NOT THE STATEMENT OF THE WIND, BUT THE WIND
Already it sits as a refrain in the back of my head. But I need the guidance; I need it to offer direction. Or maybe a reminder. It’s like a form that I can dip in and out of when I need to. I never intended it to be that way. I have simply always just insisted on doing what made sense to me, the only thing that has ever made sense to me: follow the thing that fascinates, follow it as far as it can go. A trajectory of the horror film opening the way to the twin pair of pornography and transgression. Something beyond this like mystical experience, but I didn’t know what was coming. Dennis Cooper’s muted teens were the first vessels that offered, perhaps, an opening towards this experience. Various corporeal positions and trajectories that I’ve mentioned before, elsewhere. But of course, Bataille has shaped it all, the in and out and through. Again: it was never the plan.
I’m not an academic, I have nothing to gain professionally, in the game of capitalism, by this prolonged engagement. But it’s impossible to avoid. I will depart, but then a thought pops up, and if I follow it, I end up back at this source. Last week’s essay took me into and out of Bataille. Starting somewhere intentionally, ending somewhere else, unexpected. When this happens I feel a sort of rush of continuity, like maybe I have done something right. There might not be linear reasoning, but there is, to say the least, method.
I had the thought recently, in the aforementioned throes of midlife crisis (or whatever), that something about writing feels good. It feels like something that makes sense, offers solace away from the despair, if that is even the right word (is it? or is it something else?). A centering towards a task. Calling it a purpose seems heavy-handed, but…
So I am thinking about writing. Fortunately I am also actually doing the work of writing. But I am thinking about writing. When I am thinking about writing, I find it easier to read more. This is dependent on finding the right texts. A hopscotch effect.
I am rambling through preamble to get to the actual starting point here. I saw a video by chance of a literary event; which is a participatory genre that I have found myself at perhaps more than anything else in my life (outside of the “group fitness” classes that stake a meager living teaching). The video triggered in me something slightly less dramatic than what the word revulsion entails, but it certainly was visceral. I did not watch the video, I could not.
I am looking for a sense of community. Something like a salon surrounding a larger motivation. But I think perhaps I’m too far gone; what motivates me is too specific and sometimes obscure and I have the horrible personality defect of not being able to get excited about shit that… doesn’t excite me. I cannot feign smalltalk and I have zero interest in “putting myself out there” in any sense other than, yes, I do think the work that I make is worthwhile and I want people to engage with it.
I attached myself to the writing community for a majority of my 20s, and this was easy to engage with because I was excited about writing and I was excited about drinking alcohol and when I am drinking alcohol I find myself far more capable of getting excited about shit that would not, in any other circumstance, excite me. The wall I hit was when I quit drinking and realized that the larger structural machinations guiding the literary community was not something I had any capacity to deal with, socially, unless I was, indeed, drunk. Which is to say: most writing is, actually, not that good. Beyond this, almost more objectively, I can state that at a literary reading, 95% of writers are actually horrible readers of their own work. Most writers are not performers, and that is why they write. There is a bizarre reality to the fact that such a solitary pursuit gets replaced with social activity. Personalities dominate, as they always do; networking and alignment visibly becomes more obvious than the work itself. My drunk ass always put effort into performing the work because I wanted the work to reach out to those who could engage with it: little did I realize this was naïve. It turns out poets do not actually go to literary readings to listen to each other’s work, rather, they gather under the guise of a literary event to be able to socialize before and after. This is, for all intents and purposes, fine. Most writers hardly have anything to talk about other than writing, so it makes socializing easier if one is expected to talk about writing, in the abstract, or whatever.
My problem was that I always expected people to be interested in what they were doing, not who they were talking to or publishing with. It started to feel so far beyond the point. And then I realized it was time to make my exit when the illusion of anyone caring about actual literary work itself was dropped in favor of naval-gazing political rhetoric being shouted to a roomful of people who didn’t want to think critically about anything (and if you did critically question anything, you were rather merely dismissed instead of, you know, entering a dialog about an idea, which realistically is the only potentially interesting thing that can happen when you are talking to a roomful of writers who are willing to do a bit of actual thinking in public. This probably sounds like unloading frustration and… it is? Someone told me that it’s not a “good look” to do something like this publicly, but I honestly no longer think I understand why it’s not a good look.
A specific event that I think of regularly was when I was in conversation with beloved San Francisco writer Kevin Killian. I honestly don’t remember what the entire point of the conversation was, but I think it had something to do with me reading/performing my work. Kevin said something along the lines of “but your work is a bit intense, isn’t it?”
I was thrilled! Yes, my work was intense! That was the entire reason I bothered to write anything, to move closer to the sort of intensely sovereign experience that I so desperately craved, even when I had less vocabulary to describe it. What I missed, in that moment, was that this was one of Kevin’s notorious moments of staying ostensibly nice while actually reading the fuck out of the person he was talking to. As in, his point was that this intensity was a bad thing. It was, certainly, not what virtually anyone else was bringing to the table at readings, at least in San Francisco.
Blake Butler once said, of readings, especially during this zeitgeist, that it was too easy to just be funny at these readings. It’s what everybody wants. Nobody actually wants to spend their social outing doing any work. I appreciate that he said this, it helped me intensely, but I similarly think that something has happened where the opposite direction has taken a precedence as well: where it’s also too easy to just be dour. Neither of these options, to me, offer anything worth attending.
I always aimed to give my work a performative edge, in the attempt to maybe just be erratic enough to get someone to actually listen to what was being said, to maybe have the opportunity to experience something on their own, rather than just laughing at a joke or admiring language. But once I realized this, of course, I also decided that it was performance that was more important here. And no one at a literary reading is interested in performance.
So I withdrew. I started to withdraw during the time that I was deeply investing myself into what I now call a very specific realm of Post-Bataillean poetry. For Bataille, poetry was only actually worthwhile if it was something else, something not merely literary but rather something beyond poetry. Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet Journaud, Bernard Noel, a few others with far fewer books available translated into English manage to do this. I could not, in any sense, articulate this clearly when I was most invested, but now it’s easier.
Consider the final paragraph of Start Kendall’s introduction to his translation of Bataille’s “poetry”:
Being beyond poetry may also require letting poetry go, remembering that poetry matters only to the extent that it offers its writers and reader alike an experience of the impossible. And yet, paradoxically, beyond poetry there is nothing.
(The Poetry of Georges Bataille, xli)
This is elaborated a bit earlier on:
...[Bataille had] ambivalence toward poetry as a form and toward traditional, literary poetry—beautiful words—in particular…The poet may feel compelled to write—as Bataille was—out of a need for the experience of freedom that writing provides. But the poet may also be compelled to write out of the love of literature, out of the psychological need to contribute to the store of literary treasure. In Bataille’s view, that treasure can lose its luster all too easily. Ultimately though, words are empty husks, literature is mere literature, and the poet comes to realize that, as Bataille puts it in Inner Experience, “what counts is not the statement of the wind, it’s the wind.”
(ibid., xxxix)
and again, earlier (quoting from another essay, The Sacred):
Bataille [writes…] “Whoever creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any limitations on painting or writing; alone, he suddenly has at his disposal all possible human convulsions, and he cannot flee from this heritage of diving power—which belongs to him. Nor can he try to know if this heritage will consume and destroy the one it consecrates. But he refuses now to surrender ‘what possesses him’ to the standards of salesmen, to which art has conformed.” Needless to say, the validation of the market held no meaning for Bataille during this period of his life, a period we may summarize under the heading of headlessness, Acephale, in which experience alone was key.
(ibid., xv)
Recounting all of this, Bataille as quoted through Kendall, is just to point to what this frustration that I hold could be saying. It is not writing itself, but rather art in total that this amounts to. And herein lies the larger complication. If I were to need to toss of “the meaning of life” to someone who asked, I would in the past probably having ended up muttering something about the necessity of art, and making art, in a world that is increasingly and rapidly swallowing its own tail on the trail to somewhere between entropy, absence, destruction, whatever.
But this doesn’t make sense: the impulse is not to necessarily create something that will exist in a world that is ill-fated towards destruction. That’s the same impulse, slightly adjusted, as siring offspring to keep a lineage alive, the mere insistence of creation. Things can be created that have zero impact on anyone. This is not a value judgment. This is a song for a future generation that may or may not be here. I don’t even think this is fatalistic at this point.
But if we highlight the potential for experience, if we consider how we can help to enlarge the scope of experience itself, then maybe that’s the exit that matters. Maybe that’s, actually, logic. Maybe instead of just building doors, we need to open them. There is conflict here, of course, there are opposing forces, and maybe this can be construed as selfish: I would insist that pointing to the capacity for experience is not the same as chasing extremity. It is an active work that can open itself up towards an idea of community in a different way. A different option. A different purpose.
These are notes, and I am going to let this mess of language stand as is for now. The impulse is what feels important in the present.