From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Subject: Re: The Business of Poetry
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.
Date: 13 Apr 92 11:58:04 CDT

In article <1992Apr11.045934.2059@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins) writes:
>In article <1992Apr10.131536.28619@hemlock.cray.com> n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
>>
>>Another banality is the banality imposed by the commodification
>>of everything (including language).  This banality is a consequence
>>of capitalism.  Adorno.  Gramsci. Marx.  The metaphor of the commodity
>>is of a piece with the metaphor of apocalypse which is of a piece
>>with the process of the Hegelian dialectic, which is of a piece
>>with metaphors and myths imposed by patriarchy.
>
>"This banality is a consequence of capitalism."
>
>The cry of the dull, doomed youth of the '10s, wanting war, action,
>heroism, escape from the banality of bourgeois burgher life.  Getting
>the Great Machine instead.  Trenches, stalemate, industry as war hero
>and chief general.  Dead piled in heaps at the Somme, over ground
>abandoned in a tightening of lines.  Half a million, my recollection
>(too many books ago).  What is the alternative?  They envisioned one
>escape, found none.


Of course.  War is always staged as adventure and escape from banality.
What is more banal than war?  The Great machine a consequence of
capitalism and of the values of a military aristocracy -- the great
machine transforming real bodies to metaphor.  This is the
"transformation" r hardin claims he can find everywhere that is 
therefore without consequence, interest, or meaning.  Is that what
you mean, John Wesley? 



  And us, a new myth?  Some other economy, if that
>of Marx is discredited as that of the East India Company?  (That itself
>a thumbed nose at aristocracy, at land as fortune; again at old notions
>of exchange, at silver as wealth -- instead the exchange as profit.)
>What shall be enscribed on our collar, when the gift is also demand, is
>attack, is pledge?  Whence, whence, when "Only a man harrowing clods/
>In a slow silent walk ... Though Dynasties pass"?



Then the gift is not a gift.  It is merely a repitition of the
same.  You quote Hardy.  The fatalism a typical pose but, in fact,
the clods harrowed by Hardy are women who act as symbolic markers in his fictionfor the death he wants.  Like Poe, for Hardy "poetry" is the death of 
a beautiful woman.  His characters achieve real dignity only in death.
They achieve this dignity because Hardy loathes life that ends in death.
No immortal body is available to him, so he makes his peace with
death by slaughtering women and then raising her up as immortal
goddess.    


>
>But there is Thomas' answer:
>
>	"Not for the proud man apart
>	 From the raging moon I write
>	 On these spindrift pages
>	 Nor for the towering dead
>	 With their nightengales and psalms
>	 But for the lovers, their arms
>	 Round the griefs of the ages,
>	 Who pay no praise or wages
>	 Nor heed my craft or art."
>
>Yet what is that but perhaps the commodification of banality:  grief
>paid-for but not owned, not shared?  The gift ignored, unwanted; but the
>grief a gift (a theft); the dead, dead.  (But borrowed with nightengales
>and moonlight, another theft, even a deceit -- it is for the dead, who care
>no more than the lovers.  Less, being dead.)  What's the alternative, or
>must we seek one?  The living live, grieve, love, join the dead:  even
>the poets.  Gift, theft, or exchange.  Even we who are "seared with trade;
>bleared, smeared with toil"?


Thomas again typical.  The symbolic marker of a dead girl under
the Thames, water, death, floods, woman.  

What does the "what's the alternative" question mean?  The alternative
is to refuse bondage.  The alternative is political action --
not a poetry corrupted by murders.


>
>"Consider the lillies of the field, how they grow..."
>
>Is there, ought there to be, more than this?

If the lily wants to avoid the mower, they're better be.






>


-- 
From: Ralph.Cherubini@f10.n382.z1.FidoNet.Org (Ralph Cherubini)
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