A common way of looking historically at feminism is to regard it as a “movement” which has rolled out in “waves”: the first wave would be the 19^th and early-20^th century push for women’s emancipation and suffrage, the second would be the “women’s lib” of the 60s and 70s, and the third would be the diversified or “postmodern” feminism of the late-20^th and early 21^st centuries. People are now starting to talk of a “fourth wave”, although they seem to mean very different things by it.

I’d like to suggest a different metaphor, adapted from Badiou. My suggestion is that we regard feminism as a series of discrete political “sequences”, separate periods of insurrection which have kicked off, flared up, fanned out and eventually exhausted or “saturated” themselves. The significant difference is that, according to Badiou, “a political sequence does not terminate or come to an end because of external causes, or contradictions between its essence and its means, but through the strictly immanent effect of its capacities being exhausted…There is no failure, there is termination”. While a “wave” might roll on until it crashes against the rocks, or meets with external resistance that quells its forward motion, a “sequence” generates impasses that are immanent to its own unfolding: problems of its own making, that arise from its entanglement with the real. Each sequence therefore creates problems that it is not able to resolve on its own terms, problems that are left for a later sequence to take up and work over in a new way.

Radical feminism, the feminism of the second sequence, met with a backlash (the term is Susan Faludi’s) which coincided with the neo-liberal restoration of the 1980s (Thatcherism, Reaganism) and which involved a re-naturalisation of sexist power relations and a denial that the problems encountered by the radfems of the 1970s were after all real problems. The issues that the radfems had tried to confront on the terrain of the real were scorned as “abstract”, the exclusive concern of “idealists” and those with their heads in the clouds. The failure of the radfems to resolve these issues was held up as proof that they were unresolvable “in practice”, and that it was (and always had been) a waste of time trying to do anything about them. That part of its program which was achievable, radical feminism was held (bar a certain amount of post-historical mopping-up) to have achieved; that which it did not achieve was held to be unachievable.

It has sometimes seemed as if third-wave feminism’s response to the exhaustion of the second sequence, and the cultural pressures of the anti-feminist backlash, has been to try to dissolve the specifically feminist problematic (what is to be done about male dominance and sexism?) into generic identity politics (how do we obtain recognition for minorities?) and human rights discourse (how do we protect vulnerable bodies from abuse?). This move has ensured that third-wave feminism has always had more to do (since there are always more minorities – flavour of the month at the moment seems to be transsexuals – and there are always more categories of abuse) without compelling it to address the unsolved problems of the second sequence. The question is: besides putting up a sometimes rather hesitant defence before the right-wing Kulturkampf against progressive notions, has third-wave feminism been able to develop a political sequence of its own?

Consider the following term of art of third-wave feminism: “intersectionality”, or awareness of the ways in which gender intersects with race and class (amongst other things). Intersectionality concerns the topology of oppression: its localisation in experience, and in the unions and intersections of regions of experience. Because oppression is distributed across several overlapping regions (race, class, gender), it joins together in experience that which is separate in name: identitarian categories combine and conflict in the life-histories of persons, whose misfortunes are generally multiple. An articulated oppression admits of an articulated resistance, and it is in this articulation that the political creativity of intersectionality is claimed to consist.

In the work of bell hooks, for example, the union and intersection of minorities gives rise to something like a universal subject of oppression, a “we” oppressed from every angle. This subject includes, in the final analysis, even the privileged, whose privilege limits their capacity for empathic and political identification with others and restricts the realisation of their full (social) humanity. The “global set” of the oppressed is by this token also the set of oppressors (as the oppressed in their turn perpetuate oppression): it encompasses the entire structure of oppression, in its topological distribution. Civil rights struggles may modify this structure from within, for instance by challenging the concentration of power in the hands of elites, but inequality remains the law of the system, the invariant rule of its consistency. The ultimate political horizon of hooks’s analysis is the global undoing of this consistency, the revolutionary restructuring of society at the level of its fundamental logic. But it is not clear how intersectionality can offer more than a situational analysis to the task of bringing about this transformation, which calls for a political subject capable of detaching itself from the multiple sites of its oppression and establishing a claim to existence in its own right. (“Speaking as a communist…”)

The second sequence of feminism was schismatic and antagonistic: it belonged to the century of division, of “one splits into two”. Cutting along the dividing line between the sexes, it aimed at undoing the “coherence in contradiction” of the gender system. Separatism, the securing of more or less autonomous spaces for women’s political development, was the pre-eminent sign of this scission, whether in “consciousness-raising” groups, publishing houses dedicated to the circulation of women’s writing or the communal experiments of political lesbianism. “Women without men”, liberated from material and psychological dependency on their supposed male counterparts, would come to know themselves as self-reliant political agents capable of understanding and articulating their own needs and desires. The goal of this separation was the creation of a gendered political will capable of measuring up to the facts of sexism and male domination.

Second wave feminism knew that it loathed the (mutual, yet asymmetrical) exploitation coded into conventional heterosexuality, knew that the sexual encounter had the potential to degrade as well as to gratify, and yet held to a profoundly hopeful vision of equality and freedom in which sex was neither bartered (for money, esteem or security) nor practised as predation. The attempt to realise that vision crashed and burned, but it did so for complex (immanent) reasons: in particular it foundered on the polymorphous character of desire, for example the inevitable infiltration of a “masculine” component into even the most “woman-centred” sexual identification. Radical feminism did not always grasp that the construction of sexual integrity is necessarily a creative process, rather than the recovery of a lost or occluded essence.

It may be that “pro-sex” third-wave feminists have had a more hopeful story to tell about the dialectic of sexual integrity and political agency, seeing the confabulation of a viable sexual selfhood as part and parcel of a wider project of individual “empowerment”. Certainly this story has a plausible villain: the religious right, phobic about female self-actualisation in sex, demonstrates a malicious determination to miseducate young women, filling their heads with dire prohibitions and imaginary terrors. Happily, all that is needed to defeat this stupefying knavery is a program of counter-education, disseminating awareness of the biological normality of sex coupled with a few good feminist homilies about the importance of maintaining a healthy self-esteem. It’s a popular message. But it hasn’t a lot to say about the inveterate abnormality of desire, its utter indifference to the imperatives of healthy ego-maintenance, the genuine irresponsibility which enables it to lend its potency to cruelty and destruction as readily as to creativity and loving kindness.

I’d like to digress a little here and think for a moment about why sexual “purity” has become so important to right-wing US Christians. Why have shame and moralistic finger-wagging about sex become such a significant aspect of their public rhetoric? Purity ethics have remarkably little to do with Christianity as I understand it, which is essentially concerned with the quality of care in human relationships: what the life and ministry of the Jesus presented in the Gospels are about, to a first approximation, is demonstrating that human wholeness is not accomplished by purging “unclean” elements from self and society, but by acting so as to realize justice and mercy in one’s relationships with others. A truly Christian sexual ethic would accordingly pay close attention to the practices and processes through which sexual agency and integrity are built up in these relationships, and would tend to abhor the invasive and exploitative use of sex to satisfy individual egotism – or to shore up hierarchical power relations.

It may be that the religious right is terrified by the apparently rampant egotism of our sexual culture, but its response to this terror is to fall into the mirroring sin of using sexual control (idealisation of purity together with a shaming and punitive attitude towards transgression) to preserve traditional power structures. What presents itself in the confrontation between Jessica Valenti’s paeans to self-pleasuring individual empowerment and the ghastly patriarchal kitsch of purity balls and silver ring things is the unedifying spectacle of two idolatries clashing blindly in the night, their antagonism decaying steadily into symbiosis.

In my view, the unresolved problems of the second sequence of feminism have yet to be taken up: for its part third wave feminism has yet to produce an impasse of equal urgency or intractability. It may be that it is simply too early to discern the political sequence that has been working its way through third wave thought and practice all along, and that eventually it will make itself known to everybody: we will suddenly see that the feminism of the past thirty years has after all succeeded in taking hold of a few points, and has brought about a new subjective configuration in spite of every temptation laid in its path. This new configuration will be known by its enemies, of whom I would make only one prediction: they will not denounce it from the pulpits of megachurches in archaic theological language, but through the mass media in the language familiar to popularisers of every cause. The rhetoric of reaction will not be that of dogmatic religious certainty, but that of commonsense opinion: what everybody knows. Whatever else it may be, it is certain to be accessible.

A couple of years ago the Guardian published an article of Jessica Valenti’s of memorably annoying vacuity – I distinctly recollect muttering “oh, for fuck’s sake” to myself whilst reading it, the way I used to with everything of Tanya Gold’s until she unexpectedly turned quite good. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Trust me on this one – when you’re a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex. I have a job that I love that I owe to feminism (as a writer and one of the founders of feministing.com). I have an amazing group of women friends who spend their days speaking out against sexist idiocy – and who also happily dance their asses off with me when we’re out clubbing. Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn’t a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn’t want women to speak their minds. And I have better relationships. In fact, as I was getting ready for the photoshoot for this article, the guy I’m dating (who also calls himself a feminist) tidied up for me so the photographer wouldn’t see what a tip my apartment is at the weekends. Would my pre-feminist boyfriends have done that? I don’t think so.

I find it difficult to imagine ever being friends with anyone who didn’t find this unbearable. Much of the difficulty comes from not knowing how I could ever explain why I myself found it unbearable to someone who didn’t just automatically get it. The passage above is so demoralisingly PR-perky as to sap almost all the energy required to make the transition from sub-vocalised impatience to coruscating retort.

Fortunately, IT thought it worth the (heroic) necessary effort; and her One-Dimensional Woman does a fine job of reading Valenti’s fatuous advertising copy as an ideological symptom, a sign of the times. Valenti’s response demonstrates perfectly the hostility to thought, the pre-emptive smothering of imagination, that shields the reality-system with which her putative feminism seeks to accommodate itself. Accusations of “elitism” are not only the last but also, invariably, the immediate resort of those who have accepted the capitalist injunction to “live without ideas” (as Badiou puts it). No further argument will ever be produced.

“Elitists” are those whose thought is abstract because it is concerned with the deadly abstractions which dominate our lives, and because it aims at a future incompatible with our dominated present. In point of fact, Nina’s writing is far more urgently and hectically involved with the “bodies and languages” of our common world than the most lavishly anecdotal self-help book; but it also, as Natalie Hanman rightly identifies, turns the intense focus of the “theoretical lens” on that world, in order to burn a hole through its apparent self-evidence and inevitability. This is the task of an “elite” from which everyone is equally excluded by the demand that we remain without ideas: an “elite” that already includes all of us insofar as we are capable of participating in thought.

A lovely morning – I walked to the railway station through a grey, becalmed, snow-powdered Northampton, the roads quiet and few pedestrians on the pavements. Fine snow still coming down constantly, almost no wind. I was warm and sure-footed in my fleece and boots. Later in the train I started idly stringing together fragments of baroque counterpoint in my head, the way I sometimes used to do as I fell asleep in the evening, mentally perambulating around the cycle of fifths. I haven’t felt this calm and alert in a while. Herr, unser Herrscher!

Did it snow when I was in Cardiff? I seem to remember that it did, but don’t quite trust the memory. I remember Anne with her licorice cigarette papers, tall, quizzical and sardonic. My friend Gerald said that she was beautiful, and I had to think about it before I saw that he was right: a shift in the balance of the world. Fastidious, self-shielding loneliness made me a dead loss around women, whom I let down repeatedly in smaller and greater ways. Valuing someone is an activity as much as a disposition: showing that you care, a form of affective labour. If there’s one thing I need to learn in my life, it’s that this is not superfluous. But I don’t feel that I understand the code, which sometimes seems to me to be a women’s language spoken by only a few male initiates; and some of what it can be used to say is subtly de-valuing, or works to reinforce social hierarchy. I doubt I’ll ever stop being surprised by the things women can feel slighted by, or mystified by their anger with each other.

There’s an occasional virtue, perhaps, in “emotional illiteracy” (or what I sometimes like to think of as “sense and reason”). At least, like “selective deafness”, it should be recognised as a social tactic. One of my favourite lines from The Simpsons is Homer’s comment on the break-up of Millhouse’s* parents’ marriage: “The problem is communication – too much communication”. There’s a tendency now to pluralise “literacy”: to speak of “literacies”, familiarities with various protocols. Knowing how to play video-games is different from knowing how to use a Biblical concordance, for example. Presumably one can also pluralise “illiteracy”, and speak of the tactical value of different illiteracies. What is the value of not knowing how to operate the user interface of Microsoft Word? A certain independence from the machine and its (proprietory) software: you remain plugged into the social (asking people for help) instead of letting your habits be modified by the technology so that other people become less necessary (in proportion as the technology itself becomes more necessary). What is the value in not recognising that someone’s ostensibly factual statement is in fact meant to communicate their emotional frustration, in not knowing that the proper response is to address that frustration rather than to focus on the factual validity of the statement? Independence from the affective circuits that produce, on the one hand, warm and sustaining sociality and, on the other, vicious and resentful emotional antagonism.

* Typo/slip corrected: this originally read “Millbank’s”.

via Stuart Maconie’s often informative Freak Zone, this is what Clive Palmer did after getting back from his travels in India and deciding not to rejoin the Incredible String Band – Wade in the Water by C.O.B.(Clive’s Original Band):

Where do those harmonies come from? They’re instantly recognisable as belonging to the same lineage as ISB’s, particularly in the use of inverted pedal tones. Here’s some more – Serpents Kiss, which sounds a bit like one of the woozier moments from The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter:

This one is rather lovely, too – Let it be You, from 1972’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, which again wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on Wee Tam:

But our minds are polarized by artificial debates in which we are enjoined to take sides: for or against surrogate motherhood, for or against the scarf, for or against prostitution. The question is not to know if a woman’s consent is real or not when she prostitutes herself. To question the subject behind the prostitute or the woman who wears a scarf is a form of class contempt. The real question is whether consent is a political argument. And to that I say: no! I cannot think correctly in politics without having first carried out an epistemological investigation: with what tools, what arguments do we think?

Geneviève Fraisse, in interview. I like very much her “no!” here. She has written a book on the subject of consent, which addresses such questions as whether individual acts or dispositions of consent can be joined together so as to amount to collective consent or will, and what the value of “choice” can be when it is a choice between forms of domination, but I don’t know what her conclusions are.

They’re good questions though. I think that framing the question as one of the possibility of linking a subjective disposition to a political argument is a suggestive approach to take – but also, mightn’t the link run in the other direction, such that to be won over to an argument or a political position is then to move towards assenting to the consequences that follow from it?

In Logics of Worlds, an “object” is the “objectivation” – the projection into some world – of a multiple-being (a “thing”). What’s interesting about this projection is that it conserves the multiple composition of the thing projected: there is a correspondence between the “elements” of the multiple and the “atoms” of the object, such that every atom is a “real” atom. Another way of saying this is to say that every difference (in the projected components of the enworlded object) indexes a difference (in the multiple composition of the thing in itself): this is the import of Badiou’s “materialist postulate”, which we might translate colloquially as “there’s no (phenomenal) smoke without (ontological) fire”. Objects are not phantoms, not subjective illusions in some free-floating phenomenal realm, but the worldly-being of real beings. Yet another way of saying this is to say that the “chairness of a chair” (for example) does not consist entirely of such worldly attributes as woodenness or four-leggedness or ergonomic suitability for sitting on: the “chair-thing” of which the chair-object is the worldly projection forms the indispensable support for the chair-object’s discernible components.

In his funeral oration for Jean Hyppolite (collected in Pocket Pantheon), Badiou recalls that during his entrance examination for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Hypollite, who was his examiner, asked him what the difference was between a thing (chose) and an object (objet):

I improvised an answer. And I have to say that, having worked in recent years, and with great difficulty, on the notion of an object, I still bear that warning in mind. I fear that, even today, I still confuse the two.

From Theory of the Subject, which opens with a consideration of the dialectic of force and placement, through the treatment in Being and Event of the excess of representation over presentation, to Logics of Worlds and the topic of “being-there”, the distinction between the thing-in-itself (chose) and the thing-in-its-place (objet) is a recurring concern of Badiou’s. To give it a simple, if slightly gnomic, formula: the thing in-sists, but the object ex-sists.

In Being and Event, a “thing” is simply a “being”, a multiple counted-as-one. The role of “object” or thing-in-its-place is filled by discursive objects, referents of encyclopedic predications. There are thus two ways in which a “situation” is structured: as a multiple of multiples, a thing composed of things, and as a system of referents classified and named through some predicative language which enables the discrimination of “parts” of the multiple. The power of the “event” is that it presents some chose as causa sui, and so initiates the composition of a new multiple (the “generic extension” woven from the elements of the situation) which has no place in the existing system of names. The event disarranges the familiar furniture of the world: it reveals that the contents of our “Latour litanies” of nameable parts of reality are provisional, that the true multiple-composition of a situation is neither dependent on language nor restricted to that which is able to be said.

This is not quite the same – nota bene – as saying that “objects” are arbitrarily carved (or autopoetically self-stabilised) out of some pre-objectal flux of becoming. The point here is that Badiou’s “mathematical ontology” gives us a picture of a “situation” that is not only intricately structured (being a multiple-of-multiples, to any degree of recursive depth you like*), but structured in such a way (or to such a degree) that the resources of its own language are unable to discriminate every part of it. No catalogue of objects capable of being compiled using the language of a situation can ever exhaust the multiple-being of the situation itself. But this does entail that an “object” be considered solely as the referent of an entry in such a catalogue.

The story changes significantly in Logics of Worlds, which I’ll come to next: there, the “being-there” of the object is decoupled from language, but attached instead to the “transcendental” which governs relations of identity and difference between objects. The object is no longer considered primarily as a referent pinpointed within a system of names, but it remains in a precarious relationship to the pure “thing” which still – through the mediation of the event – has the power to disturb its worldly co-ordinates.

* unless you like violating the axiom of foundation.

Some pretty bits I ripped off from Martin Simpson. In CGCGCD.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits

I’m struck by the ways in which recent discussion of Cornel West seems to turn on who he’s supposed to be (particularly as an academic) and the evident incompatibility of his own-funky-trumpet-blowing persona with this imago. I rather admire what West seems to be doing here. It’s more humble than you might think to expose yourself to ridicule in the way he has, to make your own innate ridiculousness part of a performance which also aims at the sublime. Self-regard always looks preposterous when its content (the things one believes or would like to believe about oneself; the stories one tells oneself about one’s origins and travails) is spoken out loud; and nobody learns better than academics the social necessity of caution in affirming one’s own shameful person. The great trombone-slides of West’s monologue (in reality a voicing of several traditions of self-revealing public speech) are a careless and impudent interruption of all the habits of discretion and politeness by which what West calls “the funk” gets cleaned up and shunted out of view. No doubt he makes himself look an absolute tit, but I really like him for trying it on.

Worth reading not only Anwyn Crawford’s blistering takedown of Nick Cave, but also a few of the online responses so far, which range from make-my-point-for-me-why-don’t-you sexist kneejerkery (lots of this) to earnest and even grateful critical engagement.

The piece was a bomb: it went off – proving again the power of negation as a critical mode.

I think there’s a mis-step taken in identifying Cave’s attitudes towards women quite so directly with those of the narrative voices in his fiction (although I’ve not read the latter), and that the reasons given for doing so – that Cave doesn’t really “do” irony, and takes himself pretty seriously – are only convincing if ironic distance and sincere identification are the only two stances available. It’s evident that Cave enjoys the Lustmord narrative, and that disavowing this enjoyment and claiming an ironic distance from it is not what he’s about (it’s truly bizarre that at least one Cave fan thinks that Crawford doesn’t understand him because she doesn’t understand postmodernism). But it’s also evident that it’s a source of discomfort to him, and that his music (and perhaps the fiction also) stimulates a certain enjoyment partly in order to probe the discomfort it causes. That operation can be boring and navel-gazing, and Cave has added a great deal of superfluous material to the already voluminous Annals of Male Sexual Solipsism, but the problem isn’t really to do with whether the enjoyment (or the discomfort) is sincere or not, but to do with whether the interplay between enjoyment and discomfort is managed creatively or has been allowed to become just another well-established masturbatory routine.

EDUCATION – scored in triplicate -
meaning wage-elevation through sponsored
cramming, telegraphically assessed
by barcode reader. What distills attainment
from accomplishment? Must we enhance
our bride-price by attending typing school?
Brave of you to bunk off and go marching:
I wouldn’t have; wrote poems in free periods
instead, or bandied gay rights with the C.
U., citing celibates’ vocation.
Those who can’t, make policy. Enframe
teen heroine in sketch of cordoned dust-up -
defence claims schoolgirl rioters hormonal,
depraved by music, possibly heartbroken.

public abstract class Tree implements Comparable<Tree> {

    public int compareTo(Tree that) {
        if (this instanceof Holly) {
            if (that instanceof Holly) {
                return 0;
            } else {
                return 1;
            }
        } else if (that instanceof Holly)
            return -1;
        } else {
            return 0; // All other trees are equal, as per noble law
        }
    }
}

Interesting post from Pete of Deontologistics on rationality as norm and commitment, and the disarticulation of the domain of norms from that of human animality. The crux here seems to be that “man” is not in himself a normal animal: normative accounts of human being are best taken as descriptions of the commitments we make to ourselves and others as preconditions for various kinds of social being, and the capacity to bear such norms is rather haphazardly instantiated in our animal selfhood.

This split between the normed human being and the ab-normal human animal plays out in Badiou, for example, as a tension between the “de-subjectivising” pull of egoic self-interest and the possibility of constructing a political “subject” which affirms (or “verifies”) egalitarian norms. But there’s a problem here: egoic self-interest is arguably also a normed expression of human being – neo-liberalism explicitly affirms it as a norm, as a precondition for higher forms of social organisation (e.g. those based on competitive markets). The conflict between Badiou’s ethical “good” (tenacity in the construction of truths) and “evil” (de-subjectivation, the saggy victory of the flesh) can be seen as a conflict between rival normative commitments rather than between committed and uncommitted being as such. What Rowan Williams calls the “false anthropology” of neo-liberalism does not merely declare, in social Darwinist fashion, that human beings are intrinsically self-seeking creatures: it also goes to considerable lengths to modify the “soul” of society (its basic normative commitments and symbolic co-ordinates) so that individuals will perceive this to be their true nature and act accordingly.

We’re used to hearing it asserted that when someone talks about “human nature” they are “naturalising” or “ontologising” a set of norms which underpin a particular mode of human social being, in order to secure some aspect of social organisation which is threatened or undermined by putatively “deviant” behaviour. Gender norms are an obvious example of this: there’s a tug-of-war between “stabilising” and “destabilising” forces with respect to binary gender and the institutions it supports, and the leftist critique of those institutions (marriage, the nuclear family and so on) has tended to ally itself with those aspects of human animality which make trouble for heteronormativity. (This can get a bit morbid, and risks inflating the political significance of fairly trivial impulses, when what’s really at stake is property relations, same as always).

It would be naive, for instance, to suppose that the Christian Right in the US doesn’t know that heteronormativity defines a set of commitments rather than providing an accurate map of the chambers of the human heart: they’re acutely conscious of the possibility that human animals, following their own inclinations, will renege on (or withhold assent from) those commitments, which is why they’re so concerned to hedge them about with punitive and obscurantist forms of deterrance. The fact is that they regard their image of sexual fulfilment as representing a form of  (divine) will, as being one (fairly fundamental) aspect of an overall plan for human earthly existence, rather than a “natural” state of affairs.

Faced with this kind of “divine plan” conception of heteronormativity, which is tied in to an explicitly politico-theological programme, the assertion that gender norms are not ontologically grounded has less polemical force than it’s often credited with. Increasingly I think this is true of the neo-liberal framing of the human image as well: in place of serious belief in “Thatcherite individualism” as an accurate portrait of our best and truest selves, there is now a kind of fetishist disavowal: we all know that people (well, non-psychopaths anyway) are actually pretty uncomfortable with self-seeking profit-maximisation in ruthless competition with all around them, that nobody much likes the idea of being “motivated” by bonuses and management-set attainment targets as opposed to pride and interest in their work, that we are all caught up in a complex web of material and affective interdependencies and so on, and yet we persist in honouring a normative conception of economic rationality whose sole purpose is to condition us to be good participants in systems modelled as market simulacra. What is needed here is not less belief in the ontological reality of such norms, but more acting according to different norms.

Me being interviewed about Cold World by Alastair Kemp, for Radio Reverb. The interview was conducted out of doors, round the back of LSO St Luke’s during my lunch hour…

(well, it is Sunday afternoon…)

Beati Quorum Via (1905)

The Blue Bird

(I can’t quite separate this in my mind from the stupendously strange 1976 film based on the Maeterlinck story, but as far as I know it’s nothing to do with Maeterlinck – the text, by Mary Coleridge, is this:

The lake lay blue below the hill,
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue,
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.

Who needs Malevich, eh?)

I appreciate this kind of thing is old hat by now, but here’s my stab at it anyway:

Glitches2

I’ll be running initially to catch up with myself, but the plan from now on is to accompany each After Slumber poem with a short prose piece detailing the background, explaining the references and so on. This may help to make the poems themselves somewhat more intelligible. Douglas Oliver used a similar approach in An Island That Is All The World to unfold the contexts of his poems and develop a line of thinking that ran alongside them.

I’m also now intending that there should be 91 poems in total – one for each verse of The Masque of Anarchy. It’s quite possible I’ll run out of steam before I get there, but if I don’t this will add up to a small volume of poetry and prose on the themes of public (and private) disorder and the plutocratic anarchy of the past three decades. We’ll see. It might turn into something totally different by the end…

FROZEN TO THE CORE, to synthesized
accompaniment, algorithmic ice-crystals
swarming in the air. The lyric plays
both ways, wins over the stop-whining crowd
whilst spoofing aspiration. Formally
we’re trapped, wherever; substitution
feigns mobility in stasis, like a sliding
block-puzzle, shunting the empty square
from place to place. Hard to imagine
this as a hit: what were the punters thinking?
A DEAL WITH GOD the best you can make out for
unless young-moneyed, darling of the age:
no pact or reason possible with anarchy-
the-skeleton dancing in our worthless hides.

* * *

I am compiling a dictionary of phrases quoted in these poems – the first here is from “Wouldn’t it be good” by Nick Kershaw, the second from “Running up that hill” by Kate Bush: both songs about wanting to change places, to exchange miseries or ecstasies with another – a trope that seemed to have a particular resonance at the time.