The Portal of Lost Wanting

Storming the Subjective Turn

Bourgeois Sentiment

Art is a privilege, a blessing, a relief.  Privilege means that you are a favorite, that what you do is not completely to your credit, not completely due to you, but is a favor conferred upon you.  Privilege entitles you when you deserve nothing.  Privilege is something you have and others don’t.  Art was a privilege given to me, and I had to pursue it, even more than the privilege of having children.  The whole art mechanism is the result of many privileges, and it was a privilege to be part of it…The privilege was the access to the unconscious.  It is a fantastic privilege to have access to the unconscious.  I had to be worthy of this privilege, and to exercise it.  It was a privilege also to be able to sublimate.  A lot of people cannot sublimate.  They have no access to their unconscious. — Louise Bourgeois, from Statements from an Interview with Donald Kuspit

Don'T BEE a'TOYiN'BEE wi' meeee

so i did this reading at Toynbee Studios the other night, Friday, as part of Chris Goode’s LEAN UPSTREAM festival, where i was reading.  read alongside Caroline Bergvall, whose performance was extremely hot / so subtle, a joke that was funny and sexy and smart that became total amour.  reflecting on my reading now i start thinking of all the terrible things i did.  odd words of condolence for bad work come spilling out.  someone is crying.  but what can i do, impossible to leave myself alone, i’m a Cynic, it’s like a low-fi version of a Protestant, who is the less-fragrant version of an Anglican, and they all wish they were Catholic.  i don’t know if we talk enough about the feeling-bad-ness that goes along with being an artist these days.  is that because millionaire artists don’t seem to be having that bad a time?  being allowed to earn money within the free market system is just another way of saying ‘choose your own destiny’, which is to say ‘choose your own life’, which is to say ‘be responsible for the choices that you make’.  but i speak from a time of having more than enough than i need, and i cannot have what i have in a sense that does not incorporate the economic provenance of that having.  and so, to speak of a totality is always hypocrisy, even if your discussion of it omits the first person singular.  especially so, then.  but lies are more entertaining.  also significantly more expensive.

Capitalism will not really be a system to us, and we can really not discuss it as such, until it is over.  But it’s hard to view capitalism as anything other than the living, breathing evidence of people’s values, the body of which we are the mind, and in that sense, in flux all of the time, not beginning or ending.  I want to believe that the collapse of values is reversible, but if capitalism is not a system and cannot be overthrown, then perhaps the mistaken word at work here is ‘overthrow’, and the jargonist’s error is in his speed.  Please excuse the jargon.  It’s creeping in all about the place.  I PREFER TO USE THE WORD ‘MODIFIED’.  Speed is impossible in every place but bed.

We don’t live in Capitalism the way we live in London.

All i want is for poems to be more loving.  [DIGRESSION FOR FIVE: but that would mean that i’m making a distinction between artists who can afford to live by their art, and artists who can not.  i don’t want to make this distinction anymore.  it’s too simple.  there are artists who can afford to live but have no time to make art, there are artists who can’t afford to live by their art because they live by their office job, and on the other hand you can be making insupportable shit but getting away with it because you know how to operate in society.  like JFK.  you read the CIA transcripts of things from the 60s and they’re all, ‘yeah, he was a really nice guy,’ and ‘that dude, he was a nice guy!’  ‘that President dude man was an awfully nice man.  we had some marvelous feasts.’]  i mean, ‘artist’ these days is actually a word that pertains to Damien Hirst.  wait, are you okay, what happened back there? it seems like the kind of thing we only discuss in our intimate moments - our badness.  but really, what does it mean to be really bad?  is it good to be several floors up in the middle of the night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it?  the lights are on, but nobody’s etc.  they all could see me, in my words, as if stripped in a granny chair.  my hair a bale.  someone wondered whether it was brave, i don’t know, but on that theme i certainly recognised bravery in Jonny Liron’s performance [of Chris’ O Vienna].  something that is utterly humiliating and sexual at the same time, Marcelle pissing in the cupboard, me reading poetry, Jonny uncertainly crouched over the floor, hopeful, unwilling, vulnerable.  over dinner after the show at the table we all agreed that Jonny’s performance had made us feel tenderness.  astounding to be able to use that word in such a context, given that the performance involved an unwilling act of autoerotism that never exploited its audience’s presence, that was vulnerable and awkward.  then i tuck myself back into my sweater and wonder, what happened back there? and i bite at my teeth that never give. it’s funny though because when i’m trying to describe Chris’ work to people i say, ‘it always makes me cry’.  fear and trembling, forgive me for being old-fashioned.  when i heard that O Vienna was going to contain x-treme nudity and such, i knew i would not be expected to cry, but i did not anticipate finding myself feeling as close to tears on the tears-spectrum as i did.

I saw Jeremy Hardingham’s Unfolding King Lear in Cambridge the week before.  they kicked the play’s ass, as much as it kicked theirs, and ours.  King Lear is l o n g , and the way JH’s actors played it, sometimes tripping over their tongues to make the endless white pages of script that they clutched in their hands disperse more quickly, meant that you became actively maddened and involved over the course of its blatantly accumulating length, rather than bored and alienated, as you would if you had seen it at the RSC.  as if the play were making you mad along with it.  the actors pulled dozens of acrobatic linguistic tricks spanning all different styles of discourse and moods and pulled basically all of them off (my favourite the Coxcomb speech played in the style of a Beat-Poet-poetry-reading-with-sax, cox-ccooohhhmb).  and i had the pleasure of being in the front row of Act 1 to watch JH’s Lear, his cheeks shiny and dripping with gobs of Vaseline, stuttering his decrees, feeding a heap of beautiful trifle off a two-and-a-half-foot spoon into his daughter’s mouth, and stuffing a fat train of pearls with his fist into her other mouth, then having her cough them out into her hand as she mouthed her love.  and Cordelia, painted with inches-thick white paint and scarlet lips, whose words were lost on hurricanes of vortex silence.

hold your gun like a pen?

Imagine this.  That you’re in your room reading a Raymond Williams essay online, and suddenly

The cops sweep in with machine guns and arrest your ass for accessing inflammatory material

i dream of age[nie]ncy

Iran Documents

For those of you who asked to hear my thoughts - this post links to writings from my two-week trip to Iran, mostly collected by hand in my journal and transcribed after the fact.

I was able to make this trip thanks to funding from the Harper-Wood Studentship at St. John’s College in Cambridge, which I held for 2008-9.  It marks the end of a year of reading and researching Iranian history and poetry as part of an attempt to improve my own poetic practice.  My original intention had been to go in May and June 2009, and I had enrolled myself into the University of Tehran’s Farsi program for the purpose - - but of course, the elections June 12th meant that all visa applications for trips scheduled during that time were denied.  At the time (May), I assumed that my application had been denied as the result of some personal administrative fault.  But I’ve been reliably informed since that this was not the case.  And I got my visa in the end…on condition that I wouldn’t study anything whilst I was over there.

Tehran 25.9.9

Yazd 25.9.9
Yazd 26.9.9

HAIR

TRAFFIC

Yazd/Isfahan 27.9.9
Isfahan 28.9.9

NOSE JOBS

Isfahan 29.9.9
Helpful Hints from the Qur’an

Isfahan 29.9.9_ii
Isfahan 30.9.9

Shiraz 1.10.9

Tehran 3.10.9

Tehran 3.10.9

In Museum of Contemporary Art. The first thing you see after passing through security are two portraits of current Iranian religious leaders, well-lit and at angles facing the entrance. The speakers are playing hideously chirpy, saxophonic easy listening, the kind that makes me want to puke. Feel I can’t sit here for too long as there are guards patrolling and watching and they are probably on government payroll.

Saw a motorbike bandits robbery this morning! On a street near the British Embassy, where one of the central banks has its headquarters. I hear a man shouting. ‘It’s a thief,’ says Hasib, and I see two men on a motorcycle – marauding motorcycle bandits! – tearing off down the street after having stolen a briefcase from a man who had just left the bank. A few people chased them on foot to no avail. A policeman threw his baton (pretty lame response all things considered) which missed, and fell near my feet - - the bike swerved down the street and the thief caught my astonished eye and he had mean slitty black eyes and dark golden skin JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES. And in light of this event, I think to myself, it would be so cool to get shot. I know, I know, it’s dumb, I know, but all the same – to be where that action is, to be bodily transformed by it – how fast my blood would run!

In the 4am taxi on the way to the airport I watch a streetcleaner trying to club a fox to death with his broom. But surely darkest of all, when I wake up in the middle of the night to get said taxi, I find the door to my room unlocked and ajar. Luckily I had fastened the chain as a paranoid afterthought before bed.

This was the only time I really felt vulnerable during my stay in Iran (and at that, after the fact). Many people along the way asked me whether their country is hated in the rest of the world. Not exactly, I usually replied, but admitted that many people questioned the motives of my trip. It’s crazy though, and you realize it the second you arrive: Iran is a country with people living in it. Incredible as it may seem, that’s your base point.  Diplomacy is bollocks. Diplomacy = a handful of people making decisions in mirrored rooms, full of lion-skin rugs, about things that they have no personal experience of and which negatively affect the lives of ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives.

I am thankful that I live in the West, among its loose morals and freedom of speech, thought and action. There are a thousand social, cultural and political aspects of the West that I find utterly vile, but I would rather that choice existed, and I’m grateful for my choices, and for the opportunities granted to me by these freedoms.  Reminds me, in negative form, of something that someone at the Iran Democracy Project in California said to me last year about what it feels like to live under those political conditions: ‘With every passing day, I expected less of myself, and society expected less of me.’  The primary foundation of my self-understanding is a sense of possibility and the changing boundaries of my own agency - and I now understand that, comparatively speaking, this is a privilege.  It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Shiraz 1.10.9

Not much moved by Shiraz, or Hafez’ tomb, or the sacked Persepolis (which is more or less an empty site, there’s more of Persepolis in Tehran than there is in Persepolis), or the hollering, leering men who lurk in every corner, inexplicably, despite my hijab and garbage-bag-sized covering.  How many boyfriends, husbands, are you alone. Although I was befriended by the loveliest Iranian family today in the Narenjestan Palace, their 19-year old daughter speaks fluent English and has one of the wisest worldviews I’ve ever witnessed in a human being, let alone one under 20.  She had worked as an intern at a television station translating broadcasts, but quit because she couldn’t bear translating things that were blatantly untrue.  ‘I knew that if I carried on working there, everything I believed in would fall apart,’ she said.  My kind of girl. [Pause to recall brief employment in venture capital.]  Her parents didn’t speak any English, so all I could say to them was ‘mersi’, over and over, as they continually offered me things, invited me places, escorted me around and generally made sure I was always comfortable.  And both emanating this quiet gentleness and care, something that I have noticed in Iranian people before.  Care upheld by an inner quietness, a something full of sadness but also a weird nobility, as if excellent principles, high moral standards, and hardships were visible in a person’s way of carrying themselves.

The picture above right shows the walls of Narenjestan Palace, whose damage originates with the first Shah.  He wanted to use the palace as a prison.  But he didn’t want the prisoners to enjoy the beautiful wall paintings.  So he had them covered over with plaster.  Idiot?

next

Isfahan 30.9.9

I am sitting in Isfahan, off Emam Square in a caravanserai at ‘Wellcom to Resturant’ restaurant, and I am giving myself no chores of fearful new travel except from within my own brain as all of this writing is adjusting me, and feels so good.  It has been a painful bunch of years, with good moments, beautiful moments, many of them, but more generally directionless and despairing about language and the poems slowing to a trickle and all the failed relationships and plans and obsessions and stupid supervisors. Linda Thompson’s song keeps running through my head, ‘It’s a life, a life, a weary old life, it’s better to be single than be a married wife’. Ha ha ha [deadpan].  Can anyone explain to me about facial tissues?  I mean, how are they different from facial tissue? And whilst we’re here: what is the value of secrets?  Why do we keep them?  Children here are unspeakably cute.  Sweet little chubby-cheeked little fatty cuties EVERYWHERE.

Bedtime at last having abused myself with tea and sugar and smoke.  Never understand those who remain beautiful even as they go hardcore.  Day full of mild melancholy. Blame sugar, try to.  I think that may be the right thing to do.  Such beautiful and delicious poisons abound.

next

Isfahan 29.9.9_ii

Aadil has left.  I am in a secret teahouse smoking a water-pipe after an entire day contemplating the evils of money.  Yesterday I phoned Hasib to ask him for another half day with Aadil, and he agreed, but then today when Aadil called him he said he could not pay for any more time.  Wait, I have poems to write.  [Pause for poems.]  Now they are exhausted, poor poems.  So much harder to write them these days, now that I am not excessively young, and am slowed by internet (its fetid possibility eats time, you know).   So anyway, after some discussion of Hasib’s meanness, Aadil says, I take you for tour anyway because you are like my daughter, I don’t want you to have a bad experience, just pay what you like, and so all day in back of facts and sights my mind is counting, rate per hour with car, number of hours counting, suggest some amount, some time to finish.  My first thought is that Hasib is screwing Aadil, and screwing me.  Then over the course of the day the thought turns, as I continue to count things and to make estimates, Aadil is screwing Hasib, and screwing me.  I decide, no matter what, to give him fifty bucks, as he spends so long showing me things and explaining their provenance and all sorts of things, and it is less than his rate but almost all the currency I have left.

I ask Aadil many questions about Sunnis and Shi’ites, and religious practices, and about the origins of various disputes.  For example, the Assassins (or Hashashin – they loved the reefer) of Alamut, crazy Ismaelis who take over Isfahan’s Atashgah fire temple (which we climbed this afternoon, below left) in the 11th century, were outlaws on the basis that they believed in seven imams, rather than the more widely affirmed twelve.

And the whole Sunni-Shi’ite divide apparently originates in a dispute over Ali, whom the Shi’ites believe was the first imam, whereas Sunnis believe that Ali is merely the fourth caliph. No shit! People have died - still die - over this stuff. ‘Your first imam is my fourth caliph, go hang!’ is like the 11th century equivalent of Yo Mama.  Also, anyone can convert to Islam, and will be welcomed, supposedly by Allah. But if a Muslim converts to another religion, he will burn in hell.  Errrr, Islamic hell (possibly presided over by the likes of this Qajar-era Satan (above right, not left, ha ha), who I think looks deeply huggable).

Towards six o’clock I begin to grow irate as my blood sugar is low and I want to be alone, pay money and be rid of this Aadil and his strange way of talking, becoming increasingly irate as men ask if I want to look at carpets, where I am from, fuck you all, I think, I hate what money brings us to – our knees, yapping and barking like fuckheaded dogs.  Anyway he shows me this and that restaurant, this and that kebab house, all horrible, empty, vile, soulless places just waiting for a tourist type to rock up.  But then finally a little sign over a little door in a little passageway off the little covered bazaar and the caravanserai opens up to reveal this little teahouse teeming with young Iranian couples, all puffing away on water-pipes.  It is hidden, secret, says Aadil, and I can’t wait for him to leave because I feel a poem is coming and I want all transactions to be over.  I hand the rials over in a little Persian Gardens flyer.  He studies them gravely. Really Marianne (Marr-y-on), if you need it, you should keep it, he says.  Oh whatever, I say.   It’s just money, and I want you to have what is fair.  I see he is troubled.  I remember he had said earlier that his father gave him land, and that he lives in a big house that he built himself, ‘400m squared’, and pays no rent.  He gifts me a book of Hafez sonnets. We talk a little. He asks me where I will live whilst I am studying, with my parents?  I say, no, I will rent an apartment.  Do your parents give you money?  No, I say.  I have a job, and university funding.  He is troubled.  We talk some more.  If you would like, he says, I will pay for your dinner.  I would like to invite you, he says.  He goes to pay.  I pay for everything, he says, and I tell the man you may like to stay for an hour or two to write. He seems to have found a way to balance our transaction according to what he believes is fair, which induces a feeling in me akin to being moved, finding love of fairness such a rare human quality. And I can only agree, as I am young and have nothing to my name, and I do not know what ten dollars means to him, and moreover, now that I am in Iran instead of California, do not know what it means to me either.

I was similarly amazed by the taxi driver in Yazd, middle-aged and overweight, who insisted on walking with me up the Tower of Silence in the sweltering midday desert heat, and spoke to me all the while in Farsi, and at the end of the trip refused the tip I offered, and even returned some of my money. This may, of course, have been an exchange for the vague incident of bum-clutching, which was so neutral in tone that I still wonder if it really wasn’t a genuine attempt to help me climb a particularly treacherous bit of rock. I found out later that it is common for thieves on motorcycles to chase lone tourists up the Tower and steal their money, and so was even more grateful to this taxi driver, who accompanied me merely out of concern for my safety (and his fare, I suppose – o! cynicism), and who taught me how to say ‘pigeon’ in Farsi (kaboutar).

This elyan (water-pipe) is delicious and I am puffing like Alice’s caterpillar, and all the single boys are staring, either because I am smoking like a man, or because I am blonde and strange, or both. After the balance has been redressed, I can feel that a pressure has been relieved, for both of us. Aadil tells me a few things. That he studied Freud at university, and that, due to his ‘scientific mind’, he accepts all religions, and does not practice Islam the way that most Muslims do. He has translated Freud’s essays, but cannot publish, due to ‘social problems,’ and says he must regularly not tell people what he truly thinks. And especially could not do so during his time as a teacher. This is why I love this teahouse, I say. I prefer the hidden things.

next