It Is Almost That

Looking back I suppose has nothing to do with what actually occurred. On the eastern sky, fingers of pink light. The architect Adolf Loos said that a “cultivated man” does not look out of the window; it exists “only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.”

It was primidi 21 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the thrift. I was soaked in texts. I drew hastily on the texts of others—they put into my ears the sounds of all the people living without me. Leyla Güven was on her 198th day of hunger strike in Turkey. Milkshakes overflowed on the streets of England. The author of the Horrible Histories series opened his one-man-show at the local museum. A documentary aired in English: “As war rages in eastern Ukraine, Dima, a former leader of an ultra-right group, and Tanya, a self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist, make an unlikely couple in modern-day Kiev.” Open letters addressed to Extinction Rebellion multiplied. “You can’t stop a mass movement with milkshake,” declared Nigel Farage. Hundreds of Gilets Noirs occupied Charles De Gaulle airport, chanting, “Contre les déportations, et pour des papiers pour tous-tes!” İmam Şiş was on his 158th day of hunger strike in Wales. Zumba classes restarted at the local library. “We will not be selling milkshakes or ice-cream tonight,” the window of a McDonald’s noted. “This is due to a police request given recent events.” Facebook was awash with sentiments similar to, “If you thought Alabama’s abortion laws are bad, read up on Northern Ireland.” Lawyers were preparing to visit Öcalan for the second time in eight years.

And so I left the “endless nights talking in tenement buildings” “cycling along dirt paths in the dark to Carbeth” “collective meetings lasting into the wee hours” “conversations about changing politics under broken streetlights and foliage and cigarette smoke” “mass texts about a raid or a deportation or a party or an arrest or a heartbreak” “waking up under skylights” “turning up for court support” “demos and counter-demos and counter-counter demos” “converging in Ibrox and Govan and Pollokshields and Partick” “J Hus and Hudson Mohawke and Kelela on loop” “proofing press releases” “more collective meetings” “moving tenement building every 6 months”—to live alone in a room in a house in a town in the furthest easterly outlier of England, at the edge of a street of a country that was not just a country or nation-state, but a nation-state that desired and resembled and announced itself as so; and was in turn recognized as one. A nation-state that supplied the body armour and helmets and helicopters and drones and missiles used to strike and shell that other country that is not a country, that is against the very idea of “a country,” and yet at times seems to resemble a country. A nation-state that put in place other nation-states; that consistently demonstrated economic and political interest in the building and demolishing and running of other nation-states and not-quite nation-states. A nation-state that was ecstatic to sell arms to a list of nation-states and not-quite nation-states which were in fact part of its own self-conceived list of “human rights abusers.” A nation-state that existed and was conceived as a nation-state based on the practice of conquest abroad and repression at home.

I could see it all from the window—the Confederate flag hanging from a car boot, vacant amusement arcades lining the seafront, the cash-poor circus preparing for its next show, the sounds of kriolu and guinensi and n’golá and sãotomense drifting out from the cafes with their doors open all night, the last smokehouse closing, the freight ships out to sea, the seagulls fearlessly innovating new ways to find food, the industrial area less and less full of machinery and more and more occupied with artists and unlicensed boxing rings and foodbanks and makeshift spaces for prayer and raves, the anniversary of the Suffragettes burning down the pier, the B&Bs advertising colour TV, the rollercoaster test rides, the derelict high street, the stranded crew from the Malaviya Twenty stuck in the port—growing increasingly skilled at table tennis in their boredom. What could it mean, I wondered, to end up in the place she ran from aged 17, a lifetime before giving birth to me?

One thing next to another doesn’t mean they touch. I stayed indoors through it all—in a single room of a vicarage turned B&B turned industrial cannabis-growing operation turned raided-by-the-cops turned derelict turned into my lodging arrangements. I remained by necessity an outsider, and in turn the town remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tales about, write about, and, in the end, avoid.

What I fear most
is becoming “a poet”…
Locking myself in the room
gazing at the sea
and forgetting…
 
                                    —Katerina Gogou

At the window, I was soaked in texts. Post-it notes piled up over the desk and windowsills and floorboards, between duvet and mattress, slid into pockets and pillowcases and remembered and recited during showers and stir-frys and phone calls. The notes swelled in numbers; everything was invigorated with quotation marks, and over the course of the weeks writing, reduced to language, to art, to poetry. I was determined to write something not for “them” but “for” “us”—not an indeterminable, abstract “we” of everyone or anyone, but a scattered group of people made up of my most recently contacted and my least recently contacted—in Glasgow and in Reykjavik and in London and Athens and Marseille and Granada; in Adelaide and Rojava and in Alexandria; basically, anywhere that was not here.

When you live with friends in intimacy, and with a real try for directness of feeling—when you have shared jobs and goals that help you all keep focused on the same target and moving together in a common rhythm—when all these different parts are explored by those around you because it affects them, because it affects the quality of our daily life, our work together, our sanity…when all this happens, the densest sorts of bonds can be created. They are born out of effort, striving. They happen.
 
So when I think of my experience of these kinds of rich relationships, and then I read about the history of revolutionary and resistance movements, I am puzzled. It seems that, in general, there is too much emphasis put on the roles of “ideas,” on theory, principle, ideology, as the web that holds movements together and “explains them.” Have I misunderstood something? Does something happen in the process of writing? Is it words themselves? Of course I don’t mean ideas aren’t important. Perhaps they are why we get together in the first place; the light that draws us there.
 
People try to turn themselves inside out. They go off knowing that definitions of “success” are uncertain, ever-changing, and probably not measurable within their lifetime. For an “idea,” sure. And day to day?
 
—Jean (1980) Prison de la Santé

What to write when the “we” felt as much a “we” of place, as a “we” of position? I was drenched in thoughts about the “we” and about the “I”; about the “us” and the “them.” In writing “our” lives, I didn’t want to portray or exoticize or represent or romanticize, and though I was not in any position to distinguish a movement toward the inside from a movement toward the outside, I knew that in being somewhere of such solitude I now existed closer to the “outside” of whatever—wherever—I had once considered to be the “inside.” I wondered whether then, by writing “my” life—that was by necessity “our” lives—I would do all of the above. That in being somewhere geographically removed, it could become easier to write “about” than “with.” That it could become easier to rely on words like “capital,” “community,” “responsibility,” “complicity,” rather than detailing the specific ways they infringe on our bodies and friendships and time and energy. I did not want the words alone to constitute the doing of the work.

Throughout the friends leaving and the friends returning, the friends dying in Syria and the friends-of-friends dying in Syria; the friends having babies and getting married and doing so many things we swore we would never do, or swore we would always do, or swore we would tell one another before doing, I spent too long wondering—can people be “just” “people,” not persons of such decisive moments? I knew that I didn’t want the poem to be two things leaning up against one another; one inside, one outside, to make the world more “perceivable.” But in not knowing when I was inside the protest, and when I was outside poetry, had I made not the poem but the essay two things leaning up against one another—poetry, and protest; “politics” and “poetics”; the “I” and the “we”—? Someone said, “In so many insurrections, poetics has been in the mouths and hearts of everyone,” but when I looked around during moments of insurrection—on the streets, in tenement buildings, under skylights and broken streetlights and in endlessly long meetings—I wasn’t so sure I could see poetics in the mouths and hearts of those around me. Or, I wasn’t so sure that what I could see in the mouths and hearts of those around me could be called poetics, when existing poetry’s survival seemed to rest so firmly on its inability to make itself real.

“Why is the world ignoring the revolutionary Kurds?” asks G, again. I spent so long wondering what place poetry might have in a nation-state that is not a state but something like a state that is also an anti-state, that I forgot to wonder what place poetry might not have. What place poets might not have. In the midst of movement, poets abandoned their practice, and yet poems were still scratched out on the backs of exercise books and Rizla papers and Styrofoam cups and the last of the toilet roll. Everyone knows that poets aren’t needed for poetry to exist; they are often presented as antithetical to poetry by poets themselves—along with agents, pens, publishing houses, MFAs, publications—and yet we precede to write and publish and talk about (and sometimes be paid to write and publish and talk about) how unnecessary or inadequate or unattainable or unrevolutionary poetry is in “the” world. That is, we precede still to participate in, a sort of, poetry. And yet it feels increasingly more difficult to speak of “a” or “our” or “their” world, rather than “the” world. And yet people still desired poetry—and agents, pens, publishing houses, MFAs, publications—still resembled these things, still announced themselves as poets.

The people I have written about over the past three weeks have primarily not been poets. They are my “we” and yet never chose to be a “we” that will be written about, never chose to be asserted as single letters in a sentence or quoted verbatim or listed in full first name at the bottom of a post on “poetry.” Some of us will always be framed as marginalized, but no-one is marginal to their own life. Writing can admit agency over a world—over “the” world, over “our” world—but when that world involves those-who-are-not-the-one-writing, what does it mean to write on our world’s behalf, of our world’s behalf? And can “on” or “of” or “to” ever become “with”—when it is an “I” who wrote the words—who proofed the words, who sent the words to the editor, who later thought about the words that no longer felt true or applicable or desirable—and not a “we,” the “we” of us out on the streets, in tenement buildings, in endlessly long meetings? Mostly I imagined no-one in the writing actually read the writing—and so, a kind of anti-literature of life. But then they did start to read the writing. I became soaked in words of my own—that were never solely my own—but I didn’t want anyone who-was-not-“us” to see what was shown, what was secret, what may be hidden among the visible. And yet I continued to write, to publish, to call myself a “poet” at parties and readings and meetings and once in the queue at Aldi. I was no longer ashamed or embarrassed or fatigued to call myself a poet. I just didn’t want to write.

To refuse to speak in the present tense is a specific kind of avoidance. What does a “we” mean when the “we” is no longer the “we” of place or position, but of particular person? When this “we” no longer participates in my daily dawn-to-dusk life of meals or spontaneous conversation or “where are you right now?”—but a life of Whatsapp voice messages, the clanging of letterboxes and I miss u’s? “Mostly I've lived according to circumstances, but lately my life has been upgraded in agency,” writes Anne Boyer. “In other words, I chose this solitude. Then I chose to call it lonely.” I began to live with the overwhelming feeling that this—to be alone, in this town that was a town but didn’t feel like a town but another world—was not enough to constitute a living, a life.

The water dries up before the dark blue hyacinths are placed into the vase. When I return to memory, I do not return to the same point. “The act of writing makes it true, non?” someone asks. The past established as a kind of continuous present:

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike. This then was the period that brings me to the period of the beginning of 1914. Everything being alike everything naturally would be simply different and war came and everything being alike and everything being simply different brings everything being simply different brings it to romanticism.

                                                            —Gertrude Stein

What to do with the “it” that won’t reveal itself? Soaked in Post-it notes and journals and drafted phone notes and amputated margins, I tried to recover memories. When I found a particular memory in my mind, I wrote it down. I discovered quickly that as soon as I wrote it down, I lost it. When I tried to find “it” again, all I found was what I had written—the gaze from a window overflowing with Post-it notes and journals and drafted phone notes and amputated margins. The texts became a form; the longest form—the most uncertain of forms—one which is still now occurring, ongoing, occurring, ongoing.

to any who want poems to give them answers.
not that they ask interesting questions.
only that they expect answers.
a poem is not going to give precise directions.
you mustn’t touch the hiding places.
they address a different world
where trees are decorated with diamonds

                                                                        —Anna Mendelssohn

“What does the hard look do to what it sees? Pull beauty out of it, or stare it in?” asks Denise Riley in “Outside from the Start.” When writing to an audience bigger than the contents of your contacts list, is intelligibility something to desire or something to be feared? Some things are not meant to be clear; obscurity is their clarity. To obscure is to admit a poetry that no longer presents but participates in the process of thought; to admit the memory that is not the original memory but the memory written down. The act of writing makes it true, non? No. And yet to write of a we—whether “for,” “with,” or “about” or “to”—is to represent, one way or another. “I know that a car wasn’t set alight during that demo in Marseille. I remember how scared we were; how much constant running away we were doing,” L says. “Where is that in your writing?”

Once again, on the streets of Marseille, of Athens, of Khartoum, of Reykjavik, people were criticizing the government, occupying a central square, fighting the police. I tried to imagine how these actions bled into the space of everyday life, rather than maintaining an extra-terrestrial existence alongside “normality.” “What is the relation between the poem and a form of life?” asks Lisa Robertson. I had no desire to bottle and convey the kinetic immediacy of collective action in the present; jouissance, these moments of pure power and rage that can never be intelligible, can never be used to represent us. “This poem is nothing if it has no reader,” I write in a poem—thinking it useful, thinking it collective, thinking it chooses “life” over “poem”—but now I think I might think the opposite.

Once again, I had imagined that poetry was about necessity or desirability or impact or possibility—the question being whether the doing of the poetry was itself a form of politics or not—rather than the “doing” of the person doing the doing of the poetry. Entering the doing of poetry at the level of collectivity has got to do something to your attitude towards language. In Prismatic Publics, Lisa Robertson says of the Kootenay School of Writing: “[T]he collective structure is completely non-hierarchical and everyone has equivalent say. Everyone did everything from washing the floors to writing the press releases to writing the grants to hosting the visiting writers. That’s a politics. Our writing was coming out of that very, very directly.”

What does it mean to be socially and politically accountable in poetry? “And who is that accountability to—people or concepts?” asks L. I didn’t want to eventually become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma. “The riot, it’s not just a form; its form is a content,” someone says. It was not about the story, nor was it even about how the story is told. Mostly it is about how a story is felt through joining perspectives; a proliferating, running commentary on the capabilities of form. Solitude offers its own form, its own ability to obscure—to avoid being seen, to avoid intelligibility—but so does collectivity. In solitude, can you still be a “we”—? A “we” that is, that “represents” a million things at once? To be a flâneur of the protest-turned-riot is to admit solitude as an organ of the social. I no longer wanted to believe in the idea of a resolutely “I” and a resolutely “we,” but an “I” that necessarily emerges from a “we”; an “I” that does not pin language to my experience but opens language to other experience. “There’s a stronger solitude that refuses to be understood as merely pre-social,” writes Denise Riley, “that rejects the benevolent will to make everything, and it too, familial.” But can the act of de-familiarizing—in order to write “about”—obstruct a writing “to” or “with”; only furthering “their” understandings of us, not our understandings of ourselves? “I fear that I might buy binoculars in order to bring closer / the sabotage actions in which I won’t be participating,” writes Katerina Gogou. Can the poem avoid being the resistance that resembles the original violence? And in even entertaining this question, does the poet risk the possibility of foregoing or displacing or devising the representation of a “we” in the service of poetry, of the poem?

———

A note on the title: ‘It is Almost That’ is borrowed from a 1977 artwork by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, composed of faltering phrases projected onto black-and-white slides; “the humming state of the not-quite this and not-quite that…what familiar taxonomies cannot order.”

A note on the text: Alongside that already attributed, words/lines/ideas/images have been used/developed/reworked from the writings/conversations of/with Etel Adnan, Al, Alison, Andy, Bechaela, Cai, Calum, Hélène Cixous, Clémence, Coda Story, Mahmoud Darwish, Stanley Diamond, Dilar Dirik, Marcella Durand, Eleni, Etza, Euan, Flo, Glenn Gould, Veronique Le Guen, Haukur, Lyn Hejinian, Sam Huber, Izey, Jamie, Jan, Jas, Jenni, Joe, John, Bhanu Kapil, Lewis, Lizzie, Lucy, Matti, Kirill Medvedev, Mira, Nikolas, Alice Notley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Sina Queyras, Adrienne Rich, Lisa Robertson, Roses, Jacques Roubaud, Muriel Rukeyser, Sonya, Juliana Spahr, Verity Spott, Michael Taussig, Thabit, Paul Torino, Jack Underwood, Rosemarie Waldrop, Harsha Walia, Simone Weil, Adrian Wohlleben, C.D. Wright, Stephanie Young, Zayn.

All artwork used by permission of Katarzyna Coleman.