this is part 4 of an unpublished book on poetry in the 90s
Solar implied halo of burial ash: Allen Fisher and the School of London
13.4.97
Allen Fisher, SCRAM, or, the transformation of the concept of cities (1994, 94 pp.); Fizz (1994, 30pp.); Breadboard (1994, 63pp); Civic Crime (1994, 29pp.); Now's the Time (1995, 14pp.); Philly Dog (1995, 8pp.)
One inquires what relationship this piece I am writing bears to the scattered objects outside it which are the works of the School of London. It is useful to ask, and deny, that the subject being discussed has a strong boundary, separating it from other matter outside it, and guiding us towards significant homogeneities within the realm it defines. The piece being written has inbuilt physical limits; I suggest that the subject has no definite boundary corresponding to this material or economic limit of the piece being written "about" it. Instead, the subject does not close along a specific self-joining line in conceptual space; and the prose description will not possess a homology with its subject matter which we could call completeness. The question arises of what procedural rules I will then follow to find out whether any sentence I write belongs in the piece, and when I have finished it; the answer is that I invent these rules as I go along, and that the experience, for me and later for you, is structured by arbitrary and subjective rules, fictions governed by a kind of opportunism of pleasure. Such considerations shed light on the artistic activity of this group, animated by the awareness of freedom and arbitrariness in what they do, and constantly questioning what rule-sets they are following and what tribunal it was which instated them (i.e. what pre-existing, perhaps pre-conscious, rules governed the acts of preference which instated the rule-sets being followed).
A first stab at writing about the School of London is to utter the last sentence printed and to stop there. We can point to the work on the foundations of mathematics carried out by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, amongst others, in the years before the First World War, as a systematic approach to the relationship between rules and fictions of permissibly infinite extent; an investigation disseminated in the British philosophical culture, which obviously inspired the contemplation, by these artists, of the rules underlying art, and the way in which the infinite is simultaneously possible and impossible for our brains, and for art, to contain or represent. This historicizing comment throws up a deduction which we have to deny: historicising can never provide a clinching description of this artistic school, because the area of British or European thought which it seized on was precisely the conceptual equipment for exposing, setting aside, and transforming, all operative rule-sets, and for re-entering the infinite by making the conventional, common, and inherited first conscious and then suspended. This is a series in which a term is not defined in advance by the preceding terms; and does not contain the later terms.
The description, which we are thinking of making, of this school, would have to consider and integrate the theoretical equipment of complete openness, in which any element of meaning is an undefined and potentially infinite set of relations to other, undefined but legal, meaning-elements; and the self-limiting practice of adhering to a collective project of research and theorizing, with exact attention, consistency, and self-control, which allows art workers to move through the open spaces without simply disintegrating. The mention of shared results persuades us to look at the community that shares in this sharing, both as readers and as generators of new data; a large part of it is in the USA, and most of what is vital for the school is recorded in the history of Conceptual Art, as a movement which began in the USA around 1966. Lucy Lippard's book Six years: the dematerialisation of the Art Object 1966 to 1972 is essential for the student of it. The notion of a School of London looks, then, misleading for the advanced reader, if vital for the naive reader, struggling to make out what poets I am talking about, and how they differ from the mainstream. If we are going to ascribe this piece I am still writing to named art objects, then the works of Allen Fisher listed above, the anthology Floating Capital, and an array of works by the poets included in it, would be the primary exhibits. Poets like Ulli Freer, Adrian Clarke, Maggie O'Sullivan, Bill Griffiths, Tim Fletcher, Robert Sheppard, cris cheek, Robert Hampson, and Eric Mottram, would be included in the dataset against which we measure the accuracy and descriptive power of general statements about the School. The poets collected in F Capital would probably deny being a group, but that is partly because they consider that nothing exists outside them—important evidence that a group exists.
Perhaps all modern poets would claim to be aware of the fictional basis of art, and to be investigating and exploring in their daily work. This is not in fact true; vast swathes of poets are committed to a realist and autobiographical set of rules, the leads them, in writing poetry if not in the more or less territorial claims they make in interviews, to reject experiment and the conscious generation of rule-sets. Someone painting marine watercolours in the traditional English style is perfectly capable of talking as if this were the result of intense conceptual activity, and a triumph of self-critical philosophizing; the essential difference is that a conceptual artist brings the process of argument into the work, lets the consumer take part in it, gives enough evidence to allow the flow of conjecture and refining of ideas to continue without running out in frustration. The aesthetics of argument present a complex and demanding topic, which is unforgiving and therefore counter to the notions of unbounded permissiveness which I, among other people, have been happily uttering; if the reader is gripped by a line of argument, and the artwork no longer supplies the fuel needed to pursue it, the reader will throw the artwork aside and find whatever does nourish the argument. This might be discussion with friends, comparative material from other countries or centuries, or works of literary theory. The appetite, once aroused, is greedy and vengeful. The obscurity of British conceptual art to a wider market is partly due to the sociological fact that many of its practitioners are ignorant of philosophy and how to philosophize, do not spend five minutes a week conducting serious arguments, and can base their work only on a mimicry of conceptual thought, an epistemology composed of soundbites. (This topic is discussed in the article 'The Material Practice of Bad Writing'.) Within the mainstream, the vocabulary of conceptual art is applied in publicity material; but surely we can all agree that Andrew Motion, Tony Harrison, Glyn Maxwell, or Simon Armitage are completely conventional and anti-intellectual writers, and that their work has no critical relationship to the literary traditions which it enshrines and celebrates. You cannot write a poetry of ideas unless you can compete with professional architects and critics of ideas, whose works are readily available to the public. Buying ideas from a poet might be like buying vintage wine from the fish and chip shop: an error of context which no-one in fact makes. The work of the School of London continued for years and years before anything finished, and of permanent interest, emerged; an investment of self-transformation that has yielded long-term benefits.
For Fisher, as for Prynne, the size of a prose description adequate for their works is approximately equal to the bulk of those works. Although I enjoy writing about Fisher, I do not relish the task of closing off any such writing and suggesting that it is true, faithful, and complete.
Description of Fizz
A note in Fizz says
"These new poems use two series of lectures; Patterns of Connectedness, and Global Artifacts. The first series was an inquiry into the idea of the modern in the twentieth century. The second series surveyed artifacts from ancient China, early East Mediterranean, Dynastic Egypt, pre-Christian Europe, Harappan Indus Valley, Gandharan and Guptan India, meso-American Maya, North American Anasazi, nomadic Siberia, and West Africa. Both series were delivered by the author at the Herefordshire College of Art & Design in the period 1989-92."
So the audience is of art students, post-adolescents looking for ideas to supply their own imagination, but who do not have a parti pris in favour of books and literate culture. The subject areas are chosen presumably because they are so remote from the world of images (variously, Italian-Catholic, capitalist, Hellenistic, modernist) which the students have grown up with. The area of interest is the nature of human art, and the juxtaposition of unrelated cultures is intended to see through the clutter of the historically specific and reveal flashes of what the human artistic faculty is. The method might remind us of Herbert Read's books on art, where he strings together photographs of art from different millennia and countries and asks us to see common elements in the images.
I feel closest to the poem 'Fish-Tail' because it deals with what might be called Celtic cultures. I did a degree (strictly, a two-year course) in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic; I have read perhaps a dozen accounts of the cultural sequence which Fisher is describing. (The most compelling is by PL Jacobsthal.) It strikes me that his account is a materialist one: he strips out scholarly interpretation to look only at what is genuinely ancient, and its internal formal characteristics. It is an account with zero teleology. This is what academics aim for—but which the general public find inhibited and off-putting, as they prefer to have the ancient objects encumbered by sword and sworcery novels about Celtic anarchism, primitive matriarchy, fertility rites, and what have you. Fisher avoids all that sentimental orchestration without putting the activities of scepticism and demystification obnoxiously in centre stage. Some stanzas refer to Caesar's description of Gaul, in the first century BC; while others refer to manuscripts, i.e. not before the seventh century AD: Fisher is visibly constructing a trans-historical subject, by drawing connections between objects of such different dates. A more purist approach would deny continuity at the outset and try to see if it could be established from internal formal evidence. Incidentally, some of the material in 'Fish-Tail' is probably drawn from the world of the Eurasian steppes, Iranian-speaking at the time; although the continuity of themes and artifacts between this region and Northern Europe was significant in the Dark Ages.
Compare mirror with mirror
others pushed east
jugs with invented limbs in handle
from grave an helmet with iron and gold
mountings lost cheek-guards knobbed finial
influx from heroic ideals of tribes
sword scabbard in ceremonial prowess
left in disuse since discoveries of iron.
probably describes artifacts from South Russia, or further east.
If the visible and external dominates the mind, one could argue that gazing intently at a Celtic manuscript page (or drawing its pattern again) is the closest one can get to the mind of the Dark Ages. The question, how different is it if a student in the 1990s draws a page of Celtic patterns, and if someone in 700 AD drew them, points to the weakness of the visible, and also to the importance of ideology. The question of how inevitably certain states of mind follow from certain material practices brings us to the relationship between economics and social organization; a burning question in the period around 1990, when it was being argued by the government that economic "facts" were "unambiguous" and that there was no choice about how society was to be organized. A recognition of the importance of cosmology, ideology, mythic narratives, or culture suggests to us that if we gaze at a work of art from the Iron Age we are seeing nothing, only sparks of meaning leaking through chinks in a wall which hides another cosmos of signifieds.
Fisher avoids using synthetic words like "Celts" or "Bronze Age"; his approach is rigorous in this sense, and it eschews topic sentences, keywords which bring into play a reliable sequence or set of ideas supplied by our common stock of representations. He, metaphorically, gives a set of anatomical and behavioural features and waits for us to supply the word "shark" as the cap to it all. One has to ask what the effect is, in a museum, of not supplying labels, with dates, associative words, and so forth; the viewer is cast into a world without recognizable features, and will either reject the experience and move on to something more predictable, or gaze at the objects and gradually construct names for them, through a phase of epistemological tension and uncertainty, which could include surfacing and examining the rules by which one deduces the meaning of objects and cultural assemblies.
The end step of many of the associational chains that I followed while reading this, or also perhaps the fundamental and first step of the process which Fisher was following, is to isolate and question the decision process of the artist. Fisher is not imitating his voice in the poem; he is not recreating his experience. The scene on offer is perhaps that of an artist who enters a white-painted room with a certain number of objects and assembles them into a pattern which they do not belong in, which is not the product of memory; which is not the recreation of past emotional states; which is not an allegory of something. The cognitive psychologist James Gibson claimed that the brain interprets the world using nothing but the evidence of light, not needing semantic structures to organise it with; a theory in violent contrast with all other schools of cognitive psychology, but nonetheless stunningly productive. This belief in the immediate visual environment testifies against trauma and against the notion of character: it is not in someone's nature to be unhappy, instead they have acquired a set of wrong behavioural moves, and they need to realise how open to manipulation the physical environment is. Someone's "nature" might be like a set of rules for writing a poem; familiar but not binding. Learning how to feel differently might be like learning how to write a poem that did not use nature as an image for an internal emotional state, and did not end up by drawing a moral point. This demonstration of freedom in art is pointed at the assertion of freedom in political organization and in human relationships.
It is interesting to relate the poem to an eleventh set of artistic works, namely the ones which his students at Hereford were creating, at Hereford, or will create, after graduating. Evidently the lecture series is aimed at those objects, which did not exist yet, rather than at the dead cultures which they overtly describe. The students might capture forms, either by photography or by manual recreation, from any of the five cultures presented; and might integrate them together within a single picture frame or bounded visual semantic whole. All the series are non-Christian and non-contemporary; the course asks the students to take a trip outside their personal experience or visual language. This trip estranges all their decisions; by offering worlds of art in which the most elemental decisions were taken differently. You might start a painting course by looking at a culture which did not have freestanding canvas paintings. These cultures did not have canvas paintings, or the camera. The question "what is this painting like?" could be preceded by the question "what is a painting?", to be answered by asking why some cultures (few, in world history) have (portable, representational) paintings; and what visual patterns have been used for in other cultures. The origin of the space and visual grammar of Western painting was most memorably analysed by Pierre Francastel. The painting is, as well as a material object, a record of intentional subjective acts by its creator; the hypothesis reached by virtually all materialist investigators of art (and literature) is that there is a history of subjective self-awareness just as much as there is a history of artistic forms; although the mind is dominated by its immediate perceptual surroundings (as in Gibson's famous thesis), its activity linked to levels of luminosity, it can also free itself from history by creating new perceptual environments. A vocabulary for this evolving selfconsciousness has yet to be developed.
The student gazing, however intently, at the (photographed) Celtic ironwork, in Hereford in 1992, cannot lose the twentieth century; because that is present as soon as the student comes into the room where the photograph is. If we "see" similarities between art objects from the Old Stone Age, Tang China, Iron Age Kent, and twentieth-century New York, that may be only because the same pair of eyes observed them all, and the common factor was only in those eyes. The observer structures the observation as much as the observed. Because a cat, looking at a painting, observes colours and lines but nothing of its meaning, the emergence of meaning has to do with the anatomy of the human brain; to explain "seeing a painting" we might have to spend as much time talking about the different visual centres, of different biological ages, in the brain, as about the shapes and colours of the visible surface. By confronting the failures of the observer-observed contact, something most unwelcome to those who favour spontaneity and self-expression, the student begins to grasp the problems of making art which is meaningful to somebody else, and not just to its proud creator.
Comparison of the poems with the academic prose which must have supplied their matter shows the systematic stripping out of causatives; this obscures the modern activity of scholars recovering structured "knowledge" from the raw material of digs (and thus contradicts the main thrust of the poetry, which is to foreground the observer within the act of observation). We can compare this effacement with the parallel effacement of the poet's sensibility, a way of foregrounding the observer which is traditional in poetry but which Fisher has eschewed. The causatives are the most dubious part of the papers; they are the product of conjecture and construction, and they have been jettisoned because those two activities are the most interesting to Fisher, the faculties which he will make more acute in the reader.
A partial change of burial rite signals
a spread of power
an extensive network with more than one focus
linear patterning, spirals, bird shapes
in torcs, pottery, ivories and land forms
signal inspirations and migrations
from plant and foliage and
zoomorphs with winged stencils elaborate knots
This stanza does exhibit a deduction (the word "signals" admits the jump from material evidence to interpretation). The introduction of such jumps calls on a set of positive knowledge about human possibilities as the grammar equating matter with "meaning", a set which Fisher is normally happy to spotlight, in its mystery and complexity and hiddenness from conscious processing. If trait A is bindingly associated with trait B, then human activity is constrained to a set of unique and inevitable lines (joining features), running on rails while most of the "space" of formal variability is impassible and left as a peripheral wasteland; a claim which Fisher would normally be concerned to resist. The purging of causal connectives is a feature of Adrian Clarke's work.
SCRAM
This is "a selection of poems 1971-82", with the unstated proviso that they are outside the large-scale work Place, which dominates the decade as much for British poetry as for Allen Fisher. Confusingly, the volume does include 7 pages from Place. It also includes a prose commentary, describing each section, which I find unsatisfactory as a version of events. In fact, the whole volume is irritatingly incomplete, as Fisher's work clearly does not lend itself to selection; although it is valuable to have this non-Place work gathered in book form. It is quite possible that publication of brief snatches in magazines, as chapbooks, etc., is unsuitable for Fisher, although he has done it endlessly and over three decades. I cannot make a description of this book, as the various poems belong to quite different series and provisional artistic grammars. One problem might be that the rules for moving from one page to the next are not part of a Fisher conceptual project, as in virtually every other of his publications; this level of design has been given away, and looks suspiciously like that of a retrospective exhibition, indulgently showing off the works, in mindless accumulation, with hidden principles which may be either didactic (here is the story) or biographical (here is the image of the Man of which every piece is a new illustration). Fisher simply does not write in set-pieces.
It is not possible to give an overall description of Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, the project of which all the books reviewed (except Scram) form a part, although Fisher's prose book Ideas of the Culture Dreamed of is a kind of map of it. It began around 1981; after the end of Place. The separate poems are not numbered, like the parts of the Cantos, of Zukofsky's A, etc., but have titles drawn from another arbitrary and capacious series of words, in fact a catalogue of dances; thus Grind, Fish Tail, Frug. Eagle Rock, Ferneyhough, Funky Broadway, Fox Trot, etc. The system allows new poems to be slipped in without disruption, and may be more memorable. One can doubt that there is a dance called the Ferneyhough. A number of characters weave their way through it, for example the Burglar, the Bellman, the Informer, the Badgers, the Bikeboy. Fisher already used characters in Place, specifically in Unpolished Mirrors. The speaking characters of Gravity represent possibly a move away from the belief that what any individual says or experiences at any time can represent a satisfactory account; that is, also, a move away from the attempt to write an integrated, authoritative, narrative which subsumes and makes redundant all accounts by any participants. The new manner is more like Plato, setting up philosophical masks in order to make clear arguments, without identifying himself overtly with any speaker. The manner, so unlike modern conceptions of inventing characters, reminds me of early modern Protestant edifying fiction, where the characters are halfway towards allegory, but function within an argument; Pilgrim's Progress and Law's Serious Call to a New Life are examples using such characters. Kierkegaard's creation of a series of masks, without advancing to full-blown fiction, is a later version of the same habit, and also reminiscent of Fisher's The Burglar, the Bellman, etc. It is not clear to me what the function of these characters is. Fisher has said, at readings, that the Burglar is a thief of consciousness, accounting for lapses of awareness, sequences which are locked out or lost before reaching storage; he is thus related to multiple parallel processing, and modern versions of the irrelevance of consciousness compared to efficient automatic functions. It is not clear to me how such a character can walk around meeting other characters, and saying things.
It may be that Fisher had no master-plan before starting; Documents could be that plan, but study of it suggests that it excludes nothing except the conventional, and so that there are no criteria for the finished work and its parts to satisfy. If one-half of our reading a book (or observing behaviour) is wondering what the intentions and behaviour pattern of the writer are, then Fisher has radicalized this part of the text by forswearing any fixed programme: this meaning-element (or meant-element) is unstable, in the same way as rhythm is unstable in a free-verse poem. Perhaps the central (and mysteriously shifting) element of the work is an attempt to outrun predictability, and its depressing effects on the brain, by isolating rules and subjecting them to constant variation. Perhaps the constant rule is to locate rules and turn them. This is like what sociologists do in observing societies, but Fisher is mainly concerned with the rules of making texts, although other domestic activities are similarly estranged. More exactly, Fisher started with the achievements of sociology already on the table, and is going beyond them to analyse the nuances of individual consciousness, an area which is deliberately excluded, as its major limit, by sociology. If introspection is made the focus of the poem (when elements of adventure, narrative excitement, theological revelation, etc., have been removed), then the poem has necessarily to refine its perception of reality to the point at which everyday awareness is unpredictable, in order to avoid repetition and regain uncertainty. The exit from the domestic is either through the wide movements of travel, or through the tiny movements of the microscopic, the passage from action to introspection. This shift parallels an earlier creation of the new realm of the symbolic; the brain as a smaller copy of the world. Language is a low-energy activity and yet central to the way humans live. To make character the road of the poem, the source of newness on each page, the notion of character has to be killed; psychology is now being fixed at a level at which the personality is uncertain and non-repetitive. If the project of self-reproduction is jettisoned, and with it the idea of a permanent and heroic and exceptional personality, then behaviour becomes a large set of procedures, partly common, and which we follow as if doing a drill. Also psychological behaviour becomes this-procedural, common, learnable. Experience becomes something we do. When this is true, we also have the possibility of revolutionising the social system: a new society can be made out of the old people because behaviour is a set of procedures and not something permanent and natural. Gravity cannot become a fixed structure which Fisher would "only" have to complete, because that would deny freedom to the poet at the heart of the poem and so deny the poem its freedom. Its structure was becoming, and its pattern is the location and upsetting of rules. Our task in reading it is not the virtuous and clerical task of gathering and partially memorizing its structure, but of turning its lucid gaze on our own lives, and finding the map of rules and freedom within them. We are to form many conjectures about the significance of the parts and the whole.
Gravity also has a subject matter, without which a mind has nothing to process and so cannot function fully as a mind. It includes much about the London quarter of Brixton, and about Hereford and the nearby countryside, because Fisher lived in those places. Some passages of 'Fish-Tail' contain a great deal of information, even catalogues of it; Fisher has never attempted to attain lucidity about the mind by portraying it in a simplified environment in which it behaves in a stereotyped and simple way. Notoriously, Europeans have tried to achieve clarity by sensory deprivation, in the silence of the monk or hermit, where the mind is as dead as the cadavers which supplied the evidence for anatomy.
If there is a theory of life under the poems, it is that the brain has a tendency to sink into cycles of repeated states, triggered by sets of signs which the brain itself generates, growing increasingly inescapable as they repeat; the human organism moves towards a life of dreary routine. Similarly, the brain tends to take refuge in narrowly repetitive series of states, emotions, which tend to lock into endless repeats rather than find a way out by destabilising the brain. By repeating, these cycles starve the brain of something else towards which it is strongly drawn: variety, or new information. The subjective result of this self-imitation is boredom and shutdown; but its effect on other people with whom the person is emotionally intimate is equally bad, if different. The domain in which one proposes not to repeat oneself, but to learn and improvise, is also the domain in which the relationship has sway, if still and always bounded by egoism. One of the weaknesses of art, in a previous generation, was that as people became emotionally mature their states of "emotion" became weaker; one solution was to draft in emotional primitives as subject matter, but a better solution was to lead art away from regressive, repetitive, and partly selfish and imperceptive, emotional states, and towards a new subject matter which remained to be discovered.
Civic Crime
This group of six poems is dated to 1987-8 and seems to relate to Fisher's personal position at that time, living in Brixton but preparing to leave it for Hereford; the poems are lyrical and documentary in theme. The first poem seems especially tense and suggestive, combining a textbook example of the Fisher method with features which I do not recall in any other Fisher poem. It is written in the third person, but I hypothesize that the "he" may in fact be the poet, in a mood of weary contemplation at a turning-point of his life and while his quarter of the city is in the throes of riots. It consists of 53 six-line stanzas (! some have seven lines), which makes it on its own one of the longer and more ambitious of modern poems. Themes include: the image of a woman, made by frottage, and a meditation on beauty and physical attraction; unemployment and the flow between economic status and psychological experience; dangerous experiments, possibly those carried out by Alan Turing in the 1950s, and which led to his death; watching Brixton burn; the nature of visual perception and of language; modern capitalism. I read the poem in terms of suffering:
he chooses to ignore any digital alternatives
Speaks of life in terms of wealth:
his nerves scan the City as its temperatures
pass the red index limits lighting the Brixton horizon
(...)
All day toxics
the narrative in its transparent
cruelty in an effort
not to become what I behold
(...)
he lives in fear of breakdown,
in sensitivity of capture.
(...)
he cannot teach himself
to ignore the
screams and riot outside
but evades approaching darkness in both
The extreme dismantling of lyric expressions of experience into instrumentally mediated descriptions of physiological processes is partly due to intellectual desire, intellectual greed one could say, but also has an ethical aspect: such distancing of the voice from psychological process suggests that the self is not a self-aggrandizing one, not running down inflexible and inevitable paths, but willing to adapt to other people and so make true intimacy possible. Fisher does not think that a stronger self makes for a stronger poem. In the 1960s, structuralism was breaking down the idea of a perfectly self-aware self into a set of many internally integrated behaving machines.
Breadboard
The text is dated 1982-86. The action involves what may be the first appearance of the allegorical figures: the Fireman, the Painter, the Examiner, the Burglar. It includes events on various planes: humans interacting in Brixton, topics in mechanics, observations on aesthetics. The twisting together of these strands can be contrasted with the separation of faculties into the allegorical figures. In "Break-a-leg", the speaker is in the United States, probably New Mexico. Stanza one describes the ridiculous quality of any activity photographed, or which momentarily catches the gaze (the point is about the shared semantic complexes which give any actions, and indeed any human, their significance). Two describes an experiment in cognitive psychology, about position sensitivity and awareness of movement. Three is about an aeroplane flight, and perhaps completes two by mentioning the disorientation of the ancient faculties of spatial awareness by such a flight. Four talks about "to describe the moon as an opportunity", the special language (i.e. shared semantic complexes?) of the central state apparatus of the US, which makes a flight to the moon seem reasonable, and "underdevelops civilian economy". (Marvin Gaye made this point as it was happening, "long distance moonshots/ spitting on the have-nots", from 'What's Goin' On".) Five starts with pollution, then as the aeroplane descends we "question the biochemical clock", then a new drip adds to a stalagmite. Time is being related back to physical processes? a distinction drawn between physical and subjective perception of time ("the rate of beats decrease/ as we descend") which completes the topic of physical and subjective space drawn in previous stanzas? Six is difficult, but includes "the manufacturer's input of faith and Money" and "burning tumbleweed on the edge of Interstate 25". Seven continues the flight, mentioning the navigational techniques which define the movement space of the aircraft and give it orientation; the flattening of the landscape below is a kind of "symbolisation" (he refers to "pictographs of habitation" and is perhaps thinking of the famous flat forms of Southwest Indian art, suited to textiles; in a dizzying shift of perspective he maps the radar navigation system onto the pathfinding of Indians: "Paths of nomads following geology until/ break natural formations"; then, caves with pictographs, possibly containing landmark-like information "alternate rods of snail mucus and graffiti". Eight describes the need for the observer to be ready for the moment of observation; "haematite and/ lizards spiked on barbed wire". Nine is a puzzle, with what may be vanished New Mexican Indians, the poet listening to a heat-air acoustic anomaly, air traffic controller messages. Ten, the breakdown of rock into soil, "mass wasting in a downslope gravity"; the contrast of timescales; snow geese; activity on the missile test range' the place becomes a cinema (where we track moving aerial objects?); a shift of vision, described as "An aesthetics of disappearance", or a "dromoscopy" (roots, "run", "look"), perhaps where speed stimulates the eye but snatches away the object of sight. In Eleven, an image of a palaeo-human skull with a leopard bite in it, starting up the aged vehicle of mythology, painted (when?) by someone called a Blockhead, in a visualisation of ideology. Twelve, irreducible images. Thirteen, sinking back three thousand years into a cavern 700 feet deep; stratigraphy as like a pictogram, a brilliant snapshot visualisation like the Blockhead's painting? "Any divertissement loses grasp". The opposite of dromoscopy? Part 2 supplies another seven stanzas, which I will leave alone except to say that they still deal with the problems of two-dimensional imaged surfaces, and awkward inheritance; and that the whole poem may be about the limits of abstract knowledge "known" through visualisation, an archaic technique which is tied to the body image and to awkward rules of stylisation and obscuring. The issue is less to disengage the influence of systems of representation on the mind than to realise that we can only "know" the mind within these many imaging games, each of them stylised and selective in line with its original purpose.
Philly Dog
Deals with the career of Eric Mottram and was published in a memorial issue (of First Offense) for Eric. It takes the form of a reflection on what the personality is. I reviewed this in Angel Exhaust 15.
We take a single theme from the world of conceptual art. Christopher Finch's book Image as Language: Aspects of British art 1950-68 talks a lot about the interest of painters, at that time, in creating a visual code, rather than just sensuous representations of a merely visible reality. The theme which interests us is the construction of games in language. Since all poems have worked inside a set of assumptions or horizons, whether in emotional values or in rhythms, the effect of making up rules is simply to make the limits conscious, and even to monumentalise the limits, making them prominent features of the space, rather than ones whose repression guarantees stability. Quite simple sets of rules could generate unexpected situations. The artwork could appear as a set of rules which have to be followed; e.g. a poem could be "a set of instructions to form sounds" and then 'a set of instructions to retrieve certain ideas and feel certain feelings", instead of as a report on experience, or a transformation of experience. The annexation of the arbitrary could be a way of trying out what the "dominant" do, devising events rather than being an object in events devised by somebody else. Game rules could, then, be like social imperatives, and attention turns to how we learn what these imperatives are, and what the sanctions are which prevent illicit moves. This was a fashion, but for the originators it had a lineage in Wittgenstein's descriptions of language games, in Berger and Luckmann's expert description of the arbitrariness and so game-ness of conscious experience in The social construction of Reality, in Barthes' interest in codes, in Huizinga's Homo ludens, an essay on games, and in the rise of computer programs (quite recently invented by the Hungarian, John von Neumann), where the stress on self-consistency and arbitrariness was evident. Karl Popper's work on the logic of situations was less fashionable, but given Popper's eminence in British academic philosophy, his ideas drained into all kinds of situations without being sought out.
The game is a unit structure; it is helpful to bear it in mind in reading Fisher's work, where game structures occur all the time, although in exotic combinations with multiple games and with other means of generating verbal sequences.
If human actions in a constrained set seem familiar, it is because we are constrained at every point by the limits of short-term memory and of the body. We break processes down into simple moves because otherwise they are too difficult to carry out. The limits of this short-term memory are related to the horizon inside which a human being is totally subsumed, which comprises the difference between humans, and which describes what is special in the universe of a literary character (including poets speaking in the first person), what we briefly "possess" as we read the book, and so what the difference is between reading a book and not reading one. The project of achieving reflexivity drags us out of the horizon, to the "ridge above", but there are unexpected results to be gained by dragging us the other way, into an artificially narrow horizon, the game. The other aspect of games is collusion, and perhaps the study of shared symbolic arrays shows us a way into conceptualising empathy, and how the model of the other person, which we form in order to understand them, is like a game in which we create a shell which is like a self, and ours, but not our self.
Robert Sheppard, Daylight Robbery; Empty Diaries
Sheppard (1955-) was struck by the anthology Children of Albion at the age of 15 or so, and was hanging around the avant-garde poetry scene even as a teenager, in the mid-Seventies; he was close to the Sixties Dadaist and Fulcrum poet Lee Harwood, who was a neighbour in Brighton. He completed a Ph.D. thesis on Indeterminacy in modern British poetry, concentrating on Harwood and Roy Fisher. It seems there was an aesthetic break around 1985. Early, rather conventional poems, collected in the pamphlet Returns, had given way by the mid-Eighties to a more drastic style based on montage and violent street imagery. Writing on arbitrarily chosen series of photographs ('The Cannibal Club', 1986?) or postcards from a military expedition during the First World War ('Mesopotamia', 1985-6) provided Sheppard with a route into serial form. 'Letter from the Blackstock Road' (1985?) added a documentary element, viewing part of inner North London, at a time when riots were brewing, in terms of prostitution and drugs. Round about this time, a move to London and friendship with Adrian Clarke, then editing Angel Exhaust in Islington, presumably brought him into the ambit of the School of London. In an interview in Angel Exhaust 7 (1987), Sheppard cites as sources of ideas Herbert Marcuse (The aesthetic dimension), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard (on post-Modernism), William Carlos Williams, and Allen Fisher (Necessary Business, a prose text). He also cites Andrew Crozier attacking the idea of 'empirical lyricism... which deals with discrete moments of experience as though they were somehow representative and significant': but Empty Diaries consists of just such discrete moments of experience. He shared with the other poets active on the London avant-garde scene, who included Fisher, Ulli Freer, cris cheek, Maggie O'Sullivan, Gavin Selerie, Adrian Clarke, Ken Edwards, and Gilbert Adair, an interest in place as a subject, in eliminating syntax to reveal a line dominated by nouns and montage, in repetitive rhythms, unformed sound, performance, breaking up the text with "dirty" graphics, in cutting up found texts, in documentary, the avoidance of self-expression. This scene, caught at the end of the Eighties, is showcased in Floating Capital, edited by Sheppard and Clarke. It was shaped by Eric Mottram, whose formula was socialism plus American avant-garde poetry.
Daylight Robbery, a pamphlet which later became the title poem of a 1990 book from Stride, is a long poem about video:
Whitewashed thought
Flashing articulations
Those transparencies
Into the daylight modern
Intermittent outbursts of unique
Movie mind flying skating on
Nobody's dream.
It's nobody's dream because it's actually a broadcast. The atomistic, pulsed, fragments into which the poem is divided reflect the barrage of data coming from the TV screen: along with the viewer's fantasies and reactions. The mechanical action of replaying and editing resembles the activity of consciousness.
The force of the form (the consistent refusal to continue any idea for more than a line) is to exclude the human personality; the poem speaks from a pre-conscious level, trapping reality before a filter reshapes it into part of the "personality". The factor of voice is replaced by the insistent line breaks, metring the poem like a drum machine. Personally, I think of a piece of film noir prose I've just seen: "We went down a new alley... ribbons of light spoked across this one, glimmering through the interstices of an unfurled bamboo blind stretched across an entryway... For a second I stood alone, livid weals striping me from head to foot." The contrast of signal and gap (i.e. the lines and the line breaks) is similarly dramatic. The intermittence also reminds me of a light source interrupted by a ceiling fan; or, certainly, of the flicker of a TV screen, its weird blue volumes superimposed over the volume of the room itself.
The line break is also the self-destruction of TV, its incessant escapism, its opening of secret doors and tunnels in every wall. TV replaces awareness of social problems, but is potentially revolutionary because it makes the streets, the home, the workplace, seem transient, escapable, like shadows painted on a screen: "Reversal/ Future tilted barricades luxury/ Stone hearts/ The face is nobody's/ Salvage it copy/ Translation space become pulse vision."
The technique of Daylight Robbery is purist and highly-worked. There are no captions. No inflections.
The illusion of a speaking voice is a critical limit on poetry, confining it within the limits of a social system. Process writing offers poetry the breakthrough glimpsed in the 1940s, when English poetry reached out to its edges and fell back. Conversation excludes most levels of awareness, therefore poetry should not be a mimicry of conversation.
Empty Diaries (from about 1990 on; published 1998) is a travelling shot through time: a poem for each year, from 1919 to 1990, from the diary of an unnamed woman. Empty Diaries itself belongs to the Twentieth Century Blues project. An article by Sheppard, published in America, describes the structure of the project in such a way that one does not find out what its structure is: 'Twentieth Century Blues is not about anything... The generative schema allows for a proliferation of strands and an almost cellular splitting of new sequences.' The title comes from a song in Noel Coward's 'Cavalcade': "There was another scene after this apparent climax - a night-club scene in which the harsh 'Twentieth Century Blues' was sung while dead-faced couples danced mechanically; followed by a darkened stage, with special sound and light effects representing chaos, while slowly a Union Jack, softly illuminated, appeared at the back." (Alan Jenkins). I hope that Sheppard's work does not ultimately turn out to be like 'Cavalcade' (which also tried to incorporate history). It seems that Empty Diaries is only one part of TCB, along with Killing Boxes and Weightless Witnesses. Sheppard issues, free, a periodically updated index to the parts of TCB, which are irrationally ordered (A is a subset of B which is a subset of A, M follows N and N follows M) in order to evade bureaucratic labelling. Indeterminacy is meant to be aesthetically positive, like the instances cited and sometimes praised in Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. Flashlight Sonata (Stride, 1994) is a separate work.
The question whether various lines or poems can compound to be a 'long work' without a binding structure, violating the adopted rule of 'indeterminacy', is central to the Twentieth Century Blues project. The problem of atomization goes all the way back to the Imagists. Briefly, the project of subverting a dominant reality threatens to become backwash subverting the text itself, in a long work, while in a short work it fails because the work doesn't have the self-sustaining ability that the 'dominant reality principle' does, and loses on points. The compression process is still active in his work. He is not interested in psychological continuity, and his sequence is broken up by the very heightening of the separate instants.
Sheppard has recorded some of his poetic theory in net/(k)not//-work(s), a typically fugitive A4 pamphlet from Ship of Fools. I had the advantage of attending the same poetry workshop as Robert for some two years (1991-3), which gave me rather too much exposure to his thoughts on poetics. In discussion, Robert always responds to the word 'emotion' by saying, with a gleam in his eye, 'But emotion is dubious'. How can the indeterminate be anything but dubious? I've always felt that emotion was rather important. In Empty Diaries, he compensates for its absence by cranking up the instant impact of his disconnected images:
a letter
we've just received spilling seeds of shame.
Negro dances between black sheets delivered the
lovers' blood to pathetic mythologies, filed the
oracular valves, transmogrified their twitching voices.
The language is melodramatic, even hammy: 'history's tight membrane/ the age's leaking sewer', again: "stinking conduits;/ eugenics' sewer floods'. These effects are far more obvious and strident than 'emotions'. This work makes much of blast and splatter, and is close to the aesthetics of rock music; particularly the notion of sampling, of composition by montage of samples, and the rock video style of high-calory images making an instant impact without characterization and with low affect. All of this follows from the decision to have something exciting happening all the time. Either high drive or a reduced span of attention. The finest moment comes in 1924, when the heroine imagines herself (inspired by The Sheik, a novel by E.M. Hull, filmed with Rudolph Valentino, described in Claud Cockburn's Bestseller) being ravished by a virile Arab:
This cigarette
card Empire, where an Arab
in pearls drags me to his soft
bed, collapses at my feet.
The beauty of his parted
lips: he has only to speak
and I will disappear, a
sack on a stick full of
glitter; rider on my spine.
Yes, reader, it's sex sex sex I'm afraid. The film has a plot; Cockburn provides a close reading in terms of social psychology, class frustrations, and politics; Sheppard leaves out both.
Apart from discontinuity, Robert's other theoretical mainstay is indeterminacy. I've never been able to distinguish this from indecisiveness. The definition of 'structure' is an array in which each element determines every other; indeterminacy means that the parts do not interact. Equally, the idea of character implies limitation of behaviour; if someone has no character then they offer no binding element between poems. Indeterminacy and lack of identification go together. Consciousness, as opposed to perception, involves the recognition of past states in present configurations; total discontinuity drains our consciousness. Meaning is a special form of determinacy. Twentieth Century Blues will perhaps cover several hundred pages, but there are doubts about its ability to recover the internal signalling structures, so carefully torn out of the text by Imagists and poets like William Carlos Williams, that would make it more than a series of disconnected points. It's not clear that the action of intelligence in the shape of theory can replace the lost action of intelligence within the poem, driven out by a confidence in unprocessed sensations and the anti-logic of montage. The theorising is anyway compromised by an eclectic 'rebadging' of foreign models, patched together without internal coherence or a 'deterministic', descriptive adequacy to the local, English texts.
This raid into the territory of historical narrative is a challenge, like Sheffield's fearsome avant electronic band Cabaret Voltaire taking on the 12" disco 45, in 1982's '2x45'. The whole proposition of modernism was about the uniqueness of each second, the transience of each specific conjunction; this logically led into an atomistic, disjunct, method of representation, and made any so evanescent thing irrelevant. Pattern is recurrence; I have said that consciousness only emerges with recognition. The solution of continuity with the past disables the intellect. Poetry has to reconquer time in order to reveal any kind of social process.
Bibliography
Eric Mottram's articles, uncollected. Clive Bush's book, Out of Dissent New Measure. Fisher, 'Breaks Margin' on Ulli Freer, in First Offense, 8, 54-63. My reviews of Floating Capital (fragmente, 3), Ulli Freer (Eonta, volume 2, no 2), and Allen Fisher's future exiles (Angel Exhaust, 11); of Philly Dog in Angel Exhaust 15 (at pages 94-7). back issues of Spanner. various issues of pages, AND, Reality Studios, Alembic, Angel Exhaust, First Offense. Fisher interviews in Alembic 4 and Angel Exhaust 7. Spanner 25, in particular, is an extended work (Necessary Business) by Fisher on the aesthetics of cris cheek, Eric Mottram, and J.H. Prynne. Adrian Clarke, Millennial Shades and 3 Papers.