Norman O. Brown: "There is Only Poetry"

At the end of Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown writes: “there is only poetry.” The whole statement reads: “The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.” The passage concludes the book.

What can this mean?

For Brown, poetry seems to make seemingly disparate things appear as a whole. Differences dissolve into a common matrix. He’s thinking of Blake. Especially Blake’s fire. The all consuming fire. Holocaust, sacrifice, fiery oblivion.

In his tenth chapter, “Fire,” Brown qualifies: “The real fire, the chariot of fire, the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought. The real fight, the mental fight; poetry, a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, that consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” (183). Like fire, poetry consumes its surroundings.

This is a creative destruction, as Schumpeter might have it. “Meaning is new, or not at all; a new creation, or not at all; poetry or not at all,” (248). So poetry consumes, and, in its consumptive act, it creates something new. Something emergent.

This creation seems always to be dialectical for Brown. “…in the resurrection, in the awakening, these two are one: poetry,” (266). No, not dialectical—at least not in the sense Kojeve has in mind—but more like the union of substance (in the sense Spinoza meant it), or like the chiasmus of flesh (as with Merleau-Ponty).

Poetry, not psychoanalysis, Brown said, is the art of healing (I’m sure Brown once said this, maybe in an interview). The only true thing about psychoanalysis, Brown quipped (following Adorno), are the exaggerations. For poetry things are different, at least the true things are. Poetry reveals the yoke that binds us. Better, for Brown, poetry is the bond, the nexus in which we all toil. (Nobby loved terms like “syncretism,” “mystical interconnection,” “polymorphous intercommunication,” and “unity,” of course he no less valued the flamboyant too-muchness psychoanalysis always talks about. In marrying the two, think of his felicitous phrasing: “We participate each other, connected as well as separated by a sea of death; living each other’s death, and dying each other’s life.”)

Brown’s poets included Dante, Keats, and Pound. He also liked Olson. In his “Projective Verse,” Olson writes that “a poem is energy.” Of course a poem, no matter how charged with energy its content, will not survive on content alone but through voice. Voice means something like style of thought. And this style, to sound a voice, bears an agenda: not simply to record the actual, but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. Poetry is near, common, low.

Some say also that poetry must do more. It must dislodge assumption, not by simply opposing it, but by dismantling the systematic proof in which its inevitability is grounded. Others say it must be cautious, ever-diligent not to mistake noble utterance for base perception.

For Brown poetry needed simply to be. Safeguarding the site where poetry can emerge, violently active, is everything. We must set buoys afloat to mark the spots of these sites and of their shipwrecks:

THE SEA MARKE

Charles Olson (recalling John Smith)

Aloofe, aloofe; and come no neare,

The dangers doe appeare;

Which if my ruin had not beene

You had not seene:

I onely lie upon this shelfe

to be a marke to all

which on the same might fall,

That none may perish but my selfe.

Brown may have been the ultimate buoy. His work attests to the wrecks of our time. But it also attends to the hope that is left in the aftermath: “Hope creates from its own wreck the things it contemplates.” And poetry is the beacon of this hope.

What is democracy?

With C. Douglis Lummis I share in the call for a “rectification of names.” As Lummis puts it “Democracy was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back.” For Lummis this means “identifying and junking twisted and hypocritical uses” of the phrase. I agree that it is important to confront those who would claim democracy in the name of free markets, (neo)liberal individualism, and consumer choice. Still, I am less motivated to police the boundaries of what constitutes an authentic form of democracy from its bastardized versions. What’s more, I am uninterested in the qualifier radical, which seems so often to adjectivally accompany democracy wherever its etymological meaning gets deployed on the left. For me, democracy needs no qualifier, it simply is radical (democracy goes to the root) from the start. Following Wolin, I see democracy as momentary, constituted in and as struggle, embracing a wide range of fleeting forms. Democracy is a self-consuming artifact, or at least threatens to be. There is promise in this plight: democracy as form of self-rule and freedom that seeks to reject all efforts to ground itself in something outside of itself. And I agree with Laclau and Mouffe in viewing political identity as multifariously rooted in these struggles, articulated at contingent sites of conflict and contestation. Ranciere is right to theorize these as forms of subjectification, not impositions of already recognized social identities, but introductions of new voices that are at once expressive and disruptive.

But there is also more. Democracy isn't just about popular authorization, reciprocal dependency, participatory equality, and conflicting interests. It is also about the deeply historical and epistemic contexts within which these struggles are situated. Democracy may depend on being brought to life, again and again, by insurgent, inventive subalterns. But it also depends on those groups embarking on political projects that surpass extant political topographies.