ILLUSIONS
Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s flight.When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The wild dissipation,And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world, –
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1876
via wikimedia
Cease to exist giving my goodbye
Driving my car into the ocean
You think I’m dead but I sail awayOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
WaveKissed the mermaids rode the El Niño
Walk in the sand with the crustaceans
I’ve found my way to MarianaOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
WaveOn a wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Wave
Wave—The Pixies
I was thinking of these because of a poem I stumbled on recently, which you can read here and which is alright and which struck me as an odd combination of the aesthetic of the oceanic and that of the zombie. It also made me recall the ones above and it made me want to post them again. Again after more than ten years since I first found the Emerson in an assigned cheap paperback collection of American verse, laughed to myself at how similar it seemed to the song, and then decided to throw the two up on a page of juxtaposition on tripod.com. (A page that has long since dissipated itself into some sort of more ethereal realm of disappearance.)
Evan Calder Williams has written extensively about what’s at stake in the zombie film, especially here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Go read these, if you haven’t already. Back? Good. Feel free to keep all of that in mind when thinking about the poems above, because I won’t be getting very far into the zombie element of these particular examples of the oceanic. Instead, I’m going to work at the oceanic side. I’m sure I picked up the term from this post, but since I have read very little Atwood, no Lacan, and have nothing to say about the Symbolic, I’m going to be simply using this as a term to describe an aesthetics of fluidity, motion, mixing, sound and noise, depth vs. surface, and a possibly threatening surround.
So? What’s at stake here? An aesthetic convergence or posing of a certain problem: how to present existent, concrete things as not definite things, but rather mutable and mutating—sliding, dipping, dropping, and rising within some sort of fluid that contains them, shifts them, destroys them, changes them.
And in both, the desire to be inside of this.
Furthermore to know how to know that one is already inside of it.
As an aesthetic fantasy, it is another example of a perspective of coincident self-nihilation and self-infinitization.
In Emerson, it is what I imagine to be the surfer’s fantasy—to ride the edge of a loss of control, to lose it again and again, and to return stronger.
The Pixies present an almost Ballardian fragment of post-fantasy: the car is dead, the beaches and weather are a dull postcard, but a strange ocean of pain remains.
As does the desire to dissipate into it. Though the sense that the oceanic is the cosmic has slipped—hidden by the addition of that -il syllable, that shift from the waves of mutation to the waves of mutilation. If Emerson presents the joy of the breaking crest, the Pixies convey the inexorable pull of the trough.
To me, all this is against Calvino:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974)
Possibly it is a choice of elements—water versus fire—but both the oceanic and the infernal share the sense of a raging turmoil that already exists. No, against this particular vision of the inferno not out of either a rejection of the diagnosis, or by taking Calvino’s first path of some sort of realist acceptance that this particular constellation of infernal suffering is the only possible version of the inferno of life and therefore it must be accepted. (Hardly. No such constellation is static. Which is one of the points of the oceanic aesthetic.) But rather against this because the account of people-who-are-not-inferno is flattery to the reader and not necessarily helpful.
Estrangement and alienation are better as techniques of perception than as lifestyle techniques. Having space to be with others in resistance and endurance is sometimes necessary, but for what? Is it enough to survive and in such survival oppose oneself to this raging world out of pain, anger, refusal, hate, fear? I don’t think it is. And is such self-removal even possible?
The oceanic aesthetic in its cosmic variation posits no points or beings outside the fluid, mutating substance. This is distinct from environment as an aesthetic and from atmospherics. The environmental aesthetic is like a slow-motion version of the oceanic—it proposes unavoidable interlacings, conjunctions, and non-separation of micro and macro scales, but generally through the lens of gradually shifting, temporally finite entities. The environment is the perspectival and physical world of an individual, certainly in its derivations from Uexküll it is this.
Atmospherics is the fascination and dread of the cloud, the gas, the storm.
Nothing that one could choose to plunge into, but rather an inescapable un-form of elements that overwhelm us in earthly yet inhuman ways.
The oceanic is also distinct from what I think the dominant aesthetic of this moment is—the immersive. The immersive is about projecting some self into a new ludic terrain, the oceanic is about losing a sense of surety in this self and gaining a sense of being caught up in a surrounding, moving, mixed environment.
Anyway, Benjamin Noys in discussing Ballard wrote some pretty worthwhile sentences that I feel are worth quoting:
The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)
——Better Living through Psychopathology
Ballard, Calvino—two midcentury men looking at roughly a half-century of Freudianism and modernism and a vision of the twentieth century in part as a problem of the coincidence of drastic, traumatic horror with banal, everyday life. And so social life itself, this protean force, becomes the inferno of suffering, reality is overpopulated with fictions, abstractions, surplus aura, and supposedly there aren’t any values.
Calvino says: retreat, resist, endure. Ballard quotes Conrad and says: swim.
But I want to pretend for a moment. Jump back subjectively to Emerson or to the 1920s—
What if part of the point is to take on this shifting perspective of involution & externalization in order to better swim within the waves that already exist but offer no firm shores. But not just swim. Rather to train oneself to see this reality of seemingly static forms of objects as really real while at the same moment to know these objects as Gestalten of perception and flux. Because there was no time when reality was free of fiction, because reality is always newly made and self-making.
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