Shortly after I’d posted my Michael Jackson note, I realized that in my class this past winter, we or I might have–I use the past conditional because, truthfully, I only hazily recall the reference, which might have been a blip in a conversation but was definitely not part of the syllabus–broached him in relation to one of the course’s topics, “transhumanism/posthumanism.” I think the reference arose based on his successive physical and aesthetic transformations. We did look specifically at a figure like Stelarc, but we also touched upon both self-proclaimed artists like Orlan, and non-artists who could be discussed as such, like Jocelyn Wildenstein. Now that I think about Jackson, I realize that I probably could have developed a complete little module about him in relation to the larger topic, as the surgeries, his own narratives about exceeding or surpassing the human, the use of various analog and digital technologies, and so on, would place him well within aesthetic discussions that range from the earliest examples of this notion (the use of early sound technologies, say, or prostheses) to transgenesis, advanced and digitized prosthesis, and so on. Of course I’m hardly the only onewho’s thought of him in this way, but the idea of the transhuman makes me wonder about what it might mean in a larger sense to think of Michael Jackson in relation to transhumanism and the posthuman? How does that check the impulse to critique in psychological and moral about his skin-lightening and feature-thinning regime, his approach to parenting, his sometimes technologically advanced sleeping arrangements? Is it possible to talk about this approach to his life–as opposed, say, to his art–without shutting down or off other avenues (think negative capability)? Was he the first great black transhumanist/posthumanist artist, or would others (Sun Ra, for example) qualify? R. Sirius, in his provocative h+ article, suggests that Jackson is someone whose example should be avoided, but he also goes on to make an array of points about how to relate Jackson to a conceptual program in which he’s usually not overtly linked. What do you think?

Of course there is also the possibility to consider Jackson’s strangeness–which Rev. Al Sharpton, in his eulogy, deflected back onto Jackson’s critics and questioners, somewhat unfairly I think, given how strange Jackson truly was and is (he was!)–in relation to conceptual art itself. One of the first things I suggested to my class was that we might think of our sitting in that classroom as a conceptual art project and could legitimately claim our performances and experiences as such if we–or someone else–properly framed it as such. They grasped this pretty quickly, but held it lightly, because of course they had to do lots of reading, participate in class conversations, and write papers, and unlike participants in a conceptual project, they couldn’t just walk out and not expect some direct effect on their grade. (Though I also always take to heart Gertrude Stein’s [in]famous response to a test in William James’s class, so….) But what if we think about Michael Jackson’s life, in all its rich strangeness, as a conceptual project, endlessly unfolding (still, after his death–remember he is posthuman), one that he might have been aware of, perhaps not in the ways that conceptual practices have been developed sinceGeorge Brecht, Allen Kaprow, and others in the late 1950s, but more broadly in light of such proto-conceptual theorists and practioners, people who did argue for and in several cases transform their lives into works or art, or at least break down the barrier between them to a striking degree, likeWalter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, and situate some of the at-times disturbing aspects–Wacko Jacko!–in light of this constellatory perspective? We can start, say, with that chimpanzee….

A third perspective I thought of, particularly after reading a gossipy piece in one of the British tabloids–The Sun? The Mirror?–which purported to out Jackson (he had several gay male longterm boyfriends/lovers, etc.), was of Jackson as a queericon. I’m thinking of queerness in its array of meanings, in regard to issues of orientation, identity, sexuality, gender–and I know I wasn’t the only person who thought that Jackson had remade himself at various points into Diana Ross (as Dorothy, with that fro), then, at least facially, into the young Elizabeth Taylor, and then, as one of the late 1990s mugshots appeared to suggest, and perhaps not purposefully, into something on the order of Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, among others–family, another way of reading that “strange” that Sharpton evoked, or “funny,” as people might say, meaning in relation to normalized social categories more generally, “queer” might be another way of thinking about him and how he moved through the world. More than anything, his ways of living challenged all sorts of norms of American and African American middle-class respectability, which led to considerable criticism (no, we didn’t always love him, well, not all of us, no matter what people are saying now.) I’m also thinking of the arguments advanced a few years ago by scholars like Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and, in a different way, by José Estéban Muñoz andTim Dean, regarding queer antisocialities and approaches to hetero and increasingly homonormativities. If we expand the notions of the queer family (as my mother said to me tonight about Joe Jackson, “those are not his biological grandchildren!”), wouldn’t his creative and ever-shifting family unit, as well as the paternity of and his behavior with his 3 children be less grist for some of the tut-tutting that has occurred? (Then there’s the gaggle of children he had living with and visiting him at Neverland and elsewhere, though I am not, however, talking about the pedophilic allegations.) What about his (re-)conceptualizations of home, which sometimes ranged to the highly inventive? And on and on. One thought I had was, would thinking about Michael through a queer lens be yet another step towards normalizing away the queerness that made MJ often so compelling, iconic and singular? How far should the normalizing power of queerly reorienting one’s perspective go, for him or anyone else?

That’s the headline on a blog post at the New York Times today.

http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/we-are-all-writers-now/?hp

The idea is floated that with so many people participating in blogs, twitter, and texting, everybody is writing… something.  And while saying so may seem trivial, I don’t think there is any doubt that for better or worse–to be judged sometime in the distant future–this daily writing (even if more is written than is read) now becomes one more element in the matrix of literacy within which even the most serious writing arises.  Will more people read more sorts of things because they have gotten so used to texting?   Will more people stop reading as much as they used to because texting adds one more activity to their days and nights, which are already so saturated with distractions?

I remember the first time–10 years ago?–an undergraduate student of mine turned in a story in the form of e-mail correspondence between two characters.  We are already living in the era of serial novels in the form of text messages (Japan).  I remember that someone once published a novel in which the writing was entirely limited to the use of personal license plate wit in the state of California.  How, even subtly, does this shift in how writing is used change what passes through the mind, what nudges the expectations, of at least some readers, when they are engaged in the apparently so routinized act of reading?  Expectations of reading shorter compositions?  Fewer expectations of writing not as a site of thought but rather as a way of communicating information?

And I wonder if new practices of writing will have any effect on literacy itself?  Will more people want to be (more) literate?  What opportunity for thinking about this is available in considering together (1) a text message from someone who has recently learned how to read and (2) the kinds of first compositions in The Journal of Ordinary Thought, the literary (perhaps that’s the right word) journal published by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance in Chicago.  (This magazine offers readers the brief writings of students for whom demonstrating their new literacy implies being taken more seriously as human beings.)  See:

http://www.jot.org/journal_of_ordinary_thought.php

What happens to argument, analysis, the exploration of mind itself?  That is, not only how literacy works, but also what it produces: poems, tax returns, on-line purchases, short stories, medical research articles, plays, love letters (”Great Love Texts of the World”?), inscriptions on gravestones, grocery lists, classified reports on torture…  And how does the huge gap in literacy and technology, from one part of the world to the next, open or close the possibilities of writing, reading, thought, and feeling?

OK.  Thnx 4 rdng.

(More, much much more, of what is incomprehensible to non-texters, of whom I must be one, since I do it so seldom, at: http://www.netlingo.com/acronyms.php)

Thinking back to my student years, I decided to re-read the brief autobiographical book by an old mentor of mine, the English poet and critic Donald Davie (1922-1995)–a man well-known for his intensity of opinion, sharpness of mind, and, as a poet, his unease with himself and with his own work, and also for holding contradictory ideas at different moments (for example about Ezra Pound), in his parallel career as a voluminous and often brilliant critic of poetry.  (I went to graduate school at Stanford, when he was teaching there.)  This is not a book he ever discussed with me, as he was writing it, for it was published after I had offended him personally (by a lack of tact on my part, certainly, and never having intended to do so), then with my third book of poems (and it is a measure of his great strength as a thinker about poetry that he took poems and writing as seriously as he did, responding to what he saw as moral qualities in literature), and with my politics, over the years.  I had very little contact with him after 1978; a brief reunion, though, when I attended the conference in honor of his retirement from Vanderbilt in 1988, served also as a personal reconciliation.  But after that, we were in touch no longer.  Born in 1922, he died in 1995.

Davie served in the British navy during World War II, and was deployed to northern Russia.  Today this remarkable passage especially strikes me:

What my Russian time should have taught me, what it did teach me,–though I forgot the lesson, and I forget it still, much of the time–is that the writer’s sole duty is to report what was, as it was; and that, in the interest of serving that overriding obligation, he must be prepared to be numbered among the criminals, the perverts, the barbarians, even the unfeeling administrators.  In his other capacities–and he should have them, for no creature is much more piteous than the writer who is writer and nothing else, writer all through–he is required, like any other citizen, to take sides; and to take his side not idly and inconsiderately, but with scruple and imagination.  But while he is a writer, and insofar as he is a writer, he cannot afford to take sides, but must stand above or apart from them all–not dispassionately indeed, but on the contrary with a quite feverish passion.  That passion is not a compulsion, as for their different discreditable reasons the critics and the general public want it to be.  If the writer’s passion were compulsive then he could not be held to account for any of his actions, whereas for the mere dignity of his calling he has to be, and will demand to be, held accountable.  It is an American not a British idiom that conveys my sense of this: for the writer, insofar as he is a writer, “lays it on the line.”  He relates things as he has found them to be, in the world and in himself; and he may be as aghast as any of his readers at what he finds himself saying, at what (in despite of his own most cherished wishes) he finds himself required, by the mere facts of the case, to record.  That is what I learned, not just from the Russian writers I read in translation, but from trying to take stock of my own Russian experiences even as I experienced them.  It is a simple lesson that I have never learned well enough.

This is the very standard by which some of Davie’s own most admired poets nevertheless fail, in greater or lesser part, by Davie’s estimation and by the estimation of others; yet it was a measure of Davie’s sometimes surprising generosity that he stood by some writers whom others abandoned because of the writer’s hateful attitudes.  (In the work or the life or both–such as the Cantos of Ezra Pound; Pound was one enthusiasm which Davie and I, across our many differences, shared).  Davie goes on after this passage to look at how one might want to disentangle, though, the Russian idea of the writer as teacher, as moralist, from the English and European idea of the writer as witness.  As Davie says of himself in his book, he has struggled against his own moralistic impulses.  How I would like to have with Davie the conversation that the passage above would provoke, today!

The Modernist writers of the early twentieth century, impelled partly by what they felt to be the inadequacy of language and forms of art after World War I, because no articulation of the horror of those years could be adequate, wanted to push language off its course of routine expression and perception, to freshen it (as poetry has almost always done, from its beginnings, by the use of poetic devices and tropes).  The wartime experience of the survivors was shattering; that of the victims was horrific and final.  With The Waste Land and The Cantos, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among English-language writers, deliberately broke the inherited sense of the shape of a poem.  Even William Carlos Williams, who abhorred the way Eliot and Pound based their remaking of poetry on earlier European culture, also remade poetry in a similar spirit, leaping abruptly from his immature work to his new-found syncopation of rhythms, simplicity of diction, and use of everyday subjects and images of a kind that had not appeared in poetry before.  A very compact example is this little poem (1938):

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

The language was freshened by being broken up and by its having been used to create a visual image of something so everyday (in some neighborhoods, anyway), humble, and insignificant that it really does not usually even register on our senses as a thing in itself to which we pay direct attention.  Yet to bring it to our attention, in the way that Williams does, changes our experience of perceiving, and even of using words.

Then writers, and many others, became more aware, after the midpoint of the twentieth century, that language was not only subject to routinizing, which dulls our thinking, feeling, and perceiving, but was also becoming more and more the tool of a deliberate routinizing of thought, feeling and perception by political regimes and by advertising, as media expanded enormously and began to saturate the mental environment.  Would a second remaking of poetry, especially, break language out of these new routines, especially those that had been created, and were and are constantly being renewed, specifically in order to make conformism (especially the conformism of illusory individualism) and consumerism seem “natural”?  (To say nothing of much darker ruts of idea and emotion, like xenophobia, racism, sexism–I grew up in a white zone of segregated Texas, a pretty long time ago, and these large prejudices were the unwitting ground and basis of everyday conversation among my schoolmates, and presumably their parents.)

In fact, there have been many instances of poetic attempts to free language from such associations–instances of different kinds, from poets with different approaches to poetry: organic form poets, surrealists, beat poets, Bolinas poets, Black Arts poets, worker poets, Nuyorican poets, “language” poets, and many more.  Why was there never a mass appetite for freshened language?  (Some of this poetry, in all these groups and others, was very good; some was, and is, as we should expect, sloppy, easy, trendy, bad.)  Maybe I should ask: Why was a genuine appreciation of freshened language not more genuinely widespread in our culture except in the form of a liking for certain clever advertisements?)

Might it be that with the passing of decades of ever more saturating media–which have resorted more and more to spectacle (fictional and real), violence (real and fictional), fear (real and artificial), and humor (satirical and stereotyping and ultimately only reinforcing received thought about what is “natural” and desirable)–we have grown more accustomed than we realize to living in a media echo chamber–so much so that being apart from it is what has come to seem unnatural?  Endlessly we adapt–like some small plant or water creature which over time adapts to the salinization of its wetlands and clings to existence as a species that is not aware of its own changes?

Most poetry, even some of the best, is readily understandable.  A large portion, including more of the best, is not so available to a reader unaccustomed to reading poems.  Bad poetry is often unconvincing and predictable even on its own terms of resistance to what it supposedly opposes or resists.  Given how many poetic groupings, movements, schools, etc., there have been and are now, we might well wonder if the impulse to create art in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for anything else–and especially cannot be mistaken for what it opposes–has not led poets to a proliferation of gestures of freshening either our accounts of (mostly) ourselves, or our language(s).  Mere gestures.

People’s resistance to assaults–existential, philosophical, political, moral, spiritual, ethical, practical–dissipates as a state of assault endures and people adapt, as to a siege in wartime, or die, at least linguistically.  Many talking political heads on television are dead, as are many of the elected politicians they mostly associate with or chase after or theatrically condemn.  Listening to such media-heads is a kind of linguistic torture, as well as a moral one.  Perhaps we all cannot perceive fully the insanity of such a state of being.  Every time a new change occurs, we must adapt to that, in order to survive, and even our own earlier resistance, the resistance of earlier generations, may be forgotten in both form and substance.  And we do adapt to the water that grows increasingly salty, at least for a while.

Do we watch video of demonstrators in the streets of Tehran with fear for them?  Excitement?  Does it not become entertainment of a particularly vicious kind, very quickly?

I used to think we were trapped, in the USA, in a general media narrative–despite infinite amounts of evidence to the contrary–of good fortune (spiced by the usual racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc.).  Even after 2001.  (The good-fortune mode of self-defining–largely unconscious, to be sure–contains a subset of self-pity, among some: “Why do they hate us?  Us!”))  The narrative of good fortune holds up our economy.  While for most human beings, after all, for most of the life of our species, the feast has been an exceptional experience associated with beliefs in supernatural powers and blessings, with rituals or worship in observance of those powers, for us the feast is a continuously played, fragmented, TV Mahabharata of Money.  It seems that without a myth of the feast as a continuing, 24/7 experience, American consumerism would collapse.  (How ironic that the economic power that feeds our feasting has at its core a narrative of famine; but that is changing.)

In response to all this–genuine horrors, the saturation of the media and of the contemporary ideals of consumerism by the false idea of a continuous feast, and the ease with which we fall into routines of thought because of routines of language, and on the other hand, the infinite resources of language and the extraordinary riches of world poetry–what does poetry do?

Teaching at the summer residency of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for the past week or so, I have been given the added pleasure of a festival of birdsong far richer than what I hear at home in Evanston, Illinois.  And while I very much wish I knew more about so many of the singers who remain invisible among the lush foliage of a wet summer in Swannanoa, North Carolina, singers whose voices I do not recognize, I am most thrilled by the very visible mockingbirds, the male divas of treetops, the New World nightingales, performers of amazing stamina who go on and on as they improvise imitative medleys of other birds and other sounds, and return again and again to some of their own characteristic sounds.  (They aren’t all “notes” in our sense, because the pitches are really complex clusters rather than single frequencies, and some of the words a mockingbird sings are bird-onomatopoeia.)  I can hear a mockingbird now, in the early morning, improvising jazzily as I write this in my dormitory room.

A mockingbird singing while in the mood to perform its territorial and mating display is one of the most spectacular of vocal performances.  From a high vantage point the male bird flies straight up–ten feet or as much as fifty–while singing.  It sings all the way up, and keeps singing as it tumbles flamboyantly back down, wings extended, as if falling helplessly–and returns precisely to the same perch.  And it does this again and again, flashing the white bars on its gray wings as, in order to demonstrate utter mastery, it mimics disastrous disability.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), the Italian composer, included in his score for the lovely “Pines of Rome” a recording of a nightingale.  Never having heard a live performance by a nightingale, I can’t help wishing that Respighi had auditioned a talented mockingbird for the part, too, before making up his mind.

(The talent of individual birds does vary.  Where I grew up in East Texas, in a mostly very open stretch of land with few trees, there were plenty of mockingbirds, but they did not seem to be interested in singing, or very good at it, and mostly made a lot of imitative sounds of telephones, machine squeaks, whistles, and sirens, and inserted a lot of their own noisy buzzes–a kind of bird-tongued raspberry.  I wonder what it was that led them to sing so poorly, or failed to teach them to sing well.  There is, after all, song culture; and while human schools can be the worst in the whole warm-blooded world when they are located in poor or fanatic communities, condemning children to ignorance that is imposed on them by those who should nurture them instead, songbird communities, too, although more benign than our own, overall, apparently do better or worse jobs in teaching their young to sing.)

Although mockingbirds have been extending their geographical range northward for decades, I have not yet heard one in Evanston.  So I love to hear them in North Carolina.  By chance I was able to attend an unforgettable mid-afternoon display performance in Swannanoa several summers ago that was so varied and so long, while the bird was so acrobatic in mid-air, that I was sorry it had not been the culminating poetry reading in the series of them by faculty and students that was going on indoors 100 yards away each night.  After all, mockingbirds sing at night, too.  (And, I should add, that’s a song in a different mood.  According to ornithological sources, male mockingbirds who have not found a mate sing more than those who have, and only the lonely ones sing at night.)

I came out of a building and the performance was already in progress, I listened for half an hour, and then had to tear myself away from this spectacle and go to a workshop, so I don’t know how long the bird went on.  He was working from the peak of the roof of a building, as if to imply that however well we were all singing, he was on campus, too, and we couldn’t touch him.

I suppose that young birds instinctively take in some of what they hear their elders singing, and learn not only within their own families but also from competing singers.  And then at maturity the males must out-sing their competitors for territory and mates, and, like poets and fiction writers, are good at stealing.  Art not only imitates both art and nature, but is in some sense both nature and art.  But we have nothing to teach the mockingbird.  We have misnamed it, too, in English–better if we had called it the mimicbird…  unless it is mocking us with its virtuosity.