Ravaging Idealism

Song of Myself; 6; lines 28-32

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

It was through my reading of Whitman that I first began to ponder the telos of the poetic craft: why it is we seek to draw out verses from undigested stimuli (as opposed to other sensory inputs that have succumbed to oblivion). Apparent within his “Sometimes with One I Love”—“(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,/Yet out of that I have written these songs)”—is the life of poetry: to capture by another form, by one’s own power, that which in its initial form was lost. In the context of this poem, it is to sublimate the loss of love; unrequited love reconfigured into a poetic admiration of it, hence the alteration in the latter derived, in part, from the former. Such is the drive within the Divine Comedy. Of course, not entirely; but integral to Dante’s epic is the resurrection of a corroded Beatrice who takes the form of incorruptible flesh. There is always the ostensible attempt to gather up fragments endlessly escaping us; an inability to tightly hold onto departing flux.

The poet, then, might closely resemble Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: an individual confident that what she loses will be reconciled to herself through a transcendent force. Of course, in this brief discussion, the knight of faith is removed from its Jewish context. Where only Abraham might have been considered a knight of faith—by virtue of his willingness to sacrifice Issac to Elohim with the hope of regaining him through El’s grace—we might place Lowell, Whitman, Berryman, and the like: clear actors whose moral promiscuity would drown the laments of an old testament god. But it is within the poet and the craft that we find such a willingness to momentarily abandon the ephemeral object of obsession (the shifting event, subject, or notion that drove the thought to create) with the hope of regaining it, though in a different form (as with the freshly-traumatized Issac) accompanied by embellishments and other comparisons. In considering the use of comparative language, we find the poet attempting to project the object of obsession onto the phenomenological world, as expressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, when they describe how Kafka imposed “the photo of the father onto the map of the world” (10). The projection serves the poet’s pursuit of discovering new paths and networks by which the object of obsession might be retained, however distorted its form may be. Perhaps the poet will find his beloved in a coffee pot or time in a fading, leather messenger-bag. 

Presented to us is the evident fear enveloping the poet, one she is trying to resolve: that of losing what is always and already lost. For despite the grief that drives Whitman to retain, through transfiguration, the lost lives of comrades, relatives, and the innocent, the leaves of grass are futile in the end: for not only do they distort the object, but they are always driven toward nothingness. In his study of Georges Bataille, Nick Land discusses Bataille’s conception of the sun. The sun, for Bataille, according to Land, is an “energy-blank” from which “Life is ejected…and smeared as a crust upon chaotic zero, a mould upon death” (32).  Life, for Bataille, is always attempting to escape the “maze” it has constructed for itself, i.e., a structure that encourages its continuation. And yet, despite the suffocating structures it has imposed upon itself—structures purposed with guiding life to itself, resting on a perpetually generative path—life always tends toward zero, toward nothingness. Life is always escaping itself, traversing its own mazes as it is driven to oblivion. If we consider the poet’s relation to this death-drive, we find the immediate futility of poetry, the inability to restrain life’s tendency toward zero; a futility that nevertheless ensures the continued production of poetry.  Rather than allowing the disillusionment that arises from the impossible nature of such a task to hinder the creation of poetry as it is conceived in terms of its telos, the poet allows herself to be driven further into the supposed objectification of this impossibility, fueling, once more, the production of poetry, its disillusionment, its production—in a limited regress. Limited in terms of the years arbitrarily allotted to the body. 

This tendency to sublimate disillusionment, and to thereby produce poetry, is, in part, what Land discovers within Derrida. Noting this habit within the tradition of deconstruction, Land writes: 

the ‘text of Western metaphysics’ finds itself subject to a general ‘destruction’, ‘deconstruction’, or restorative critique, which—amongst other things—fabricates ‘it’ into a totality, rescues it from its own decrepit self-legitimations, generalizes its effects across other texts, reinforces its institutional reproduction, solidifies its monopolistic relation to truth, confirms all but the most preposterous narratives of its teleological dignity, nourishes its hierophantic power of intimidation, smothers its real enemies beneath a blizzard of pseudo-irritations (its ‘unsaid’ or ‘margins’), keeps its political prisoners locked up, repeats its lobotomizing stylistic traits and sociological complacency, and, in the end, begins to mutter once more about an unnamable God. Deconstruction is like capital; managed and reluctant change. (14) 

As with the poet and capital, deconstruction serves only to guarantee the presence of that which provokes it to a recapturing of the evasive. It is in keeping with the “phenomenological tradition, with its fetish of awareness” that poetry, capital, and deconstruction retain a distorted vision, whose ultimate object of sight is entirely ineffable: the desire for and envisioning of the object as repaired and restored to the subject (11). Such a critique may be applied to misreadings of Marxist evaluations as well. Within the Marxist tradition, primarily as it is conceived through dialectical materialism, we find an opposing approach to that of the habit of poets: a tendency to ground collapse or losses in their material reality, along with what might arise from such collapses. 

What we find in Marx is not a determinism of any sort (an epic misreading) nor the notion that the socialist state will emerge from absolute historical necessity, but a pursuit of present material conditions, their analysis, consisting of the ways they may be altered to bring about affirmative change. The ravaging idealism of poetry, with its proclivity to draw back material conditions to its telos and attached totalitizing consciousness, must consider the limitations presented by its contemporary moment. It must consider the “dialectical illusion” it is immersed within, one “through which reason pretends to the transcendence of itself” (3). Perhaps what is required of poets is not the fabrication of a goal of retrieval but of the continued upholding of pure exploration, with the possibility of retrieving new forms autonomous from any thought to bastardize old forms. What the poet might attain is something similarly expressed in Berryman’s Dream Songs, but taken to its definitive conclusion: the rejection of the nostalgia-self and its dependence on a static phenomenological structure that inhibits novel creative formulations. To allow death to move forward as it pleases, as it comes to us; not to shape it in the direction of what was lost.