When The Lights Go Out

 

Implicit in the idea of ‘archetypes’ is the possibility of ambivalence, the bipolarity of light and dark – also, there is the possibility of mortality, for archetypal influences can wax and wane or ebb and flow, like tidal forces, like everything in nature.

If the world is an imperfect place, then the archetypes are correspondingly imperfect (natural): it is unrealistic to assume, like Plato, when he devised his scheme of ‘ideas’, that the archetypal world is a transcendent sphere of ultimate, supreme perfection. It is necessary to criticize this Platonic delusion, crucial to expose this mystique of ‘perfection’ and purity. But, even in a secular society, there will be a reluctance to deconstruct any proposition of this kind because humanity is so desperate to escape the curse of endurance. Any straw in the wind, any ‘insight’ confirming the universe we know as ‘fallen’, or a pale reflection of a better, happier place beyond suffering and degeneration, becomes more precious than holy writ and believed even more tenaciously.

The shadows on the wall of our cosey, little cave are our own ‘ideas’ – shallow and superficial intellectual speculations, ideological snares and distractions, nothing more – we are the sole occupants. When the cave is blocked by an avalanche, what then? What happens when the lights go out?

Illus: The Rattlesnake Pit Organ, 2005

Poetic Neo-Puritanism

 Arriere la muse academique! Je n’ai que faire de cette vielle begueule. – Baudelaire 

Anti-Romanticism is a current orthodoxy among ‘progressive’ or ‘innovative’ poets today. So-called ‘innovative poetry’ – a kind of Anglicised literary fashion derived from Black Mountain style Projective Verse and ‘Language Poetry’ – ascribes an ethical value to approved technicalities. ‘Ethical openness’ is defined against the ‘paradigm’ (watch out for that give-away buzzword) of ‘romantic’ self-expression; ‘self-expression’ is the deadliest sin for  neo-puritans. The technicalities of ‘innovative’ poetry are a rhetorical box of tricks, devices for identikit, academic ‘whiz-bang’ writing and, furthermore  – do not be deceived – there is a sinister pattern here – the inherent totalitarianism of the English intelligentsia remains the same threat to freedom today as in the previous mid-century. Then the same coteries of ‘fellow travellers’ issued diatribes against ‘nineteenth century liberalism’ or ‘bourgeois individualism’ and used the term ‘romantic’ as a vague insult, with connotations of  ‘ivory tower’ escapism and sentimentality. ‘Self-expression’ and ‘individualism’ are both negative terms in this discourse, a discourse that seeks to discredit the very basis of creativity itself – the individual imagination.

Nothing much has changed, except that the collapse of the Soviet Union means that these Stalinists are reverting to their Puritan roots; an essentially reactionary, moralistic obsession with selflessness and aesthetic abstraction. For some reason one is reminded of stories told about the Donatists, early Christian fanatics who invaded churches and threw buckets of whitewash over all the decorations and brightly coloured representational murals.

Illus: Freedom Express, 2005