Finding a Form (29 page)

The religious tradition may have been based on fraud and hypocrisy, but at least it claimed to serve transcendental values. The State may have been another liberator that became a tyrant, yet it, too, pointed its gun at the sky where the flag flew. Furthermore, in each case, there were doctrines to be adhered to, ideals to be followed, practices that promised an improvement to the spirit. Now it’s all Vic Tanny. And ideals last as long as their symbols can continue to be sold for profit. We have at last reached the democracy of the five-and-dime. The cross that hangs around the neck and the T-shirt that displays a product’s logo deal, as we know, with illusions; but now illusions are all equal, and my bumper sticker is worth every bit as much as your rosary.

Alas, no one assails the artist anymore, only their funding agencies. The railings of a utopian socialist such as P.-J. Proudhon belong, sadly, to another century, when a word like “form” could fill a shopkeeper’s soul with a surge of anger.

Oh, to be lice like that (if ever we were), gnawing (if ever we did) at the scalp and follicles of civilization! To be sure, artists wanted to reject Mammon and have their Mammon too, but it was once romantically supposed by both audience and author that the poet’s or the painter’s motives were ultimately out of the ordinary—dedicated, pure—and the avant-garde artist’s aims more admirably elevated than anybody else’s.

Theology invented a besouled self so the soul could be damned, saved, and fought over; and the State did the same with the taxpaying soldier-citizen, who was English or German before he was conceived, and a kindergarten patriot before he was confirmed. Now Capitalism and Communism have given us the economic self: either the worker who is defined by what he produces, or the buyer who is defined by the goods he consumes. We may not have a classless society, nor be aiming for one, but we are all equally crass; high culture rests on the same penny-ante base as low; preference is power; and pushpin, as Bentham said, is as good as poetry.

In the act of attacking their enemies, the avant-garde declared those enemies to be their equals—the main body. Can we nowadays imagine any self-respecting artistic movement turning upon the comic book, the blood flick, the gooey erotic romance, minimal moonshine or similar musics, painted photographs as large as small buildings, sideshow sensationalism and other vocal groups, TV’s endless inanities, as if these had betrayed some noble cause, or had lured us off the high road of art and onto the low road of love and
other lyrics? Any avant-garde that believes itself up to the mo should have the High Moderns as its foe, but these artists are, in fact, among the avant-garde’s few friends, and its only equal; although there is at present some doubt about even that, because the avant-garde itself—in name, if not in substance—is now a trademark for the trendy. Avant-garde condoms should do well, like those unrepressed avant-garde underpants. Even if a genuine note were to be sounded, it could not be heard, for commerce has filled the whole of cultural space with rock bands, celebrity trials, and other little cultural commotions.

In a large and diversified market, if the numismatics magazine can make a profit, any heresy can too. Against such a Medusa-headed enemy there is no point in calling yourself an avant-garde. Rebel against the Establishment, bugger all or any, and your check will be in the mail. Against such an enemy, there is nowhere to aim your anger; there is no real object for your scorn because business, they will tell you, is in the business of giving its substance away: to museums to put on “the Greatest van Gogh on Earth,” to orchestras to replay the classics, to public television to emasculate the masters, to writing-program writers to succeed with the superficial where other superficialists have failed. And from the makers of merchandise themselves, well … what will not be richly forthcoming: commissions for bank lobbies and boardrooms, investment acquisitions by conglomerates, arty trophies bought by the intrepid bankroll whose cultural greed will one day be honored with a gallery enshrining its purchases.

When there is no windmill to tilt at—tilt not. At the present time one can only practice silence, exile, and cunning, except that “silence, exile, and cunning” is a cheer for the basketball team representing the Sisters of the Poor. Why be silent? Because if you open your mouth, your saliva will be sold as a prescription for something. Why speak of exile when you live very comfortably as a gargoyle facing a quiet quad? And your cunning cannot compete with those who smell new money the way—as the old joke had it—Napoleon smelled de-feet.

Many and various are the vicissitudes of the avant-garde, and it is true that now there is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did; nevertheless, there is one sort of something—one theme, one theory—that throughout all common connivances cannot hang its head, although the old romantic myths of the artist have been remaindered and each of his motives questioned. “To live is to defend a form,” Hölderlin said. It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, and every dance were designed to be danced in the dark.
Non serviam
. That would be a worthy no.

But it will never be uttered.

Where shall we find breath enough to say such a long, long word?

L
et us begin where we began—in darkness: a darkness in which there was yet no color to the skin, no distinction between thine and mine, no tangle of tongues, no falsely alluring ideas, no worries which might spread like an oil slick over our amniotic ocean; hence no hither-and-thithering either, no mean emotions, treacheries, promises, prohibitions, no lifelong letdowns. We began in a place where darkness really did cover the face of things, and not because the shades were drawn and the lights were out, but because darkness was our ether, and let us sleep. It was a world where
¿Qué pasa?
could be honestly answered:
Nada
.

What colored this darkness with calamity? We soon grew too big for our boots, our britches, and our own good. So the walls of our world moved against us, squeezing us out as though we were a stool: what a relief for the old walls, loose at last, lax as a popped balloon; but what confusion for us, now overcome by sensation, seared by the light. Some still call it a trauma—birth—and the earliest Greek poets bewailed the day just as the babies bewailed it, explaining that we cried out at the cruelty of being cast into the harsh bright air where perceptions and pain were one, where screaming was breathing.

Before, we had been in nurture and in nature’s care, and although poisons may have seeped into us, or our genetic codes been badly garbled, all our exchanges had been innocent and automatic
and as regular as our pulse. Now, suddenly, we were in the hands of Man; that is, in the hands of Mom and Dad, proud in their new possession, proud because they have fulfilled their function, happy because they are supposed to be happy, cooing their first coos, which will be our first words—
coup de coude
,
coup de bec
,
coup de tête
,
coup de main
,
coup de maître
,
coup d’état
,
coup de grâce
—while we wonder why we are wet and where the next suck is coming from, or why there is so much noise when we bawl, why we are slapped and shaken, why we are expected to run on empty and not scream when stuck or cry when chafed, not shit so much, and not want what we want when we want it.

Life is itself exile, and its inevitability does not lessen our grief or alter the fact. It is a blow—
un coup de destin
—from which only death will recover us, and when we are told, as we lie dying, that we are going home, we may even be ready to welcome the familiar darkness, the slumberous emptiness of the grand old days when days were nothing but nights. For the carved crusader merely sleeps in the stone above his stone, the lady rests her alabaster hands upon her alabaster breasts, the sword, her gown, the cross upon the shield, her smile, her diadem: they sleep too, until the Day of Redemption Dawns. Perhaps that is the last lie we shall be told, however, for the advancing darkness is a darkness we shall never even dream in. It will not be the sincere zero of a release after long suffering—a quilt-covered quiet, the past recaptured, a womb reoccupied—but the zero with the zero in it. It will not be the Nothing from which nothing comes, but the Nothing that is nothing but its no—and a no, in addition, that is nothing but the pure, brief round of its wholly hollow
o
.

When Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, according to the Christian story, death, pain, and labor followed them to serve as punishments for their transgression—for falling for the first apple that fell in their lap. With an orchard of pears, plums, and cherries to choose from—the Tree of High Times, the Vine of Accomplishment, the Hedge of Military Hardware, and the dense Bush of Indecision—what must they do but pick a piece of fruit a
worm has recommended. For the Greeks, far wiser in my opinion, life was a sentence, the Denmark that made our world a prison, and the body was the coffin of the soul. That attitude became a poetic tradition, so that centuries after the Greek poets had grumbled that the worst thing that could happen to a man was to be born, while the best was to get to the end as quickly as possible, Guillaume du Bartas was writing:

That things were better for us once upon a time—before the revolt of the Angels (all those puissant legions, Milton wrote, whose exile hath emptied Heaven to fill Hell), before the Fall, back in the Golden Age, prior to the Flood, the destruction of the Tower of Babel, when giants walked the earth, when there were real heroes, honest kings, and actual dragons, in any case before we were brought, through birth, into this brutality—is a belief that constantly accompanies us and somehow gives us comfort. The comfort, of course, is in the note of grace it lets us sound: that wretched things will one day be put right, and the wrongs of our distant forefathers finally paid for in full, and death will release us from present pain, and we can go home again to Paradise.

We continue to mimic these mythological banishments with ones of our own. The Greeks punished people by driving them out of their cities, by sending them into exile the way unwed former maidens were sent away from the door of their family home—with babe and blanket and much weeping—into the cold and falling snow. Even Hades was considered just another foreign country, a lot like Persia, where the barbarians bowed down to their superiors, sniffing the dust of their lordlings’ feet.

As we invariably exclaim: how things have changed! A vast reversal of value has taken place. Children want to leave home and hometown, the sooner the better. Down-on-the-farm has been replaced by up-on-the-town. High on the hog is not where we choose to feed, but on the shrimp and the sole and the slaw in our low-cal
life, a life through which—in lieu of jig—we jog. Money is our country now. We go where it goes—we followers of the cash flow. There is nothing more seductive than the bottom line. Money makes the world go around, the song says, but the world keeps the wheel of fortune spinning, and that’s as warming as the Gulf Stream to us all.

Money. The Japanese make it. Hong Kong smuggles it. Singapore launders it. The Swiss hoard it for everybody. The Italians style it. The French flavor it. The Germans mark it. Americans lose it. The English pout. The Russians long. The Chinese make change.

Increasingly, to be exiled means to be sent to a place where you can’t conduct any business.

In our brave new world, there isn’t a single exciting word that won’t fit upon a billboard. Pictures contain our immediate information. We go blank when the screen does. Our previous definition of the human—that we reason; that we reflect upon ourselves; that we make tools, we speak—is in the shop for microchip repairs. We are really, when you count performance and tabulate behavior, not supercomputers but a lot like locusts, little chafing dishes maybe, small woks, modest ovens, simple furnaces, barbecue pits and picnic grills: we consume. A universe is burning—a forest for our flame.

We number ourselves now in billions, a profusion so dangerous that were we, all told, to fart in unison, we would flatulate and methane the world; and were one to strike a match at such a moment … boom would not be the half of it.

We also live in an age of migration and displacement. Driven by war, disease, or famine, out of fear of genocide or starvation, millions are on the move, by boat, mostly, as it has always been. Not every foot of ocean is under someone’s boot. But boot people don’t let boat people land. And, as if to balance those who have been thrust out of their country like a dog to do its business, there are an equal number who have been shut up inside it; who would leave, if they could, in search of freedom, a better living, compatible ideals.

So we have learned to punish people by keeping them home as well as by kicking them out. Yes. Stay home at the range, with Mom and Dad and their ideas; stay home by the monitored telephone, out of sight of the shops and markets, behind the bamboo, lace, or iron curtain; stay home, where home rules rule and the roost has already got its rooster.