Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  To understand this mechanism of Seidel’s poetry, as vehicle of both moral critique and self-empowerment, consider Alexander Nehamas’s analysis of Nietzsche’s use of hyperbole,

  which is often insulting and in bad taste, but which never lets his readers forget that the argument they are getting involved in is always in more than one sense personal. . . . It is true that Nietzsche’s texts, compared to many other philosophical works, often say too much; but this comparison leaves open the possibility that the excess may after all be even more accurate than the literal standard, which may itself come to be seen as a trope in its own right, as a litotes or understatement.

  Nehamas goes on to contrast Nietzsche’s “self-aggrandizing, aristocratic, esoteric manner” with Socrates’s self-effacement, suggesting that the German’s style has the effect of heightening the sense that the reader is in the presence of a personality.83 Nietzsche’s hyperbole is affective and rhetorical, but it’s important to note that his hyperbole is an entailment of his philosophy, not an exaggeration or evasion of its conclusions. His philosophy requires excessive affect because it holds that the excessive is not a limit case but the only adequate response to a world that is “a monster of force.”84 In such a world, dialectics is “a symptom of decadence,” decorum the recourse of cowards.85 Seidel’s hyperbole has the effect of Nietzsche’s “magnificent exuberance of a young beast of prey that plays gracefully and, as it plays, dismembers.”86 In Seidel’s poetry, to exuberantly inhabit the world is to participate in moral atrocity and dismemberment—“Horror, horror, I hear it, head chopped off”—and the critique Seidel proffers lambasts us for turning away. Like Nietzsche, Seidel reevaluates a dominant ideology of morality from the perspective of one who sees clearly into the abyss of modernity.

  The point is that something authentic or essential seems to be unearthed about both the world and the self in extremity. Seidel’s hyperbole and excess are amplifications of the literal. More precisely, they are a way of saying, with Theodor Adorno, “The barbaric is the literal.”87 For Seidel, then, hyperbole is a means of confronting the world on its own terms, of constructing an affective vocabulary adequate to the world’s barbarism. It is also therefore a means of producing personality in a specific relationship to shame. Seidel seeks to move entirely beyond shame, to be literally shameless, making the most barbaric aspects of the self the sources of its power, presence, and even delight. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, drawing here on developmental psychology, shame is “the affect that most defines the space wherein a sense of self will develop.”88 With this in mind, I want to consider some of Seidel’s most offensive lines in order to read his commitment to inflating and dramatizing his own worst impulses—to a performance of his own shamelessness—as a way of confronting a moral dependence on taste and sensibility.

  Specifically, Seidel’s “bad taste” poses a challenge to his readers (as well as to himself) to defend their unthinking willingness to be guided by their tastes. He insists on the triviality of questions of artistic propriety in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of the affects surrounding taste—particularly when it takes the form of horror or disgust—as a response to a world that presents itself, to Seidel as to others, as “a killing field.” “I stick my heart on a stick / To toast it over the fire,” Seidel writes in “Mr. Delicious.” His heart “blackens to / Campfire goo” while “choo-choo- / Train puffs of white smoke rise” and “trains waddle full of cattle to the camps.” “Ovens cremate fields of human cow” and “fields of human snow.”

  “Mr. Delicious” both crassly refuses and boldly confirms Adorno’s shopworn proposition that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. It is worth imagining, because it is imaginable, a claim that the “actual value” of “Mr. Delicious” is as an exercise in moral edification, mimetic of the atrocity the poem describes: the language one uses with children (“choo-choo train”) seems grotesquely out of place, until one reflects that children were grotesquely out of place in the death camps. The seemingly innocuous word campfire, with its connotations of Scouts munching marshmallows, glints off the gold teeth of corpses reduced to ash. The point of the poem would then be something like: the twentieth century has tainted language itself, cremated it—which was Adorno’s point. Of course poetic language is incommensurate to the horrors of the Holocaust, Seidel says—and here’s how incommensurate it is. I can’t even write a poem about it, I can only try to show, hyperbolically, how obscene any attempt to poeticize the event must remain.

  But this reading, which would make Seidel into an edgier Steven Spielberg, seems adequate neither to the gleeful energies with which the poem violates propriety nor to the perversely clichéd subject matter. These lines baffle any attempt to read them as conducting redemptive political work. Seidel’s hewing to the standard imagery of chimneys should instruct us that he is not really trying to tell us anything about the murder of European Jewry. The Holocaust, precisely because it has become the archetype of the horror and absurdity of political violence, lends itself too easily to representation, at the risk of triteness—which is to say, it resists representation, even of the subversive, antinomian variety Seidel attempts here. In fact, to say this much is already a cliché. Seidel recognizes this, flags it, by reaching for his images only as far as the nearest docudrama—cattle cars, the smoke of crematoria. When we examine his 9/11 poems, we encounter a similarly clichéd representation of an atrocity already almost illegible behind its scrim of clichés: the planes approaching the towers, the flames, the collapsing buildings—no detail not immediately accessible to anyone whose imagination and memory extend no further than televised news footage. He is, we might say, shameless in his exploitation of atrocities that have already passed over into the banality of popularization.

  Instead of dismissing this as an aesthetic defect, however, I want to ask what sort of aesthetic defect it is—or, rather, what effect is intended by means of aesthetic defect. “I stick my heart on a stick”: what will be skewered in this poem is precisely the sentimentality found in what Blake stylizes as “the human heart,” and the taste of that heart. Seidel sneers at our refinement, our sensibility, our taste—an entire morality that rests on these—toasts it over the fire to demonstrate its gooey insubstantiality. Indeed, the dimension of the poem most disagreeable to good taste is perhaps not the inappropriately jovial tone but Seidel’s very aestheticization of the horror. The cattle cars “waddle” in an inane pun, as if they and not their human cargo were likened to cattle, and the human cows become snow, the white ash of their transubstantiated flesh drifting across the fields. This is rather effectively poetic, a nice elaboration of imagery that I, for one, find quite pleasing—and which I therefore, in turn, find quite distasteful. That is, all these images (the heart as toasted marshmallow, the packed, waddling cattle cars en route to concentration camps) are wholly poetic both in their form (what are the boundaries of impermissible comparison?) and their content. The heart has been toasted and eaten before, after all—in Baudelaire’s “Causerie,” and in the first sonnet of La Vita Nuova:

  [Love] seemed like one who is full of joy, and had

  My heart within his hand, and on his arm

  My lady, with a mantle round her, slept;

  Whom (having wakened her) anon he made

  To eat that heart; she ate, as fearing harm.

  Then he went out; and as he went, he wept.89

  Or, perhaps more to the point, Edward Trelawny on Shelley’s funeral:

  The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.90

  It is not, then, that the heart is being cooked and eaten that is objectionable, even within the context of a poetic repr
esentation of the Holocaust. It is the content of the image, its gooey incongruity with the subject matter, that so affronts taste. It is, in other words, a goofy image, wholly inappropriate to the gravity of the occasion—especially considering how many very real human hearts were actually consumed in the ovens. Adorno warns that artistic representations of the Holocaust,

  by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are . . . wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. . . . The aesthetic principle of stylization . . . make[s] an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed.91

  He then argues that such representations have nonetheless a dialectical value, for “no art which tried to evade [the victims] could confront the claims of justice.” But do I need to say that Seidel appears uninterested in the claims of justice? “Mr. Delicious” is not about the Holocaust at all: it is about its own violation, about the disgust and shame it provokes—the shame we feel on reading such uninhibited desecration of what has taken on the aura of a sacral event, and perhaps the poet’s own disgust at himself for writing it (it is, after all, his own heart he is toasting, as if to say “It should not be there”). What is stylized here, what we are challenged to transfigure, is not the horror of the “unthinkable fate” but our readiness to assume it is thinkable within the boundaries of our too-human emotional or aesthetic reactions.

  Of those reactions, as I have been implying, shame and disgust are the principal ones against which Seidel directs the full furious force of his personality. Adorno anticipates affect theory (or suggests that at least some of its insights are not new) when he invokes the “shame we feel in the presence of the victims.” For while Adorno’s primary meaning is clearly that we should feel shame that we escaped—that we did not suffer as they did, that we did nothing to prevent their suffering—it would be a mistake to neglect the complexity of shame’s multidirectionality. Sedgwick recounts that in her lectures on shame she would ask listeners to imagine what they would feel if a distinctly Seidelean character, “unwashed, half-insane,” were to wander “into the lecture hall mumbling loudly, his speech increasingly accusatory and disjointed, and publicly urinate in the front of the room, then wander out again.” She pictures “the excruciation” of the onlookers, “each looking down, wishing to be anywhere else yet conscious of the inexorable fate of being exactly there, inside the individual skin of which each was burningly aware; at the same time, though, unable to stanch the hemorrhage of painful identification with the misbehaving man.”92 It is this “double movement” of shame that Seidel rejects: he wants to be the only person in the room not overwhelmed with shame—the urinating intruder, or the homeless man in “To the Muse”:

  I watched him squat in the street near the curb while the traffic passed,

  Spreading under himself sheets of newspaper;

  Which when he rose he folded neatly

  And carried to the trash basket at the corner.

  Across the street were Mortimer’s’ outside tables set for lunch.

  Seidel refuses not only the commonsense notion of shame, which we feel about our own persons, but the more complex relationality explored by Sedgwick, in which the mere presence of certain others—somehow marked, Sedgwick follows Silvan Tomkins in remarking, by strangeness—makes us feel ashamed for them or on their behalf. It is not only his shame that he challenges, but our own, the shame we feel for him as we read his work.

  “Mr. Delicious,” like so many of Seidel’s poems, takes for granted that we are offended, and asks us why we should value our own sensibilities enough to care that we are offended. What is it about our taste that strikes us as so trustworthy that we should allow it to dictate our moral responses? The poem, in other words, is a demonstration of the category mistake that is made when one is offended by evil. Rather than portray the horror of the Holocaust, or trivialize it (it is already, as received by an infernal culture, trivialized), Seidel instrumentalizes it in order to shame us with our own horror at his violation of decorum. There are aspects of the world that cannot be humanized, cannot be brought to submit to adjudication as matters of taste. Seidel’s philosophy, as I read it, is deeply anti-humanistic in its insistence that opinion is beside the point, that a morality of taste is no morality at all. If one is tempted to dismiss Seidel’s poetry on grounds of aesthetic taste, in other words, one should at least acknowledge that a central purpose of the poetry is precisely to challenge us to question those grounds.

  And if we’re disgusted by Seidel’s poems, we should at least acknowledge that the poet rouses the affect of disgust exactly to propose a critique of its utility as a moral response. Seidel opposes disgust because it humanizes, makes thinkable, what cannot or should not be humanized:

  Think of the most disgusting thing you can think of.

  It is beautiful in its way.

  It has two legs.

  It has a head of hair.

  On one level, these lines make the banal Calvinist argument that the human being is the most disgusting thing imaginable. A reading more attuned to Seidel’s critique of a morality of taste will note that the most disgusting thing imaginable, in a literal sense—“the most disgusting thing you can think of”—has human attributes. Seidel here suggests a limit to the cognitive value of disgust: if the most disgusting thing “is beautiful in its way” because we cannot help but see everything as human-shaped, then there are things we cannot see by means of disgust. Disgust is an all too human measure—like cruelty and jealousy in Blake’s “A Divine Image,” it has a human form. If the horror we seek to confront is instead elided by means of a morality that cannot but humanize what it looks upon—cannot but see itself in what it sees, as though it looked in a mirror—then that morality remains ineluctably aesthetic, beautifying what is so monstrous it cannot be assimilated to human systems, which are inexorably grounded in taste.

  That disgust should play such a large role in Seidel’s critique of a taste-based morality is inevitable. Disgust and taste are intimately linked, perhaps most systematically in Kant, for whom, as Winfried Menninghaus points out, the disgusting extends to “the morally disgusting, hence to phenomena subject . . . to an intellectualizing judgment.”93 A different approach to the problem is that taken by Martha Nussbaum, who has recently argued that disgust (and a morality of aesthetic reaction in general) is the wrong basis for criminal legislation, insofar as it represents an attempt to deny our very humanity, a cringing before our embodiment out of a pathological resistance to our own vulnerability.94 For Seidel, as for Nussbaum, the aesthetics of taste is precisely the field on which the moral cannot possibly be adjudicated, and his provocations call on us to recognize this. It is this morality of taste against which Seidel directs his verse, but with crucial differences. For Seidel, a morality of emotion and aesthetic evaluation is too human: the disgusting partakes of its opposite, the beautiful; because it remains within the realm of taste, disgust humanizes the inhuman. On further inspection, though, this contradiction vanishes. What Nussbaum means by human is something like what Seidel insists cannot be “humanized”: “I like the odor of spoiled meat,” Seidel writes of the corpses of the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11. This odor should not be humanized insofar as that means assimilating it to a symbolic aesthetic order that would tame it, dilute its representation of the ultimate horror at the heart of existence—but in another sense there is nothing more human than this odor, nothing more human than that we are all rotting carcasses. Seidel is trying to make us see what he calls, borrowing the terminology of theoretical physics, “the invisible / Dark matter we are not made of / That I am afraid of”—that which cannot be humanized, about which �
�opinion” has no bearing.

  Seidel, then, seeks to make of himself something not beautiful “in its way,” to get at an aspect of self or world that cannot be “humanized.” Dark matter, of course, is believed to make up almost all of the universe—the visible matter of insects and stars and cattle cars and Mortimer’s and anuses is the merest fraction of what exists. It’s a useful trope for Seidel because it is his view of morality writ cosmological. The human image cannot be adequate to the truth, because the truth encompasses horrors that dwarf the human scale. If shame and disgust, reactions based in aesthetic decorum, keep us from seeing the infernal truth about the world—make it into a kind of invisible dark matter—then Seidel will hyperbolically evoke those reactions, as if to demonstrate their inadequacy to the excess that is even more accurate than “the literal standard” established by a morality of taste.

  Inferno as literal standard is, as it were, literalized on a Tuesday morning in September, brought abruptly into Seidel’s actual home in “The War of the Worlds”:

  People on fire are jumping from the eightieth floor

  To flee the fireball.

  In the airplane blind-dating the south tower,

  People are screaming with horror.

  The airplane meeting the north tower

  Erupts with ketchup.

  Again we are meant to be offended by the aestheticization of an event that has taken on a sacral aura. The tastelessness required to describe 9/11 in terms of blind dates and ketchup provokes a reaction that Seidel turns against us. The fire is figured as the fake blood (“ketchup”) of the television screen, the plane’s penetration of the south tower as a blind date, as if the two were contestants on a reality show. The attacks of 9/11 did not simply become a spectacle but were designed to be one, endlessly looped on cable news. But this is a rather obvious interpretation of the poem—even the metaphor of September 11 as reality television is stale by now (Jean Baudrillard apparently having begun work on it by September 12). The violation of decorum is thus built into the event itself, the tastelessness of Seidel’s representation diluted by its redundancy.