The Saucer: A Record from the Outside
This text is an introduction to a book of poems I’ve titled The Saucer. It interrogates the threshold between what is thought/felt and its symbolic representation (language). It asserts that the poet is tasked with restructuring our mode of relation.
I want to demand that my poems do something unique to the abilities and methods the poetic license gives me.
- Performs some new way of relating to things (people, cosmos, community, animals, whatever).
- Gives that relation a new structure, a language, a technology that breaks free of the relation-prison of, say, standard English.
- Is a structure or technology that is “user-friendly,” something others must actually be able—and want—to use and deploy as an innovation in relating to life.
The poem is, like the standard usage of a language, another approximation, only a new one, and by virtue of being new and idiosyncratic, suggests and sometimes enables whole new structures of relation, new ways of engaging, dealing with, and navigating life. This is a unique power.
The question then is, what are ways of relating to life that we want or could use? Is there a way of relating to life that we don’t have but really need?
No one person can identify what structure(s) of relation is/are most needed. And the work creating them is probably inexhaustible. I can only do what I can do. So I turn to what strikes me personally as the most impoverished or sick ways I have been taught to relate to life.
Such as the default material philosophy of our “modern culture,” the structure of relation that reduces physical reality to the blind play of molecules. At play, for example, in the scientifically confident atheist who tells me that my feeling of love is only the sensation of hormones and other survival instincts collaborating in the advancement of evolution. If all we’re supposed to do is make kids, then why do we go out dancing? They reply: it’s a courting mechanism.
It doesn’t matter if this is correct or not; the structure of relation is poisonous either way. How can we engage, for example, a robust environmentalism, if we’re only able to relate to the outside world as a collection of more or less useful resources? The term ‘conservation’ itself implies resources and utility, that the earth is a warehouse of these things. I’m not saying anything new. Through this structure of relation:
The Open [the world] becomes an object, and is thus twisted around toward the human being. . . . [E]verything, beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and atmosphere become raw material.1
How do we build a structure of relation that turns this ‘raw material’ into something else, something that isn’t simply a thing to be manipulated and used? If the world is a field of objects under the (western) modern’s structure of relation, how can we give some form of subjectivity back to it?
The frenzy of objectification and instrumentalization does not stop at the physical world. Foucault shows us in Madness and Civilization that the expressions of consciousness, of the mind, can be put to empire’s service too. The category of “madness” was originally an invention that distinguished between mental compositions that were flattering to “the city” (civilization) and those that, not having any function, had to be systematically exorcised.
How much are our standards for “mental health” still based on what best serves civilization? My brother is nonverbal and has serious cognitive challenges; it isn’t hard to see that his lack of use to society is precisely what characterizes his peripheral, irrelevant position in the community. Civilization had to become too embarrassed with the way it treated people like him before it developed the social-programs to support him. Yet even those programs have the same function as their earlier inhumane iterations: to keep what complicates empire’s standard of mental normativity outside, away where it cannot corrupt its operations.
Yet Nick, my brother, laughs, cries, yells and looks up in wonder at the geese in the sky. This is not because he complies with our established structures of relation, not because he has been conditioned, not because he has learned that laughing is the standard social reaction to things that make him happy. His expressions are, to me, proof that something preverbal exists in our relations to things. Where do the laugh and cry come from? Something in Nick’s condition gives him a more direct relation to that origin. Maybe I’m connected to it too, but my antenna doesn’t get as clear a signal as his.
Can a poem reorganize the structure that relates me to this origin and strengthen it? This would be a poetics with the social side-effect of starting to undo the pariah status of those with non-normative cognitive compositions. In the varieties of cognitive compositions there are, obviously, a variety of relations to thought and feeling; a poetics that seeks to demonstrate and celebrate this variety might also prompt the creation of social structures that would seek to diversify our exposure to these varieties. I’m imagining a reason to pull people like Nick out from the margins and back into the fabric of social relation, not on some obligatory ethical ground, but on a ground concerned with the origins of consciousness and expression. I’m saying Nick directs my attention to something fundamental, to my being a thing that expresses preverbally, to the cosmological explanation of laughter and yelling.
But part of Foucault’s point is that the polis, civilization’s exemplar, is premised on the eradication of anything that reminds us of nature’s gratuitous ruthlessness. In his Madness and Civilization he shows that it was the lepers who were first evacuated and kept out of the city. Once this cleansing process was complete, the cleansing agent, with whatever economic and cultural momentum it had established behind itself, had to forever find more objects of eradication. This is how the category of madness is necessary to empire; empire has no raison d’être when nothing is wrong to correct.
Frantz Fanon makes a parallel gesture in his explanation of ‘blackness’ (as a philosophical category). Whiteness—merely a racialized word for empire—has no basis without some Other to correct/surmount. Blackness is necessary, no, constitutive to whiteness. As long as the project of empire is maintained, blackness (not the word or color necessarily, but the category) will remain. For this reason, Fanon concludes, there is simply no possibility of self-determination for black people. The parameters of the black imagination are predetermined by the white outside, by a structure that directs all conscious imagery and thought, restricting what can be imagined to the point where thought itself is unable to refuse its participation in the advance of history.
None of what I am saying is new. But who is talking about this cultural requirement that there be ceaselessly renewing objects of eradication/correction? Why don’t we call it for what it is: a teleology of annihilation: nihilism. Is there a way to interrupt this cycle? Maybe by reprogramming our structures of relation to life we can do the beginning work of training the eradicating instinct out of us. A poem can demonstrate a relationship to life that refuses to eradicate, extirpate, sterilize, etc. It can free us from the nihilism that is the engine of modernity.
Beneath all of this is the issue of Cartesian consciousness. After the announcement, “I think therefore I am,” two features that are essential to the project of empire are established. One is the severing of consciousness (subjectivity) off from the outside world and the other is the logically inevitable objectification of the rest of the world (as discussed above). “Rational man” becomes the only true agent in a world that is his stage and property, a field of objects waiting to be bent to his will, manipulated and exploited toward whatever aims he assigns.
In the study of consciousness there is what is called “the hard problem of consciousness” because questions of the origin, territory, nature, and physics of consciousness seem impossible to answer. So it surprises me that there even is a normative construction of it, a cultural default that restricts the origin and territory of consciousness to the biomaterial of the brain. A scientistic confirmation bias. An article of faith. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the cultural default of consciousness serves the ethos of empire.
Poems have been engaged in repopulating the world with diverse and multiple intelligences for I don’t know how long. It’s hard for me to see it as a poem if it doesn’t start from a subjective state that is multiple and porous.
I like how Clarice Lispector puts it: “I can hardly believe . . . I am cut out and defined. I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, living in things beyond myself.”2
Then there’s H.D. who identifies a womb faculty, William Carlos Williams who says that through the imagination we become extensions of the intelligences moving the world, and Jack Spicer who can’t write poems except as a radio receiving signals from Mars.
Demonstrations of radically different and multiplied compositions of consciousness are everywhere in poetry.
Wallace Stevens asserts that the imagination is that special faculty which is part of reality, happening with it, and each of us are like a drop of water in a stream. The intellect, on the other hand, is a faculty removed, the spectator, reacting to reality.
The imagination impels the world, develops bird plumage innovations, handles clouds like clay, and gives human fashion styles their cyclic pattern.
Our assumption that evolution moves linearly, deterministically, toward a zenith, has been proven false many times. But talk to anyone, even biology professors about it, and you’ll still get that old 19th century iteration of evolutionary theory, the version that—no coincidence—makes modernity and its people into life’s highest achievement.
I prefer to believe that matter is everywhere infected by innumerable intelligences that are mostly playful and creative, given to tangents and excesses. Dahlias are an easy exemplar: so many unnecessary varieties and colors. Evidence of what Nietzsche calls “nature’s art-impulses.” We can be participants in this aesthetic project by loosening our grip on our sense of control and allowing the wild flying faculties of imagination into our conscious space.
The poems in The Saucer are attempts at restructuring our means, the avenues our minds use for relating to life. Attempts to see it as imbued with aesthetically inclined intelligences, faculties that sometimes borrow the human, sometimes a municipal collective, sometimes a human as well as a little twister on the block. They are blends of the urban and natural world for the simple reason that the urban is not separate from the aesthetic unfolding of life.
The poems are successful where they absorb or lure the reader into entertaining, maybe even believing in this construction of reality. Their relation to any critique of what I exhaustively call ‘empire’ probably seems quite remote. I worry that direct critique is too compliant with the grammar of empire, too ready to be absorbed and coopted by its discourse. I don’t want to make something that would help empire revise itself. I want to find the points of weakness in its architecture, pick at them, and by doing so, begin an altogether different ontology. I want to develop a mode of relation to Life that, on one hand surmounts the material-mechanistic nihilism of modernity, and on the other, creates an ontological habitat where the machinations of empire simply have no ecological support. A habitat where something else, a different species of relations if you will, can exist.
So this is “a record from the outside,” like The Golden Record if humans were the recipients of such a thing. But The Saucer is not something sent from green bobbleheads. It comes from beings that are outside the bounds of fathomability, from intelligences that we cannot sense or perceive except as inspiration, erotics, dream.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these words from Paul Valéry’s “Poetry and Abstract Thought”: “A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” Maybe that seems obvious. It should be if it isn’t. It needs to be top priority if we are serious about saving poetry from the cultural-margin-graveyard it’s been cast into.
Of course more could be done at the cultural/pedagogical level to encourage, even institute poetic/aesthetic literacy in our commercial society. But the motivation for those sorts of reforms cannot emerge unless the arts also try to “create the poetic state” in those who have been most excluded from its conversations. Not to say this book is some emblematic example, but I know I tried.
Leave a Comment