books in question, Sara Larsen's Merry Hell and Danny Haywood's Pragmatic Sanction (both £3+p&p and available via http://material-s.blogspot.co.uk/ ). Anyone reading this should happily purchase.
both texts are interested in what history is, and living in history now. Sara Larsen uses slippages and associations, like those between hell, Helen, her husband Paris, and the place Paris, to launch an assault on straight thinking and straight history. However language is a motor for this, it is quickly established as an embodied kind of slippage, a lived kind of slippage, like living in multidimensions: "my nerves swap / with Helen / un-cobwebbing all expanse". This claim is lived up to in the poems in the ease with which the poet's passion can see and live through the sequence's dedicatees: "Helen of Troy", "the women of the Paris Commune", and "my friends, now". These friends, I think, live in Oakland, which emerges from the poems as a place where you live by paying rent, with banks, police, riots, fire, and $4 lattes. I could not say that either the time of Helen, the time of the Paris Commune, or the time of Oakland 'now' dominate the world of the poems, and this is testament to the powerful vision the poet offers the reader. This feels both contingent and mythic, in one poem we have:
"my sisters and i at Delphi vow to the holiness of the hearts affections
what is an autobiography: me and all the windows are one the window of this existence dis app ears"
in context, this feels like mythic and historical Delphi is being inhabited in the present unfolding, on both an allegorical level (i.e. the relationships the poet has with their friends kind of feel like they rhyme with how we might think about the seers and rites of Delphi) and also a pretty straightforward level: if this bit about Delphi is not autobiographically & straightforwardly true and accurate, then what else could Delphi even hope to be? 'the window of this existence' reads to me like the body, that allocated and tranistory portal into the dense collocations of previously lived & currently unfolding experience made accountable and relatable to each other in this sequence of poems - the poet's exceptional vision is always aware, humbled, and enabled by the contingency & comprehension of their body, I think, and the sources in the world that have allowed for their vision: "nameless, i watched the murdered insurg ent with bullet stately / his third eye blown open [...] he lent me more sight".
Damn the Caesars has claimed of Merry Hell's connection to Oakland now that "[r]emoved from its local environment, the legibility of such a document is limited at best" [ http://damnthecaesars.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/two-compline-titles-from-oakland-out.html ] . Put quickly, the scope of the poet's imagination, the ease with which it can reinscribe and associate ostensibly distinct historical moods perhaps make it best read removed from its local environment, insofar as the poems work hard to inscribe their own environment, the geographic specificity of cries like "o Oakland" changing the nature of the place, allowing it to dwell with "the Hotel de Ville" and "the dirt of Sparta" in a place where, the poet has ensured, "there is no eternal homeland" and "nothing is indelible" . What emerges is not an ahistorical, or postmodern, landscape: there is a pointedness, seriousness and sense of direction retained throughout the poetry's temporal and physical slippages, even as they manipulate the intoxicating kinds of dreamy associations well-known to poetic thinking to get there (best of all when the poet knows "i am dead and living it", and wonders "how do i come / not in time not space / or wherever"): the poet can be seen to conduct their operations with a singular and committed purpose:
"to only crash through costume lavish sweetbread club officers un union of femme
is my serious task"
Danny Hayward proposes 'our task':
"which is to teach ourselves just what movement is in spite of the desire to believe that movement cannot be taught, to teach ourselves the structure in which we move, to teach ourselves to approach fearlessly the immense power it has to exceed us, not denying but making our intensities adequate to that excess, as the intelligent fire that overflows in its turn, this is our task."
Before this, we were informed:
"[t]he most pressing task is to make it possible to feel that knowledge can be acquired even through the compulsory movement that appears to disable it. Impatience with stopping must be transformed and not rejected. No one seriously confronts impatience unless they learn to guide their own advance."
The theoretical tenor of these extracts is nowhere near representative of Pragmatic Sanction as a whole, which is more like a hyperabundant picaresque platformer with a judgement in excellently rhymed couplets inserted about 3/4s of the way through. The variety of the definitions of 'the task' have a self-defeating irony that does not numb the sensation that they are each asking to be taken with some sense of their immediate urgency. Pragmatic Sanction seeks to dwell in moments of such contradiction, as is immediately made evident from its easily quoted opening sentences:
"The conclusion is theoretically wrong. But before that, in the run-up to it, on the road to hell with the first door that exits from a pipe protruding upwards in the vincinity of the third door leading onwards into a highway with a person standing in it, call it me or you."
We begin with a point we are yet to come to: time is out of joint in the world of Pragmatic Sanction. As the side-scrolling videogame narrative of the book moves on we are able to pass in one relatively small chunk from 1392 to 1403 to 1408 to 1422 to 1491, observing as we move via "the travellator" a psychedelic "pinprick that is also a tear or a gash or hole or rent or cut in a field or backdrop or sheet" consumed by fire to become "a foam stressball". There are several extended descriptions of transformation in this book, reading like movements in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit composed by a Hegel that found himself transposed to a historical era that had "no idea any more where the fuck in history we are, who we should speak to, which mayor or chief or factory owner in which wheelie bin for what recyclable material at which opening ceremony in what epoch before the beginning of the waiting period was rolled out, phased in, locked indifferently into a point somewhere over our heads in the form of a software package resolving into the form of a hand clenched up into a mouth": a man with a fork in a world of soup of sorts. The period covered, 1392-1491, is important to the book insofar as it kind of marks the end of 'The Dark Ages', of which we hear: "[i]n the dark ages we forget everything, lost everything, proved it is possible to go backwards", before we came to "wake up absolutely alert in the knowledge that it is 1503".
Absolute alertness of existing in a moment of time is the condition for the zany, blossoming, and desperate mode of narrative that Pragmatic Sanction adopts. Here there seems a close relation to allegory, as we are asked to both entertain the idea that we really are "on the road to hell", with all accompanying pipes, highways, and persons, at the same time as we recognize that this state of affairs is really just a virtual thinking tool to get at true comprehension of the way we live now. It is this contradictory approach to the material at hand, taking it for what it is through what it is not, that is the teaching of the movement that cannot be taught, the 'darke conceit' of allegory. Walter Benjamin's description of allegorical practice in baroque literature is not dissimilar to the sensation of reading Pragmatic Sanction: "it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification" (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans John Osborne (Verso, 1998), p.178). The fragments of Pragmatic Sanction are the props of its narrative, the constituents of its historical moment: the years that roll by, LCD screens, green pipes from Super Mario Bros., snatches of Marx, bandages, hernias, Mesopotamia, the Yangtze Delta, the human body's biological systems, fire escapes, civil servants, dragons etc. etc. etc. If Hayward uses these as repeated stereotypes it is only in an impassioned pursuit of détournement, and it is important to recognize that there is something like a strict idea of a goal.
For Benjamin, "the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory" (p.185). This kind of melancholic is convinced that no aspect of the world can be delivered into a meaningful state by anything other than the messianic intervention. As such all earthly objects exist only for their contemplation, and all earthly action is doomed to be meaningless. Allegories prove amenable to this state of mind by gesturing towards the meaning that will unify and make sense of all the individual parts of the allegory, whilst ensuring that this meaning never actually arrives, that the separate components retain enough autonomy to provide a fecund sense of possibility: contemplation is thus given the time and space to roll around and make its own pleasures of deferral. Danny Hayward may not be a melancholic, perhaps instead a thinker thinker, concerned with trying and destroying the lazy thoughts that conceal the nature of class struggle today. Other texts from the same source suggest a capacity for maintaining sceptical thought to the crucial moment where it becomes genuinely insightful, as in the conclusion of 'Adventures in the Sausage Factory: A Cursory Overview of UK University Struggles, November 2010 - July 2011' (online at http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/adventures-sausage-factory-cursory-overview-uk-university-struggles-november-2010-%E2%80%93-july-2011 ), where the true potential of the student protests of that period is seen to rest in what was offered to working class teenagers: "a material setting in which working class students could partake in aggressive and confrontational collective action in conditions of relative security". The analytic rigour that leads up to this position is observeable in Pragmatic Sanction's continual control over its syntax and narrative: however expansive these things get, at no point do they stop making sense.
Ultimately, it is with the 'theoretically wrong' conclusion that Hayward comes closest to the stance of a melancholic:
"everyone who I have ever known who has been hurt has been a greater person than everyone who I have ever known who has not been, and this is for each of you who I hope will understand I have nothing to give but the life I have stolen into."
Arriving at a theoretically wrong conclusion feels like an accomplishment in the context of Hayward's previous logical and technical accomplishments. The question of hurt gestures towards the idea of consolation, of making life liveable, whatever ongoing injustice. In the context of Pragmatic Sanction, this sentiment does not feel evasive, even as it comes close to suggesting that disengaging from struggle entirely is a valid, even necessary, option ("...this is a story about living in a class society where the real answer to despair is to see that their system can't contain us"). Instead, it presents a foundational moment of contradiction where the impulse to radically change the lived experience of reality recognises itself in the impulse to be able to endure lived reality. Whether this is the recognition of a historical moment that comes after a brief window of passionately felt revolutionary potential, this feels like a new place to work from.
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