Poetry has mused on reality, trying to
pierce the
numinous halo of language and find nature as it is, transcendently
real.
But beyond language is the silence of the Other, which the poet cannot
speak.
Poetry murdered the Word in order to find
words.
The words led to sarcasms, fractures, endlessly reflecting mirrors, the
eclectic costumes of a consumerist, colonised language, ethics so
generalised
as to be non-existent. Irony winked from the wings.
Some poetries attempted a retreat
to a pure
music, a concatenation of sound which eschewed the tyranny of
constructed
meanings. This was a nostalgia for the natural body and for nature
itself,
a retreat to an imagined innocence of the sensual before the Fall of
consciousness.
It was an innocence legitimised by a gesture towards mathematical
incorruption,
the arbitrary but scientific precisions of music. Yet as poetry
retreats
from the totalisation of meaning towards pure formalism, it becomes
more
wholly its own myth: a Poem. The only response to this dilemma is irony.
Some poetries sought the legitimacy
of prose,
the literary queen of the age. The prosaic exposes the tyrannical
pretensions
of the poem, its lack of humility, its unrepentant subjectivity. The
poem
may take on the discursiveness of a novel, the multiplicity which
disguises
a novel's essential unity. The self of a poem, which has become its
shame,
may thus be sunk below the surface of writing. The poem may borrow a
novel's
celebrity. The poem might even become a movie. The poem vanishes.
Some poetries turned to speech.
This is also
a kind of nostalgia. But the more poetry steals the locutions of actual
speech, the more it disguises itself in the apparently natural, the
more
it becomes victim of itself: for it may be that the mythologies
embedded
in speech are the most insidious, the most invisible, and there poetry
may be most bound by the very frames it wishes to escape: casting out
an
old fashioned romanticism, only to invent a contemporary romance which
seeks to deny its own existence.
And which speech is amenable to the
poem? The
conversational speech between people? The speech of advertising or
politicians?
The speech of the marginalised, the dispossessed, who are thereby
appropriated
to an aesthetic? The speech of the self inside the head? Where may an
ethics
play in this, except as fracture, pastiche or parody? That is, as irony?
Other poetries simply gave up and
died. Their
corpses litter the landscape. They of course neglected irony altogether.
Now it is clear that irony is
inescapable,
that it is the inevitable and logical end of the failures of poetry.
This
in itself is enough to cause suspicion. For irony is biddable: it
escapes
the embarrassing unambiguity of an ethical question simply by eliding
it,
and embraces contradictions by negating their significance. Irony, once
a useful, if minor, literary tool, has become as inevitable as the
triumph
of capitalism, as necessary as corporatism, as satisfying a closure as
the "end of history".
Yet irony is merely a function of
embarrassment.
In a catastrophic world, it is a luxury that poetry can no longer
afford.
Irony is extinguished by
catastrophe: it exists
only before or after the event, in the anxiety of apprehension or the
apprehension
of hindsight. It is perhaps only in the moment of catastrophe that
poetry,
as pure resistance, might exist. The primary
meaning of catastrophe is overturning, or sudden
turn.
A moment, that is, of transformation, which itself calls up the mask.
Mask,
an ancient symbol and means of transformation, is where irony tends,
without
arriving. It may be useful then to ask of the acknowledged deceptions
of
theatre - the home of irony, the very hearth of myth - what truths
might
be pillaged for the poem.
So, drawing on poetry's
anthropomorphic power,
consider the puppet. Its animation is a crude and obvious irony. Its
crudity
and obviousness might, perhaps, be virtues.
I experience a puppet's emotional
potency without
irony, although I can see clearly how it is animated. The Bunraku doll
dies on stage, and its death is a catastrophe. I am simultaneously
completely
aware of the puppeteers manipulating the pegs which move its hands and
feet. The pretence is naked. What remains of this collision between
real
effect and raw artifice is a moment of transformation which occurs
wholly
in the present and which may not be repeated. This unmetaphorical and
non-linguistic
possibility might parallel the anarchic ambition of a poem.
Such thoughts suggest Beckett's
theatrical
oeuvre: his astringent humanity, his refusal to turn to stone, his
metaphorical
purity. The question is how to find an amplitude beyond his
ever-diminishing
trajectory. The gamble is the compassion necessary to be present in a
moment
of catastrophe. The speculation is the presence of the other, for the
other
is where an ethics begins. The hope is poetry's inevitable failure.
Now, imagining something as
contingent as faith,
to begin again...