Ignoring the Cops at the Burial Ground
notes on literature and consciousness

•

1

The debate about the role of politics in literature, about whether it even has a literary role beyond sloganeering and propaganda, is often misleading. Misleading because all sides in the debate assume that the question as posed makes sense and that once the issue is debated that debate's contents will have an impact on the literary world.

Bullshit.

Arguing about whether or not politics is a suitable subject for poetry is about as worthwhile as fussing over whether roses are. A bad poem about roses sucks, as does a bad one about politics, whereas a good poem about either subject leaves the reader satisfied, provoked, thoughtful, whatever. In the end, anything is a suitable subject for a poem. In fact, the real question is never whether a subject is suitable, but rather whether the poem is constructed in such a way that it honors its subject by pulling out all stops and kicking ass. If it isn't well constructed, no subject, no matter how theoretically noble, will save it. Similarly, no subject, no matter how theoretically unpoetic, will bring down a poem that's well made.

No matter how often university creative writing programs debate this issue, they won't change the above facts nor will they deepen in any other way the dialogue about what constitutes good literature. How could they? After all, for such a debate to deepen the dialogue, the debaters would have to grasp precisely what too many university authors don't grasp: that their debate, and they themselves by implication, is irrelevant to literature since it completely misses the point—i.e., that it's a given that a writer can write about anything she or he wants, just as long as the writer is self-disciplined, talented and clever enough to make it work. Understanding this is the sole "deepening" that can result from such a debate. From this point on, the debate can be judged as "successful" only if it disappears from the literary scene.

If it does eventually disappear, a far more interesting issue can be raised than the politics-and-literature one. That issue is: Since a writer is free to write about any topics he or she desires to write about, why do so many writers nonetheless self-censor, that is, convince themselves that certain subjects (e.g., politics, sexual orientation, racial relations, etc.) are for some reason exempt from serious consideration.

This is a question that should interest all writers.

Predictably, it doesn't.

2

Too many writers never overcome their youthful love of language. This lingering love, cute in an adolescent way in one's early life, becomes a symptom of infantilism as the writer ages.

A writer unable to free her or himself from such a rosy-eyed view of language is a writer ripe for self-censorship. This is because language itself is a censoring device, a mechanism that "clarifies" the meanings of specific words according to rules that prioritize certain assumptions over others.

If a writer doesn't understand this, or only understands it casually, then the writer has taken the first step in adjusting to a censored view of the world. Once this step has been taken, it is easy to take the second step: to accept as natural (as truth) one's own, often unconscious, prioritizations —prioritizations that, although personal, at least to some degree bear the mark of the culture at large. Each such prioritization is an act of self-censorship in that it emphasizes one version of the real at the expense of another or others.

3

In her late teens or early 20s, a young woman, in the process of permanently leaving her childhood home in order to build a life in the larger world, might hint at her growing independence by distancing herself from traditional religious concepts.

This is what Sylvania Plath did in 1956 at age 24 when she composed "Dialogue between Ghost and Priest," a poem about a priest who argues with a ghost over why the ghost has remained on earth when he should have gone, according to the priest, to either heaven or hell following his death and judgment "in a higher court of grace." In response, the ghost rejects the priest's traditional theology, instead declaring

There sits no higher court
Than man's red heart.

Although "Dialogue between Ghost and Priest" stresses a theme -- i.e., inner torment ("the higher court" of "man's red heart")—that would later inform many of Plath's most daring poems, "Dialogue" itself is only a mediocre apprentice poem.

But a revealing one. Some of what it eventually reveals may appear so obvious that it seems barely worth mentioning. Yet as is often the case in life, the "obvious" and the "barely worth mentioning" frequently top the list of things that should be examined in order to discover what our apparent familiarity with them may gloss over.

At the outset, the poem's title alerts us to the fact that this is a religious poem and undoubtedly will include characters and concepts with which we're already familiar: Almost immediately, we're confronted with a Roman Catholic priest, the Christian concepts of God, heaven and hell, and a ghost who has "grown feverish" with grief. Since there is nothing in any of these characters or concepts that deviates from the traditions of Christian storytelling, ballads, etc., we are familiar with them even before we become acquainted with them in the poem. Looking at life, death and morality through the lens of Christian symbolism has been a western culture trademark for two millennia.

It's not surprising then that when Plath tried to express conflict between a transcendence-centered and a human-heart-centered view of reality, she resorted to Christian imagery, thereby crowding out other perspectives on the issue. These perspectives get exiled because the tale she tells in "Dialogue" doesn't make the same sense within, say, a Hindu framework as within a Christian one (in Hinduism the concepts of a father God and heaven and hell don't exist, and the soul's migration out of the body after death is viewed as the byproduct of a universe consisting of endless cycles of death and rebirth as opposed to being the prelude to a final sentencing in a universe organized like an elaborate judicial system). Therefore, in order for Plath's narrative to work, it must cling to its Christian mythology and, in spite of its exclusion of other perspectives, try to get away with posing as a statement about religion in general, even though it's not. After all, how could it be a universal statement about religion when the Christian vocabulary that Plath used to tell her story doesn't make reference to ideas that are absolutely crucial to other religions—for instance, wu wei (resignation to the natural unfolding of things, Taoism), samma samadhi (the practice of meditation in order to achieve higher consciousness, Buddhism) and ahimsa (adherence to nonviolence whether or not one is provoked, Hinduism). And these are only 3 of the world's other religions.

Even in the place within the poem where Plath strays from established Christian mythology, she does so only minimally. The ghost's rebuke to the priest—i.e., that "man's red heart" is a more powerful court than the allegedly divine "higher court of grace" in which we are supposedly all judged at the end of times—doesn't break free of the Christian notion of a guilty or innocent final judgment, it merely reorganizes it. As such it possesses none of the nuance of Hinduism's reincarnation concept nor any of Buddhism's often bleak realism.

It is important to know this, to understand that our vocabularies don't only express meaning, they also restrict it, dictate it. Consequently, the word God in English reflects different assumptions than does the word God in Marathi or Urdu. Potentially, words are our allies. But just as potentially they constrict our capacity to express ourselves and can even become our enemies, forcing us to think in certain ways.

Only one solution exists. Be wary. If you're a writer, this means don't let language gain the upper hand. Befriend it but at a distance.

Take note of its movements.

Don't let it sneak unwanted meanings into your life.

4

Often nonliterary languages provide a writer with better insight into language's communicative powers than do literary languages.

When I was a kid growing up in NY in the 1940s, early 1950s, girls jumping rope sometimes sang

I ain't worried, I don't care,
I'm gonna marry a millionaire;
if he dies, I won't cry,
I'm just gonna marry another guy!

This is language in one of its purer modes. The words are unburdened by many of the thou shalt and thou shalt not overlays of church and state morality tales. What we have instead is a brief story about low-income life told in a stripped-down, brashly practical, nonjudgmental way. The voice is strong and undeviating: the jaunty female "I" will marry for money, then if her husband kicks the bucket, she'll unsentimentally move on to a new man as quickly as she can in order to survive. Still, in spite of the stanza's humorous realism, it isn't free of cultural baggage: it assumes a woman's destiny is to marry. But at least the woman's given some wiggle room in terms of attitude. There's no mandate that she must be passive, syrupy-minded or uncreative about this fate. Quite the contrary, the stanza, in keeping with the braggadocio of much street culture, suggests taking control.

Another song the jump-ropers sang was

When Sally kissed Billy, he ran away,
next day she figgered how to make him stay;
not long after came the day of their marriage
and nine months later a baby carriage!

Unlike the first song, this one, although also humorous, is more in the "be careful what you wish for" mode. The second line, with its sexual innuendo, shows a cagey Sally outfoxing Billy and getting him to be her boyfriend. As the next two lines show, however, her victory is a mixed blessing: pretty soon she's married and obligated to start the hard work ("and nine months later a baby carriage") of motherhood.

Children's rhymes are of course only one facet of the slangs, dialects, class lingos, immigrant patois and so on that exist at the edges of so-called proper English, simultaneously drawing strength from that English and irreverently reinventing it.

Another facet of English's various outsider vocabs can be found in the lyrics of marginalized groups' adult musics. In the U.S. the most dramatic example of this phenomenon is found within the evolution of African-American music from field-holler through spirituals and blues to jazz, r&b, hip-hop and beyond. It should be pointed out, though, that although these black-originated musics may be American by definition, they are an example of a global phenomenon—i.e., the process by which a disdained underculture in a particular nation creates a body of stories and methods of telling those stories that, growing ever more powerful in their influence, reflect a different view of history, creativity, equity, and what is and isn't acceptable in storytelling than do the productions of that nation's mainstream culture. In India, for instance, dalit (untouchable) and adivasi (tribal) dialects, oral traditions, folk musics and anti-system behaviors are an example from the other side of the world of how undercultures reshape a mainstream culture as they struggle to expand, survive.

Bessie Tucker came out of East Texas anonymity in 1928 to cut some songs for the Victor label in Memphis. In 1929 she recorded more songs at a second session. Following this second session she disappeared, never to appear on the blues scene again. The only thing left to attest to her existence as a singer was a slim collection of 24 tracks, 7 of them alternate takes. Most of the songs went unheard for decades. Yet in spite of such a limited output and Victor's failure to circulate what had been recorded, Tucker's songs are unmatched when it comes to the sustained realism of their lyrics in combination with her haunting contralto. Although other blues musicians composed and sang songs on many of the same topics as Tucker, none of them developed a body of work so consistently austere and naturalistic as she did.

More field-holler than gospel or dandified blues, Tucker's voice remorselessly flattened melody into something in which moan and word merged and unmerged, then remerged again, on and on. There was nothing "aspiring" about this music, it aimed for nothing in some hoped-for future, neither in the religious sense of a heaven nor in the secular sense of an improved way of life. Like the people in the stories her songs told, this was a music resigned to doing what it took to get by, sustaining itself not on lofty thoughts but on whatever it could scrounge, no matter how lowly or "unsuitable." Even in comparison with other blues singers, male or female, Tucker's realism was so bare-bones, so apart from the usual, that her music was almost an anti-entertainment. Unlike the more sophisticated and playful style of Victoria Spivey, another Texas blues woman, and also unlike the almost vaudevillian presentation style of Charley Patton with his polyrhythmic guitar playing and huge voice, Tucker's singing possessed a spartan feel and a dirge-like lyricism characterized by a combination of fatalism and intransigence. Tucker's "Got Cut All to Pieces," a song in which the female narrator is knifed by another woman with whom she's competing for their mutual lover's attention, exemplifies this.

I got cut all to pieces 'bout the man I love
I got cut all to pieces 'bout the man I love
I'm gonna get that other woman just as sure as the sky's above

Now when my man left me, I was half dead lyin' in my door
When my man left me, I was half dead lyin' in my door"
I was a-sufferin' and a-groanin', "Oh daddy please don't go"

I been in so much trouble for the last few days
I been in so much trouble for the last few days
and it seem like this trouble is gonna carry me away

If I don't get drownded or washed away
If I don't get drownded or washed away
I'll meet you next summer on my side of the way.

Such lyrics are typical of Tucker's music, which consists primarily of songs that tell grim stories in a slow-groan style. But there are exceptions . "Better Boot That Thing," as an example, possesses the exuberance of a more raucous blues and another—"The Dummy"—employs a lilting upbeat tempo, although the tempo's misleading in that it's at odds with the song's storyline about a female hobo caught up in an cycle of vagrancy, violence and the use of sex as a survival tactic. The narrator relates how she tried to hop a boxcar in order to ride for free because she "didn't have no fare," then when she was caught and "the police asked me what I was doin' on there," the cop

caught me by the hand, he led me to the door,
he hit me cross the head with a two-by-four.

Later in the song, the speaker employs barnyard imagery to tout her desirability. Whether she makes this pitch as a professional sex-worker or simply as a woman who sometimes trades on her physical assets in order to scrape by is never clarified. Her availability, however, is not in doubt—

Well, I ain't no pullet, I'm a real young hen;
If you come by here once, you'll come back again.
I ain't no pullet, boys, I'm a real young hen.
If you come by once, you'll come back again.

Nothing about Tucker's music is comfortable. The 24 tracks on her collected works CD make for a claustrophobic collection of raw tales that compensate for their lack of verbal flourish with a simplicity born of familiarity with the hidden, but everywhere present, violences of daily life. Rarely in literature does one come across a grimmer, more tightly packed collection of life-sketches drawn from society's economic wastelands than Tucker presents in her songs.

The importance of Tucker's artistry, however, isn't that it resulted in such a forbidding vision, but rather the degree to which it shows how revelatory art can be. Decades before the feminist movement, let alone the rest of society, started scratching the surface of violence directed against woman, Tucker's music not only bore testimony to this reality but also traced, with stark strokes, the interconnections between this violence and other violences. One of those "other violences" was, not surprisingly, race and class based: e.g., the sadism of the overseer who works farm laborers beyond human endurance, thereby goading them to dreams of revenge ("Key to the Bushes")—

Captain got a big horse pistol, ah-ah ah, and he think he's bad,
Captain got a big horse pistol, ah-ah ah, and he think he's bad,
I'm gonna take it this mornin' if he make me mad.

Born of poverty and the resulting climate of despair, such a mindset, fluctuating between desire for payback and feelings of hopelessness, inevitably undermined one's stability, pushing one's consciousness to the breaking point ("Fryin' Pan Skillet Blues")—

I done lose all ah my money, ahh-aahhhh , now losin' my mind.

Further reinforcing this despair was the law's hostility to blacks in particular and the poor in general and the consequent havoc wrecked upon any attempt at family life ("Whistlin' Woman Blues")—

I followed my daddy, oh my baby, to the buryin' ground,
the po-lice told me, "Bettuh turn around" . . .

I'm a whistlin' woman, ah-aahhh-ah, I'm like a crowin' hen,
the folks all told me, "He'll come to no good end."

In the end, Tucker's music, although suffused with despondency and containing portrayals of dead-end lives, nonetheless possessed an aesthetic freedom—i.e., the capacity to make art out of anything, no matter how squalid or apparently without creative merit. In doing this, Tucker did what none of the allegedly "great" writers of her time, the late1920s, did: painted a vivid, harrowing portrait of the human toll of America's racial and capitalist priorities, priorities designed to insure blacks' continuing subjugation to white supremacist customs and institutions. In Tucker's songs one glimpses fragments of a world in which racial subjugation has left no aspect of black life untouched, no matter how private or personal. No surprise, then, that her music is filled with images of unavoidable doom, broken relationships, physical violence, jail, privation. As she sings in "Penitentiary,"

Ahhh-aaahhh ah-a, what's the matter with my man today?
Ahhh-aaahhh ah-a, what's the matter with my man today?
I asked him if he loved me an' lawd he walked away

Penitentiary, penitentiary, ah-aahhh ah, it gon be my home
Penitentiary, penitentiary, ah-aahhh ah, it gon be my home
because my man he mistreated me, lawd, he don me wrong

The man that I'm a-lovin', lah-aahhh, is gonna get me killed
The man that I'm a-lovin', lah-aahhh, is gonna get me killed
because love is a proposition that got many a poor girl killed

I love you, uh, Leonard, aaaah-ah, but you won't behave
I love you-oo, Leonard, aaah-ah, an' you won't behave
You gonna keep on-a prowlin', gonna wake up in your grave.

5

People drag words from one place to another, constantly reinventing them.

The English word "dope" for drugs began not as slang, nor as anything pertaining to narcotics, but as a late 17th/early 18th century adaption by English speakers of the Dutch word doop, which meant a gooey paste or pottage. Once adapted and mispronounced as "dope," the word was used as a name for sauce or gravy.

About a century later some people started using the word as slang to describe the practice of smoking a liquid opium concoction. By this time the word also had other meanings (e.g., dope as in thickheaded or stupid) and therefore had become a multiple-use slang expression.

Decades later, as the word migrated through the hipster/beatnik/hippie communities of the second half of the 20th century, the association between the word dope and narcotics was cemented in the popular mind, although the word continued to be used alternatively to mean "a dumb person" or even to specify important information as in the phrase "the inside dope," a phrase thought by many linguists to have originated as a horse-racing term related to the fact that a gambler who knew which horses had, and which hadn't, been doped prior to the race was more likely to place intelligent bets on that race than other betters.

The word dope also had at least one regional use in the U.S. that was directly tied to the emergence in the early 20th century of a product that was to become a long-enduring symbol of American capitalism: Coca-Cola. In the southeastern U.S. "dope" was used as a colloquialism for Coca-Cola, either because its base syrup was thick/viscous or because of a rumor that the drink contained a narcotic. Eventually the term was used for all sodas, although that particular usage ultimately faded from the language. (James W. Tuttleton and Louise M. Ackerman, "Coca-Cola and Dope: An Etymology" in American Speech, Vol. 38, No. 2, May 1963, pp. 153-155)

The most recent addition to the word dope's history has been made by hip-hop culture. Playing on the idea that a narcotics high makes a person feel good, hip-hoppers squeezed new meaning out of the slang word by reinventing it as a signifier of the quality (1) of being great or outstanding or (2) of being so superlative that like dope it's addictive. By adding these new definitions/nuances to the word, hip-hop culture helped turn dope into an example of how slang frequently becomes a vehicle of adding so many layers of meaning to a word that the word resonates with a poetry that belies the notion that street language is inferior to the allegedly more sophisticated language of the more educated classes.

Theoretically, of course, many people who are interested in literature might agree with the description I just gave of how street language evolves. The problem is that outside the theoretical, that is, in daily life, they don't have the stomach for such vocabularies' messy rawness, for their refusal to show restraint when it comes to making their point.

Truth's uglinesses are always an outlaw phenomenon and as such often require outlaw language to express them, as when Eminem raps in "American Psycho" (D-12, Devil's Night, Interscope Records, 2001)

Each thought's completely warped
I'm like a walkin, talkin, ouija board
Speakin in tongues, I've never spoke this speech before
.. Hhem-delle-la, ennich-me-noughh-mi-niche-mick-norr ..
Have you ever experienced spirits in lyrics when you hear 'em
'til you scared to stare in into any mirrors when you near 'em?
Well if so, get ready for some shit yo
"Is this some kind of sick joke?" Shit no, motherfuckin schitzo,

When Eminem lays down such rhymes and off-rhymes, we're not dealing with an undisciplined rush of meaningless words, but instead with a theme that regularly shows up in serious literature: the writer as a revealer of upsetting realities that not only shake up his audience but that shake up her/him also. These realities upset the writer as well as the audience because they seem to the writer to come to her/him out of nowhere like, as Rilke wrote in his "First Elegy," an "uninterrupted message forming from silence." Being invaded, taken over, by such a message is precisely what Eminem's narrator is talking about when he uses occultist (ouija board) and religious(speaking in tongues) imagery to convey the experience of being occupied by a force larger than himself so the force can express itself through him in a new language that, at least for him, is initially disorienting and unintelligible—

I've never spoke this speech before
.. Hhem-delle-la, ennich-me-noughh-mi-niche-mick-norr ..

Following this descent into incoherence, the speaker, disoriented by the very message he's trying to communicate, imagines that his words have been inhabited by a bunch of jinn-like beings (the "spirits in lyrics") bent on driving him insane by destroying everything he knows to be true. This is the insanity of self-fear, when one feels that one's very love of life, the desire to live it full-blast and to express it fully, is the enemy, a force to be avoided. The last thing the speaker wants now is to see himself, to understand in what direction his attempt at self-expression has taken him. Which is why he confesses that he doesn't want "to stare . . . into any mirrors" now.

It is precisely at this point, gripped by fear, that the speaker morphs into an outsider prophet, a possessed man who has come from the margins to destroy everything that stands in the way of new knowledge. As such, he is John the Baptist howling in the wilderness or Ugly Mole (from a Kiowa legend) leading the first people up from under the earth into the light. Although such figures are eventually viewed as advocates of the good within their respective mythologies, the fact that they are outsiders also makes them, initially at least, an unknown quantity, unpredictable guides whose unusualness (one a sectarian nonconformist, the other nonhuman) makes them a potential menace. Eminem takes this menace idea and pushes it to the limit—

You bout to - journey into the mind of a psychopath killer
Blood spiller, mentality much iller
than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams
You'll feel his pain and his silent screams
You bout to - journey into the mind of a psychopath killer
Blood spiller, mentality much iller
than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams
You'll feel his pain and his violent screams . . .

This is the voice of the bearer of wisdom, a prophet, who is viewed as a lunatic, a "psychopath killer" of conformity and all status quo ideas.

The menace who turns out to be the fosterer new knowledge is a theme with deep roots in literature.

In Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding, as an example, the androgynous sideshow freak plays a role similar to Eminem's narrator in "American Psycho." In each case the messenger—i.e., a supposed biological oddity in McCullers' novel, a killer in Eminem's rap—possesses characteristics that supposedly signify that he is a threat to others. This is why the girl Frankie, the main character in Member of the Wedding, is panicked by the "Half-Man, Half-Woman, a morphidite and miracle of science" at the Chattahoochee Exposition. The freak's physiology drives home the point that nothing in the world, not even the human body, is confined to what we expect it to be.

For those in need of an ordered world in which things don't deviate from the assumed, knowledges and facts which don't conform to the expected order of things are often viewed as murderous in that they lay siege to our worldview, wanting to demolish it. It is in this sense that Eminem's narrator raps that to understand him, to grasp the knowledge he has accrued in the world, one must enter

into the mind of a psychopath killer
Blood spiller, mentality much iller
than you could ever imagine in your wildest dreams
You'll feel his pain and his silent screams.

Eminem's statement here isn't much different in its implications than what Kenneth Patchen, the poet and novelist, wrote at the beginning of WWII in his 1941 antiwar novel, Journal Of Albion Moonlight, in which he claimed

A soldier kills after the fashion of soldiers; a writer must kill with what he says. They have ordered that we all become murderers. Very well, I answer, be witness to my kind of destruction. How simple to kill a man's body! I choose to kill his soul . . . the fact that I wish to put a purer soul in its place does not alter the fact of murder. The State has given the command to destroy: I wish to be a good citizen.

Although the speaker in Patchen's Albion Moonlight clearly accepts his role as a philosophical murderer, whereas Eminem's speaker in "American Psycho" is driven to the edge of sanity by his related role (the bearer of a new knowledge), they nonetheless share the same mission.

They are murderers: assassin-artists committed to killing old ideas and laying waste to the status quo.

6

The question of course is, How do we write the literature we want to write, a broader more omnivorous literature, a literature that learns from the beetle how to eat holes in rosebush leaves, a literature that experiments with Ketamine at raves then stops dancing in order to float around on a cloud of sub-bass reverberations , a literature that can smell oregano in the grocery store down the street, a literature that seeks out today's social-economic problems while simultaneously never forgetting to show the proper reverence for the miracle of veined rocks and the glory of sunsets, a literature so full of the real that we couldn't stop it from kicking ass even if we wanted too?

So, how do we write it, that literature?

There are no absolute rules, only hopeful guesses.

First, we must be the mistresses/masters of speech rhythms, not only of proper English but of slanglish as well. And we have to know how to take charge of metaphors and similes so we can link together what status quo seeing denies is connected. Also, we must be avant-garde percussionists, ears always attuned to the underlying beat of things, no matter how simple, fragmented, multidimensional or bland that beat or those things may be at any given moment. The lyrical is everywhere.

But as important as these tactics are, we also must know how to use other language devices , ones that initially may seem counterproductive like

(a) word techniques that challenge the very value of words and that reveal the fascistic assumptions that lie behind many strict grammars, and

(b) incoherence, not as a form of nonsense but as an exploratory articulation of the unsayable/prohibited.

Such skills are mandatory for those who want to understand and/or write about the widest range of things, from spring's first forsythia bud to that dementia of powerlessness which leads girls the age of Miley Cyrus to strap on suicide bombs, then walk down middle eastern streets in a sunlight brighter than Annie Leibovitz's flashbulbs.

Being a democratic poet is no longer as easy (if it ever was) as writing in "the language of the people" (Whitman's "barbaric yawp"). Nonetheless, as radical writers who want to unearth the vibrancy/creativity of the so-called underculture, i.e., the various class and ethnic and gender cultures that are dominated by but not eliminated by mass culture, we certainly must revel in the plain diction of daily life, but that alone isn't enough, we must do more. We must learn how breakdowns (whether personal or social-economic) produce their own coherences and languages: visions of dying worlds, fragmentation as a new form of wholeness, belief systems decaying with age, hopelessness as the only form of hope left, utterly beautiful lyricisms that at first make no sense.

There is no forward without a break with tradition, there is no break with tradition that isn't experienced as a violence against daily life.

Another thing we can't forget. For the committed writer, multilingual doesn't just mean knowing , in addition to one's native tongue, the languages of at least one or two other nations. It also means knowing the different languages within one's mother tongue. The slang or dialect that is the antithesis of that tongue, that theoretically degrades it by not adhering to proper grammar and pronunciation, may in some ways be the better language, containing precisely the vocabulary necessary for communicating truths obscured by the dominant/official language.

In speaking and writing, the difference between good taste and bad taste isn't a matter of grammatical rules but rather of a roll of the dice. Just as history is written by the victors, so are the rules of acceptable language use. Words, definitions, nuances, pronunciations, etc. that are considered outside the normal are relegated to language's boondocks. For much of U.S. history, for instance, there were no "proper" vocabularies for describing the dignity of slaves or the sanctity of love between homosexuals or the inalienable rights of women. A variety of slangs, gutter humors, outlaw political views and unseemly philosophies were the only vehicles through which one could express such "non-realities."

7

The most serious problems a writer can have with writing, or language in general, have nothing to do with finding the right voice or enduring writer's block, they have to do with language itself, with one of its specific characteristics: its role, not as communication facilitator, but as a Trojan horse transporting an invading army of prefabricated meanings into the most private areas of our lives.

In his poem "Late Autumn" (The November 3rd Club Journal, Winter 2009), Andrew Rinn deals with this very issue when the narrator describes what should be a relaxed scene with words colonized by government warnings about the need to protect public safety—

The leaves turn from yellow to orange to red. They are my early alert system. Winter is now a credible threat and I am preparing.

Populated by post-9/11 phrases and innuendos, the language here is complicated by multiple meanings. The result is that a pastoral vocabulary (e.g., "leaves turn from yellow to orange to red") that once would have evoked the transition from autumn to winter is no longer capable of doing this in a traditional way. The author shows how, compromised by current events, the vocabulary now carries within it new meanings that reorient the old meanings. In fact, in the poem nothing within the narrator's range of sight escapes untinged by this reorientation. To see a thing, anything, and then to express it is to view/describe it in terms of the overriding issues of the day.

My neighbor cooks out, grills vegetables. Ears of corn listen for the tell-tale sounds of sedition.

Rinn's vision is in part ironic, mocking the U.S.'s state-fomented post-9/11 culture of paranoia by linking the ordinary (e.g., the grilling of vegetables) with the overblown (e.g., the sounds of sedition). But at another level, his vision is unironic, darker and more subversive. He presents a world in which words no longer represent the freedom to express what we want to express but rather something more unsettling: a choice between expressing ourselves with mass-culture-saturated words/symbols or, in the alternative, expressing nothing at all.

Although I doubt Rinn was thinking of Jacques Ellul when he wrote "Late November," Rinn's conception of a language inhabited by meanings (i.e., nuances, implications, etc.) over which the speaker has no control echoes Ellul's interest in what he calls total propaganda. Ellul employs this phrase to specify mass culture's capacity to disseminate, through its myriad corporate structures, government institutions, communications technologies, educational strategies and so on, a worldview that so thoroughly seeps into every aspect of society that it (the worldview) ultimately migrates into the tiniest nooks and crannies of our most private communications. Ellul argues that during this saturation process language is transformed from a communications-enhancer into a utilitarian mechanism for producing certain actions or responses.

Language, the instrument of the mind, becomes "pure sound," a symbol directly evoking feelings and reflexes. (Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Vintage Books, New York, 1973, p. 186)

From Ellul's perspective—and I think he's correct -- once this happens, thought, analysis, reflection become increasingly passé. Language's purpose is no longer to transfer meaning and knowledge from one person or group to another, but rather, like Pavlov's bell, to make the target salivate. Consequently, all vocabularies (whether of images, words or sounds) become nothing more than collections of advertising jingles, catchphrases and symbols designed to trigger specific outcomes. Rinn's "Late November" gives us a narrator drowning in such mass thought. Look at a tree and be reminded of terrorist threats. Even "ears of corn listen for the tell-tale sounds of sedition."

Rinn's "A Triolet" (The November 3rd Club Journal, Winter 2009.) possesses a related insight. Simultaneously traditional and subversive of tradition, the poem employs a formal stanza type and a philosophical tone to express something edgier than its structure on its own might imply: that language is in peril, that, indeed, a sort of genocide against meaning is underway as language/communication are infiltrated by syntaxes designed to diminish the meaning-gap between lie and fact. According to Rinn, such a world is one in which people can firmly believe that

Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction
even if we know he doesn't.

Rinn here captures a dimension of the propaganda issue that is often ignored—i.e., propaganda is no longer merely about the state's capacity to feed populations self-serving information that has the effect of getting people to believe that information, it's also about a social reconstruction of consciousness that expands consciousness' ability to divorce what it sees from what it knows, so that a correlation between the two becomes less and less necessary when developing a worldview. The goal of propagandists is no longer to indoctrinate people but rather to direct their minds into a state of permanent malfunction. Hence, Rinn's lines about accepting as true what we know to be untrue.

In bringing this paradox to light, Rinn follows more than 50 years later in Hanna Arendt's footsteps, specifically her analysis in Eichmann in Jerusalem of the Nazi's use of "language rules" to obscure their genocide against the Jews. Arendt's insight is still relevant because it went beyond the simplistic assumption that substituting a phrase like (to use just one example) "final solution" for "liquidation" or "mass extermination" was an attempt to hide the truth of what was happening from non-Nazis. Although Arendt recognized that the Nazis' development of special language rules (i.e., the use of specific phrases in all official communications) was indeed part of a strategy to mislead outsiders, she also recognized that the language rules were a psychological device employed by the party hierarchy to restructure the thought processes of its own members and everyone else under its control. The essence of this restructuring was the creation of a parallel vocabulary designed for the purpose of engendering in its users what in psychiatry is called a dissociative state—i.e., "a dissociation from or interruption of a person's fundamental aspects of waking consciousness" (National Alliance on Mental health). A typical dissociative state, often resulting from a trauma (e.g., child abuse, rape, etc.), entails a sufficient degree of memory and knowledge loss to impair the person's capacity to recall the interconnections between certain events, moods, behaviors. Nazi language rules sought to produce a similar end: the creation of a dissociative state of consciousness which made it easier for people to disconnect what they saw (e.g., mass deportations, violence against Jews, homosexuals, communists) from its moral significance. In other words, the purpose of Nazi language wasn't to trick Germans, Poles, etc. into thinking that what was going on wasn't really going on, but rather to make observing and/or participating in genocide tolerable by restructuring consciousness in ways that made it invulnerable to the values embedded in ordinary language. As Arendt wrote,

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 86)

8

Unlike Rinn's two poems, Samiya Bashir's poem "What I Can Not Do" (The November 3rd Club Journal, Winter 2009 ) doesn't battle status quo language with irony -- i.e., by using language in ways hat reflect language's covert role as a carrier of prefabricated meanings. Instead, in her poem she directly confronts language's dictatorial powers and tries to out-think and undermine those powers while taking the language prisoner and making it hers, thereby subverting the master-servant (language-author) relationship that turns many writers into automatons whose special talent is the production of updated clichés.

On the surface Bashir's theme in "What I Can Not Do" is frustration resulting from her inability to accomplish certain tasks related to socially relevant issues.

I can not undo a bomb's detonation
can not piece together bits of bone and flesh . . .

I can not give oxygen to the soldiers buried alive
in desert sand . . .

Although her itemization of these failures may not seem very daring at first, she makes it work by forcing the reader to repeatedly rethink where the poem leads. Initially, the poem seems like a "simple" antiwar piece, but, although the poem is antiwar, it also meditates on the relationship of characteristics to essences and causality to action --

I know no way to separate the mushroom
from the cloud, the firing pin from the trigger, but
I can separate the napalm from the hand that sprays.

Such imagery renders the poem's ultimate direction unclear, even if the last line just quoted does indicate that the only relationship of any importance when it comes to violence or war is the one between doer and the thing done. Still, the task of identifying the poem's direction is recomplicated when the narrator starts fantasizing about the creation of an ideal mathematics in which even

7 and 3 have roots squared and whole;
where zero is not ignored or assumed.

The idea behind the narrator's fantasy here is that such a mathematics would allow him/her to accurately identify the exact amount of damage done by war in general ("new calculations / of the death tolls of yesterday's wars"). This hope, however, is just one more item in the poem's list of undoable things. The possibility of determining the exact number of people/things/potentials killed/lost during war is a self-delusion since the logic of scientific calculation is simply not up to the challenge, the author infers, of itemizing the full extent of war's physical and spiritual butcheries.

As interesting as "What I Can Not Do" is up until this point (through stanza 5), everything so far is only prelude. With the ease of a writer capable of identifying the links between apparently disparate complexities, the author now shifts the narrator's focus from an ideal mathematics to the following possibility—

If I could, I would sit on the cold auction-house floor
before Picasso's painted ladies, separate the pink--
fleshed paint into decisive reds and whites, add water
and oil, add blue, add green, emulsify into my mother's face
before the pain. But I can do this

no more than I can return to her womb, separate
the cells of my embryonic self into egg, into seed.
I can not go back and offer her young body
the freedom to choose my birth. For her I would
do this: dismantle my flesh as I would not
dismantle my spirit.

These 11 lines pack more meaning into them than many status quo poets get into whole books. The "cold auction house floor" image is the point at which the author's thoughts about the impossibility of fighting against war or even of computing its consequences transitions into a recognition of the interrelationship between the multiple oppressions that conspire to rob us of freedom. Contemplating an artifact from the world of allegedly "high" art, the narrator imagines what amounts to a racial deconstruction of a Picasso painting of some women, disassembling their European skin tones into their component "red and whites," then mixing in blues and greens to darken their complexions in an effort to produce a picture of

my mother's face
before the pain.

Given the poem's beginning, the pain mentioned here inevitably reverberates with war-related meanings—e.g., "some beloved spirit blown apart," napalm destruction, etc.—as well as with the newly introduced idea of the mother's personal or physical pain. From this follows the narrator's recognition that that she can no more adopt/rework/transform western art's traditional racial parameters and make them work for her than she can physically return to her mother's womb and

separate
the cells of my embryonic self into egg, into seed.
I can not go back and offer her young body
the freedom to choose my birth.

So now we have a meditation on one violence (war) eased into a meditation on another violence (woman's body as a man-or society-owned territory and therefore not free). Bashir desentimentalizes this moment in the poem by allowing her narrator to describe, in spare understated language, the fantasy-act of giving her mother's

young body
the freedom to choose my birth.

Or, by implication, not choose it and eliminate the narrator from history. This is where the poem arcs back again toward war. But not until after these lines—

For her I would
do this: dismantle my flesh as I would not
dismantle my spirit.

The first line and a half here mean that for her mother's sake, the narrator would go back in time and give up her own birth, her existence, if doing so would save the mother from pain. It's in this sense that the narrator says she would "dismantle my flesh." But given that she is alive and there's no way to change the fact of her birth, the one thing she won't do is "dismantle my spirit," the force that apparently gives her life meaning. It's at this point that the 3 lines above become a fulcrum that returns the poem to war themes, but at a different level than initially. This time the war images evoke an oppression disconcertingly present not just out there in a faraway war but also in one's daily life—

I can not sit idly by while my back
yard becomes Guantanamo, my living room imprisons
for profit. I can not convince children to go gentle

into good night dreams if I can not disarm
the bogeymen reaching out to frighten them.

This is a vision of war that goes well beyond liberal comfort zones. In this war, pictured as inhabiting our yards, houses, children's dreams, there is no comfort to be taken in the smug notion that that one has retained one's moral purity simply by being intellectually against the war. The war implicates everything we are and everything we do in its barbarisms and we therefore are all part of the problem unless, as the poem's last line implies, we put ourselves in harm's way to stop it and

with furious fingers . . . yearn to stop the bullet.

The point, of course, is that a person's fingers/hands can't stop bullets and will get shattered if an individual tries, but if the individual doesn't try he/she suffers an even worse fate: the dismantling of their spirit. Now the poem has come full circle from antiwar through meditations on self, then back to war. But how we view war at the poem's end is different than how we viewed it at the beginning. This is true in spite of the fact that 5 out of 6 of the last lines are identical to the poem's opening 6 lines, thereby communicating the same despairing picture of war that we were given at the outset—

And yet I can not undo a bomb's detonation
nor piece together bits of bone and flesh to
resurrect some beloved spirit blown apart.

I know no way to separate the mushroom
from the cloud, the firing pin from the trigger, but
with furious fingers I yearn to stop the bullet.

Besides the last line above which is different than the sixth line at the poem's opening, the main difference between the poem's beginning and end resides in the third line, which can no longer can be read in the same way at the end as it was at the poem's start. It's no longer possible to read this line as merely a statement of grief/despair over not being able to bring one of the distant war dead back to life. It now, because of the poem's trajectory, also must be read as an outcry against what the narrator dreads most, the one thing she said she would not do even for her mother: dismantle her own spirit. The war that we don't stop not only kills the alleged enemy, it also kills what's human in us ("beloved spirit"). Actually halting the war therefore is what matters, not ignoring it or merely posturing against it in status quo-approved ways. Knowing this leads to the realization that failure to definitively resist the war results in the spirit's death. It's because of this that Bashir's narrator futilely tries to stop the bullets of war with her hands —better to die with sprit in tact, the author implies, than to live with it dead.

9

In the first section of these notes, I wrote:

Arguing about whether or not politics is a suitable subject for poetry is about as worthwhile as fussing over whether roses are.

Yet no matter how much I insist the politics/literature question is outmoded and doesn't need to be discussed further, I always end up coming back to it and discussing it more.

I'm obsessive, inconsistent, a flailer who just can't stop.

There are reasons for this of course . . .

God forbid that, rather than thinking of poetry in quasi mystical terms, we start viewing it historically, as part of the centuries-old dialogue between those with power and those without it. Also, God forbid, that poetry should be analyzed as the outcome of work performed within certain social-economic contexts in the same way that other, allegedly less "sophisticated" outcomes are produced by other kinds of work—e.g., the shirt produced by the seamstress or the rib ripped out of the slaughtered cow by a butcher using a steel puller designed specifically for this purpose. Such tasks—shirtmaking, butchering -- are not performed in isolation from the politics and economics of daily life but are instead essential parts of the political-economic structure. Poetry, like them and like everything else, is an aspect of this structure too, not divinely transcendent over it.

There is no better example of the U.S. poetry world's integration with, and reflection of, the nation's political-economic system than the plethora of MFA creative writing programs that have colonized the poetry world and made it a subsidiary of academe. This has been done according to the McDonald's corporate model: interested parties in various locales gather the cash to start a local franchise (in this case, an MFA program) and then, after first agreeing to produce all their hamburgers (poems in this instance) according to standardized production techniques that guarantee that all hamburgers (poems) look and taste the same, they get their franchise going and start selling creativity in a variety of guises -- with or without cheese, topped with bacon, whatever. In concert with other institutions like university presses, well-established "independent" presses, and poetry organizations like the American Academy of Poets, Poets and Writers, and the American Poetry Review, these MFA programs have helped to produce not only the largest poetry bureaucracy in world history but also a poetry that is as undernourishing as a McDonald's menu and that has done far less to excite youth about poetry than have, not surprisingly, hip-hop culture and the original urban slams. This is the U.S.'s so-called official poetry world. Within it, fashionably grunge or vaguely political is okay, but nothing caustic. No shitting on anybody's strawberries is allowed.

As an example of such watered down oomph, take the anemia of Robert Hass' "Bush War," a so-called antiwar poem from his 2007 book Time and Material, for which he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The poem begins

I typed the brief phrase, "Bush's War,"
At the top of a sheet of white paper,
Having some dim intuition of a poem
Made luminous by reason that would,
Though I did not have them at hand,
Set the facts out in an orderly way . . .

Here, at the poem's very start, we're exposed to a weakness it never overcomes in spite of going on for over 100 lines: a lack of will. Although the narrator daydreams about composing a poem "made luminous by reason" concerning the current Iraq war, he admits he doesn't possess the facts needed to lay out this argument "in an orderly way." So what we have, then, isn't a speaker who reveals at the beginning any specific gut feeling about the war but rather a speaker who approaches the challenge of writing about the war like an unwanted assignment for which he isn't prepared. The speaker takes the war seriously, all right, but less as an event out there (i.e., outside of himself) than as an event that provides him with an intellectual puzzle to solve: how can I include this event in my work and get away with it even though I'm ill-equipped?

The narrator proceeds to answer this question, not by gathering together facts relating to this particular war, but by evoking the horrors of multiple wars, stretching back o WWII—e.g., the firebombing of Hamburg, the destruction of Tokyo, the German massacre of Russian prisoners, the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Korean conflict, and the "non-war" in Vietnam where in the end, along with 2 million Vietnamese dead and 50,000 U.S. dead, there were also

whole races
Of tropical birds extinct from saturation bombing.

What the presentation of so much imagery and data from wars prior to Iraq accomplishes for Hass in "Bush's War" is the freedom to skim over the Iraq war without being specific about it while simultaneously creating a "sensitive" narrator attuned to the inhumanity of war violence in general. This in general is liberating for a writer whose instinct is to be casually political without the burden of actual risk-taking. Which is why Hass' poem concludes less like the end of a struggle to comprehend the tragedy of this particular war than like a fashion model's calculated walk down the runway, aware that this is it, the moment to parade your stuff. And this is exactly what Hass does in the poem's last lines. A man totally in control of his art, he steers a savvy, intricate course between dissenter and conformist, careful to say nothing too risky, yet nonetheless wearing the mask of someone who might secretly be daring (albeit somewhere off stage where he can't get into trouble). Although the narrator admits that as a population at war we are being asked to embrace the absurd and

. . . to act like we believe
The dead women in the rubble of Baghdad
Who did not cast a vote for their deaths
Or the raw white of the exposed bones
In the bodies of their men or their children
Are being given the gift of freedom,

this acknowledgement is only a prelude to his real purpose in the poem, to shift focus away from the war and onto a topic obviously dearer to him: his narrator's anguish as he struggles to understand the conflict. This problem, of the strain the speaker endures as he tries to grasp the war's meaning, edges the war itself off-screen and takes center stage. Rather than assume that the tragedy of the deaths mentioned in the above quote is more important than the writer's meditation on those deaths, Hass instead prioritizes this meditation, i.e., the poem, over everything. It's the dilemma of having to think about the war (of having to fulfill his "assignment" of writing about it) which interests him the most, not the actual deaths of the innocent. By extension, it's the narrator's pain, his experience of being depressed by something not quite defined in the U.S. thinking process, that replaces the pain of Iraq's suffering civilian population, that usurps the war as the poem's true subject. And so the narrator, not surprisingly, emerges as a hero, weary yes but insightful when it comes to diagnosing the flaws in other Americans' thinking—

It's hard to say which is worse, the moral
Sloth of it or the intellectual disgrace.

Having reduced the Iraqi war to the issue of diagnosing the particular dilemmas it raises for the aggressor nation's most "sensitive" citizens, Hass makes sure the poem's "antiwar" message isn't overly judgmental but also that it provides readers with ample space to realize that criticizing the war if we think it's wrong isn't ultimately necessary since

what good are our judgments to the dead?

This is the perfect antiwar poem for a country afraid of political poems.

10

On a Philly bus, I once heard a young man say about Wilbur Montgomery, the outstanding Eagles running back from the late 1970s/early 1980s, "He runs like Jesus would've run if Jesus wanted to go to the Superbowl."

With that kind of quick-hit poetic quipping arising out of the blue all around us, what makes many writers so timid when it comes to making their language rock? Hell, these writers are already being out-poetried these days by most rappers, so why not go for broke, try out a few slam-bang daredevil tricks and, in the process, admit that the only marriage in town worth going to is the one between literature and the full scope of the real, from playtime to dying to power hierarchies to a crocus to politics. Writers have got to stop insisting that they'll write about truth but only if all its teeth are removed so it can't bite.

Fusing lyricism and social commentary in literature is nothing new. Of course, not every poem or novel is overtly political; still, in one way or another individual works of fiction and poetry always reflect, either actively or passively, a certain aspect or aspects of the dominant
political/economic/cultural values of the era. Sometimes this is done in a celebratory, sometimes in a critical, sometimes in a neutral, way. However it's done, though, politics is in the mix. You can't read Plato and make the claim he wasn't political. You can't read the early Vedas and insist that the conflict between the atheistic thinkers and priestly class of the period wasn't a political one. Similarly with al-Hallaj, the 10th century Islamic heretic-saint—one can't read his poems or statements and conclude there's nothing political about them. And what about Robert Burns' use of "common language" in his poems/songs and how this use reflected his republican sympathies and his belief in the creativity of the so-called lower classes? And then there's Dante who not only wrote The Divine Comedy, a religious/psychological epic, but also chose to write it not in the literary language (Latin) of the day but in his native dialect, thereby playing a major linguistic role in Italy's political disputes. One result of Dante's writing successes was hat the Florentine/Tuscan dialect in which he wrote soon became Italy's unifying language, thereby helping to establish the Italian peninsula as a cultural whole.

Two of the U.S.'s great 19th century writers, poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, shed light on this issue in not always predictable ways. Although they're usually viewed as opposite types of writers, he more interested in playing the role of muscular narrator and teller of tall tales and she more comfortable with backyard flights of fancy and writing tiny enigmatic poems , they were nonetheless linked as upstarts. Each of them was connected to the politics of their times by doing what Thomas McGrath described a century later as "finding the new words" to describe a moment in history that has evolved beyond the grasp of old vocabularies. Whitman did the barbaric yawp thing in an effort to unleash the wildness of daily life into the allegedly purified realms of the civilized poem. Dickinson yawped as much as Whitman but in a different way: in reinventing the role of spinster and transforming it into a life choice usually reserved for men—i.e., the figure who withdraws into solitude in order to explore the extent of his genius—she produced some of the most psychologically astute poems of her—or anyone else's—day, thereby laying the basis for a type of "private voice" poetry that would help to usher in a period when the previously unheard—women, blacks, etc.—would establish that their silence (i.e., their exclusion from the literary world because of their supposed lack of artistic sophistication) was actually not a silence but rather a different kind of (revolutionary) language that was beyond the comprehension of many so-called sophisticates.

Note about silence as a different kind of language:

The black experience in the U.S. (from slavery through segregation's/racism's many mutations) provides us with one of the richest troves of knowledge we have about this process of silence becoming language and of the essential political nature of that transformation. Of course, slaves weren't actually silent but were only silent in the sense of being unheard. Even when the clamor of slave life broke through the wall of white unhearing, though, what was heard wasn't language as such or attempts at meaningful communication but rather something pre-cerebral, an animal's grunting and growling. Consequently, poems like "I's wild Nigger Bill from Redpepper Hill" and "Run, Nigger, Run" weren't heard as artistic denunciations of racist violence, which is what they were, but rather as the crude attempts of illiterates to speak coherently. Yet this upflowing of an outcaste experience into the language eventually became, no matter how often it was derided by leading taste-setters as repugnant and even obscene, an unstoppable law unto itself, evolving in complicated ways into a whole counterculture of stories, legends, bible myths reconstructed into liberation parables, field-chants, gospel songs, the blues tradition, polemics and so on. One of the best polemics examples is David Walker's Appeal, a document that for all practical purposes fuses the mandates of the Declaration of Independence and the Sermon on the Mount into a political/liberation theology manifesto that reinvents the meaning of freedom by pushing it with bulldozer relentlessness toward a vision of justified violent black upsurge against white racism.

Besides being essential in its own right for understanding U.S. life, an analysis of racism also provides a model of how to approach the operation of undercultures in general, including how they impact on a society's language, story-telling traditions, self-view, and notions of what is and what isn't "good" culture. Fundamental to these issues is the question of how the non-standard-Englishes (e.g., black English, working-class English, the various immigrant Englishes, Native American English, slacker English, etc.) of all politically marginalized groups intersect with "correct" English in ways that impact both correct English and all its ethnic, regional and racial variations. To me, it is a self-evident truth that the constant cross-fertilization of all these Englishes provide the U.S. writer with a second chance regarding what too many U.S. writers have forgotten: that English itself, in the course of its evolution, constantly reinvents itself (through dialects, slangs, the creation of new words, etc.) in an effort to make sure that all experiences can be evoked or analyzed or described. This should be remembered by all those who diligently look for excuses to eliminate political subject matters from their writing. To do so is basically to run and hide from language's natural evolution. Not running doesn't mean daring to include the extraneous (i.e., the political) in one's work, but rather of recognizing that on its own literature is all-inclusive and doesn't view anything as extraneous. And why should it, given that language exists for one purpose and one purpose only: as an ongoing attempt to name every thing, action, process, emotion and so on in the world. Writers who can't get this through their heads are writers who promote secondrate (i.e., censored) languages.

To move beyond such censored languages is to move from mental imprisonment to mental freedom.

It is to become fully present in the world.

11

I write all this at the beginning of the 21st century in the 6th year of the U.S.'s second war with Iraq since 1990.

What I've written in these notes up until this point only gets us so far. Any analysis of language, politics and writing in the present era must confront the problem of what happens to language when the very vocabularies we rely on to express dissent suffer from vulnerability to cooptation by information dissemination systems so widespread in their reach that in combination they dwarf any previous method of philosophical control? One minute hip-hop is raging at society's margins, combining racial and class analyses into anti-system spoken-word riffs, and the next it's a lifestyle advertisement that adulates bling and substitutes strut for substance.

This shouldn't surprise us. Such changes are always occurring. Only a brief time ago, in the mid-20th century, so-called "race music" (i.e., African-American music) underwent a sudden Sun Records-fueled transformation into a new genre called rock-'n'-roll aimed primarily at white teenagers. The explosion of this black-influenced "primitive" (so the moralists labeled it) music onto the U.S. scene initially generated much social outcry. The fear was that the music, with its relentless beat, would stir the young's emotions in ways that would make them vulnerable to forces (e.g., illicit sexuality, antisocial attitudes, unChristian behaviors, etc.) detrimental to society at large. Typical of the crazed puritanism of many denunciations of the new music were the March 1956 comments of Asa Carter, the executive secretary of the North Alabama White citizens Council. Carter proclaimed that rock-'n'-roll was an "immoral" attempt to "infiltrate" white teenagers' minds in an effort to seduce them into racial mixing. Because of this belief, Carter advocated that records featuring black singers should be "purged" from record store shelves and radio station collections. ("Segregationist Wants Ban on 'Rock and Roll'," New York Times, March 30, 1956, p. 27)

As it turned out, the initial anti-rock-'n'-roll crusade only lasted a relatively short time as reinvention experts like Dick Clark of American Bandstand put a clean face on the music's allegedly demonic energies and consequently brought it, tamed and highly profitable, into U.S. capitalism's mainstream. He was aided in doing this by the music industry's Caucasian-star-creation assembly line which placated the status quo by producing a slew of smooth-looking but vacuous singers—e.g., Pat Boone, Fabian, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon—who softened rock-'n'-roll's image by reassuring society's moral overseers that many of the new music's up-and-coming performers were white, nice and in the music business for the same reason that most people went to work: to make a few bucks so they could lead a mom-and-apple-pie-based life.

Mass culture's assimilation of rock-'n'-roll, which initially seemed to be such an outsider force, is a relatively clear-cut example of how cooptation operates under capitalism. But occurring as it did at the beginning of the so-called communications age, which began in earnest in the 1950s with the massification of television use, it's a misleading example, coming from a far simpler time in terms of technological development.

The difference today is that the cycle of rise and usurpation of dissident vocabularies (I'm using vocabularies now in the broad sense of not just words but of other symbols and gestures as well) is quicker and more ever-present than ever before. This re-raises the old question (albeit in a different context) of what actually must be done to be heard, to sustain a serious critique of the system? It's one thing to get your 15 minutes of dissenting fame and then to be yanked off-stage, it's quite another thing to stay on stage as an anti-system guerilla for as long as you want. The latter provides at least some hope of communicating your vision, the former very little. What makes the situation even worse is that the very language we use to critique the world is stacked against us. Saturated with status quo content, it drowns out alternative visions.

This is what Ernst Cassirer is getting at when he writes in Language and Myth that we are beholden to "a language which does our thinking for us." He raises the specter here that the very idea of dissent and revolutionary solidarity between dissenters has come dangerously close to being obsolete because the moment we lift our voices in an outcry for social change, the outcry itself—i.e., the fact that it is "allowed" to exist—becomes proof of the openness of the very system it claims to deplore. In other words, according to the logic behind and within the language, the very act of verbalization is proof, regardless of anything the sayer might insist to the contrary, of the validity (in the sense of deserving the public's support) of the social/political contexts within which this verbalization occurs. Some people—a few social scientists and far too few literary folks—have looked closely at this issue of how institutions, in capitalism's current corporatist/managerial phase, have become technically adept at taking languages and behaviors that are intended as expressions of dissent and turning them into their opposites: methods of pacification. In her book Ethnic Routes to Becoming American, Sharmila Rudrappa studies a battered women's center and an Indian cultural center in the Indian/Pakistani section of Chicago. One of her conclusions is particularly relevant to what I've been saying. Rudrappa shows how the very sense of ethnic/racial identity that is promoted in both clinics as part of their attempts to help center participants resist being overwhelmed by the dominant white culture has in fact become a tool of that culture, which has institutionalized the idea of multiculturalism for its own benefit by promoting a sense of citizenship that emphasizes—and even celebrates— your right to ethnic difference. Meanwhile, as the cultural aspect of identity is promoted, the part of identity that pertains to the powerless's subordination to the powerful is defined out of existence. "Immigrants," Rudrappa says, "may think of their organizations as safe havens where they have sole discretion on how to deploy their difference in accordance with their sending nation's 'traditions and customs,' yet these alleged safe havens are sites for Americanization."

The future awaits us. Its poetries. Its speeches. Its definitions of what it means to be human. At this very moment, the future is being created as various forces battle over who will own tomorrow. Which forces within our current society will win this battle and lay the basis for our future society? What will we find in that future society? Less freedom? More freedom? A place where TV's record all our actions? A place where working people and the previously marginalized have power to lead the lives they choose to lead? And what will literature be in the future—computer generated texts created by software programmed to output fictions on the basis of plots created by random combinations of predetermined linguistic formulas? Or will it be something better? Beyond censorship of all types? Open to everything? A true lyricism of the totality of being?

Nothing happens automatically.

Frederick Douglass said, "Without struggle there is no progress."

Like everyone else, writers forget this at their peril.