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Fictive Certainties
A Spiral Dance Essay
Increasingly, one notes a search for certainty in the world, millions
of people seeking clearcut answers to life's difficult situations.
THe problem is, omst such certainties are fictional: they are
fictive certainties. They have no real existence, except in the
minds of those who seek them.
This search for certainty turns up in all spheres of human endeavour.
It includes the search for the divine, as well as the search for
truth in criminal proceedings. The problem is, such certainties
are very elusive, and much depends on faith. The search shows
up in neo-conservative ideology, which is largely a reactionary
ideology, an attempt to roll time back to a fictional time when
things made sense. The search shows up in literary movements such
as the New Formalism. It shows up in critics who despise the avant-garde,
almost without thinking about it, without any real critical stance
to support their views, and who therefore often resort to dismissal
and vilification.
The search is for certainty. But the world is aleatoric, uncertain,
unclear and indefinable. The Mysterious quite overwhelms. In music,
the search for certainty was given a deathblow by the composers
who began, in the middle of the Twentieth Century, to use indeterminacy
in their music. John Cage, Earle Brown, Karlheinz Sotckhausen,
Morton Feldman, and many others, left elements of their musical
experience open to chance, to aleatoric compositional processes,
to indeterminacy.
I attend a monthly poetry critique group out there in realspace,
and every so often someone brings in a sestina. (What is it about
archaic, antique forms that so compels some writers? Is it an
unconscious urge to impose will and order on an otherwise chaotic
and unpredictable universe? One wonders.) Sestinas are extremely
difficult to pull off, and while they may be formally perfect,
as is this one, I have to ask: where's the music? where's the
beauty that makes me want to re-read the poem? I mean, to come
back and re-read the poem *as a poem*, not just as an example
of a well-executed sestina. The greatest poems pull you into their
worlds, suck you into their worldview, and you totally forget
about the formalisms and meter and craft while you are experiencing
the poem; that didn't happen here. *shrug* Sorry. (Nor am I insisting
that every poem be a great poem; but if we don't aspire to seomthing,
whatever that is, why even bother?)
I recently had a discussion with a neo-pagan who described himself
as a Chaos Magician. I asked him what he meant. He spoke a little
about chaos theory, then started to describe his ritual practice
and altar setup. It struck me as being largely a collection of
symbols, a way of imposing fictive certainties on the turbulence
of everyday life. I listened to his description of his practice,
then I pointed out that one of the distinctive things about chaos
mathematics as used to describe non-linear systems is that the
identical initial state can lead to divergent results in different
simulations. So, you can start from exactly the same place, and
end miles away from each other at the end of the process. I asked
him if his magickal ritual results were repeatable, and he said
they were. I then pointed out that, from his description, it sounded
to me like he was trying to impose his will on chaos, that in
fact he was trying to manage chaos, and bring chaos into order,
so how could he possibly be a Chaos Magician? He was not amused.
I mostly prefer to listen to 20th century and contemporary music.
One of the things I like least about 18th and 19th century musics
was the fictive certainties with which they structured perception
and existence. This was rooted in the complacencies of European
economic and politcal superiority, the certainties of Empire,
certainties which have all been erased and questioned since.
The Victorian-era saying was that the sun never set on the British
Empire, which meant that British colonies were spread throughout
the globe, so that some colonized area was always seeing daylight.
This is no longer true, and while the former colonies are now
largely banded into the Commonwealth, they are sovereign unto
themselves. There are still lingering relics of the colonial domination,
for example, the English court system in use in India. But, time
and turbulence tore apart the Empire upon which the sun never
set.
Listening to the New World Symphony on the car radio recently,
Antonin Dvorak's 9th Symphony, one still retains a sense of beautiful
melody, but there is an expansive and a simultaneity that moves
beyond the standard practices of the preceeding centuries of tonal
music.
It matters what you listen to. But it matters more that you listen.
In a recent interview author Kurt Vonnegut said this: "Anybody
practicing the fine art of composing music, no matter how cynical
or greedy or scared, still can’t help serving all humanity. Music
makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would
be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist,
always cheer me up." This sums up exactly how I feel about making
music
It also sums up exactly how I view my own artistic activism, which
is to say, my music and art and poetry ARE my activism. I spent
some time as a marching in the streets variety of activist, until
I realized that no one who disagreed with me ever was present
at those marches; we were always preaching to the choir. How much
more effective it is, by presenting new and different and alternative
ways of experiencing the Universe: breaking form the familiar
into the Unknown.
Dana Gioia, a neo-fromalist poet, has been nominated by Presidnet
Bush (Junior) to head the National Endowmnet for the Arts. I have
a couple of Gioia's books, and while he makes interesting arguments,
they all boil down to a form of neo-conservatism. He is in the
footsteps of Wallace Stevens primarily in his idea that poetry
doesn not belong to an elite, but to everybody--which is something
all Dromen already know. His poems are not nearly as good as Stevens',
which is where the comparison fails.
His "New Formalism," like many other contemporary forms of artistic
formalism, is far more reactionary than revolutionary. It's a
harking back to the Glory Days of the past (which probably never
existed, anyway), and not at all what it cloaks itself as. What
it pretends to be is a radical response to the vagueness and illogical
forms of free verse--but in fact, it is a reactionary response,
a crawling back into the pre-Eliot cave where everything still
seemed to make sense. It's a return to the womb, a fleeing from
the perceived dangers of the scary, outside world, where nothing
makes sense any more.
The problem is, this flight back to past certainties is doomed
to be unsatisfying--as those seeming certainties of the past were
in fact only fictive certainties, no more solid or real than anything
around today. They only LOOK more certain because they're a 100
years or so in the past, and because people in the present era
WANT them to be solid.
For example, while some of the quotes that Gioia gives at the
end of the article are pretty good, this one is as fatuous as
it gets: "Sometimes refusing to be a revolutionary is the most
radical form of rebellion." What this REALLY means is, "I find
the uncertainties and indeterminism of present are too much to
deal with, so I want to return to a mythical past, where everything
fit into neat little boxes and made sense." The only folks out
there who use this "refusing to be a revolutionary is the most
radical form of rebellion" argument are neo-conservatives.
Remember, this guy is primarily a businessman (again, the comparison
to Stevens). His book of crit, "Can Poetry Matter?" made some
ripples, and is worth reading, if you find a used copy. The fact
that Bush would want to appoint him to head the NEA says more
about Bush than Gioia, though. Bush can't seem to communicate
with people who don't already agree with him, so he probably figures
that since Gioia is a businessman, he will be as reactionary as
Bush himself is. Which, in fact, may be the case, gods help us
all....
In a similar way, the protests against the proposed war on Iraq
and Saddam Husseim that have sprung in the winter of 2003 are
about certainties and indectainties. The interesting thing about
this cycle of anti-war protest is that it IS closer to the Vietnam-era
protests than anything since.
Generally, the news media, since they are owned and operated by
establishment interests, barely cover anti-war protests. But there
was a whole long segment on the country-wide protests last night
on Nightline AND on the NewsHour (PBS). This tells me something
is different, not biz as usual.
During Daddy Bush's Gulf War, it was considered un-American and
anti-patriotic to protest that little party. Some protesters I
know got beat up. I participated in a few events where only 5
people showed up, not these hundreds and thousands last week.
I also remember the post-Gulf War parades, which were shameless
and unselfconscious displays of jingoism, during which any dissenting
voice was shouted down and hushed up. Too many folks wanted a
"clean war" to lick their wounds from the still-lingering wounds
we had taken from the 'Nam. They wanted their little certainties
about god and country to be true, even if they were fictive certanties,
and didn't want to hear any still small voices even slightly disagreeing.
The spectacle was frequently infantile in its flag-waving.
There's less and less of that going on right now, even though
there was a LOT of it immediately following the 9/11 attacks.
The jingoism is not as comforting, it seems. So, people here and
now perceive this war as different than the Gulf War. I'm not
sure that anyone knows what's different, though.
I suspect some of this is evolution, a more "grown up" populace,
moving away from the first chakra survival stuff and closer to
the heart-chakra compassion and lovingkindness. I hear a current
of rhetoric in the anti-war talk that hints at this.
On the fear-based level, though, I also hear a fear of escalation,
that attacking Iraq is going to give the terrorist outfits such
as Al-Quaeda all the justification they need to do more violence.
It proves their point for them, and fuels their fire. I think
some folks want to take a higher road than this endless cycle
of vengeance.
As yet, these are scattered, circular thoughts on aesthetics and
life and art. More will be added as it develops.
A Spiral Dance essay © 2003 Arthur Paul Durkee / Black Dragon
Productions.
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