De profundis

There's no particular providence in the fall of an apple.

(Pace Isaac Newton. See Ken Robinson's "The Book of Nature" in Into Another Mould. Routledge, 1992, p. 86.)

Goffman (and Greenstreet) on Institutions

I had occasion to dip into Erving Goffman's Asylums today. Here's the first sentence of the first essay.

Social establishments—institutions in the everyday sense of that term—are places such as rooms, suites of rooms, buildings or plants in which activity of a particular kind regularly goes on. (15)

I will be using this in my work on "composure" as a counterpoint to Kantian intuitions.

In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. (KRV A19/B33).

Intuitions and institutions together are the media of immediacy.

What I like about Goffman's definition of institutions ("in the everday sense") is its concreteness. It's tangibility. We can heighten it by imagining what Kate Greenstreet would do with it:

I think of places
(rooms, suites of rooms, buildings
or plants)
where things regularly go on

Wittgenstein suggested that our belief in the "intangibility" of mental states stems from our "refus[al] to count what is tangible about our state as part of the specific state which we are postulating" (PI§608). In this spirit, I think it is important to approach our institutions through the rooms and suites of rooms in which things happen. Marriage is an institution and the home (the house or houses) is its place. Money is an institution and the bank its tangible place. There are places that put us "in immediate relation" to our activities.

Flarf Reading #12c

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

Mesmer's subject is unable to subscribe and certainly no lawyer. Tost's subject is not a pilot and unable to "analyze complicated data". It's simple:

I am not a pilot, and I cannot assert anything with 100 percent certainty.

Nor could you if you weren't a pilot. If you are not:

Repeat after me, 'I am not the pilot,
I will not attempt to fly the ship.'

There is a clear theme of amateur passion. We can make certain demands of "seasoned professionals" but, if we are not pilots, and we most assuredly are not pilots, then we may wonder about both whether "the data is correct" and "how realistic the sky is". That's for pilots to say.

Pilots are wonderful and much like us, but we are not pilots.

[We] have not taken the test
that allows [us] to take over the controls as of yet.

This poem, it seems to me, gestures at what Wyndham Lewis called "the art of being ruled". In recent years we have been faced with a particular problem of control (a beatiful, difficult, thing, Drew Gardner reminded us). We are apparently unable to subscribe, as Mesmer put it. We are not pilots, we are "not part of their operation", and we don't claim to "understand that whole 'brotherhood'". I don't know if things have changed now that we also "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals", as Obama so eloquently put it.

Flarf Reading #12b

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

Probably most of what I see in Flarf I saw in this poem first. Most of what I see in contemporary American poetry today, I guess, I first saw in this poem when I read it six years ago. At least in glimts and flashes. But I did not understand what I was seeing. I did not know what it meant.

So let's begin this reading with what I think "I Am Not the Pilot" means. The pilot is Palinurus, Aeneas's helmsman, or gubernator, a word that shares its root with "cybernetics", namely, the Greek for the verb "to steer". Palinurus is also the pseudonym (the false name) of Cyril Connolly, the author—not so much: the compiler—of The Unquiet Grave, which, of course, is also the title Tony Tost gave to his blog.

So the voice of "I Am Not the Pilot" is, implicitly, not the voice modern Connolly and not the voice of ancient Palinurus. And who were they? (Who is he?) "He is the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within" (TUG, p. xiii). Palinurus is, let us say, unable to work under these conditions:

We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot coordinate what is not there. (TUG, p. 2)

And, of course, we have no time to read; we are emotionally exhausted; the material is cheap. Palinurus is the name of our resentment of what we have been given to coordinate.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck. (93)

It is this resentment of what we have been given—paultry as what we have been given may be—that the voice of "I Am Not the Pilot" renounces. In fact, he simply leaves it on the side. Connolly was aware of this possibility as a possibility of any poem. Indeed, he too renounced the (otherwise undeniable) morbidity of The Unquiet Grave.

All grief, once made known to the mind, can be cured by the mind, the manuscript proclaimed; the human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow. (xvi)

Well, Connolly's manuscript is less convincing in its proclamation than Tost's. Where The Unquiet Grave was stitched together of the "finest" material in the literary tradition, "I Am Not the Pilot" makes do with, with all due respect to his sources, "the muck". Coming to this poem as a reader, one finds an experience that is, unremarkably, and with no profundity, beyond time and space. One finds something (something in one's own miserable self) that is, finally, immune from sorrow.

Coming to it as a critic, one says simply (to steal Ben Lerner's line), "It was open, so I walked right in." That's what we will do in the next post.

Flarf Reading #12

Tost, Tony. 2003. "I Am Not the Pilot". Cortland Review 22.

The argument for this poem being a work of Flarf depends on its likeness to, say, Gary Sullivan's "Poem" and Sharon Mesmer's "I Am Apparently Unable to Subscribe". All three poems are obviously Google-sculpted and all three offer shifts between frivilous and sentimental moments. There is nothing "profound" in any one line of these poems. And this lack of "surface depth", if you will, is to my mind the greatest achievement of Flarf.

I have decided to read this poem more closely than planned. So I'll leave it here for now.