find a way to say Modernist poetry is complexity. This has been done
before by collapsing formal distinctions (of which genre is a good example)
and making new distinctions, like between Romanticism and Modernism, for
example. A bit like reinventing the wheel but then there is nothing wrong with
inventing a new wheel if this new wheel suits your use and the old
wheel broke. If that wheel were said in a way to be form, then breaking form
and making a new form would be a way to go.
Did I read human narcissism critically? The system of narcissism (from
Freud, On Narcissism, Mourning and Melancholia) has been used before to
understand or perhaps describe the gay scene but this is not enough. The gay scene
in Darlinghurst, Sydney over the 1980s and 90s has a singularity,
HIV/AIDS, which I date as Darlinghurst, 1985 (thanks to a suggestion the Sydney gay
journalist and writer, Gary Dunne made) and which is a Plateau.
I started in the middle as Ezra Pound suggests with the first Canto and
don't know in advance which way to go. Lets just go to Marx saying something
like: the problem is not the two sexes, men and women, but the third
non-human sex.
What is the third non-human sex? Following Hegel it could be the
dialectical unity of man and woman which in the final analysis would be the State,
which for Hegel is also through a dialectical unity of the separation of
church and state religion and for Marx the machinery of the state apparatus.
But Marx demands much more rigor then what is so far just a lazy
Hegelian-Marxist (if there is such a thing?) reading. With the rigors
of Marx this third non-human sex would also be a precursor as well as
non-human machinism. (The dialectic in Marx is supposed by production
and machinic desire. While the genius of Hegel reverses Plato, the grandeur
of Marx does a way with genius and reverses philosophy itself placing Marx
outside philosophy.) Also, the system of narcissism in Freud is a
non-human reading of narcissism in a human form, in a materialist reading of
Freud.
My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact,
constantly expressing a plenitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am
unaware. [Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.]
The self of the lyric poet raises its voice from the bottom of the
abyss of being; its subjectivity is pure imagination. [Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tradegy] This event is, of course, quickly covered over by everday banality or,
on the contrary, by the sufferings of madness. [Deleuze, Logic of Sense.]
I may be crazy but I'm no fool. [Bessy Smith]
The voice of lyric poetry in Romanticism is the voice of the Person and
a distinction: Modernist lyric, as Doug Barbour suggests in a Bakhtinian
way of lyric/anti-lyric, an event in ahuman systems. An event is a
singularity. (A phase transition or bifurcation.)
There's a new human god in here somewhere, as well. Let the old gods
laugh at that, as Nietzsche suggested somewhere.... wish I could find
that quote....
Chris Jones
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