Here’s a window into my twisted mind.
When I’m working on a short story and I come up with a particularly apt or clever title (not always a good thing, this clever streak), I’ll often Google the title so see if or when or how often the phrase has appeared online. This habit often leads to some good reading, which occasionally sparks unexpected connections and new ideas that, in turn, shape my thoughts about the phrase (and sometimes even the story) in question.
The other day, for instance, I learned that ringtone sales have surpassed CD sales in Britain when I Googled the phrase “cacophony of ringtones.” Later in the day, I adopted the concept of the ringtone as a way to refer to recurrent themes in the stream of my thoughts. In other words, a clever title led me to a topic of interest since I was a teen (record sales statistics--as in, who's in the Top Forty this week, and why do loathe most of those artists?), which resulted in a new label I could apply to thoughts that repeat themselves like slow-motion broken records. Never know when one of those ringtones will ring out.
Today, when I Googled the phrase “feces on canvas” (a possible title for a story I'm working on) I came upon this interesting interview with British painter Mandy McCartin, whose painting "Charity shop" (definitely not feces on canvas!) appears above. Her answer to the question “how long have you bin showing your work in the U.K.” helped to clarify (or, at any rate, to nudge along) my thoughts about poetry:
Some of my earliest memories are of my uncle bringing from his workplace these books of blank pages (god knows what they were and sadly he is long dead so I can't ask him) which I would draw in. I always drew as a little kid. My first "serious paintings, which I did in my bedroom in Sheffield at about 14 years old were about urban life, clubbing (I was, and still am, a big soul fan) and race. Most of my friends were black at that time (mid-70's) and the National Front was active and I remember making a painting about a racist march through a black area, and one about the megalomaniac power of the DJ! I have no idea what happened to them. I think I gave them away. When I went on to do a foundation course (Chesterfield College) the work carried on in the same vein - it was figurative, all to do with my immediate culture ( working class) and always had some message - I've never had the slightest desire to make art about art. Mine has to be about life, and also has to be accessible to a big range of people. On foundation I made large canvases about blues parties (reggae), installations about racism and lithography prints of Dillinger in concert!
My first real exhibition was New Contemporaries 1981 at the ICA. It was very gratifying because by the final year of my degree (North-East London Polytechnic) I had become alienated from the tutors - I was passionately resisting their attempts to make me intellectualize my work, I could see no point in making things more obscure than they needed to be - and the painting that was accepted was done completely freely without any tutorial input, proving me correct in my own judgment. I remember the tutors being quite surly and miffed about it! So I've been exhibiting since 1981.
As an artist carving a living from the wall of academia’s ivory tower (like so much graffiti—my initials, perhaps: “E.B. WAS HERE!”), I sometimes feel (though not deeply or powerfully, nor from any internal impulse) the push to intellectualize my own creative work. As the school year comes to a close and I return to my own creative work, in the form of short stories now, I find myself moving comfortably along the grooves of academic analysis that come from a year (my first) of full-time composition instruction. It’s all too easy and familiar to think of a subject in terms of research questions, arguable positions, compartmentalized assertions drawn from and supported by evidence and joined by effective transitions that show the relationships between this and that.
In any case, what McCartin says about seeing “no point in making things more obscure than they need to be” rings true for me, even rises above the cacophony of ringtones cluttering my brain these days. I’m not ready to commit to paper (or, for that matter, to blog) my evolving thoughts about what I perceive as a schism between intellectual, avant garde poetry and poetry that non-poetry-academics can appreciate without spraining their brains; but I will say this much: when I read a poem, I want to see and hear and smell and feel it. When I read a story, I want to engage with it not just intellectually but in the half-imagined, half felt, entirely and intuitively
known world of tangible reality.
Poet Reginald Shepherd (whose poem “X,” at Poetry Daily, I linked to earlier) touches on this aspect of the nature of language
at his blog Language exists in and as a liminal state between the material and the immaterial, thing and idea: it is neither sheer marks on the page, sounds in the air, nor sheer ideality, but rather it is their contingent and temporary union. (This would be Saussure’s union of signifier and signified that together produce the sign, which Saussure brackets off from the unattainable, and unsayable, real.) It cannot veer too far in either direction without losing its character as language. (The poetic avant-garde seeks to discover how closely language can approach either pole without losing its language character.) Language is neither object nor concept but their articulation. Words hover and hesitate over the abyss between being and non-being, presence and absence. They embody a non-Aristotelian logic of both/and, in which A need not equal A and simultaneously equals B, as well as some third term that’s both their combination (A/B) and some other item altogether (a not A/not B not quite reducible to C).
The notion of direct, unmediated presentation of the “as is,” Pound’s demand for “direct presentation of the thing itself,” is itself a metaphor, a speaking of one thing—the things of the phenomenal, event-full world—in terms of another—words, which are at once tangible and intangible, which are both things and non-things. The world is, for us, always a tropological world.
In other words--and, though it oversimplifies, I don't believe this summary of Shepherd's remarks is too far off the mark--language is magic.
So is Google, for that matter.
And with any luck even "feces on canvas," gimmicky as that concept may be, could have magic in the right hands.
(A tip of my dreamed-up hat to
Matthew Cheney for his link to Shepherd’s blog.)
