The Vanity of Small Differences

A couple of weeks ago  I managed to catch Grayson Perry's show at Manchester City Art Gallery, The Vanity of Small differences the day before it closed. I realised that I knew very little about his work; it struck me me just how much work had dominated life over the past 25 years, and the extent to which contemporary cultural life had simply passed me by. There is an element of personal choice here too, I like the art of the past, I have written and read quite a bit of poetry, I have travelled en famille, and photographed places - particularly around the Mediterranean, seen some stunning places and eaten great food overlooking the Med from Spain to Greece. I suppose the latest Coen brothers movie, who's won the Turner and Booker prizes - what heartfelt novel is exciting the cocktail bars of Islington, I treated with a bit of bourgeiose, boorish disdain. What I'm saying, I guess, is have I missed out?

Grayson Perry's work is very direct and engaging. He explains the ideas behind  The Vanity of Small differences on the Channel Four web-site more succunctly than I could ever hope to.

The exhibition was interesting for three reasons. Firstly, from a personal standpoint, his 'Rake's Progress updated', charts the diaspora hidden behind upward social mobility in a way that is immediately recognisable to me.

Just from the description I've given above as to what I've been up to in recent years, you can tell that the dining room I'm sitting in right now, typing away at the computer in the corner - is just like the one in the tapestry; - my i- phone to hand - just like in the tapestry; the abstract art on the wall....the penchant for bruschetta... Yes, Mr. Perry is spot-on in his observation of social mores. His approach is comedic - what a touch of genius to depict Jamie Oliver as the god of social mobility peering down from the heavens!

There is humour, but also pathos. The figures of Tom Rakewell, 'nouveau riche computer whizz-kid' and his middle class bride, are taken from Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,(1426/7) in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. That upward mobility may involve loss, as well as gain is signalled by the way the female figure clutches a copy of Paradise Lost. Wry humour perhaps, but anyone who has crossed class and cultural boundaries will recognise the sense that one imperfect world is being swapped for another, and in a sense you belong to neither.

This was captured the other week by Professor Robert Hudson in his session on cultural identity. He handed out an excerpt from Michael Ignatieff's  The Broken Path, (1988):

This century has made migration, expatriation and exile the norm, rootedness the exception....

If we add social mobility as well as cultural mobility to the mix, then indeed migration is the norm. Is the whole 'Voceti' project an attempt to re-capture a sense of englishness that I feel I have lost, or even to search to see if such a notion has any meaning now at all?

The second aspect of Perry's work which interests me is his return to tradition, form and representation. Much of the art of the past half century has been either conceptual - piles of brick; or dada inspired art occurrences - happenings, flash mobs, psychogeographical/situationalst space invasions, objet trouve; or self-referential explorations of materials. It is refreshing to engage with pictures that tell stories using the tricks dreamed up since the the Renaissance, pictures that challenge people to think about how they live and the kind of society we are creating. Serious arrt with mass appeal using tapestry! Bravo Mr Perry!

The final point I suppose, is well, I would say that wouldn't I - mixing received form with contemporary social situations; using modern idioms within a traditional genre...that's what I'm trying to do surely. Look at Trio, for instance - doomed couple trapped by circumstance.... a melange of poetic forms woven together to emulate beat free verse, but adhering to metrical patterns, pop culture and 'street talk' referenced all the time, the whole thing framed by 24/7 connectivity.  It can be done, and I think, like Perry's work, it can engage a broader readership.

Studying Cultural Landscapes

Robertson, Iain, and Penny Richards, eds., Studying Cultural Landscapes, (London: Arnold, 2003)

The introduction and first chapter of Robertson and Richards survey of developments in the study of Cultural Landscapes gives a  useful overview of this emerging subject since the 1950's. Such 'a precis' is invaluable for interdisciplinary scholarship as it provides summaries which enable researchers to grasp the 'big picture' across differing areas of knowledge.

The introduction covers developments in studying landscape as 'cultural product' and 'cultural processes'. Rather than simply summarise these I have decided to illustrate the content by choosing a number of key quotes.

1. Cultural Products.

Landscape is never simply or purely aesthetic, but it is also ideological: that is to say the ideas of beauty we have inherited [...] in fact encode deep social needs, sometimes asserting and sometimes obscuring relations in power and wealth. (p.1)

In viewing landscape as cultural product a number of approaches can be noted. The earliest scholars such as Sauer (1925) defined landscape as: ' a land shape in which the shaping is by no means thought of as simply physical .... an area made up of distinct association of forms both physical and cultural'. (p.2)

Whilst acknowledging that Sauer does not concentrate wholly on the physical aspects of landscape, the editors assert, that along with many early landscape historians, Sauer understates the significance of symbolic elements within landscape. The starting point for their survey is the approach taken by English cultural geographers, Cosgrove and Daniels, developed further in the Work late last century by Everson and Williams, Hooke and Muir. Whereas landscape historians purport to take an objective view, the approach of cultural geographers is subjective, treating both real and imaginary landscapes as representations. Like Raymond Williams in the groundbreaking The Country and the City, landscapes are perceived as cultural products.

As such landscape is a political as well as cultural product:

Landscapes, then, reveal, represent and symbolise the relationships of power and control out of which they have emerged and the human processes that have transformed them and continue to transform them...and hide the social, political, economic and spiritual behind a placid surface.

It is important that in the same way that the meanings and values of the dominant group are visible in the landscape, then the meanings, values of resistance and alternative cultures can also be written.
(p. 4)

Theorists adopted methodologies developed in the mid twentieth century in art history - iconography and iconology - and applied them to the analysis of symbolic landscapes.

Critically, this symbolic methodology does not deny the visuality of landscape but seeks to reveal values and meanings written into these visual images by a culture group. (p 5)

Some theorists have developed this further, drawing on literary and media theory to interpret landscape as a text, and introduce, particularly in the work of Duncan and Duncan, the notion of intertextuality, which acknowledges that existing material and other texts influence the reconstruction or reading of the landscape text.

Work within literary theory, particularly relating to polyvocality lead to the notion of polyvisuality being proposed by Kinnaird and Seymour (2000). Feminist scholars have sought to decode 'gendered landscapes' asserting that landscape is capable of being interpreted simultaneously in different ways depending upon the cultural or gender bias of the interpreter.

Debates relating to the relationship between mental and material landscapes have lead some commentators such as Mitchell to criticise seeing landscape as a cultural product as being too static, and an alternative theoretical framework has been proposed which explores landscape as a cultural process.

2. Cultural Process.

Whilst we can recognise within cultural geography 'a shift from textual interpretation of the working of these texts to an interpretation of the working of these texts in popular cultural practice' (Crouch,2000) it is within the fields of archaeology and anthropology that the notion of landscape as a cultural process finds its most consistent expression. (...) This leads commentators such as Ingold (1993) to reject the notion of landscape as a cultural or symbolic construct as it falsely separates the mental and material world. (p. 7)

For Ingold  landscape is a product of 'dynamic dwelling'; he coined the phrase 'taskscape' to capture this notion, a term taken up by other scholars who assert 'the landscape is never built, it is always work in progress.

Tilly (1994) then goes on to develop a sophisticated understanding of landscape which draws in 'the spirit of the place, the social and individual times of memory, paths and narratives in order to conclude 'a landscape is a series on named locales,. (p.8)

For Seymour (2000) 'Landscape does not simply mirror or distort the underlying social social relations but needs to be understood as enmeshed within processes which shape how the world is organised, experienced and understood. (p.8)

3. (Re)reading architectural landscapes.

In chapter one Iain S Black sketches the broad outline of the way architecture has been regarded as a key element within landscape.

Whereas the 'Berkeley School' concentrated on architectural history, largely ignoring the social and cultural function of buildings - particularly houses - during the 1980's and 1990's the work of Cosgrove and Jackson focused on the social and political aspects of buildings and increasingly treated them either as 'texts' or configurations of symbols and signs.

Applying Barthes idea of revealing layers of ideological sediment, Duncan and Duncan (1988) analysed landscapes in order to reveal power relations and cultural codes: 'landscapes serve to neutralise asymmetrical power relations and cultural codes thus serving to stabilise variation through hegemonic practice. (p.23)

Baker in Ideaology Landscape in Historical Perspective (1992) defines three purposed for landscape:

a. Quest for order - assertion of a world view through simplification
b. Assertion of authority - struggle for power between conflicting groups.
c. A project of totalisation, whereby ideologies offer an overall representation of society and, in consequence a reconstruction of existing power relationships (via Utopian planning projects, for example).

Having set out in the opening sections the broad currents within the study of cultural landscapes the remainder of the book applies these approaches to different disciplines and areas of study - poetry, film, identity, diaspora for example.

The book concludes with a useful subject related glossary.

It is summarised on Amazon as follows:

The land in which we live both shapes us and we shape it: Physically, by means of cultivation and building, and imaginatively, by projecting onto it our aspirations and fantasies of wealth, refuge, well-being, awe, danger and consolidation. From the earliest civilisations, humans have exhibited a need to connect with the world around them by transforming land into landscapes.


Studying Cultural Landscapes combines a collection of lively and engaging essays covering the symbolic reading of a wide variety of landscapes. It offers historical, cultural, political, visual and poetic perspectives, offering analyses of landscape forms from the rural to the celluloid.

The Bow and the Lyre - random quotes!

The problem with reading for purpose is you tend to start a book half knowing what you are looking for and  miss interesting points that the writer makes because they don't fit  your aims. I suppose it is a major downside to reading for research  So, as I was reading The Bow and the Lyre I constantly was assailed by ideas that I did not really have time to fully absorb. Rather than let them simply slip by, I kept a note of them by sticking a 'post-it' on the page. I thought it might be interesting  just to pull together a few of my favourites.

*It is not the poet's task," says Gardia Bacca, "to tell things as they happened, but as we would liked them to happen." The realm of poetry is the "I wish." The poet is "a man of desires." Indeed, poetry is desire. But that desire is not articulated in the possible, or in the likely. The image is not the "likely impossible," desire for impossibles: poetry is hunger for reality. Desire always aspires to suppress distances,  as seen in the desire par excellence the amorous impulse. The image is the bridge that desire places between man and reality (p. 54)

The Poetic Revelation

..absence and presence, silence and the word, emptiness and plenitude are poetic states as well as religious and amorous ones. (p 125)

After creation, the poet is alone: now it is others, the readers, who are going to create themselves in re-creating the poem. The experience is repeated but in reverse: the image opens up to reader and shows him its translucent abyss. The reader leans forward and plunges. And yet as he falls--or as he ascends, as he penetrates the chambers of the image and abandons himself to the flow of the poem he breaks away from himself to enter "another himself" previously unknown and ignored. The reader like the poet, becomes an image: something that is projected and separates from itself and goes on the the encounter of the unnameable. In both cases the poetic is not something that is outside, in the poem,  or inside, in us, but something that we make and that makes us. (p. 151)  

Now, how can poetising not be a judgement our original fault or defect, if it has been agreed precisely that poetry is a revelation of our fundamental condition? This condition is essentially defective, for it consists in contingency and finitude. We are astonished at the world because it presents itself to us as the strange, "the inhospitable"; the world's indifference to us stems from the fact that in its totality it has no meaning other than that which our possibility of being gives it; and this possibility is death, because, "as soon as a man enters life he is already old enough to die." From birth on, our living is a permanent being in the strange and inhospitable, a radical malaise....lack is our original condition because originally we are lack of being. (p.132)

Moreover, no one "is in history," as if history were one "thing" and we, before it, another: we are all history and we all make it together.

The history of modern poetry is that of the continuous dichotomy of the poet, torn between the modern conception of the world and the sometimes intolerable presence of inspiration.

Man is plurality and dialogue.

And in truth inspiration is not any-where, it simply is not, nor is it a thing: it is an aspiration, a moving, a forward thrust: towards that which we ourselves are. Thus, poetic creation is the exercise f our freedom, of our decision to be.   (pp. 147 - 149)

And in truth inspiration is not anywhere, it simply is not, nor is it a thing: it is an aspiration, a moving, a forward thrust: towards that which we ourselves are. Thus, poetic creation is the exercise of our freedom, of our decision to be.

The distinctive essence of man does not consist so much of being an entity of words as in this possibility of being "another." And because he is another he is an entity of words. They are one of the means he has to make himself anther. (p.162)

The Consecration of the Instant

The poem traces a line that separates the privileged instant from the temporal current: in that here, and in that now, something begins: a love, a heroic act, a vision of the godhead, a momentary wonder at a tree, or the face of Diana, smooth as a wall of polished stone. That instant is anointed with a special light: it has been consecrated by poetry.......it is an instant packed with all its irreducible particularity, and it is perpetually susceptible to repeating itself in another instant, to re engender itself and illuminating new instants, new experiences with its light. (p.169)

Signs in Rotation.

Technology can foresee these or those changes and, up to a point, construct future realities. In this sense technology can produce the future. None of these marvels will answer the only question man asks himself as a historical being and, I must add, as man: the why and wherefore of changes. [..} Indeed, in proportion to as the future it builds is less and less imaginable and devoid of meaning,

....so it is that everything that once seemed loaded with meaning now appears before our eyes as a series of efforts and conditions that are non-sense (..._ the now is no longer projected into the future: it is an instantaneous always. We are lost among things.  (pp.143-4)

Man does not see the world, he thinks it. (p.258)

We live a present which is fixed and interminable and yet is constantly moving. A floating present. (p.261)

Otto Paz's achievement is to re-imagine consciousness - thought really - as a pervasive inventiveness - and celebrate poetry as its song. His insights into the relationship between religion poetry and the sacred are profound and thought provoking as is his analysis of the position of the poet now, in a secular and increasingly technological world. The Bow and the Lyre is a truly inspirational book.















  

The Bow and the Lyre

Paz, Octavio, The Bow and the Lyre, trans Ruth L C Simms from El Arco y la lira, 2nd edition 1967, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1973).

Just before Christmas I downloaded a copy of Auden's reflections on poetry and criticism  - The Dyers Hand -  as something I should have read long ago if I was serious about writing poetry. However, my eldest daughter bought me Octavia Paz's The Bow and the Lyre as a present, so I read that instead. I will get around to Auden, but I cannot help but feel it will be a different experience having read Paz's work first.

The reason for this is simple and is encapsulated in a single quote:

The Saxons are dissidents of the West, and their most significant creations are eccentric with respect to the central traditions of our civilisation, which is Latin-Germanic (p 68).

Since the only poetry I know is 'Saxon', and every poem I have written draws on the English tradition, and if pushed I woud probably prefer Wordsworth to Blake or Larkin over Dylan Thomas, then the effect of Paz's book was considerable. It was a little like coming across NASA's famous photograph of 'Earthrise' for the first time. The Bow and the Lyre is an ambitious book; it seeks to assert what might be termed a 'Gaia' of the poetic, and to account for mankind's urge towards making poetry in terms of both the psyche and through history.

Impressively these grand intentions rarely lapse into the grandiose or become lost in mystification which is often the allure of the sublime. In a book which does not shy from discussing the supernatural it is the breadth of Paz's knowledge of world  literature, clarity in terms of structure, and the author's careful choice of over-arching themes which sustains interest in a book which  at times enmeshes the reader in intricate argument. . then challenges through sudden, intuitive flashes.

Paz summarised his approach as follows; 'The three parts into which this book has been divided propose to answer these questions: Is there a poetic utterance -the poem - irreducible to any other form of expression? What do poems say? How is poetic utterance communicated?' (p.15)  The nature of poetic language is considered initially. Human conciousness is asserted to to be a state of constant inventiveness, we literally make-up ourselves and the world through language. 'We cannot escape from language [...]  we are their (words) world and they are ours, The nets for catching words are made of words.' (p.21)

However poetic language is different to that of prose:

Poetic creation begins as violence to language. The first act in this operation is the uprooting of words. [...] The second act is the return of the word: the poem becomes an object of participation. [...] The poet and the reader are two moments of a single reality. Alternating in a manner that may b aptly cyclical, their rotation engenders the spark: poetry.' (p.18)

The second inherent characteristic ot the poetic is said to be rhythm,; Paz associates this with an archetypal sense of time. He writes ' Time is not outside of us, nor is it something which passes before us like the hands of a clock: we are time and it is not the years that pass but we ourselves.' (p.46) The ideas explored in chapters 3 - 6 so often remind one of Eliot's Four Quartets -  The contiguous time present and time past in the opening lines of Little Gidding, or the peasants in East Coker lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, 'keeping time, keeping the rhythm in their dancing'.  Exploring the relationship between poetry and the sacred Paz asserts a common root - a sense of 'radical strangeness', but distances poetry from organised religion. He concludes, ' the poet is not a magician, but his conception of language [...] brings him close to magic. The poet bewitches the language by means of rhythm. (p.45)

From this position, having conceived poetry as the 'consecration of the instant', Paz attempts to place this within history. He traces various manifestations of 'the epic,' tracing its development from the early classical era, then contrasting the notion of the tragic found in the Athenian playwrights with later manifestations of the form; Shakespeare and writers of Spanish Golden Age Theatre such as Calderon de la Barca or Lope de Vega, reveals Paz's preference for the epic over the lyric. The central concern of poetry is seen as an exploration of the human condition and it's relationship with notions of the sacred. Examples are drawn largely from the European tradition - Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes - but touch on works from other cultures through a discussion of Aztec myth, The Upanishads and Japanese Noh plays and the haiku of Basho.

The latter part of the book concerns the challenge to poetry and the role of poets from the growth of the bourgeoisie during the Nineteenth Century. Paz. in the chapter 'Ambiguity of the Novel' consider the rise of the form as an inevitable outcome of the emergence of modern sensibilities: ' Irony and humour are the great inventions of the modern spirit. [...]  The novelistic conflict cannot give birth to a tragic art.'  The French novel is seen as the apogee the bourgeois form:  '..no country has such an uninterrupted succession of great novelists, from Laclos to Proust. French society sees itself in those creations, and alternately, divinizes and examines itself. It extols itself, but also judges and condemns itself.' (p. 210)

At this point poetry becomes esoteric, and poets alienated. 'Condemned to live in the substratum of history, the modern poet is defined by loneliness.' (p.213). Paz traces this isolation starting with Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud; Symbolism is presented as a precursor of surrealism which is cast as the most radical modernist attempt to preserve 'the consecration of the instant': 'The surrealist programme - to transform life into poetry and thus to bring about a decisive revolution in spirits, customs and social life'. (p.225). Paz notes that even the novel, that most bourgeois of forms, took a 'poetic' turn in the early twentieth century, notably in the the work of Kafka and Joyce:

The vastest and most powerful work in modern literature is that of Joyce; [...] the story of the fall , wake and resurrection of Tim Finnegan, who is nobody else but the English language. [...] and the book itself and the author are a single voice that flows in a circular discourse: the word, end and beginning of all history. The poem devours the poet.' (p.255)

For all  The Bow and the Lyre's  breadth, erudition and flashes of brilliance it could be said that its concerns are typical of mid-twentieth century modernism. The consideration of poetry in relation to received tradition, concerns about the nature of history and the relation between 'time present and time past' and interest in ritual, magic and myth is, as has been previously noted reminiscent of both Eliot and Pound. The exploration of the relationship between creativity and revolution, interest in Buddhism, a focus on surrealism and French symbolists and other anti-bourgeois art, - all this places the work as a product of its time. However, in three aspects at least, the book has proved prescient.

Paz was conscious that 'the modern age' was one which was 'expiring now'. In the Epilogue - Signs in Rotation - the author peers beyond the curtain of his time to speculate upon issues of concern to what we now term a postmodern age. He writes: 'And still submerged are the poetic worlds waiting to be discovered by an adolescent whose face we shall surely never see.' (p.239). He speculates what some of these new circumstances might be: 'One is the loss of the world image; another the appearance of a vocabulary composed of active signs: technology; still another, the crisis of meanings.' (p.239)

Taking each of these circumstances in turn: the loss of 'world image' is associated here with post Newtonian notions of time and space - 'Everything was a whole. Now space expands and breaks apart; time becomes discontinuous; and the world, the whole, explodes into splinters.(p.240)  However, the future has a habit of unfolding in unexpected ways. Paz's evocation of time fractured anticipates CERN, but not 'Earthrise'. The image of our blue planet seen from the moon, observed daily from the ISS, or glimpsed as a tiny dot by the Cassini spacecraft as it orbited Saturn has engendered a 'global awareness' unimaginable to Octavio Paz writing in 1955. In relation to technology, Paz's speculations do indeed appear more prescient: 'If the world as image disappears, a new reality covers the whole earth. Technology is a reality so powerfully real - visible, palpable, audible, ubiquitous - that the real reality has ceased to be natural or supernatural: industry is our landscape, our heaven and our hell'. (p.241)  Paz associates this new technological reality with a crisis of meaning:

Thus, technology is not properly a language, a system of permanent meanings grounded on a vision of the world. It is a repertoire of signs that possess temporal and variable meanings: a universal vocabulary of activity, applied to the transformation of reality....' (p.243)

The implications of this crisis of meaning for the writer are clear to Paz;  though he couches his conclusions more guardedly, they are strikingly similar to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault's writing from a decade later concerning the 'death of the author' and the indeterminacy of the text.

With the disappearance of the one who speaks and the one who answers, language is annulled. A circular nihilism that ends by destroying itself: the sovereignty of noise.

....In reality every poem is a collective. Intervening in its creation as much or more than the active or passive will of the poet is the language of his time...Later, whether the poet may wish it or not, the proof of his poem's existence is the reader or listener, the real repository of the work, who recreates it and gives it its final meaning as he reads.' (p.256).

Ottavio Paz's achievement in The Bow and the Lyre  is to spin a thread which traces 'the poetic' from its roots in primitive man's rituals and magic, considers its place within culture from antiquity to the modern era, and speculates about its place within a future that appeared increasingly materialistic and technological. In the final paragraph he asserts a common desire that unites mankind across the ages in his need ' to be at one with his creations, to unite with himself and with his fellows: to be the world without ceasing to be himself'. (p.262) Poetry bridges this 'ancient and perpetual split of being' providing a 'momentary reconcilliation'. The final image of the book remind one that for all his learning, the breadth of his knowledge and depth of his intellect, Octavio Paz primarily was a poet; he writes, 'In the poem, being and desire for being come to terms for an instant, like the fruit and the lips'. 

For anyone who is serious about writing poetry The Bow and the Lyre is an inspiration; reading it may not make you a better poet, but it must surely make you a more thoughtful one. It is a profoundly challenging book.

Earth from the Cassini spacecraft