Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  A more fruitful reading would require us again to attend to the scale of the human. We should note that Seidel once more traffics in the clichés of the outsized event. “9/11” quickly became a kind of emergency code for national trauma, oversaturated with meaning, which is to say all but meaningless for poetry. The attacks themselves are humanized, figured as human actions (“dating,” “meeting”). Those familiar with his work cannot but recall the opening of the earlier poem “Spring”: “I want to date-rape life,” he writes. This line suggests that if we must approach life through the lens of human action, we might at least admit that to do so is to do violence to reality, and that no human violence could possibly be adequate to reality’s own. One clue that the redundancy of “The War of the Worlds,” too, is deeper than it at first appears is that it erupts onto the surface of the poem as redundancy only when the event’s human actors take the stage: they are “fleeing the fireball” even though they are already “on fire.” In this way, the infernal is perversely humanized, the human figures assuming its fiery aspects in a kind of parody of the way human affects like disgust project, as Blake would have it, the human shape onto everything. Seidel’s irony is double: first, his critique of taste’s reliance on the human abstract is conducted via the humanization of the planes and the towers. More complexly, the aesthetic defect reproduces the defect of a morality of taste precisely insofar as it is a defect. Taste is an aesthetic phenomenon, and the aesthetic is the inevitable horizon of human action. Only a perspective that goes beyond taste is capable of grasping the truly monstrous at the heart of things, the dark matter we are not made of that is not made of us, and in order to go that far, one must violate the boundaries established by taste and decorum.

  This helps us understand why the Shoah—the real Shoah, “terrifying and inadmissible,” not the one in books and social studies classes—is a model of the dark matter that taste prevents us from seeing. The Holocaust is a preferred stage for Seidel to defile, because it is a paradigm of an event one is expected to treat with such reverence and respect that its representations are scripted in advance. In the earlier poem “The Complete Works of Anton Webern,” the cattle cars of “Mr. Delicious” are already made the vehicles of a poetic violation:

  These trains had kept it all inside.

  These trains had never let their feelings out.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  These trains shat uncontrollably

  All over the sidings and ramps

  Jews for the camps.

  Here again, the content of the image is simply grotesque. The trains are personified that they might defecate the Jews onto the ramps—the Jews are not human cows or snow, they’re shit. This is the more offensive given the well-documented hellish conditions on those trains, whose floors were often covered in feces and quicklime, and many of whose passengers did not survive the journey. That Seidel’s Grand Guignol is directed against a moral reliance on taste and decorum is evident from the passage’s rhetoric of psychobabble and self-help psychology, whose spokespersons urge us not to “keep it all inside,” to let our feelings out rather than hold them in. Seidel follows this advice, and shits his feelings all over his readers: you think feelings are what matter, I’ll show you feelings.

  The Holocaust presents an especial affront to attempts to transcend feeling. Like a beautiful woman’s anus, the Holocaust should not be there. Seidel certainly wasn’t there:

  I don’t want to remember the Holocaust.

  I’m thick of remembering the Holocaust.

  To the best of my ability, I wasn’t there anyway.

  This refuses the logic of “never forget,” but with characteristic perversity, as though Seidel took the injunction personally. The tastelessness is prominent as usual: what Seidel wants can hardly be at issue, while the childishness of saying you’re “sick” of remembering the Shoah is matched only by the inappropriately comic affectation of a child’s lisp. But what is at issue in the call to remember something you didn’t experience? Can it be that the very insistence on remembering prevents us from seeing, that the memorialization of the event domesticates it, brings it down to a manageably human scale, makes us too “thick” to penetrate its horror?

  It is difficult to determine Seidel’s position on the question of whether the Holocaust is essentially continuous with human action or constitutes a radical rupture. Certainly the Sadean-Nietzschean thrust of his critique would seem to indicate agreement with the tenor (if not the political tendency) of Adorno and Horkheimer’s view that barbarism is constitutive of modernity as such, and the possibility of civilizational rupture inheres in the very fabric of instrumental rationality. But this is countered by the poems’ repeated insistence that the human is not commensurate to the scale of evil represented by the Holocaust. “To the best of my ability, I wasn’t there anyway” is a very strange line. His not having been there has nothing to do with his “ability”—he was a nine-year-old boy in St. Louis when the war ended, the son of a wealthy coal magnate. Is the absurdity of claiming agency for contingent historical circumstance intended as a rebuke to those who would locate the Holocaust within the continuum of human action?

  Regardless of whether Seidel goes so far as this, he is certainly concerned with the extent to which the diabolical conditions of modernity nullify human agency, and the second of his urgent tasks as a poet, coexisting uneasily with the moral critique, is to stake out a position from which agency might be recovered. This would also produce an expansion of agency, a new freedom and strength for the self: “I felt invulnerable, without feelings, without pores.” He seeks an ideology of self-representation that might be adequate to an infernal present—and such an ideology has no room for delicacy of feeling, or indeed for the porosity of feeling that encourages us to let our feelings out, not to hold them in. Seeking to free himself from the tyranny of feeling, Seidel spews his feelings on the page, refusing to curb their intensity—by giving them free rein, he both parodies the logic of the self-help movement and purges himself. It is important to note that this intensified self-presence is directed against taste, but for a very different reason than that which motivates Seidel’s critique of a morality blinded to the truth of the world. Seidel’s aggressive claim of agency is related to—in fact, reliant on—the horror he diagnoses, and the two currents of his poetry share a vehicle in his offensive against taste.

  For Seidel is responding to this infernal present when he presents himself as infernal. He represents the self not as a bulwark against a ruined culture, or as merely determined by it, but as appropriate to it—he makes himself into a devil in order to be at home in hell.I If our sensibilities enrage him, it is not because our feelings of horror and umbrage seek to deny that we too belong to the infernal but because they prevent us from seeing it in the first place. To perceive a morality of taste as a veneer is not incompatible with a moral sense of another kind. Seidel’s outrageousness is incomprehensible without a recognition that he is outraged, that he would not have to try to make a home in hell if he felt at home there already—or if he could believe that there were an alternative to life in hell, the possibility of salvation through the expiation of sins rather than the negative salvation of their embrace.

  In “December,” Seidel imagines 9/11 as an infernal parody of the Eucharist, a sacrament dedicated to the proposition that salvation depends on external agency: “I like the color of the smell. I like the odor of spoiled meat. / I like how gangrene transubstantiates warm firm flesh into rotten sleet.”

  We are close to Sade here, whose novels often stage blasphemous travesties of Catholic rites. Like Sade, Seidel seems to risk lapsing into mere antinomianism, “liking” what disgusts us, transported into synesthesiac ecstasy by the smell of rotten human flesh. As the Jews become human snow, the victims of 9/11 become dirty sleet—the profundity of carnage reduced to a weather report. But the imagery recalls us to Seidel’s preoccupation with his own mortality, to the
always unwelcome recognition that we are only dying animals, organic systems of reproduction and waste excretion whose hearts, on their sticks, will be quite consumed away. In The Cosmos Poems, Seidel repeatedly stresses our relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe, of whose nature we remain almost wholly ignorant (the invisible dark matter we are not made of apparently making up most of everything that is). The similarity to Nietzsche’s naturalistic perspective is not accidental, Nietzsche who wrote of “a star on which clever animals invented knowledge” and knew that our knowledge and belief systems and values would soon be snuffed out:

  After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. . . . [The intellect] was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee . . .

  Seidel elaborates this view of a universe governed by “the tendency / Not to be.” “Death is all there is,” he quips, revising the Beatles: “Death will have to do.” “What, indeed, does man know of himself!” Nietzsche continues; what indeed do we know of the dark matter we are, of which we are not made. Like Seidel, Nietzsche insisted that we are deceiving ourselves, that we are no more than “clever animals” that will become “spoiled meat.” We shy from the truths our bodies, those total nightmares, would tell us, and insist that the anus “should not be there”:

  Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the bloodstream, and the involved tremors of the fibers?95

  Thus the irony of a humanizing perspective: for Nussbaum, the human is “the coils of the intestines,” while what Seidel has in mind is “beautiful in its way” precisely because it fantasizes that the human is noble and fair.

  Seidel turns these coils and tremors into sources of power and delight—the foundations of a hypertrophied self-presence—by embracing the Nietzschean amor fati. “I like” that we are bags of rotting meat, “I like” the people on fire jumping from the eightieth floor, “I like” the carbon ash of human corpses drifting like an early snow onto the streets of downtown Manhattan. This bears more than superficial resemblance to Nietzsche’s recommendation of “an unreserved yea-saying even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything questionable and strange about existence”—although Seidel is more likely to say “no” to guilt by embracing those actions that from a conventional moral standpoint should produce guilt.96

  The impetus for such relentless assertion of the self is in part the overriding suspicion that as the appendage of an infernal culture, the self is nothing, that “we are not made of” anything. “I isn’t anything,” Seidel writes in “Barbados”: “And I is the first one hacked to pieces.” If the self isn’t anything—not even part of “the nothing” “we know so much” of—then what could its taste possibly amount to? This is the critique of the metaphysics of presence applied to the real world, where the self is a dispersed network not of signifiers but of body parts on the jungle floor. The death drive is figured here as the desire to literalize the trope of the subject’s dispersal: the paradoxical desire “to cut oneself in two” because one suspects one’s self is nothing.

  But an alternative is to hold that if the self is nothing, one might as well behave as if it were everything. In “Barbados,” therefore, we meet Seidel as a tourist staying at “[l]iterally the most expensive hotel in the world” in a tropical paradise built on the slave trade, which he envisions as a surreal cartoon:

  The most expensive hotel in the world

  Is the slave ship unloading Africans on the moon.

  They wear the opposite of space suits floating off the dock

  To a sugar mill on a hilltop.

  They float into the machinery.

  A slave’s arm gets caught in the machine, which “isn’t vegetarian,” and “turns into brown sugar.” The slave’s “screams can’t be heard above the roar.”

  It isn’t the lack of a moralizing perspective on slavery that is offensive (as if we needed Seidel to remind us that slavery is bad) but the sense that the poet is simply gloating over the human costs that prop up his privilege—that he is not just refusing to denounce the fruits of slavery but actively enjoying them as such. Another poet might write a poem that acknowledges that his island vacation was made possible by the exploitation of other humans, in order to explore the complex relations of the self’s dedication to its pleasures with the guilt induced by those pleasures’ price. But Seidel gives the impression that he is simply using an atrocity, and another representationally exhausted one at that, to expand his sense of himself—as if all the evil of slavery were worthwhile if it produced one afternoon in Frederick Seidel’s life of “pure aristo privilege.” The machinery of the world—nature, politics, economy—eats the “spoiled meat” of human beings, grinds it up and spits it out, despite the refined vegetarian taste of liberal sensibilities. Hacking the “I” to pieces is just what the world does. A single slave’s screams cannot be heard above the roar of the “epileptic fit” of the universe. So what would Seidel’s denying himself his tastes accomplish, compared with the aggrandizement of self-power that they enable?

  For Seidel’s denunciation of taste as a moral category is perversely dependent on his affirmation of his own exquisite taste in luxury items. This millionaire poet has never had to work for a living, and his poems rarely fail to evince this. He represents himself unapologetically as a man of wealth and taste. Many readers will find this dimension of his poems the most vulgar of all. Seidel stays, of course, at “[l]iterally the most expensive hotel in the world,” smugly poeticized as “the smell of rain about to fall.” (The intertext here is offensive in itself—from his playboy paradise, Seidel is paraphrasing lines Pound wrote in the death cells about “the clouds over Taishan / When some of the rain has fallen / and half remains yet to fall.”97) His collected poems rub their readers’ noses in Seidel’s appetite for expensive things: Cartier watches, his Savile Row tailor; there are paeans to the famous jeweler Joel Rosenthal. But for Seidel’s most conspicuous consumption, we must turn to the poems about his six-figure custom-made Ducati motorcycles. He is especially fond of the Ducati 916, “the most beautiful motorcycle ever made,” an aesthetic “miracle / Which ought to be in the Museum of Modern Art.” He flies to Bologna to see his bike being built; he is shepherded through security; it is like being initiated into religious mysteries:

  The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.

  He buzzes me through three layers of security

  To the innermost secret sanctum of the racing department

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Trains are delayed.

  The Florence sky is falling snow.

  The trains and snow are innocent here, within this temple of exquisite taste, but we are still disgusted. How crass is this profligacy, how worshipful an ostentation. In passages like this, Seidel is still challenging our dependency on cultivated liberal taste, no less aesthetic than his literal commodity fetishism. But these moments are also distasteful because they are so blatantly hypocritical: he sneers at our disgust and horror, our commitment to aesthetic propriety, and then he kneels before the “altar” on which his beloved superbikes are consecrated.

  * * *

  The one time a cognate of the word shame appears in Seidel’s omnibus Poems 1959–2009 is in the last line of a poem from Evening Man. Seidel is describing a friend’s husband whose sudden partial paralysis puzzles his doctors:

  It is exactly as if he’d had a stroke—though he is young.

  But his speech and cognition are unimpaired.

  But he can’t even use a bedpan or sit up in bed.

  Art throws the dog a bone.

  I am ashamed of my poem.

  Here Seidel acknowledges the im
propriety of turning a friend’s trauma into the occasion for a poem, but of course his insincerity is almost audible. He’s about as ashamed as Sidney’s Astrophil in Sonnet 34: “Art not asham’d to publish thy disease? / Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.” Much more suggestive is the penultimate line, which recalls Elizabeth Bishop’s famous rebuke of Robert Lowell after he incorporated passages from Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters into the poems of The Dolphin: “Art just isn’t worth that much.”98 The dog—surely Seidel himself in this case—is the paragon of shamelessness, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out:

  The dog . . . ignores human social conventions and is completely free of any form of shame. From the dog the followers of Diogenes acquired their name: Cynics. Complete shamelessness—learning to ignore others’ negative reactions of disgust at one’s appearance and behavior—is the only true road to the self-sufficiency that is the distinguishing characteristic of the good human life.

  In one sense, Seidel more closely resembles the Cynics’ “precursor and patron saint” Herakles than he does Diogenes: “Herakles made no attempt to reduce his needs and desires. He was, on the contrary, notorious for his crude and unbridled passions . . .” But Herakles was also noted for his altruism. Like Diogenes and his followers, Seidel adopts “the goal of self-sufficiency without the altruism.” This is, as Geuss notes, “deeply unpolitical”:

  First, by aspiring to complete self-sufficiency one tries to remove oneself from the state of mutual dependence on other humans, which is one of the basic preconditions of politics. Second, to assume an attitude of complete indifference to others’ opinions, and especially to behave in ways one knows others will find disgusting, is consciously to produce in others the experience of a barrier and tacitly to give them to understand that one expects to be able to do without their assistance, an assumption they might, justifiably or not, find insulting.99