Phil Hall has an essay up at AngelHouse Press in which he says on p. 3 of 14 something I find refreshing…this distinction between habit of revealing rawness/emotionalism and just a particular way of doing verbal theatre.
When Layton says (in the last line of ―The Bull Calf‖), I turned away and wept, he is flaunting an emotional, sexual, poetic, & political superiority.
He is pointing to his own larger, freer, feeling. It is theatre. Not truth.
I was doing the same when I wrote, I should have shot my father.
I thought I had broken through the sentimental into a raw & beautiful truth.
The unsayable zinger. Being bad. It feels like health. Refreshing.
Startling, quotable, epigraphic. But the truth is always more complicated.
Or sight-to-the-blind simple. As in Basho’s ―plop.‖
The oversimple narrative, the one thru line of one tone thru a poem to one upshot, whether intellectual or emotional, aiming the persuasive, or the meaning aversion, overt or averting any sound bite summary of intent, all are theatre.
Theatre is stylized play, easy enough to take so earnestly that it becomes work. And taking itself seriously. Or keeping perspective to an audience that insists it is important work. Then the role of writer becomes a deadpan humour that mocks that prim audience, or carries on until the audience catches on.
He talks about when being a common man of anecdote was the in-thing. A class-based sort of heritage informing literature/identity from the tallest nail gets hammered down. In Academia there’s more a bed of nails, a willing exploration of different limits with the luxury of being able to dabble over a wide range of international influences. Each has a sense of class-identity in it. It’s a community of choice, collaborating on a group fiction, group norms, range of distance one can hear over.
p. 6 Hall continues about this shadowland of lived versus related of life…
(Orwell was convinced that the straight, simple sentence could fix all
gobbledygook.
It won’t. Plain English is just another propaganda-costume.
To know we are not Truth but brokering fragments of illusions keeps us sane as we are going to get within the chaos. The mind needs to impose order for its well-being. We need patterns and we need to let the patterns break, be of multiple parallel lines of (make)-believing and skepticism both.
The taking seriously is necessary to set up straight man for contrast with the nonsense. That aspect is necessary for laughter and laughter is essential for survival. A small measure of laughter takes off a disproportional weight of frustration, fatigue and disappointment which become the lion’s share of life.
We have to keep shaking up our responses because we callous, become immune to the effects of any substance or idea. As the effects wear off, we try harder, or try something else. All boils down to coping.
p. 8
a component & supporter of Quietude.
[…] The blunt & the correct use the same elementary syntax, the same rules of order.
For both, editing & revision become exercises in deletion—instead of invitation.
Poetry is as much psychology as art. When the world is too emotional, our finite limit on emotion is used up. We want simple but we still want poetry. When the world is too staid and standstill, we cope with injecting a counterbalancing style. Too small, open up. Too open, shut down. Have dialogue without being able to run on, write protracted monologues. Have ample chance to interact, poetics shift towards interactive forms.
How to aggregate trends of how word toys are played with? People talk about what seems to have currency but think the world in silence until a style comes up, can be bundled over to someone who is in a place to hear and talk back meaningfully.
Any given subject and way of communicating is current. Is the question of what prevails relevant? Which question should it be?
p.11
the weight of that huge dark Babel-Chorus—
sure dilutes the punch of solemn protectionist one-liners.
Are we to boil down poetry into essential directions, like fiction’s 20, 7 or 2 basic plots? To make poetry fit into the shape for neutrotransmitter uptake is a kind of research and marketing. Skill along one line to right audience can make a poem that works well.
Or look at something individually as communication as we would if it were not such constrained conversation. What’s the function? Motive? What is someone’s conscious and unconscious trying to do? What values or hopes are expressed? On its own terms of the unconscious of the writer, can it be heard? What needs are the word’s self-medicating for the reader? Is it medicine that the reader needs at that time?
That’s not to say all forms and all expressions are equal. It isn’t to erase differences as al good, levelled out landscape with indistinct differences. But the absolute of good is relative to function. We get tangled up in our distinctions. We can never quite remove them. Rather like Hall’s idea of the dog seen thru the screen door.
If we somehow concluded that our eyes are out perceptual filters and therefore they bias how we see and we would be better without bias so remove our eyes to see clearly, clearly, an oops-incoming. Or if we were to close our eyes and decide this is the best way to see dog.
It’s easy to get caught up in the stylistics, clogged in. We want custom perfect poem for what we need, the designer dogs inside our heads. We may be dissatisfied with formal, verbose, minimalist, harsh, romantic, goofy, dark portrayals of someone else’s dog. To listen to their meanings of dog without trying to terra-form their yard, just listen, just hear compassionately, about them, not trying to check tags or make a yard from their shed hair, just listen. That’s a selfless thing. That’s a hard thing. It’s a different kind of dialogue to fight with yourself to keep your ears open.
When you want to write your own dog, how to clear out the whole howling pound of 101 dalmatians and a 1000-odd other purebred and mutts?
What do you need to be told by yourself?
In a previous AngelHouse Press essay, Writing from the (Proletariat) Bones by Jeff Fry complains at length of not enjoying what he reads. Always a baffling argument to me. Maybe because of country music’s “I’m for Love” with “if you don’t like it, can’t you just let it pass. I’m for turning off the news and turning down the lights… ” and something that rhymes with lights.
Still, criticism can help. I can understand a call for balance but not a call for muffling as taboo people writing from where they are. If people with what he’d consider petty concerns of privileged lives write without irony of what concerns them, what would be preferable, the silencing or appropriating voices of the poor in well-menaing trite aspects? To go off and suffer? It is an othering of another and an othering of self rather than staying away or drawing near.
There are certain brackets of frustration that are more or less belonging to different classes.
Patterns of class exist. I’d rather not be reduced to class. And class is a mire of mix. Most people shift class at least once over their life, due to fortunes changing personally, or nationally, or marrying into another class.
Perhaps he wants his taste and values reflected outside himself in the mainstream, to be the norm. He would like to see a voiceprint of the downtrodden, for them to be part of the spectrum of what is worth writing about. This is a democratic and large picture thing.
One must write about what one cares about. It’s not as if there is much wiggle room in that choice. We gravitate to what resonates, or, in some cases, away from what resonates provocatively. We cluster, generally, to like-minded so we can speed each other’s growth by cooperatively piecing together what we think without wasting energy fighting ideologies that are working from another page of assumptions of what happens and why.
the story oozes middleclass privilege and family drama. On top of that, the trivialness of a hurt pig is so badly out of step with the gravitas the story tries to garner that the story really falters as a serious drama.
His frustration and anger rings thru his disrespectful language of disgust. Fry wants deep, lasting importance, not trifling stories. Where’s the artery cutting a new path thru a body of air? There are “no ruptures to the story’s pedestrian framing.” He advises that the message should be tempered with the version of truth that life is unfair and random, where there is an agonizing twist such as a loved pig biting off a child’s finger or child converted to lunch. A pet pig should not heal. This is middle class narrative of redemption.
it is not a world be wants replicated, promoted. It is not the medicine from literature he seeks.
If these stories are indeed irrelevant to the experience of the majority of people, which is partly the reason for the floundering of big magazines, why are these stories winning? Who likes them (outside of the editors)? On one hand, this is a problem of class and correlative experiences
and tastes.
So much to unpack of assumptions in that.
Middle class isn’t the majority numerically, apparently. I would have blind-guessed it at 60% but this source says of middle class, between 1980 to 2000 “in Canada, it grew to 37 per cent of the population from 33 per cent.[…] During the same 20 years, the upper class shrank by 1.9 percentage points, to 33.3 per cent of the population. But more [middle class growth] came from poor families moving up.”
A Pearson textbook pegs it at 40-50% of Canada as middle class. Now that’s economics not a poll on what morality is subscribed to, and assuming that there are patterns based on “lifestyle”. And that gets into dicey ground with Macionis and Gerber saying the values difference is poor people are intolerant and rich means broad-minded. 10-foot pole anyone?
Unfortunately, most of my reading of class comes from Ruby Payne whose theories are coming under fire as being a formalization of stereotypes more than observation of actual patterns. Making what feels right getting the facts to fill the feeling is a troubling framework, more like constellations and astronomy than predictive science.
So, are we willing to get past questioning the motives of those who critique her work, past the “but she seems to make sense†reasoning, past anecdotes about ones own family members, and down to the core questions of whether we’re simply settling for Payne rather than bringing all that we know to the education of poor children?
My ideology is showing: What we care about we may become emotional about, become absolutist in, both of which are a sign of weakness. Exchanging words is distinct from exchanging ideas. Ideas are positively valued. Argument is negatively valued. One should endeavour to look past words at cause. Silence is superior to most speech but far less amusing and more dire. Talking doesn’t make for being heard. To hear and be heard, one needs to step out of our own shoes, the ones that fit best, or at least are the most familiar. One must always assume one is wrong and the other respected but also misinformed and a valued witness both. Is this latitude and attitude in service of my financial constraints and that of my parents?
Where to go from there? I tend to throw my hands in the air and declare most things inscrutable, unknowable, and a cosmic joke. Not to say anything is no enjoyable. And not to say that all is lies. Or unnecessary. But patterns flux.
The poor are always with us. Maybe not here or not now. And poor have all kinds. The poor who are healthy as they expect is normal and don’t know they are poor. The poor by making poor financial mistakes. The poor by unmanaged mental illness. The poor by random series of circumstances. The generationally cultural underdog. The romantically, religiously or ideologically poor who think it is morally better than to chase mammon. The poor who aim to conform in all ways to be indistinguishable from middle class. The drug-addled poor who reel along for a year or few decades in slum communities. The poor who scrape by never quite “making it” by some standards but being a personal success by one’s own.
The theatre of binaries casts caricatures of what the monolith of any given cast wants. But few fit the mold of the class. The burden of class and values is like gender or age or poetry and the roles and rules are boundaries that shift according to need. We are used to obsolescence, forward leaning to expect something to be irrelevant. Waiting for the next thing.
The notion of relevancy is with us. The question of what is worthwhile of someone’s time is a matter of what needs are met, what is suited to one’s temperament, who one wants to interact with and how. Where one’s tastes are at the moment. Over a lifetime, as Hall pointed out, he’s shifted. We all shift and are in multiple headspaces at once.
Perhaps the complexity of parallel thoughts is too complex for conversation. We want to give a simple caricature of self. It winnows out what we need to attend to, makes our lives more comfortable. At the release of the rabbits, as hunting dogs, we lose all the quarry if we dash to and fro, not deciding on one to take down. We must eye one at a time. Might get it, might not. Might be a good one, or not. Next run we can try for another and see if our luck gets better.
