Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  Of course, Seidel is not “behaving” in these ways, but representing himself as disgusting and indifferent to others’ opinions. His claim that the poems are to be taken at face value might also be understood, then, as a kind of speech act meant to ensure that the representations have the force of disgusting conduct. In other words, Seidel’s shamelessness is a form of self-sufficiency, an extreme assertion of a self that delights and affrights in the infernal, that in fact requires the infernal as the only tableau adequate to the force of the personality on display. Anything less than hell itself would be crowded out by Seidel’s hyperbole, which would then seem disproportionate to its conditions. In “December,” he announces: “Down here in hell we do don’t. / I can’t think of anything I won’t.”

  We’re in hell, but we still “do don’t.” Don’t is what we do do: don’t look at the anus, don’t instrumentalize the Holocaust, don’t flash your privilege. Power and freedom inhere in the violation of prohibitions, as Sade knew, and Sade could have said, “I can’t think of anything I won’t.” Even to declare this much is to declare that one accepts no limits to agency, that one’s will is the only law one recognizes. In practice this is disastrous, but as a poetic strategy predicated on the violation of taboos that govern acceptable discourse, it offers a neat solution to the perceived impotence of individual will in our modern hells, where it can seem that all we are able to do is don’t.

  Seidel elaborates this position in “The Tenth Month”: “Someone is wagging a finger in her face—Charlotte! / Down here in hell we don’t do that! / As if she were a child.” An adult would recognize the absurdity of schoolmarmishly lecturing someone about her bad behavior in hell, and would find such proscriptions childish. But down here in hell we relish issuing prohibitions, as if by allowing disgust to guide us, by curbing our excess and waste, we could regulate horror out of view, as in “Home”:

  I bend down with a bag to clean up after the dog.

  I take the shit out of the bag

  And stuff it back up inside the dog

  And sew the anus closed.

  But it is in the very violation of prohibition—letting shit happen—that Seidel differentiates himself from the other damned souls, at least within the poetic sphere: “I can’t think of anything I won’t” do (or think or write or say or even prohibit). To accept any limit would imply that there are some actions (or thoughts or words) worth being ashamed of. The line “I am ashamed of my poem,” then, is just more proof of Seidel’s shamelessness: he can’t think of anything he won’t write, including that. To elevate any commitment—even one to shamelessness—to the status of a principle by which to live would be to limit the potential scope of agency. Seidel’s singular poetic achievement is to have made the rejection of taste the pivot on which turn both the disclosure of radical evil and the only means of self-assertion in its flames.

  But there is an instability at the heart of Seidel’s poetics. The twin motives of his poems—to render and face real evil and to carve out within that reality a space of power and agency for the self—are ultimately incompatible with each other. This, I feel, is the source of the strange appeal of Seidel’s poetry. For if the point of the offense, the tastelessness, the excess, is to make us see that our offense, our taste, our timidity do not matter, that they leave evil untouched, that they allow it to flourish, then the desideratum must be that we should cease to be offended, should give up our reliance on a morality of taste. But if we did that then the second motive, the motive of agency, would fail. For if we saw the conditions of modernity as the hell they are, flensed of our illusions of taste, Seidel’s personality would no longer appear as a grotesque hyperbole but as entirely adequate to his surroundings. All other poets would then seem cowardly devotees of litotes. Seidel’s poetic voice can retain its force only if readers perceive it as a violation of, rather than as the only appropriate response to, the demands of decorum.

  * * *

  I. Perhaps it is worth pointing out that devil, from diaballein, and hyperbole, from hyperballein, share an etymology—ballein, to throw. The diabolical is cast out, while the hyperbolic is thrown too far.

  EQUIPMENT FOR SINKING

  Looks like what drives me crazy

  Don’t have no effect on you—

  But I’m gonna keep on at it

  Till it drives you crazy, too.

  This little poem by Langston Hughes comes back to me too often. Someone shoots up a church. The cops leave another black body in the street. Rain forests burn. Someone shoots up an elementary school. Workers jump from an Apple factory in China. CEOs make in an hour what their employees earn in a year. Someone shoots up a movie theater. American drone bombs obliterate a wedding party. Half of marine life disappears.

  I know: You’ve heard it all before. I’ve heard it all before too. We’ve all heard it all before: we don’t hear it anymore. And anyway, what can we do?

  There is no limit to what a poem can’t do.

  * * *

  Poetry makes nothing happen—everyone knows that. Nothing is what poetry can do, and it does it. What drives Hughes crazy—the lynching tree, the landlord, the “mint / Of blood and sorrow,” America that never yet has been America—makes nothing happen. “Go slow,” would-be allies counsel, “While the bite / Of the dog is fast.”

  I’m gonna keep on at it—

  That’s the only way nothing won’t happen.

  * * *

  Hughes’s little poem “Evil” appeared in his collection Shakespeare in Harlem in 1942. The reviewer for the Times wrote that “it looks at the moment as if the richest Negro minds had not gone into literature.”

  Poetry makes all sorts of things happen. This book has been about some of them.

  What doesn’t happen happens no place; it happens in utopia.

  From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

  That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

  And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

  I believe Wallace Stevens. I believe that poetry springs from lack, from a recognition or sense that the world’s not ours, not us, not easy.

  * * *

  Or one might speak in Marxian terms, like Adorno, of the contradiction between what the forces of production could bring about—“a condition worthy of human beings,” “a paradise on earth”—and what the relations of production actually generate: “wrong life,” “an existence outrageously unlovely.”100

  Sometimes I walk down Wall Street just to feel fury, to remind myself what the real dregs of humanity look like. They look good.

  * * *

  There are many ways of convicting everything of not being something else. This is what art is for. In spite of blazoned days.

  * * *

  A commercial for the Honda Civic begins with a cod blues band playing a song on a porch: “Today is pretty bad / Today the world is pretty sad.” The proof flashes on the screen: crashing markets, collapsing ice shelves, foreclosed homes, laid-off workers, billowing pollution, riot cops, trash dunes. “Yeah it’s worse than ever / But that’s just where we’re at.”

  Cut to an attractive young woman driving a new Civic: “Except, it’s not.” Other fresh, multicultural faces join in: “It isn’t.” “It really just ain’t.” “Today is pretty great.”

  “This world’s full of problems,” the soulful singer protests, but now we’ve got this killjoy’s number. The fresh faces fling rebuttals: “What about science?” “Selfies?” “Puppies?” “What about being accepted for who you are?”

  The Civic asseveration concludes with a chorus of “Today is pretty great!”

  When ideology is this transparent—forced to acknowledge the objective state of things before staging its refutation—you know things are bad.

  * * *

  In spite of blazoned days. Yeats can’t manage a half hour, much less a day, but his evocation of transient bliss is as convincing as any I know:

  While on the shop and street I gazed

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sp; My body of a sudden blazed;

  And twenty minutes more or less

  It seemed, so great my happiness,

  That I was blessed and could bless.

  This is convincing precisely because limited, “hemmed in,” Oren Izenberg writes, “by a duration that is comically precise and approximate at once.”

  Izenberg asks whether there might exist a “poetry of ease”:

  poetry that does not speak of that state as one speaks of an unknown country we might wish one day to visit—Cockaigne, Bensalem, Innisfree—but rather a poetry that expresses ease as we express our native air: stirring it with our living presence, not exhausting it with our efforts.101

  Is there a poetry of blessedness and blessing within human time but without one eye on the clock, a poem that springs from the opposite of the condition Stevens describes? A hymn to a place that is ourselves—a unity of habitation and self?

  I guess I wonder why anyone in a state of ease would bother to write a poem.

  * * *

  Adorno was much taken with “Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness.”102 This awareness need not be the paraphrasable matter of the work—there are innumerable odes to joy and parties in the USA.

  Kenneth Burke: “form, a public matter that symbolically enrolls us with allies who will share the burdens with us.”

  * * *

  A high school kid calls in a request to an Indiana radio station as a kegger winds down in 1983:

  I’m up here in Muncie, and a friend of mine just passed away, and, uh, I wanted to know if you’d play Bob Seger, ‘Against the Wind,’ and dedicate it to Tim Barton. Could you do that for me? Tim Barton? He had a car wreck, and, uh, he got hit broadside, and it made his little Pinto about two foot wide. And, you know, he was in a coma since Friday, and he just passed away today, and I was wondering if you’d, you know, play that for us.

  This is a scene from Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s Wisemanesque documentary Seventeen, about working-class high school youth in the Rust Belt, which PBS refused to air: the kids’ cussing, drinking, pot smoking, and interracial dating scared corporate sponsor Xerox.

  The DJ does play Seger’s cheesy, glorious ballad, and the few kids who haven’t gone home or passed out gather to listen to it in a bedroom with faux wood paneling. The camera focuses on the boy who placed the call, then on two girls slumped side by side on the bed. They look at the floor, look inside themselves, and sing along, but silently, their lips moving as if they were whispering a prayer for their dead friend. They wipe tears from their eyes. The mother of one of the girls looks on from the door, half in shadow. She wipes her own tears away and fades from the shot.

  Seems like yesterday.

  * * *

  The sons and daughters of American wood paneling needed Bob Seger then, as I suppose today they need One Republic or Sam Hunt.

  “Against the Wind” was a staple on the tape deck of my dad’s Subaru in the early ’80s. It’s a ruthlessly tasteful song, not a lick out of place, mixed to within an inch of guest hairstylist Glenn Frey’s stock options. It lacks the bushy contours of Seger’s best numbers (“Night Moves,” “Back in ’72,” and “Roll Me Away,” for the record), which know exactly how full of shit they are. Despite one great line (“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”), “Against the Wind” is trope-by-committee, earnest as an HR rep.

  But sometimes that’s what you want—generic, sanded-down professionalism, an oiled star-maker machine grand enough to grind a two-foot-wide Pinto into powder.

  * * *

  Except for a brief phase in high school when I scoffed at any band bigger than Camper Van Beethoven (which at my high school meant U2 and the Grateful Dead), the viral marketability of the music I love has never bothered me much.

  I had the good fortune to become obsessed with the radio in 1983, an annus mirabilis for pop: “Billie Jean,” “Down Under,” “Burning Down the House,” “Every Breath You Take,” “Little Red Corvette,” “True,” “Holiday,” “Der Kommissar,” “Back on the Chain Gang,” “Faithfully,” “Africa,” “Rock the Casbah,” “Twilight Zone,” “Lawyers in Love,” “Our House,” “Photograph,” “Cum on Feel the Noize,” “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Sweet Dreams,” “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” “Electric Avenue.” I knew them all by heart. The next year would bring “Oh Sherrie,” “Jump,” “Run Runaway,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “When Doves Cry,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “Missing You,” and more.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to do as you were told and listen to the radio.

  * * *

  Mass-produced, standardized pop is designed to reinforce the social order, despite appearances to the contrary. It mimics the relentless cycle of everyday life: verse-chorus-ideology of economic domination-verse.

  So have I heard, and do in part believe it.

  This process is mysterious, but one of its corollaries is transparent. We’re used to reading that Taylor Swift just purchased Ghana or whatever. No other art I love so directly reproduces the barbarism of economic injustice.

  But I take it on faith that popular music is art (I take a great many things about art on faith, and so do you), for all its evanescence and monetization. And art is bidirectional, dialectical, contradictory. Its form points toward the brightly burning Dumpster we have made of the world—toward the swindle, the sales copy—but therefore also toward a world of never-ending happiness, where you can always see the sun, day or night.

  * * *

  Maybe it’s just me.

  I have friends to whom art seems to arise from all kinds of impulses, to whom today seems pretty great—full of the usual horrors, sure, but very far from terminal, full as well of promise and hope.

  Even that stupid commercial points beyond itself, to a dissatisfaction with the structure of the pretty great world—how great can it really be as long as you’re not driving the new Honda Civic?

  I believe, with the usual suspects, that art exposes the contradictions of the present dispensation and thus preserves the yearning for the other, better world that can be achieved only by negating the existing one.

  It says nothing about the forms that world might take. It says nothing about the likelihood of achieving it.

  * * *

  In a poem called “(It was raining in das Kapital),” Joshua Clover writes, “We thought it was 1900 / but it was MCM again,” extending the pun of the title into history itself, time as capital. Marxian transformations, fiscal years. 1900—eve of the twentieth century, ten years before the modernist rupture, when “human character changed,” according to Virginia Woolf—is transformed into Roman numerals, familiar from film copyright notices, which the prime symbol then transforms into Marx’s general formula for capital, “the unceasing movement of profit-making”: money (M) into commodities (C) back into money, “the original sum advanced, plus an increment . . . I call ‘surplus-value’ ” (M′).

  The formal changes represented by 1900 shift duck-rabbit-like into the fundamental change of form that governs our lives, capital—a process, not a thing, “structure in motion” as Clover puts it elsewhere. “Why do things / seem to shudder / because volatility.”

  It’s not 1900 again, but 1900-prime—the volatility of the modern once again intervening in the volatility of capital, but with an added increment, a chance to learn from and make good on the broken, bloody promises of the twentieth century. Elsewhere, Clover poeticizes the ritual de-Stalinization the left must ceaselessly perform: “The longest social experiment in history / Has been abandoned, nobody liked it anyway, the cigarettes were awful.” The experiment in question is of course Soviet communism, which “Stalin’s beard ruined . . . for everyone.” Clover dreams of a revolution with better cigarettes and “Marc Jacobins” “walking / With headphones on through the theory district.”r />
  At this point in history, the responsible critic declares, such hopes seem delusional, even dangerous. Everybody knows that liberal capitalist democracy is the final costume Spirit will don. But as Clover reminds us, “history isn’t something.”

  “History does nothing,” Marx and Engels write in The Holy Family, against the idealist conception of history, “it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”

  History makes nothing happen.

  * * *

  “How high that highest candle lights the dark,” says Stevens (whose work is rarely as ahistorical as it seems) of the imagination. I love Stevens, forever addressing some bird he doesn’t like.

  But Gwendolyn Brooks, hymning the rioters in Chicago after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., is the poet I return to to think about the something that history isn’t and the nothing it is:

  what

  is going on

  is going on.

  Fire.

  That is their way of lighting candles in the darkness.

  * * *

  “The poem must be on the side of riots looting barricades occupations manifestos communes slogans fire and enemies,” Clover says.

  This is directed, of course, against the tradition of disinterestedness in which the poem must be a free and autonomous end in itself. And while I’m not sure that anyone really believes art is autonomous in any strict sense, the claim is made often enough to be worth the rebuttal.