Continued from here.

If Herbert is consciously involved in the play and pull of history and morality on an obviously macro level, Tomaž Šalamun engages with those things on the level of pure consciousness and his own awareness of the mind at work. Šalamun’s mind at work is the framework upon which his poetry is based. He makes, in print, the associative leaps that everyone does, but he is interested in those leaps as contributing to his work.

They’ve blocked our radio.

In freedom, everyone’s eyes will shine.

We’ll smooth out foil chocolate wrappers
and roll them up again in tight, tiny balls
for other continents.

Bombs kill grasshoppers, too, if they fall on a meadow.

It seems to me that he is every bit as interested with the pitch and rock of consciousness as it affects history and day to day life, but presented in the personal, microscopic frame of reference that each person is responsible for. (I should also say that both of these writers are very funny, but in that way that I have noticed that Eastern Europeans are, with a sad, wry smile that bespeaks the weight of serious and long-endured history.)

Herbert shares the long view, inviting you to look over his shoulder as he points to moments in the past, and following his guiding finger, traces the arc of history over what is happening now, allowing the reader to lay the past over the present to see that the two are embarrassingly (and encouragingly) similar. Šalamun places the reader squarely in the center of his head, with neurons firing all around her like mortars and shows the spot where each sparks hits and catches fire to another, creating the twine of thoughts, twisted and frayed, with each thread its own, yet always connected (even if tangentially) by awareness and consciousness, displayed with frustration and glee.

It has taken me a while to appreciate both of these writers. Herbert, because of the scope of his writing, and because I don’t have the education he had, and thus a lack of reference (which I am endeavoring to rectify); Šalamun, because of the fact that I don’t live in his head and didn’t understand that the first time I read anything by him, it was necessary to simply absorb the words, without attempting to assign them cohesion and linearality, because that’s not the way he is meant to be read. It’s a little like the first time I listened to Machine Gun by Peter Brötzmann or Playthroughs by Keith Fullerton Whitman–I simply didn’t know how to hear them, on their own terms, as artistic statements, the way the artists insisted on listeners engaging with them. It takes time, and sometimes, especially as a younger person, patience was not something I possessed as an audience.

This is an exceedingly long-winded way of engaging with the Oppen quote at the beginning. I don’t really think that very many artists possess that “pragmatism of art” that allow their very beings to be constant fodder for art. On the contrary, with very few exceptions (maybe Jorie Graham? or Anne Carson?), the process of art is turning what we think on a daily basis, with no thought toward artistic creation, into the personal expression of our art. Each of us is the only person capable of thinking what we think, as our perceptions are clouded by our pasts are influenced by our genetic make-up, making us uniquely qualified to give voice to our thoughts and feelings. These two artists spent (are spending) their lives examining the way their thoughts existed in the world and figuring out how to turn them into art, and making that investigation crucial to the art itself.

In his first daybook (ca. 1963-64), George Oppen wrote the following:

At least two kinds of devotion. The devotion to art, a sort of pragmatism of art which refuses to think anything that will not contribute to poetry. The other is a devotion which tries to makes poetry of what the mind, the free and operating mind thinks can know–or must know–and is going to know.

I have been thinking about this quote often, as I have been rereading Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and reading for the first time Tomaž Šalamun’s A Ballad for Metka Krašovec. My thinking is that the second devotion is what most of us who write ascribe to, since the vast majority live in the real world and have things happen to us and do things involving other people that, by necessity, have nothing to do with our art. Having the thought, I feel shitty is not a thought that by itself contributes to a poem–as a line it won’t break well, spondee/trochee does not have a particularly pleasant meter, etc. But it is in the writing it down, the parsing it for how it sits in the world and lives in our heads, that we understand it and make it into art, allows us to know something about ourselves and our relation to the world that we did not know before. Oppen also said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking.” I dig Oppen, in case you hadn’t caught that.

I give this information as a lead in to talking about the books by the above Central/Eastern Europeans. I have been trying to find a copy of Mr. Cogito for the last three years. It went absurdly out of print almost immediately upon its printing in 1993, and I have, until recently, not been able to find a copy of it for less than $100, which has kept me from buying it. But I finally did (also could return Joel’s copy) and proceeded to devour it over our vacation. Mr. Cogito was a kind of “psudo-persona” that was and was not Herbert. Most helpfully, Mr. Cogito allowed Herbert to laugh at himself in a way that being an aging Pole, post-WWII and deeply committed to art and philosophy in the time of brutal Communistic dictatorship would not generally allow. But it also allowed Herbert to exist, at least artistically, at any time in history and relate the themes he understood to be omnipresent across time and space in his poems. One of the great joys of the poems is that, unlike many other poets, there is no real dividing line when Mr. Cogito starts and Herbert ends, which gives the poems a verisimilitude that is difficult when the reader know that the writer is writing about someone else’s thoughts and feelings. In these poems, it is often as if Mr. Cogito is Herbert’s astral twin, whom Herbert envies and pities, but whom he also understands completely and whose experience Herbert loves because he cannot be every place he wants to see and cannot live to see what happens in person.

Herbert is deeply rooted in the classical education, referencing Plato, Spinoza, Caligula, Gilgamesh, as well as all kinds of myths and stories. I spent most of my time reading the book with wikipedia open in front of me, so I could look up the references and be able to follow the literary and historical plane upon which Herbert exists, since it is not a plane familiar to me. To that end, I have been starting to fill in the serious gaps in my classical education (yes, I know there is no such thing as a classical education anymore, but when have I ever been mistaken for someone who doesn’t believe there is value in the esoteric?). I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I enjoyed quite a bit, though I think the word epic is perhaps slightly outmoded, since it is only about 40 pages. It is lovely and sad and made me appreciate Suzanne Gardinier’s new long poem that I heard snippets of at the SLC Poetry Festival this year. I am going to try to read some Greeks, perhaps actually read some Ovid, since I should have when I was an undergraduate and didn’t, because, to no one’s surprise, it isn’t easy and at age 19 or 20, I couldn’t imagine why the hell I would possibly want to spend my time reading poetry written 2000 years ago by a dude telling some stories that, if I wanted to, I could find on the internet and the pertinent information would be provided for me. There are days I want to punch my 20 year old self.

I’m going to eat some breakfast and then write a little about Šalamun.

I have been thinking a lot about bureaucracy of late. Though it may seem like a somewhat dry theme to most, for me it is the most interesting thing going on in my recent (and, uh, not so recent) media consumption. I have said it before, though perhaps not in writing, that watching The Wire has taught me more about my job as a teacher than anything in my teacher preparation classes. And this realization hit me when Jeff and I were watching the first, maybe second, season–not while watching the fourth season, which was the first to explicitly address public schooling.

What makes The Wire so very fascinating is how it depicts bureaucracy as generating both internal and external conflicts. Bureaucracies become characters in and of themselves. And The Wire does not treat bureaucracy as a structure limited to government: the drug families and gangs are just as bureaucratic as the police department as the public schools as the DA’s office as the city government of Baltimore. As each of these bureaucracies butt up against one another, so do the characters, some of them playing different roles in conflicting bureaucracies concurrently.

Each character in the Wire-verse gets caught between his or her ideals/integrity and the political necessities of what is the truly magnificent machinery of his/her primary bureaucracy. The turning points, the moments that make you cringe as a viewer, are those times when someone has to compromise his methods or compromise his goal for the sake of playing the political game required by working inside gargantuan systems of hierarchical human beings.

I bring up The Wire before “Brazil” because I find it instructive in parsing Terry Gilliam’s vision of bureaucracy run amok. If you haven’t seen “Brazil” yet, I highly recommend it. The screenshots in this post are filched from the film and give only the slightest hint at the insane visual display that it is. I’m not even certain I would have realized “Brazil” as bureaucracy per se had The Wire not primed me to see its sordid effects in every institution of our modern lives.

“Brazil” is your classic dystopian vision of the future, a la 1984 and A Brave New World. Check out the number of people it takes just to organize the records in the shot at the top of the post to get a feel for the extent of specialization and bureaucracy it depicts. What makes “Brazil” such a distressing vision of the future is that there seems to be nobody in charge. The movie is black comedy of the best kind, it is dark and almost completely absurd–it is the lack of figurehead that gives the situation its absurdity.

As Sam, the main character, tries to navigate the bureaucracy, he is pretty much completely unsuccessful. I myself wonder if what renders him incapable of getting anywhere is that the bureaucracy is so entrenched and complicated that there is, in fact, no one in charge. There is only bureaucracy, either in form resembling an ouroboros or a flattened pyramid/brick wall.

Ultimately in the world of “Brazil,” the bureaucracy fails and ducts take over everything with no one capable of fixing them (see screenshot above). Things don’t turn out much better in The Wire, where it appears that even if you make a breakthrough, the victory is isolated and the bureaucracy will remain essentially unchanged, as though you cleaned up one room of ducts but millions remain.

This is how I feel as a teacher–one woman in a bureaucracy gone mad with excessive levels of political maneuvering and employees falling in straggling lines beneath an ambiguous leadership figure (is it the principal? the chancellor? the national government?)–like I’ve entered a school where the ducts, the internal workings, are the primary focus and prevent us from doing the real work at hand. All this becomes that much more heartbreaking when I think of the students. I don’t care that much if I am eaten up by the political machinery, and I keep my nose clean enough to save my own skin, but what happens to the kids is much like what happens to Sam’s apartment up there with the ducts spilling out all over. The people whom we should be serving have no one to serve them because we are all caught in the intricate workings of bureaucracy.