Letter 4. Events.

I didn’t write any letters in June because events seemed to have overtaken the need for poetry-criticism for a while. During both a pandemic and an uprising against white supremacist state violence, witnessing, protesting, listening, organising, and demanding seemed more important, and still do. But the more isolated we are from/by events, the more starkly our need for both reading and commentary has presented itself. And yet many people report a reduced ability to concentrate, particularly on books, during quarantine or lockdown. I have always struggled with concentration, even though I read a lot; I found it very liberating when I first read Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text that he admitted that, when reading a classic novel, ‘we do not read everything with the same intensity […] we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations’. He was admitting it? And: other people did it too?? I also remember once reading an example of the kind of dry biography that Barthes wonders why we so enjoy and realising that my attention had been wandering about the two pages I had open in front of me, so that I had taken in everything that had been said, but in a chaotic order. In fact I was not, as Barthes insists we are in such reading experiences, ‘like the priest gulping down Mass’, but rather pottering around the chancel like a tourist – because after all, ‘no one is watching’.

The ways our reading is disturbed during momentous and terrible events shouldn’t be ignored; they are a response to the conditions. The term Barthes uses for that skipping is tmesis, which originally referred to the rhetorical practice of separating a compound word for emphasis (‘abso-fucking-lutely’), but here he categorises it as an effect which ‘does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: [t]he[y] cannot choose to write what will not be read.’ We can only understand the word abso-fucking-lutely if we mentally bracket ‘fucking’ and let ‘absolutely’ reassemble itself – tmesis on the part of the writer is the exploitation of our ability to hold that tension. What Barthes is describing is what we might call ‘tmetic reading’, where attention to the text is non-isotropic – to borrow another Barthesian metaphor, it is like a piece of wood, which in some parts is going to offer a lot of resistance to the nail, and in other places much less. We sometimes have, I think, an idea that the only correct, attentive, studious reading is to pay equal attention to each word, each character, like reading a ticker-tape coming out of a telegraph machine. This is not to advocate for speed reading, which (in the way it is taught as a professional skill) is a kind of nightmarish experience whereby texts are reduced to the most ‘relevant’ information they can disgorge. The ultimate tmetic reading experience would be to enjoy a text without getting any usable information from it at all, although I think this is as platonic an ideal as the isotropic/ticker-tape reading, because the desire to understand is also a sensuous part of reading for pleasure, even if it is never entirely reached.

[Image description: close-up photograph of a punch tape reader with tape running through it.]

In Renee Gladman’s Event Factory, the narrator arrives in the fictional city of Ravicka as a visitor, having studied its language but still awash in its various registers, which include a gestural component. A mysterious political/economic/spiritual transformation is underway in Ravicka, an ‘emptying out’ which the newspaper articles never quite describe – there is a context missing without which she cannot understand what is happening. She stays in a hotel which is not a hotel – it is the site of many ambiguous erotic friendships (there is a sense that everyone in Ravicka is cruising each other) – and eventually the person who runs it disappears and the narrator falls into the role of concierge. She writes him a letter: ‘WE NEED YOU. ALL SYSTEMS HAVE COLLAPSED. PEOPLE AND MONEY ARE ONE.’ (p. 39) Under these conditions, she feels the urge to escape, to know the city by moving through it.

Later, she explores the old city (pp. 49-62), an apparently uninhabited labyrinth of ruins. Images of the city become disorderly, chaotic, abandoned, apocalyptic, and yet in this sense somehow more accessible to us than before. We are not sure exactly how this disorder or upsetting happened. But then the narrator and her companion meet a tribe of wandering artists, the Esaleyons, who have taken up residence in the abandoned buildings. She learns something about their language and customs, but struggles to describe their speech of ‘gaps and air’. ‘An instinct says tune it out, but something deep within fastens your attention.’ (p. 62) Eventually she has to leave, for reasons she does not quite understand, but it has to do with ‘the intensity of my dreams’ – the effect of her insistent, doomed attempt to understand them, to read them, is violent. Her way of paying too much attention to the wrong things damages the Esaleyons’ way of thinking and being. Her desire to cram it into an academic, critical mode (‘I’m a linguist’, she explains when they walk her to the edge of town) is incompatible with this utopian society.

[Image description: a pale, misshapen crocodile emerges from a manhole cover.]

Erica Hunt’s Local History sees how modes of reading become vectors for violence. In ‘Correspondence Theory’, the long prose poem at the centre of the book, the police attempt to ‘read’ the city through their own deficient critical instrument when they ‘put out an all-points bulletin for the angel of anger, the double of themselves: they look as if they might be violent’. They will recognise violence when it looks like them, monstrous, demonic, the return of the repressed of white civil society. ‘The definition of a description is this: his eyes are red, his teeth go way back in his head, a crocodile about to swallow his own tail.’ Teeth have their hidden, alarming, nerve-touching roots that we only see on the dead, and crocodiles are a classic urban mythology trope (especially in US cities) of the return of the repressed, as what we would rather not think about, rejected and flushed away, growing to monstrous size in the sewers. The police do not recognise (or pretend not to see, or just don’t care) that this is located as an impulse within themselves.

Just as in Ravicka, in Hunt’s unnamed city a series of unaccountable events snowballs into chaos. Reading is the way out of this crisis, like Gladman’s narrator who has to decipher a Ravickan sign to move from Part I of the book to Part II, but inadequate reading is also what alienates her from an alternative mode of living, from connecting with others who are dealing with the same insufficiency of the old world. For Hunt, to live in a city is actually to live in a ‘replica’ of a city made up of ‘exemplary forgeries’ where it is ‘difficult to read the intention that launched you’ (‘City’ §I). The city has to be read, picked over, criticised, but the processes prescribed eventually lead to a catastrophe: ‘We found in separate editions an unexpected glut of disasters. It was not possible to read without violence. Certain poisons have the distinction of being palatable in small doses while proving toxic later.’ (Hunt, ‘City’ §IV) Hunt’s descriptions of arriving at this city, where relations with others are possible but strained and strange and marked by fear, tempt allegories (with academia? experimental poetry?) but ultimately the process being described can be found in any one of the discursive processes of whiteness and neoliberalism that alienate us from, and numb us to, violence: ‘the multiplication of grotesque loss of life and limb spread like a disease, out of proportion to the population, which no matter how anonymous, was slowly dividing into a them and an us’. When we live in cities, reading replaces experiences and behaviour is ever more curtailed and policed, whether inside our minds or by actual cops. ‘Politics’ is completely neutralised by this policing and poisoning of the imagination, and so the only resistance to this comes from fantasies of the city transformed – and their realisation in marches, fires, riots, and occupations which take over and transform the streets.

[Image description: two crescent moons, one yellow and one grey, from the cover of Dhalgren.]

Finally, this same relationship to the city irrupts in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, where the city of Bellona has undergone a cataclysm which has hurled it into disaster and its inhabitants into a state of stranded squatting which is at the same time economically and ontologically insecure, but also autonomous and in some ways utopian. I took the name of this critical project, ‘second moon’, from an event in Dhalgren. It is this unbelievable, excessive, and yet somehow existent and enduring phenomenon which cannot help but be a topic of conversation in the stranded/freed city.

What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don't need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire’s base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. (p. 96)

Isolated from other people, direct experience of them is replaced with reading, a kind of reading that prevents us from thinking about the fact that we are reading. At the bright edge of boredom (which might be the phone or computer screen), we are driven to a banal, endless reading that hurts us, horrifies us, and then numbs us to the horror. Don’t forget, don’t scroll past, don’t look away. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by pretending this is not happening, by pretending we are better readers than we are – reading of the news, social media, texts, emails is tmetic in much the same way Barthes describes. We don’t give everything the same importance in our reading – we do skip some things and focus on others, influenced by desires and fears we don’t entirely understand. Hunt writes: ‘The disease of not knowing or seeing for oneself but having it told to you made it more contagious, unchanging virus, and changing in circumstances manufactured completely in the imagination, without enlightenment.’ (‘City’ §IV) So how can we better read those desires? Now that the fatherly, orderly, day-marking sun has refused to rise again, what is the alternative that has appeared, unbidden, in the sky? Not to say anything so tedious as second moon=poetry, or =criticism, but the ‘search’ it inspires – to read, not a ticker tape of disasters, but a pattern in the smouldering coals which is never going to disclose anything so definite as ‘success [or] despair’.