Where the Image Itself Senses

What words can be said now? And how do they distinguish themselves from those that must be said, now. Shots of daffodils flattening in the rain; the return of growth and desire. “Time is the only medium for having a body, extending a voice, acting towards others,” writes Lisa Robertson. “Spring is an opening in time.”

I caught myself more interested in the wasp pressing itself up against the glass than the people animatedly gesturing behind the glass. It was nonidi 9 Floréal in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the hyacinth. I suspected that the poppy seeds I had sown in C’s garden back home might be beginning to shoot up through the soil.

I did not desire to “look back” as much as I did not desire to “look forward,” and yet I was having difficulty looking here, at that which was right infront of me—other than the wasp pressing itself up against the glass. Past, present, future; I began in the failure of these images. I was happy to look anywhere else—upwards, downwards, sideways, slanted—as long as it no longer constituted an “it.”

this is not the distinction of looking (long and fixed the
gaze) as in backward (“summer is over”) or back at you (“i
want to memorize your face forever…”)—thoughts up
the pass.
 
it’s us who move into awake, finding our calling.

                                                                    —Daphne Marlatt

I sat at the window of the small room that was not mine, looking out to the streets of Kyiv. I caught myself wondering what “failure” could mean in the context of movements, of protest, of poetry. “Images in the unconscious are like underwater fauna and flora,” wrote Edmond Jabès, “the diver’s quick torch tracks them down.” I caught myself thinking about that YouTube video—the shots of a non-nation-state flag in the background, shots of olive trees operating in the breeze, shots of a gun shrugged over the shoulder; “martyr” written in Sans Serif across the screen:

I come from an anarchist tradition, but… [I no longer believe] it will be able to achieve its major ends by its own. However, it has the possibility to affect other revolutions. As I am myself too deeply engrained in my anarchist ways of thinking and working, I see no other options to implement the anarchist ideals than to enter the ground where it has some kind of leverage and merge with other revolutionary forces. This ground at the moment is in Syria and in Rojava.

“A common vocabulary is not necessary, and probably not desirable,” write Lisa Robertson and Matthew Stadler in their introduction to Revolution: A Reader. “For us, revolution will be the difference that each of us brings into living, the difference that resists even the smoothing activities that can be a part of community formation. It’s only by staying with the often-difficult texture of difference that we can begin, that there can be a stance that opens into a movement beyond.”

D asks, “What does Rojava mean in the age of hijacked and abused revolutions?” E asks, “How come no-one went to Ukraine to fight?” The headlines ask, “The Ukrainian Euromaidan: The Solution to Putin, or Just Another Fascist Political Coup?” I caught myself trying to imagine the scenes in Kyiv in 2014—the things I had witnessed only on a screen: hand-thrown chunks of whatever; shots of people kicking free a pylon cemented to the sidewalk, producing further hunks of concrete when finally hauled out. Shots of tiles torn off of walls, empty bottles—shots of anything not actually nailed down loosened, ripped out and thrown at the Berkut. Thick clouds of tear gas freshly filling the city each week. Once again people were criticizing the government, occupying a central square, fighting the police. I caught myself trying to imagine how these actions had bled into the space of everyday life, rather than holding themselves apart from it or maintaining an extra-terrestrial existence alongside “normality.”

B, rushing from a distance at standing A

swerving at collision point

repeating again and again

trying to lock eyes

A, saying “now” when eyes hold

 

B, instantly halting rush, holding A’s eyes

until one or the other looks away

                                                    —Allan Kaprow, Comfort Zones

“I remember seeing it happening during the Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine: bona fide fascists, progressives, and anarchists all fighting cops together,” lal0cur4 writes in one Reddit forum. I too caught a glimpse of the red-and-black flag that did not divide itself diagonally but horizontally. Among the brief murmurings of the crowd, I had imagined everything that moved was red, but I caught myself wondering whether red actually meant something altogether distinct from what I had come to know it to mean when I saw it on demos, on t-shirts, on pins and graffiti and press publications and bare skin—when I saw the flag entwined with a sign that read “Glory to Ukraine!”, a swastika pinned to the top right-hand corner.

What was happening elsewhere was happening here: a single-issue protest led to brutal police repression led to a generalized uprising, transforming a square in the capital—which this time was a city in a country that did desire a nation-state, that seemed for the very idea of a “nation-state,” and at all times appeared to announce itself as a nation-state—into a fiercely defended autonomous zone. Insurrection, apparently. This seemed to offer a new approach, in which people cohered around tactics and forms rather than parties or ideologies—grievances with specific governments and specific economic policies and specific social programs and specific instances of corruption. But this was in fact not new, in the way Occupy named a tactic rather than a goal. To many, watching from our laptop screens or bar-TVs or balconies or binoculars or helmets, the specific organizers and demands seemed incidental; it was assumed the important thing was the antagonism these upheavals facilitated against the state.

The helmets donned by “the people” became a kind of symbol of the ex-citizen, but anger with government and economy—whether protest, riot or insurrection—has never necessarily suggested anti-state and anti-capitalist aims. Greek flags illuminating the presence of nationalists in Syntagma Square; fully-armed militia members showing up to Occupy Phoenix. In the weeks leading up to Euromaidan, people smashed the windows of banks during anti-austerity protests in Rome; tens of thousands took to the streets in Italy and Portugal to protest against budget cuts enshrined by “the crisis”; ATMs were jammed with glue in Greece and 24-hour strikes were started; roads were blocked and sit-in occupations of banks were organized in Germany. But in two months of confrontation, there was not a single shop or business window broken in Kyiv’s downtown, though state vehicles were overturned and burned as barricades, government buildings were seized, bricks and paving stones and Molotovs were hurled at riot police and state snipers.

War supersedes participatory insurrection with the spectacle of professionalized violence, sidelining the general population—“a” possible people that announces itself and makes an account of itself as not having been accounted for. What it means to resist becomes militarized, confines the substance of the struggle to a clash of power-endorsed, armed organizations, rather than spreading subversion into every aspect of social relations, or grassroots guerrilla groups. Then the “populist” parties take over. The endless monastery walls crammed with portrait photographs of those killed fighting in Crimea and Donbas. L points out how no-one in those first portraits from 2014 is dressed in military uniform, but by the time we reach 2019—all the way around the sharp corner of the monastery—all we can see are the yellow and blue flags in the background of the portrait, the military uniform, the diagonal red-and-black flag, the neo-Nazi symbols posed in front of.

What to do with the failure of insurrection, when insurrection is not simply a conflict with the state, but a three-way fight against it and its authoritarian opponents; when it is not a contest of arms but a clash between different forms of relations; when it is not just the struggle for physical territory but also for tactics and narratives—for the territory of struggle itself?

And so I returned again to the question of form. I wanted to ask, does the poem need self-defense not only against the system but against other struggle areas, or do other struggle areas need self-defense not only against the system but also against the poem? I wanted to ask, can the poem relate to a phenomenon that exceeds it? I wanted to ask, can the poem choose a method other than completely ignoring the legal-official politics’ existence by refusing to acknowledge it? I wanted to ask, can the poem avoid being the resistance that resembles the original violence? It would be a lie to say that these questions first appeared to me as poetry, rather than a politics in which the poem is actually the organized left, or “the people,” or the struggle, or “the system.”

Every question, there’s like, five more multiplying. “Do poems like these work?” Adrienne Rich asks of the writing in With an Iron Pen: Hebrew Protest Poetry, 1980-2004. I tried again to think about whether the “how” of things brought into being is aesthetics. I tried again to think about what the “what” alone of things could mean. The bare, brutal facts of the words on the page; the room of 12 students crowded around a print-out, discussing the syntax and preposition and use of punctuation and title. I used to think that writing took me away from—outside of—my politics; now I think that writing more often brings me back to my politics, but the talking and the reviewing and the examining and the analysing of the writing with people who are not a part of this politics is what took me outside of my politics, outside of myself. I became less prepared to collaborate with those who did not know the difference between a horizontal red-and-black flag and a diagonal red-and-black flag. Mostly I found myself willing the poem not to work, and the more the poem refused to work, the more the rest of life became conceivable, became copious—not built from “a” life, but slowly growing to become the life in which other lives were entangled and inseparable and together enacted a mode, not a virtue. Mostly no-one in the writing actually read the writing—those the writing was for, of, from, about—and so, a kind of anti-literature of life.

How broad can something be; how much can a form hold before the form is compromised; how inclusive can a poem, a movement, an insurrection be before its “aim” is completely diffused? Brecht wished that volumes of poetry would be printed smaller so that you could keep them in your pocket, but Hilary Creek questioned how the police could have found a pair of gloves “impregnated” with explosives in the pockets of a pair of her trousers when the trousers concerned were proven to have no pockets. “These trees don’t take comfort in less sky,” wrote the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos, before being imprisoned in 1967 and exiled to the island of Samos by the military junta, for his allegiances to the National Liberation Front. In the early ’80s, the National Liberation Front was recognized as a “resistance movement” and “organization” by the Greek state, its members honoured and provided with state pensions.

In Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, an assistant bookkeeper in a Lisbon fabrics firm records impressions he doesn’t expect to see published. “To see and feel,” he says, “makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary.” Cynicism can be inherently hopeful, inherently utopian—the slow cancellation of the future. “If we don’t believe in possibilities, in a future, or even really in each other except in individual friendships,” writes J, “then of course we will always hold back from the struggle. If no matter what we do we cannot win, but it is within our power to make our lives nice, or at least bearable, we will just focus on that. If there’s no hope, why should we push on when things are hard or challenging or dangerous or scary?” Hope is not the same as optimism or positivity, as looking forwards; hope necessitates a looking backwards and downwards and upwards and sideways, slanted.

Existing poetry’s survival rests on its inability to make itself real. “What is the direct trial of this today for the poet if there has not yet been any poetry, any poetry?” asks Anne Boyer. Antonio Gramsci wrote that to imagine a new kind of society is to imagine a new kind of art, one that we cannot see from where we now stand. A female PKK combatant in the mountains in eastern Turkey unfurled her umbrella when a drone passed overhead. All the other women were killed. So the PKK ordered black umbrellas from Russia. But the trucks were intercepted by the Turkish army, expecting arms, only to find… black umbrellas. To commit to poetry may be to commit not to that which has happened or may happen, but that which has not yet happened or may never happen; not in the form of “anti” something but “for” something else entirely. I caught myself wondering whether poetry, and protest, will begin to add up to something when everyone shares not a principled tolerance towards the actions of others, but a common strategic perception of the situation:

It's a product of liberalism to talk of unconditionally accepting people. I caught myself wondering whether “broadness” in movements and revolution and poetry so often ended in “failure” because so often the only kind of broadness we ever run with is one that tries to approach—to make—everyone the same, rather than recognize our own real or imagined proximities and diffuse subjectivities. “Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination,” wrote Mark Fisher. Community, and collectivity, is not an agreement to share a style. I tried to imagine “a people” of poetry—a people who desire a literature that is not made from literature, who desire a poetry that is not stateless but anti-state, who desire not to gather, share, verify, and discuss information—but to invent information that did not pretend to narrow the gap between information, poetry and the world, despite the growing feeling that information and poetry aren’t actually outside of the world. This imagining rests not on an agreement of content, accessibility, aesthetics or even form, but rather as an ethics of doing—an entanglement, whether the writing was read by those it was for, of, from, about; or not. “Accessible to who?” I wanted to ask for the millionth time.

And so, after speaking in the assemblies, after participating in “direct” democracy, people got in line once again to vote, to reaffirm the democracy of the state. “Democracy” itself becomes an obstacle; “a” people become “the” ex-people, like the lives of two lovers during the “revolutionary years” in Anatoly Mariengof’s The Cynics. We wonder not, “who should I vote for?” but “is this incompatible with my existence?” Yes, reading is a learned and regulated act, but in reading everything is to be begun; not only that, but unlearned, and then at last begun—together. Not collage but montage; a sequencing that suddenly makes sense in relation. J writes, “We have to change the way we see things and develop the culture that underlies, not the form.”

The evening doesn’t harbor the gold savanna also — feeling
hurt bound by elegant M and the-man-who-wants-faceless-mother-
slaves isn’t in evening (an emotion is after its origin, only, but there is
no time except ‘its’ [possession] — evening is in the motion?)
 
                                                                                     —Leslie Scalapino

This writing was my first failure. By now the wasp that had been so earnestly pressing itself up against the glass lay dead at the bottom left-hand corner of the window. Too many attempts to be meaningful; the mute image that cannot speak for itself. I caught myself no longer wanting to employ the quotation mark for revolution, for protest, for poetry—no more attempts to reinvigorate their power or strangeness or extra-terrestrial existence alongside “normality,” which became itself the “it” holding itself apart from the space of everyday life, the space of the literature of a life that both worked and resisted work. Shots of blurred outlines hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light, shots of ourselves walking along the rug as it is pulled out from underneath our feet, shots of letterboxes where there should have been a lake. It was only in failure that cohesion no longer began to matter, and so we began to read. No getting “outside of” anything. Outside of what.

———

A note on the title: ‘Where the Image Itself Senses’ is borrowed from 3 Summers by Lisa Robertson: “Walking between the field and the last houses at 10 p.m. / holding the lilacs aloft like a torch / its vital sense of pause / everything will be hesitation / the acts of transposition / muscular, tactile, olfactory / where the image itself senses.”

A note on the text: Alongside that already attributed, words/lines/ideas/images have been used/developed/reworked from the writings/conversations of/with Al, Alison, Bechaela, bpNichol, Cai, Calum, Clémence, CrimethInc., Dilar Dirik, Eleni, Sergei Eisenstein, El Errante, Mark Fisher, Flo, Donal Foreman, Haukur, Lyn Hejinian, Jas, Jazra, Jenni, Joe, Bhanu Kapil, Oleksandr Kolchenko, The Kootenay School of Writing, Lewis, Lucy, Mari, Matti, Jonathan McAloon, Kirill Medvedev, Anna Mendelssohn, Yedda Morrison, Nuit à Bout Action Committee, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Muriel Rukeyser, Alexey Samoedov, Oleg Sentsov, Vadim Shershenevich, Juliana Spahr, Michael Taussig, Paul Torino, Ivan Verstyuk, Volodymyr, Void Network, Fred Wah, Rosemarie Waldrop, Harsha Walia, Simone Weil, Adrian Wohlleben, C.D. Wright, Stephanie Young.