On Insouciance and Other Matters
We (in the broadest sense: humans) express our opinions as one way of working out psychological and social conflicts (which may be quite unrelated to the actual opinion. The expression of the opinion may simply be a means of emotion-management, i.e. pressure release).
We use our art works for the same purpose.
Not that there aren’t many other purposes as well.
But I won’t villify “acting out” as a major “sake” of artmaking.
It’s OK to act out your conflicts in public (if I have any ambitions for my imminent middle age, it’s to be a permission giver). Like anything else, it’s in the rendering. They (the conflicts) can be veiled, or not. Instilled in characters, abstractions, formal systems, in heavily manipulated rhetoric & syntax — or not.
What I like to see is people going into a trance. Or into hysterics. You almost never see either happening in the poetry world. (The poetry world is more repressed than… Japan, even!) Trance more often than even theatrical hysterics. I saw a documentary on TV about Haitian voodoo that impressed me more than almost all the poetry readings I’ve ever seen. And then there’s butoh…
When I sing it is a way of allowing in some controlled hysteria. From the uterus by way of the diaphragm. But my singing seems to invite a little quiet disapproval. Not because it’s bad, I think, but some people seem embarrassed by it. Others say it obscures the language, the words, the text. Sometimes I feel the exact opposite, that the words obscure the song, the pure vocables. I don’t believe in or aspire to pure poetry, but I do long to just make sound, just one long chanted variation of aaaaaaaaaa. The OPEN THRoAT. (hence, of course, “ululations”)
Sometimes when I watch Adeena Karasick perform I see a hint of her going over into that land of vocables & trance, but it’s more cavernous, where she goes, like a trip inside a giant human body, things hanging down from the arched ribbed inner carapace like uvula or magic rocks (made of bits of dayglo flesh?). She rides the rhythm of her poems in ways that I think most people are too self-conscious to do, as if she were on a mechanical bull of prosody. But it’s only sometimes, at glimmers of moments, that I feel this, watching her. There are things that keep her — unfortunately, I think — from going completely over into that other land.
I lamented to some poet-friends several months ago, on the way home from a reading, that it is so hard to be an organicist among formalists. Although I daresay it’s a false distinction. But when I think about the formalist approach, the one I learned in college and one I enjoyed very much employing, I ask myself, what is its purpose? To analyze the effects of devices. And then I ask myself, to what end?
I suppose there are many ends for which one might use such an approach, some useful and some totally nugatory, some for “betterment” and others quite devious . And I would certainly prefer that readers “stick to the text” in most cases, if the alternative is to spiral off into stale abstractions (as opposed to delicious ones). But I notice this: although I like to DO close readings and formal analyses, and I admire very much the fact that people write them up, I don’t so much like to read them. It gets a little tedious. It’s really only when I am already IN THE THRALL of some argument that a close reading or formal analysis keeps me attentive. The argument itself must be compelling. But arguments are prisons, as I am now finding myself in a prison of my own making, and I am hoping I will be let out for good behavior.
……………………….
Compelling. Magnetism. Hysteria. I might as well say “luminosity.” But for some reason I’m supposed to know better.
That light doesn’t *really* come off the page.
That there isn’t some *mysterious alchemy* that makes some works fertile and others sterile, or some light and others dull and airless.
I’m supposed to be able to explain things. Rationally.
Like “Insouciance.” What’s that? How would you analyze it? Are some phonemes more insouciant than others? Maybe. Certain rhythms, voicings, inflections, lexical choices? Doubtless. That being said, can you fake it? Doubt it.
We don’t even have a word for it in English. I think it’s French for “drunk on life, swinging around a lamppost.”
I’m thinking of the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Or the Raj Kapoor movie Gary and I just watched. Or the lasting resonances of the being and oeuvre of Frank O’Hara.
Is insouciance incompatible with conscience? Is it a state of blissful self-absorption, of childlike irresponsibility that effectively blinds the insouciant one to the miseries of existence, the horrors of opressive social structures and rampant injustice?
With all my heart — dil se — I hope not. Rather, I find it contagious and I long for it, look for it, search it out — as an educator and performer it’s a quality I aim to emit and spread around, like so much whipped cream or silly string or squid ink.
Andrew Levy has a new book I like very much indeed. It’s called _Ashoka__, which means, in Sanskrit, “the active absence of sorrow.” That might be a good definition of “insouciance” too.
(Not that I reject or deny — or even avoid — sorrow, preferring anything deeply felt to emotional blankness or a shallow anxious hum.)
_Ashoka_ is so unpretentiously composed — it reads almost like a notebook of observations, overhearings and mishearings, like some of Alice Notley’s early work. And because it’s like a notebook, it’s charmingly ungainly, and I feel some human connection to Andy’s private consciousness. It is funny and sometimes sharp, making fun. Unconnected lines pulled at random:
the birds twitter in the trees on tv but not here
I don’t quite know how to put this
….
Be my nephew
….
a world where the only thing anyone ate
was beef jerky
Beef Jerky World
….
public melody #1
And, as if he were agreeing with the direction in which my argument was moving a little earlier in tonight’s entry:
this non interpretive method, though it had an objective edge,
suffered from excessive neutrality. The use of scientific jargons and technical
terminology failed to merge into farm level language and idiom.
As a consequence, even when facts were presented
as facts, he perceived them
as half-truths.
Farm-level! I love that. The meadow and the pigpen, eye-to-eye with the cow and gander and black-and-white sheepdog. The farm level within. It’s just one step from the farm to the fair, and from the fair to the CARNIVAL.
The quality of insouciance emerges even when he is noticing what’s wrong with the world, as in this ironic little trope that turns on itself to make me smile wryly.
Artists have all the power
near the hole in the ozone
Which is not to say of the book what Gary did of O’Hara’s oeuvre, that it lacks emotional range. There is anger and honesty and odd blank statement and hopelessness and sarcasm and childish/like/ness , plenty of metatextual devices and a great variety of cultural quotes and references, but as he writes,
The world is filled with ether
and
Hello. How are you?
Are you happy?
and
I’ve managed to bring rhythm into it
and that rhythm is both formal and emotional, it is ashoka, and it is … insouciance.
It’s a quality I find lacking in the work of many of my contemporaries. There are many new books I simply can’t read, although I try. Reading them, I feel like I have stuck my head into huge mass of feathers or a bucket of cement. True, we don’t live in light times. But we never have. No one ever has. Insouciance is the wisdom of the fool (who dwells in all flawed creatures). It illuminates dark times and dark places. I don’t think it’s something we can achieve without letting go of our desires to make “important” statements or create “serious” poetic architecture(s). Which is not to say that, willy-nilly, we will not, just that writing which is overburdened with such ambitions and anxieties might have the same kind of difficulty breathing, and (ugh) finding itself that might a child whose parents were determined to make [usually] him into their idea of a brilliant and successful person regardless of his own inclinations and desires.
Otohime 