Updates.

So... I'll be writing again soon. Currently busy. Got married, got invited to the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference, which will be happening around the end of June. Been working a lot.

Confession as a Dominant Aesthetic Mode

Recently, I did a video about the Confessional Poets for my other creative venture, the Vlog Poets. I hadn't been very familiar with those poets or their work, but I recognized something very quickly: if you're a poet, or an admirer of poetry living in the United States, you're familiar with the approach of the Confessional Poets, and you're probably a Confessional Poet, yourself. I would go so far as to claim that we're all Confessional Poets, an idea that has it's predecessor in J.M. Richard's similar claim about Modernism(which you'll find discussed in the linked article). The idea is simple: when people enter into a specific epoch, they can't help but be a part of that epoch based solely on their involvement in human culture.

An oversimplified example might illustrate my point: if you were born among Neanderthals and raised in a cave, chances are that you would paint a seal on the cave wall using charcoal and animal fat instead of painting, say, Bosch's detailed vision of Hell. The society we live in, in other words, is in itself, the precondition for the aesthetic productions of that society. May the future forgive us for enabling 19 Kids and Counting. Anyhow, extending this logic to the production of poetry, I want to argue, briefly, that we find ourselves on the far side of a particular cultural moment that has enabled (or, somehow, demands) "confession" as a productive aesthetic mode, figured primarily in so-called Confessional Poetry. I'm not a fan of asserting a historical narrative of stops and starts, or "breaks," which seem, to me, too highly specific to really account for the varied and unfolding series of events and their even more various repercussions, which we call history. Instead, I'll advocate for a soft, non-confrontational evolutionary model, in which those series of small modifications and reconfigurations bring us suddenly face to face with  a whole new "animal;" one that bears a family resemblance to that of the moments preceding it, but bears, also, unmistakable marks of newness and change.

Remember that what is called Confessional Poetry is dated to the publication of W.D. Snodgrass' book Heart's Needle, in 1959. The poem that shares it's name with the book begins, after the epigraph, with these lines:

            Child of my winter, born

            When the new fallen soldiers froze

            In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,

            When I was torn...

It is, to my mind, no accident that the first book to be called "confessional" begins a poem with an invocation of the social conditions in which the poet is writing, and specifically, with an invocation of a war. And this war, specifically, comes on the heels of another war in the same world region, which had ended just two years before the next started. Further, this is a war that the US will not win, that we were not excited to enter, and that many public intellectuals and artists would speak out against.  Notice in these introductory lines the collapse of the personal into the social. It seems as if the winter the soldier is dying in is the one the poet has called "...my winter..." and it seems to me that, if the soldier dies there, then the poet does have something to confess. Perhaps the framework of my larger argument can be seen in this point: the religious undertones of the word confess are inescapable, and it seems to me that a culture aware of the purging of ones guilt available to them in confessing are likely to confess; confess and never stop. In a different context, Michael Cobb says of a James Baldwin character that he uses a religious rhetoric that, "... is not therapeutic as much as it is strategic," (God Hates Fags, pg 54),"  and that "...the sacredness of religious rhetoric is":   

 

"... a limit of language, the expression of what cannot be expressed, as well as the literal  indication that something exists outside of language, and by extension, human culture."(Pg 64)

All of this appears in a discussion about Baldwin's attempts to work his way around his status as a queer, African-American man, but I think the ideological framework about religious speech is useful to us, here. If the "confessions" of Confessional Poetry aren't able to escape their religious connotations (and I think they can't), then it's relevant to see how a religious and confessional rhetoric can be employed in a way that nods towards the religious in a secular world. The question, for me, is what is the strategy involved? and, further, to what end is this strategy being employed? The use of confession in a largely secular world must be a particular, and new, function of language and poetry. There has, after all, long been the theory that art is a method of "dealing" with the loss of God, and that the "sublime" of images and artistic productions are second-class replacements for the sublimity of God, himself. So allow, then, the Vietnam War to stand for one of the modulations of human society that becomes a precondition for Confessional Poetry, and let the death of God, announced by Nietzsche in 1882, be another.

What should we let stand as the third modulation, the third conceptual construct that makes Confessional Poetry possible? I will follow Robert Lowell in suggesting that it is the most major artistic moment preceding his own: Modernism. In Lowell's Collected Prose, he registers the anxiety about following the Moderns that the Confessional Poets felt:   

"Were we uncomfortable epigoni of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, etc? This bitter possibility came to us at the moment of our arrival. Death comes sooner or later, these made it sooner." (pg115)

With this, my tripartite scheme is complete. Confessional Poetry arrived in a cultural moment when: 1) poets and artists were experiencing a (guilt-evoking) war (it's not fun to be viewed as an intrusive imperial bully), 2) experiencing the anxiety about answering to, or moving beyond Modernism, and 3)speaking into a void where God's ear was not.    

This returns us to a matter of strategy. Who, under these conditions, to confess too? Everyone. And what changes when everyone might hear our confessions? Everything.    It is my contention that the shift towards a Confessional, personal, model has been semi-permanent, and that the poets, the artists, and society, are still trying to figure their way out of the logical trap imposed by confession as an artistic mode. The trap is this: in Postmodernity, if the dominant narratives are to be believed, we live in a period of extreme and complete heterogeneity. All things are only recognizable in their differences from other things, and are not any typical things in themselves. If this is the case, then, a Confessional poetry would be unsatisfactory because it represents an invocation of the notion of a "self" that, at least provisionally, is relatable to other, isolated, but existent, selves. That's why Ezra Pound sounds like this:   

II

The wind moves above the wheat-

With a silver crashing,

A thin war of metal.

I have known the golden disc,

I have seen it melting above me.

I have known the stone-bright place,

The hall of clear colours.

and someone like, say, Philip Shultz, writing in his book, Failure, sounds like this:    

My wife's younger brother took heroin and died

in the bed he slept in as a boy across

the hall from the one she slept in as a girl.

He sold pot he grew in their basement.

She'd leave work to take him to the clinic

but she understood she had to save herself.(pg 25)

The first sounds melodramatic and old. The images therein can be related to our own experience only in tenuous ways. We assume he means, by "golden disc," the sun, and that the "metal" sounds of "war" ascribed to the wind above the wheat is a sort of symbolism. On the aural level, especially in the melodramatic repetition of the iambic phrase I have, I have, I have. The second example, though, appeals to us on the aural level, and also at the level of the image, and in a larger conceptual framework in which the feelings an individual would feel experiencing these things are understandable by someone reading this poetic account of those experiences. I've known people on drugs, I've seen pot, I've been in basements. I know what it's like to leave work. Is that all, though? Is Confessional Poetry simply a sign of our own narcissism -- I can relate to this, and, therefore, it's important -- or our own self-involvement? What, after all, about the lines by Shultz makes them poetic, and not simply oddly shaped prose? The attempts to answer to these dissatisfactions with the Confessional mode have been diverse: prose poetry, conceptual poetry, New Formalism, and endless varieties of hybrid poetries have proliferated as poets, frustrated with what has become a new status quo, have struggled to move beyond the Confessional impulse.    For my part (and I think I'm now in a clear minority), I'm content to continue letting the Confessional mode have its day. I say this because I think that the move from poetry about the world to poetry about an individual's "inner-world" seems to me the logical endpoint of poetic innovation for the moment. Almost any other poetry represents only a manipulation of form, leaving content quite unaffected. In the most radical experiments, those in which, say, a computer writes a poem for you, it is still necessary for the "poem" to be represented by a particular construction made of lines and words. Words are inevitably indicators of our condition as human beings: they are symbol systems we've created for just these sorts of representations, after all.

Much in the same way some grammatical and spelling errors can slip by Microsoft Word, or autocorrect gets it totally wrong, a computer generated text is a construction imbued with meaning only when released back into a social context. For now, at least, our guilt, anxieties and passions are the stuff of poems. And I think we're better for it.   

Again, we're all Confessional poets now. At least that's what I think, tonight.   

** An addendum: An article in the Guardian, today, discusses a Scandinavian author who's just finished publishing a 6 volume autobiography described as "a scorchingly honest, unflinchingly frank, hyperreal memoir of the life of one man...". The term "hyperreal" has been employed more often lately to describe a "return" or, perhaps, an introduction, to an aesthetic that is clearly, at least in part, a response to the vagaries of non-representational and conceptual art. As the debate about the book continues, it's likely that the concept of the hyperreal (especially the concept as introduced by Jean Baudrillard) will be gain a more public and non-academic audience. 

Consider the author's admission about his family's reaction to the portrait of his grandmother: "... they said I was lying." The mode of Confession relies on anxiety about the status of truth and of authenticity for its valence, which is, also, it's biggest problem. The more fervently one confesses, the more intimate the truth they divulge, the more flat the admission feels. I remember reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and being unmoved. Partly, this was because Didion herself seemed unmoved, as she mechanically recited the facts surrounding the death of her husband, and subsequently, of her daughter. Our anxieties about authenticity have lead us to this point: we divulge everything, digging into ourselves like someone going through a trunk looking for that specific thing that might be at its core. It is possible, though, that we might not find whatever bauble it is that might anchor our sense of ourselves and give meaning to the narratives we tell. That we might end up disappointed, tired, and looking into an empty chest. Remember that 3 of the six major Confessional poets, in the end, committed suicide, after years of staring into themselves.

For the Workers

Debates about the aesthetic values of postmodernism are giving rise to an interesting array of linguistic devices. "Meta," for example, has escaped from being considered merely a prefix, and is now a descriptor in its own right, and even a budding critical category. Then, there is a range of metaphors meant to register the disgust of academics and cultural critics who are sure we've been here before: cultural necrophilia, or cannibalization among them. Beyond the first level of reference, that we're in some way "consuming" our aesthetic past, or images of past-ness, is a complicated mesh of warranted desires for a return to previous cultural moments and a despicable nostalgia for the open, uncontested sexism and racism of the past.

I wonder what makes the copycats of today any more pernicious or unscrupulous than the cultural movers of previous generations? My suspicion is that it has to do with the (perceived) difference between reaction and remixing. It's a relatively uncontested narrative that Modernism is a reaction to Romanticism, and Romanticism emerged as an aesthetic reaction to the Enlightenment, and on and on. Postmodernism, then, isn't merely a periodizing term (when it is, it refers to, roughly, the period between WWII and the present),  but also refers to an aesthetic break after which the values of the Modernist no longer obtain their cultural weight. In the Postmodern period, all potentially aesthetic productions are considered to have equal presence and merit, and any distinctions are subjective and personal: I can go to a museum and see one of Andy Warhol's screen prints hung a room over from works from Picasso's surrealist days. In that example, Picasso is reacting to the Romantic and formal painting of the 19th century, and Warhol is manipulating already extant materials (his screen print of Marilyn Monroe is made from a photograph by Eugene Korman) to create something that can't properly be called new. The problem of artistic integrity and legitimacy, then, must have something to do with creating a new sort of aesthetic product. So, here at the beginning of the 21st Century, having run out of images and materials that strike us as new, artistic production has moved into alternative mediums (film, performance, computer-based arts, so-called street art among them) and the measure of artistic integrity, creativity and originality is reserved for the assessment of the conceptual underpinnings of this or that appropriation or manipulation of "found" images and materials. I've witnessed how this often plays with the public first hand: I once went to a gallery with my father, and we stood together in front of a quilt made of squares of fabric that had been affixed over the tailpipe of the artist's car over a series of days. The stained squares were aggregated into a larger square that almost had the integrity of a single canvas. After pondering the image (or lack of an image) created by the piece for an inappropriately brief period, my dad looked at me and asked, "What the hell?"

My dad, art critic.

Interestingly, in the more popular forms of aesthetic production, film chief among them, we've seen -- rather than a similar retreat from conventional filmic images into re-appropriation and unbridled experimentation --  an unprecedented mining of previous narratives, forms, and images. I think much of the anxiety over this has a lot to do with a shortening of the temporal gap between the "original" and their reiterations: The Stephen Spielberg of E.T. revisiting the early 80's in his most recent movie, Super 8, seems like a good example. He's a great filmmaker (Jurassic Park? So good!), so why was he compelled to set this movie nearly three decades before the present day, in a period, after all, during which he was shooting original, less derivative movies? What accounts for the idealization of a time so recently passed?

Are these the marks of a cultural globalization that has temporal borders (particular decades, most often the "long" 60's or the 80's) and geographic borders (the United States in these periods)? It's not impossible to look at the 80's, especially, as a desirable past: it's often represented as both a time of financial and sexual decadence, and conversely, of innocence and exploration. The appeal is in some ways "universal" in that "everyone" can get what they want from it. In a naively optimistic way I'd like to see the phenomenon as an attempt to graft the smooth cultural/social functioning of the period's representations (and not, obviously, of its reality) onto our more precarious position now. Too, I think, it has something to do with Guy Debord's notion that the Image is, at last, a commodity -- moving on the ebbing and flowing tides of Capitalism and manipulated at every level of our societal hierarchies: the reclaimed PSA's of the G.I. Joe's available on youtube, where one might also see the ads for the militaristic, racist Transformers of Michael Bay's limited imagination (produced by Stephen Spielberg?!  Come on!).

I think something of the reiterative nature of our culture explains the appointment of Phillip Levine to the postion of Poet Laureate of the United States in August of last year. As our financial situation has worsened, and as we've looked to assuage our pain by fetishizing past moments of relative wealth and decadence, we've had, also, to face the realities of that past. The 80's saw great devastation to Union strength, and to the wage earners, generally. Not surprising then, to see a poet whose concerns have often been the workers of the US getting attention, and moving into a position of (relative) prominence. In the last few years, stories, movies, and poems about working and working culture have steadily gained traction in popular culture. Consider movies like Bridesmaids and Horrible Bosses: in these comedies (often the place of social critique...) economic disparity, a poor economy and job security are central to the plots. Likewise, there is a real pondering about the interstices of economics and art in Matthew Zapruder's poem, "Pocket":

...Today the unemployment rate/ is 9.4%. I have no idea what that means. I tried/ to think about it harder for a while. Then/ tried standing in an actual stance of mystery /and not knowing towards the world.

In the five lines, Zapruder grapples with a reality that interposes itself into poetry whether or not he wants it to be there. He, like many of us, pushes back against that reality, trying to stand "in an actual stance of mystery," as regards that reality, hoping for a transcendence and lyricism that seems like it's no longer available to us. The speaker's attempt to think the reality is marked in the poem and invoked in a way that lets us feel this process as work: the poem continues, "Which is my job." Poets after Romanticism are not merely aware of their crafting of poems as something that stands outside of the real world, yet bears a relation to it, but want to assert that what they do is some sort of work on that real world. Frank Bidart's incredible works attest to this fact, with a plethora of references to the creation of poems as making. His brief couplet, "Homo Faber" (which can be alternately translated as "man the creator," or "man the maker," or even "man the thinker") concerns itself with the work of being human beyond our local market concerns:

Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within
me as I die dies with me.

This isn't merely the anxiety of a poet or a creative worker, but the anxiety of full generations and nations. Most of us share a confidence that we have something to offer the world, and many of us, especially in hard economic times, are worried that the energy we want to dedicate to that pursuit of that something within ourselves is being diverted towards the bland material realties of life: we must eat, we must rest, we must seek shelter. Robert Hass says as much, when he writes in 20th Century Pleasures that, "The first impulse towards any art is, no doubt to make something, to act on the world (emphasis mine)." Our acting on the world is, often, a matter out of our hands; we pick up garbage, we use tools to fix an engine, we shovel sidewalks, or serve food. In any of those cases, I think, the individual puts something of herself into the work, wants something outside of the monetary in return. What she seeks is recognition of her part in a tapestry of human society.

So when we consider the conceptual work of contemporary artists, and poems about the work life of people in the United States, or comedies about the financially downtrodden as equally part of a nostalgia for a time that, perhaps, never was, I think we start to see what's so unsettling about the nostalgia of our age: if our nostalgia is for a past that we've mainly invented, it might as well be nostalgia for a past that never was. I think that the concern isn't really that the pop songs of 2012 are sad reiterations of the pop songs of 1985: it's that the pop songs of 2012 are markers of a creative nostalgia that imagines what it might be like to look back on a world that should have been. And as soon as you have a culture looking back at what should have been, it can't be too long before that culture looks forward to what should be. I think so far the consensus seems to be that 2012 should look like the 1985 we imagine Lean on Me to indicate, or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or any of the sappy feel-good movies where guys and girls get what they want, thwart the grown-ups and are confident everything will be alright.

I think that what we want, rather than getting back to the future, is for our future to come back to us. Wherever we are. Maybe the real break with Modernism is somewhere in this: that we've, for the most part, suspended Pound's edict that we "make it new," while we are forced to focus more on just making it. That's what I think for now, anyhow.

* A friend of mine made a few important corrections that I think should be noted: Spielberg produced Super 8, but didn't direct it, and Spielberg's latest directorial work are both period films from before the 1980's... Tin Tin, and Warhorse. I'm not sure if this changes the content of my argument... but it does reveal that I'm a poor  researcher!

How Do We Communicate?

I'm currently in my fifth month of unemployment. The challenges and the stress of that unemployment are manifesting themselves in increasingly ugly ways. One manifestation has been an experience I think I probably share with a lot of people: knots of anxious frustration with no obvious outlet are incorporated into myself as anger and combativeness. In the moments I'm least proud of, this combativeness has been pointed at my partner of nearly a decade, (a wonderful, beautiful person and a fantastic photographer), Stephanie. Frustration about my personal circumstances become useless argument in which I externalize my issues with inferiority by claiming that the degrading thoughts I have about myself are actually the thoughts she has about me. Certainly that's problematic in itself. It's sort of tangential to what I want to talk about, here. The other phenomenon that is quite real, and quite apparent when I start my useless sparing, is that she and I speak at different levels, or utilizing differing value systems. (So, terms like "unprepared," or "want" or "need" are weighted differently depending on which of us is using the term, and what the larger context is).

At risk of revealing personality flaws in myself, I'll acknowledge that this happens to me in another, less complicated, sphere: on the internet! I argue, as I've mentioned here before, with Aunts and Uncles, friends, and the friends of friends, or completely anonymous people. Don't pretend you're immune. Or, if you are, please, for my sake, don't let me know how annoying I've become. Many of the arguments are political, and are more or less in the tone of most of the political debates that happen in the United States: "Neo Fascist!" "Socialist!" "See you at Thanksgiving."

Being outside of an academic setting, I'm out of practice in the cool, measured format of (most) of those conversations, and I'm thrown back into the fray, as it were. I'm making a concerted effort to change that, to attempt to convince through the reasonable presentation of understood (or misunderstood) facts when available, and (ideally) appealing to shared principles when they're not. I probably wouldn't be, if I hadn't seen this exchange on youtube a while back:




What you witness here is astounding in two ways: 1) It shows exactly how degraded media coverage is in this country (oops! This was on CBC - Canadian TV... the general sentiment still stands, though), especially as other networks pick up on and employ fox-style "reporting" tactics (as if Glenn Beck pretending to douse someone with gasoline is reporting, rather than psuedo-pornographic fear mongering ) and 2) Therein, you observe an impressive intellect disregarding the clearly unnecessary personal attacks as Hedges drives through to get his point across with absolute aplomb.

It got me thinking about communication, and the problems of communication in life and (of course) in poetry. I think that, in a lot of ways, all anyone wants if to be effectively communicative. The different systems I was talking about, above, are equally at play in our art and poetry. That's why, I think, in the work of many writers and poets, a reader can sense worry about communication and dialogue. Poets, particularly, are always worried about their own obscurity and the lack of attention paid to their work. It's not a modern problem, though. Roy Harvey Pearce, in a book that really shows its age, particularly in its deployment of gender pronouns, talks about poetry's relationship to communication in the United States:

"For the achievement of American poetry is a good measure of the ahcievement of American culture as a whole. The poet's particlar relation to his culture -- his self-imposed obligation to make the best possible use of the language he is given -- is such as to put him at the center of the web of communications which give his culture its characteristic style and spirit (pg 3)."

But, later, in The Continuity of American Poetry, in an example of the absolute worst of poetic "culture," states his "rule" for the production of good poetry:

"The rule is this: that the poet who would reach the great audiece had, willy-nilly, to cut himself down to its size. Such a cutting down does not imply only a falling below the standards of high art; it implies also the production of an art in some respects different in kind from high art, and to be judged and valued accordingly (pg 246)."

Pearce is playing fast and loose with the poetic tradition, trying to show that it's both central to American life and communication, and isolated from that life by, in its proper form, remaining a "high art," that would need to be "cut down to size" to become popular. All of this, too, in defense of the necessary obscurity of poetic culture, which, Pearce feels, is where it thrives. How poetry envisions itself as communication is in part due to its recognition of itself as an obscure art, and partly due to the sensibilities of individual poets. This is  Li-young Lee, (the best pessimist in the US) in his poem, "Sweet Peace in Time:"

                               "I said, 'We should give up/ trying to be understood./ It's too late in the world for dialogue (pg 31)."

In this poem, from his 2008 book, Behind My Eyes, Lee imagines a speaker relating to us (and thus forcing us to consider that even the speaker's reporting might be skewed by his own perspective) a conversation between his self and a woman only identified as "she." The mournful tone of the poem will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lee, before. This stanza, though, I read as a challenge, not merely to other writers and poets, but to all people. It says you have to figure out a way to be communicative. It dovetails neatly with my earlier evocation of Zizek's Living in the End Times in its nod to the idea that catastrophic, apocalyptic, things are happening in the world. For my own part, moments of overlap (between art and life) like these are exactly what I love so much about literature, poetry, photography: these are means of communication that can approach something like the "universal." It comes as no surprise to any lover of books that recent studies show that a good relationship with literature helps develop the human ability for empathy.

It may be imperfect, but it may also be all we have. I don't pretend that poetry will save the world, especially because the language of poetry is often seen to be so specialized and outside of the purview of ones life. In the rural town I grew up in, it's very unlikely that I'd be able to talk about US conflicts by invoking The Wasteland, or Wilfred Owen's incredible war poetry. Too much cultural pressure, too much fear that poetry is somehow feminine, that one risks their masculinity in reading it (even the sentence I've written just now is rife with some of the assumptions that would need to be made to maintain this tortured logic... maybe another post...). But, just because people aren't generally attendent to their poets, doesn't mean their poets aren't attendent to them. In 20th Century Pleasures, Robert Hass argues the rhythms and stresses of a poetic line metaphorically invoke the content of that line, so that he is able to say of a Gary Snyder poem about two friends parting ways on a mountain trail:

"The variation comes in the one three-stress phrase and in the set of three two-stress phrases. The paired phrases with a pause inbetween insist on twoness, on the separateness of the two friends (pg 129)."

The central line he's discussing looks like this (with Hass' emphases added): "HIKED up the MOUNtainside     a MILE in the AIR". So, there is, he argues, a metaphoricity in the rhythmic system of the Snyder poem: that stresses are so consistently paired, and then, later, deployed differently, suggests the pairing of the friends, and then their separation, adding emphasis to the content of the poem. I'm not sure I find the position persuasive, but it's certainly intriguing. It also illustrates something about what I'm saying, here: with all of the various systems of communication simultaneously in play, how does communication happen? Maybe something like the collapse of one communicative system into another really does happen, as Hass suggests. I've mentioned him before, because of my admiration of the way he sees the political and the real situations of the world at work in poetry:

"I have it in mind that, during the Vietnam war, one of the inventions of American technology was a small antipersonnel bomb that contained sharp fragments of plastic which, having torn through the flesh and lodged in the body, could not be found by an X-ray. Often I just think about the fact that some person created it. At other times I have thought about the fact that the bomb works on people just the way the rhythms of poetry do (133)."

Either way, it seems to me that our responsibility is to resist the speaker in Lee's poem, to resist giving up on dialogue, and to investigate how we communicate the way Hass does: with earnestness, with honesty, and with an ear for how what we communicate communicates. I want to continue thinking about what poetry means as a type of communication, and how it means. The examples I've used here are interesting, I hope, to people interested in poetry and in communication. The three thinkers/poets I've quoted (Hass, Lee, Pearce) each write to communicate to the reader something about poetry and its place in their respective lives. The variatious and multifaceted ways each of them evokes poetry to their own ends speaks to me about communication, generally. If Pearce is right about the central role of poetry in American cultural life, and Hass is right about the many levels on which poetry speaks to us, I hope Lee's lines find their place: they frustrate and challenge us, and make us contemplate the dire circumstances under which any dialogue happens, now.

 Here's hoping we communicate better in the new year.

... To that end, have I ever told you about the poetry vlog I'm part of? Project videobard? We put videos up on youtube every day of the week. Check it out!

Things I want to Learn About Yoked onto a Discussion of the Poetry of Peter Davis

So, most people who know me know that I'm very much interested in poetry. My personal goals very much concern poetry. I try to write it, and I want to be a good critical reader of it. I want to be able to bring a Marxist literary perspective to the study of poetry in a productive way, and I'm currently not sure what that means. As I filled out my applications for PhD programs in English and literature, I was trying to flesh out what this project would look like. At first, I was interested in a notion of pastoralization, as developed by Raymond Williams in his The Country and the City. This book charts shifts in the social ideologies of the U.K. as expressed in their poetry. Ultimately, I think his argument hinges on the proposal he makes about the pastoral, as an aesthetic, that its idealizations "... [serve] to cover and to evade the actual and bitter contradictions of [a] time"(pg 45). This notion is carried through from medieval to Modernist poetry, and is shown with example after example to be at least "part" of what's going on in the poetry of a given time. Williams suggests that perhaps the sort of metanarrative developed is based on the Biblical account of the Fall, when Adam and Eve are forced to leave the garden due to their failure to obey the will of God. Since then, we mortals attempt a return to a garden that no longer exists as it did, and recedes in our collective rear view mirror, even as its loss is felt more strongly in our consciousness. Because this narrative is at the base of our experiences of nature and civilization, our poets evoke nature in overly romantic, idealized ways that have little to do with either the brutality of nature itself, or the capitalist mechanization of that nature represented most clearly in the orchard or dump. The lesson of his book, anyhow, is that we can't possibly assume the innately pristine-ness of nature, or even the existence of a "natural" world separate from ourselves.

The though frightened me, because I think, to a certain extent, I had idealized my own childhood lived in rural upstate New York. You know, undoubtedly that place wasn't beyond the commodification of the market place, but it certainly didn't feel like the city, or a suburb for that matter. Experience is organized in different ways away from urban centers, and those experiences leave one convinced of exactly what Williams exposes as ideology: the "purity" of the rural, the inherent impurity, decadence, and difference of the urban. In any case, interesting as all that is, it doesn't much impact the practice of poetry in the U.S. today -- though I know of poets who would consider themselves "rural," as opposed to "urban" poets -- outside of being an organizational tool for poetic anthologizing, after the collapse of the notion of unique "schools" of poetry.

So, that Marxist theory would have specific and interesting things to say about the ideological mystification necessary to create a sense of difference between geographically marked poetries isn't as interesting to me as a subject worth examining, mainly because I think that the maneuver represented there has a particular, parallel structure that is much more intriguing, and not as often considered: that is, representing labor, itself. If it's true that people tend to valorize the pristine, removed countryside, I think it's equally true that we valorize certain types of labor in the same way. If this isn't an older trope, it's at least a more fully developed trope in the American imaginary. Representation of manual and physical labor is often times run through with notions of heroism and dominance, raw power and perseverance. It's tied into our notion of the Protestant work ethic; that bit of ideology that suggests that our reward is in some next life, and the failure to toil through this one is an inherently moral failure. The moral failure represented by the lack of a strong work ethic is then manipulated by all sorts of constituencies for all sorts of ends: 99% protestors are "lazy," and simply "don't want to work," intellectual labor isn't labor to be respected (I don't think that this is the point of the novel linked to here, but I think it's the platform from which the content of the novel is -- critically -- explored), and on and on. Take with that the complaint of every generations, that kids these days, who, though raised by that previous generation, represent some failure in the perpetuation of that former generations' values.

What I'm interested in, then, is how poetry represents labor, in both senses of that word: what images and contents it utilizes, and how its practice is imagined as labor both by its public, and by its practitioners.

To that end, I'd like to mention a poet whose poems are a rare thing: honestly funny. They're funny in a way one would usually expect from a stand-up comedian. But also, his poems have a serious content at their core: how does one create art in the commodified market place? Anyone who is a maker of any sort wrestles with these questions to a greater or lesser degree. The poems, though, in Peter Davis's Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! takes that interaction between art-as-art and art-as-product to its extremes, in a sort of Shlovskian defamiliarization that challenges us in very interesting ways, at the same time that it makes us laugh our asses off. Not a bad combination.

Almost all of the poems in the collection are addressed to a super-specific constituency, in a way that mocks (or maybe takes seriously) the debates about "accessibility" that have probably always surrounded poetry. The titles usually name the addressee, as in "Poem Addressing my Past, Current and Future Students Who are Sufficiently Interested in Our Class to Check Out My Work," and "Poem Addressing People who are Reading this Underwater," and on and on. The implicit suggestion is that the poet is working on making sure his book is available for any person who could possibly have some sort of connection to it: increasing its market viability, its prospective audience, etc. The tone of the poems are consistent so that you get the sense that the speaker is the same throughout: an anxious, conflicted and plain-spoken individual concerned with how he appears, his future job prospects, and his eventual legacy as a poet. Each of the poems interacts with its title in a way dictated by the title itself: in one "addressing babies," baby-babble is employed throughout, though the speaker can only mobilize the babble to speak about how great the poem currently being read is,  for a poem addressed to a baby. The absurdity of the poems becomes the content of the collections' message, even when the idea that it has a message is lampooned:

              "... you might want to consider/ this poem and its relationship to: Melville, William Carlos Williams, Emily/ Dickinson, peace, consciousness, ego, psychology, Freud, Gertrude Stein/ hapiness, success, movement, cartoons, Raymond Queneau, Joe Wenderoth, / post-pre-post-modernism, aesthetics, surface, resurface, biography, smallness,/ George Perec.... (pg 68)"

Part of the brilliance of the work is how it capitalizes on the way language works: even though I suppose that there isn't an "intellectual" or "literary" way to link this work to that of Melville, or the idea of peace, the evocation of those people and concepts in the poem itself constitutes that link, and forces the reader to take the possibility of that connection seriously, outside of and against their own desires. In a broader sense, that's the only way these prose poems seem to function as poems at all. They make us see them as poems because they're in a book called Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, and each is titled "Poem Addressing...". The way the language evokes the "aura" of a poem challenges our notion of the ways a poem can be constructed, and how poetry is work. The collection reflects the "meta"-ness of our current cultural moment as reflected in our television shows (think Community, where there are constant winks and nods to the idea that the show is a particular construction that used to be called a "sitcom," and contrast it with historic representatives of the form, like, say The Cosby Show. We couldn't imagine that show getting away with Bill Cosby looking out at the audience, or into the camera, and winking, or for a single episode to be devoted to alternative timelines of similar events, etc, in the way that it seems completely normal to Community) our music (hip-hop sampling and appropriation is the clearest example -- the Ghost Busters theme with a bass-filled club beat under it evokes our nostalgia for the 80's, at the same time it gives us pleasure now), and on and on.

The point is, for me, at least, that this is a particular mode of expression, that must, at its base, have preconditions that make it possible, and realities that make it necessary or, at least, interesting. What those realities might be, I think, have a lot to do with our notions surrounding labor and creativity. I haven't fully fleshed this idea out yet, so let this post stand as a sketch of a longer, more well considered, more well organized, discussion to come at some later date.

Until then, I'm going to do the unforgivable and reproduce one of Davis's poems in it's entirety. I hope you like it as much as I do. It's called "Poem Addressing Fans of Celine Dion":

"I look at myself in the mirror all the time, as you might, and I just think,/ what the fuck?"(pg 90)

Do this guy a favor and buy his book! I'm sure he has a poem in there addressed to you, and that he'd really like your take on it.

Melancholia - A Review

Last night I saw Lars Von Trier's new film, Melancholia, with my ladyfriend. I've been excited to see this movie since I was first exposed to Von Trier's films with 2010's Antichrist. That film seemed, when I saw it, openly misogynistic, locating the Fall of Eden (as does the Judeo-Christian tradition) in women; in this case, particularly in a single woman's sexuality. I don't know anything about film review, so this is going to be a very basic reading of the movie, and, cards on the table, it's going to lean heavily on the book I've been reading most recently, Slavoj Zizek's Living in the End Times.

So, two caveats before we move on: 1) This review will include "spoilers," if that term even applies for a film like this, and 2) This review will probably, consciously or unconsciously, cop the style of Zizek, and apply (read: steal) his ideas.

The film follows two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in two episodes (the theme of duality is important throughout, more on that in a second) presented back to back -- first, a wedding which takes up fully 2/3rds of the film, and then secondly, the return of Justine to the extravagant estate where the wedding was held, and where she, her sister, and her sister's family will witness the end of the world. That's about as brief a synopsis as I can give of the plot, and of course it elides tons of details and doesn't touch at all on the beauty of the shots from a cinematographic point of view. There are, I think, only about 6 characters that need particular mentioning. These are Justine and (Dunst), Claire (Gainsbourg) -- two sisters --, John, Claire's husband (Kiefer Sutherland), Leo, Claire and John's son, and Claire and Justine's parents, Gaby and Father.

On one level, it seems like the most important thematic is the duality/pairing off that exists everywhere in the movie: Justine/Claire, Gaby/Father, the aborted Justine/Michael (Alex Skarsgard), Betty/Betty, Earth/Melancholia, Earth/Justine, and Melancholia/Justine. Each of these pairings is filled with it's own sort of automatic content: sisterhood, marriage, excess, whatever. Viewing the film in terms of the successes and failures of each of these pairings allows one reading of the narrative that really is about melancholy, and about the artificiality and tenuousness of our relationships and all that. But, being the dirty, stinking Leftist that I am, I want to push the plot towards a specific direction: that of allegory. It seems to me that what is important about the movie as a political/environmental statement exists not very far into the interior of the film, I think it's there for anyone to see, and that maybe it's even too easy. Whether this reflects the simplicity of the movie or of my mind is debatable, though I would suggest that latter.

What resonates with me about the notion of the impending end of the world starts with something Zizek says, with a nod to Fredric Jameson, in Living in the End Times:

"Fredric Jameson's old quip holds today more than ever: it is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relations... All one has to do here is compare the reaction to the financial meltdown of September 2008 with the Copenhagen conference of 2009: save the planet from global warming (alternatively: save AIDS patients, save those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments and operations, save the starving children and so on) - all of this can wait a little bit, but the call "Save the banks!" is an unconditional imperative which demands and receives immediate action"(334).

Seeing the film soon after reading this passage, I was struck with the possibility that our cultural products, as they always do, are working to imagine exactly such catastrophes, on an allegorical level, to either forewarn us of our impending doom, or, perhaps, to do the work of psychologically preparing us for the possibility of that doom. Reading Melancholia in this way, things fall into place really quickly. I think there is a way in which the planet, externalized, immediate, perceivable, becomes the embodiment of all of those smaller disasters that exist in our periphery, but don't interact the way they should: Global Warming, sure, but also over-fishing of the oceans, fracking, oil pipelines, loss of habitat, extinction of species, etc. All of these exist, are happening, and are absolutely lamentable and disastrous. A Marxist analysis of this particular situation would talk about the commodification of natural resources, the drive for profit at the expense of ecological stewardship and all of that, in a way that lets us take Jameson's quip seriously: let us, then, in Melancholia, go ahead and stretch the imaginative apparatus to create exactly the end of the world. When we imagine the film this way, it becomes, rather than a tale of depression and ennui, disgust with institutionalized marriage and all the rest, a film about our current environmental predicament, and a character study in which characters are reduced to types who (re)act as representatives of particular groups reacting to our current crisis. This is the reason for Justine's depression: she knows something isn't right, she foresee's the end of the world, and that possibility leaves her emotionally distraught. This state leaves her, at different times in the film almost paralyzed. Doesn't she, then, stand in for the environmental movement as a whole, always castigated as overly emotional, unable to articulate the problems that face us? How could criticisms of the notion of climate change exist, unless they exist in part by thriving on the doubt people feel when faced with "liberals" and "nuts" who make these vulgar attempts to emotionalize our connection to the earth: "she's our mother, we weep for her, we mourn for her" and all of that shit. Even those more astute critics of our treatment of the earth only know that something is happening, and that maybe we should slow down, step back, or whatever. It's no surprise when we meet Justine's parents, then, to find two opposite responses to the possibility of ecological disaster: her father arrives at the wedding with two women (both named Betty, as if both are really just more of one...), immediately gets drunk, and harasses the waitstaff. In him, we have an example of hedonistic excess: since there is nothing to be done, we should enjoy ourselves, we should indulge ourselves and please only ourselves. This notion is reinforced when Justine begs him to stay at the estate with her because she feels a pressing need to talk (to vocalize the problems as she sees them, to express what she is feeling is exactly what he wouldn't be able to stand, since it would challenge his self indulgence). Later, when she arrives at his room, he's already vanished, leaving a ridiculously short and non-explanatory note. He feels no need to justify himself, he just acts, and that's it. Her mother exists at the other end of that spectrum: she is mourning for the earth, she's overwhelmed with her guilt and disgusted by empty social rituals that she thinks ignore the reality of the situation people are in: life is short, we will be unhappy, and the end is coming. That this registers her attitude towards the earth and ecological matters is made clear when Justine witnesses her mother's morning routine, looking from one balcony to the next: her mother is doing some sort of Yoga-style stretching, an exercise that should bring peace of mind, but instead only delays her having to suffer her knowledge of the reality of the world.

Since this has focused mainly on Justine's family, it's important to note her sister, Claire. If Justine and Claire are the offspring of this older generation, who represent the reactions of the old Left of '68 to ecological and political disaster, then they have synthesized these reactions, Justine becoming our paralyzed, despondent ecologists who try to tell everyone the end is nigh to no avail, and Claire trying to make her peace with Capitalists, looking to the wealth and reason of our Capitalist system to allay her fears. That's why she is with John, the wealthy individual who throws the wedding, funding the maintenance of cultural rituals and reacting with glee at the approach of the planet (think here of statements about the possibility of Arctic ice melting, that it would present new opportunities for exploration and trade: don't worry about ecological disaster, our system will appropriate even these disasters for the continued accumulation of profit and exploitation of the Earth). As the wedding closes and it's clear that Justine wont stay with Michael, all of the sociological drama of the film fades away (I'm not arguing that level of the film isn't important... it was incredible), leaving us to the final section of the movie, leaving us to contemplate the end of the earth.

When Claire asks John about the planet, she asks him what his scientists say about it. She doesn't ask it in a way that suggests he employs scientist, but in a way that suggests he looks at particular opinions and particular attitudes about the approaching planet: isn't this exactly what happens with global warming skeptics, who would rather listen to the <2% of scientists who question the data on human-made climate change? His scientists tell him that everything will be fine, disaster not only will be averted, but isn't a possibility in the first place. This leads to one of the most beautiful metaphors of the film, and to scenes I found particularly fascinating, in that they reveal some level of optimism. This metaphor exists in the absurdity of the tools surrounding the observation of the planet. John, the ur-Capitalist of the film makes these vulgar displays of moving his telescope around to get the best view, even going so far as to yell at his butler (if there isn't working/owning class tension here, I don't know where it is), "No, you don't touch this!" The point is, his tool is one of appropriation, distanced observation. It's his way of "having" the planet, or having the experience of the planet. Contrast this with the simple device his son creates: a coil of metal wire at the end of a stick that reveals very basically which way the planet is moving: if it moves towards you, it will soon get too "big" to be seen inside the loop of wire, if it recedes, it will be seen within the loop of wire, a circle getting smaller and smaller. This imaginative tool measures rather than observes the planet, foregrounding the relationship between that planet (again, the figure for our impending ecological doom and apocalyptic disaster) and our own. This is where I think the film, though it ends with the end of the world, is optimistic: the young boy -- the "next generation" -- isn't interested in idly watching the impending disaster, instead, if he can't control or avert the disaster, he wants a way to observe it's scope, he wants a means of warning others about it. As the disaster becomes impossible to avoid, John takes his own life, abandoning his own family to experience the end as they will: he robs them of the possibility of a painless end in a final act of selfishness, taking the sleeping pills Claire procured for the family when she knew the end was nigh. This, I think, stands as a statement about what will happen when all cards are down on the table...

Incidentally, I have an uncle who sometimes argues with me about environmental damage and Capitalism and all that. When I posted a video about overfishing he sarcastically replied "Oh no, fisherman catching fish, what a problem!" I responded that the problem wasn't that they catch fish, but that by-catch makes up 99% of what they haul in, an incredible waste of life, since it's thrown back in, and habitat is destroyed. Confronted with this information, his tactic suddenly changed: "Who cares, we'll destroy the world and people will die and natural balance will be restored." The rhetorical differences in these two responses show the ideological milieu from which he emerges: first, of course the fishing catches fish, that's their job, this is merely an issue of work, making money, all of that. When that information is yoked to the possibility of ecological disaster, he retreats in the opposite direction: of course we're destructive, we're guilty of being destructive and that's why we deserve the impending punishment of starvation and ecological disaster. Never a position between these two poles: perhaps fishing should be regulated in ways that make such by-catch impossible, perhaps we should short-circuit the economy before we short circuit the planet!


It's important, too, to note how the movie ends. Claire, displaying the Freudian death drive (at least, my oversimplified understanding of it) requests that the three remaining people in the huge, obscene estate ("How many holes does my golf course have Justine?" John asks. "18 holes." "That's right." John smiles, and leaves the room) -- Claire, Justine, and Claire and John's son, Leo -- go out on the balcony, listen to music and sip wine. She wants control over how they die. Instead, the unimaginable becomes the object of their final fascinations. Justine tells Leo that she can create a magic cave, in which they'll be safe. This is the final optimistic moment of the movie: in the face of absolute, certain death, Justine and Leo build a teepee looking structure out of sticks, and sit inside their "cave," where Justine instructs Leo to close his eyes to more fully "occupy" the imaginary cave. Now, the three people who foresee the doom, the disaster, and who emotionally respond to it, try to measure it, and try to control their death are in an imaginary space, where, the viewer is left to think, they imagine their way out of the end of the world.

This review elides all sorts of details and ideas I wanted to touch on, but I feel like it's going pretty long already. Whether this is a conscious part of the writing and shooting of the movie, I feel like the details are persuasive enough to allow us to read the film this way. At least, I hope you found something interesting or persuasive in this. If this acts as nothing else, maybe it can illustrate the way an idea or perspective can be used to read a film in a particular light. The notion that it's easy for us to imagine the end of the world is one that is, to me, striking and interesting. I'm sure the next time I see the movie, that these themes wont be so dominant in my mind, and I can see it a whole new way.

The Godlessness of my Worldview.

This will be quick and not at all scientific. I'm about to get whiny.

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not afraid of the nonexistence of a god, gods, god-like creatures, or their earthly manifestations. I think it's too late in the human game for that, and anyway, it's vulgar to believe in the validity of one over the others in the ever expanding pantheon of deities.

So, bracketing that initial assumption ([there is clearly no god]), all that is left to attend to is the rhetorical existence of a god, gods, god-like... etc. Due to my particular context, let us also assume that all future references to God (who I will call god, or "a god") refers specifically to the one of the Abrahamic faiths (as much as practitioners of each are willing to disparage the others, the continuity between their traditions is indisputable, and from my secular, heathenish standpoint, in the most literal sense of the word, remarkable). This is precisely where the trouble begins for our wanton, stupid, excitable species. Remember, after all, that as god recedes from the realm of the "magical" (Zeus is a god of lightning, gods bring us crops, gods make mountains explode, they oversee our celebrations -- Bacchanalia anyone?), he must operate in even more shadowy, even less quantifiable realms: now, god makes us who we are, we are his hetero or queer creations, or, he spookily knows the entire future of the world, all of our individual identities, but will not intervene on behalf of a single sinner who, after all, he created in his own (debatable) image, because his test of our free will is more important than a decent, livable existence on earth. At this point in this little rant, I'll mention the catalyst for it as a means of moving forward: I got in an argument. (Not uncommon for me...). The argument was, at first, about gun laws, and then the nature of the United States' relationship to Israel, and eventually, about god. The points I want to explore are twofold: 1) This is a backwards way to go, isn't it? We sort of swim upstream if we start from various political positions and trace them back to their (allegedly) religious undergirding. And 2) I think one of the dominant issues of our day will be our navigation of exactly this nexus between religious and political beliefs.

Let's begin.

1)The Chicken,The  Egg, The Christ and an AK-47.

At the point in the conversation in which my interlocutor invoked her belief in god, I stepped away. To me, it is useless to attempt to carry on a conversation about real, material circumstances in the world when the other individual assumes that all of what we experience was manufactured, first, in the head of one invisible, non-present, (specific to this case) biblically represented being. Let us not be derailed by a conversation of world, universe, or all-of-existence origins: I don't give a shit where it came from. Much in the same way it would be absurd to argue who the architect of the burning building you're standing in might have been, it seems irrelevant to conversations about the nature of gun laws in the 21st century United States whether the universe blinked into being for the fuck of it, or was snot-rocketed into existence by the big man upstairs.

The important thing to think about is the rhetorical nature of her invocation. At a point in which all of our cards were down on the table, where we could either agree or disagree based on any single policy point whatsoever, she bracketed and set aside our entire conversation and said, (paraphrasing) "Whatever the policy problem, at base, God is the solution." So, in some sense, god not only created the impossible-to-comprehend physics of the universe, but he's really concerned that Obama might regulate gun ownership before his four years in office is over! This is a powerful (thought content-less) argument. I can't possibly disagree with you about what your faith tells you god wants for our country (because he gives a shit about invisible lines on the map): this would be reckless, insensitive, condescending, and a whole lot of other pretty negative things. Fine. What I can do is put god back into the historical context from which he arose, and point out that your invocation, and the invocation of others are completely at odds with each other. We're certainly used to hearing the religious themselves talk about this very point: Islam is a religion of peace, Islamic terrorists have perverted the message (I do believe that's the case), Christianity is a religion of high moral standards, child-raping priests and their subsequent coverups don't really represent the mainstream of religious thought (again, I concede the point, and in this case, it's the nature of the coverup not the crime itself that is...  fuck this will be misread... so reprehensible. By that I only mean statistically, child sexual abuse doesn't happen at greater rates inside the church than it does outside the church, what varies in the case of the church is the scale and duration of protection granted to known pedophiles). So, if in those cases, the nature of the religion doesn't determine the nature of the acts done in it's name, why should we assume anything different for the case of rhetorical deployments of religion for political ends in the United States? The easiest counterpoint to today's rabidly free-market conservative evangelicals is the existence of the liberation theologists of South and Central America. In that it would be impossible to argue that either one or the other represents a truer representation of the will of god, the equation deployed by the religious conservatives here is flipped on its head: it is not that Individual A <believes in god> and therefore <holds these specific political values>, but that Individual A <holds these specific political values> and this determines the means by which they <believe in god>. My own sense is that there is much more scriptural evidence to support the notion that god (and his kid, born of a virgin on exactly December the 25th, at which time a Christmas tree was erected in a stable and Joseph received a gift card to Macy's from three wise uncles he never sees but, whatever, at least he can get that kitchenaid now, amen) is a dirty redistributionist ( I don't remember how much Jesus charged for the loaves and fishes, or how much he put in stock with the moneylenders in the temple, do you?) rather than an American individualist. That's neither here nor there. Here comes a random paragraph break!

2) Now, let us use the two assumptions from above -- 1) god? Not so real, 2) In the main, ones politics determines their reading of god, god does not determine ones stance on politics -- to end with a brief discussion of what these things mean for us, as political beings, members of a species called homo sapiens, citizens of individual countries, and eventually, the entire world. Let's examine the list of things god cares about in the United States, right now:

 -- Gay marriage (Against!)
 -- Lower taxes (for "wealth producers," like, you know, Paris Hilton)
 -- Gun Rights (For!)
 -- Bible in School (For!)
 -- Evolution in School (Against!)
 -- Lady Gaga (Against... but secretly For)
 -- Israel (For it whatever the fuck that means!)
 -- Global Warming (Not happening!)
 -- Globe-as-financial-resource (Happening!)
 -- Abortion (Against!)
 -- Muslims at Ground Zero (Against!)
 -- Muslims preserving their social practices (Against!)
 -- Muslims using airplanes (Against!)
 -- Muslims (Come on!)


How has it never struck any of our churchgoing friends that god happens to line up exactly behind Rick Santorum's presidential platform?

In disregarding the various objections to the possibility of god's existence put up by Richard Dawkins and Christoper Hitchens, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton rightly, though, I think, too condescendingly, notes that the problem with their objections is that they take religion at it's word (when Christianity says there is god, and he created the world in 7 days a few thousand years ago, this is exactly what Christianity means to say) rather than recognizing religion as the most perfect deployment of that weighted Marxist term: ideology. As an ideological system, that is, as a system of beliefs that effects your actions in every day life, there probably isn't a more perfect historical example than religion in all of it's forms. How else to explain people kneeling on a rug five times a day, people avoiding certain animal products in combination, people not trimming beards (I thank god for this specific practice. Beards or bust), or playing with snakes and all the rest? Think of how less complete all other similar systems are: even the most ardent capitalist might eventually take their social security benefit, even the most prominent Republican might accept a loan to their state, even the most liberal democrat might eventually vote to keep Guantanamo open, etc. In all of those cases, the ideological standards of the system aren't nearly completely encompassing in the way the standards of any of the Abrahamic religions are.

The problem this poses for us is a complex one: How can we ask the right questions of religious people, if "God is the answer" to questions we've not yet even formulated? How convenient for God that he gets to occupy the space at the outer most limits of our imaginations so that his powers, paradoxically, increase even as they decrease. Wherever I don't understand something, in steps the omnipotent. Politically, the issue is more straightforward: if we leave our politics to god, we're fucked. For whatever reason, he's figured out how to paint us beautiful sunsets each evening, but he hasn't gotten around to a reasonable distribution of food, so that, as we enjoy the sunset tonight (which I undoubtedly will, California has it's  benefits) another day will have closed during which 26,000 children have died because they literally couldn't gather the calories together necessary to sustain a human life. If you're wondering where those extra calories are, look at your Big Mac, Big Gulp, Double Downs and five pounds of grilled cheese. The issue is, in this sense, very material, very basic: god is behind very many causes, ideas, and political stances, but, except through human actors, he hardly ever gets anything done. So what humanity needs (not America, not the US, not the West... I'm an unrepentant universalist -- yes you can have your individual identity, but it is our collective future that is the realm of politics, proper) is to put god's political platform aside, and formulate a different, inclusive, secular, creative one.

The goal then, is to create a rhetoric that excludes god from the sphere of politics.

I promised brevity and instead gave you this rambling (riddled with intellectual errors, I'm sure, riddled with grammatical and punctual errors, I'm sure) bit of psuedo-intellectual nonsense: Whine about it.

That's what I do.