically with one another than with any political pundit of any identity or persuasion. Continuing with our theme: in Tablet, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, again with reference to Roth, mocks the ludicrous political preening of Aleksandar Hemon, who traded his first books’ inventive language and imagery for a mess of moralism; in Compact, my fellow Stratfordian Matthew Gasda reminds the Oxfordian new right that great art is unanchored to social status; and, here on Substack, Alice Gribbin issues a remarkable defense of the muses against the art-historicizers:
Synchronicity always brings me what I’m looking for, even when I don’t know I’m looking. I’m writing a novel one of whose characters is a manifestation influencer, so I now know—and in fact love, “unironically,” as we’re always forced to qualify—the manifester’s mantra courtesy of the entity Abraham as channeled by Esther Hicks and subsequently heard in ten trillion TikToks: Everything is always working out for me.
Somehow in ten years on tumblr I’ve never actually become cognizant of Carson until today, probably because I’ll admit I don’t really do poetry after a certain point. (When I was in school I always used to say that a real knowledge of poetry was what separated the English majors from the mere dilettantes.) that Tupitsyn (someone else I’ve somehow avoided encountering until now) you linked could inspire an essay in and of itself, but maybe that can’t wait. Personally, although I may have misunderstood what exactly is being signified by the your usage of the original quote (I myself being a mere dilettante) the place I’ve always found myself as a reader and writer is between Gertrude Stein and Borges, itself I a difficult (though I hope not a dishonorable!) place.