Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics 3030857417, 9783030857417

Citation preview

Legibility An Antifascist Poetics

John Kinsella

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Series Editor David Herd, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the field and its significance. Editorial Board Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffield Nisha Ramaya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Ann Vickery, Deakin University Carol Watts, University of Sussex

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14799

John Kinsella

Legibility An Antifascist Poetics

a prosimetrum (but not a ‘defence’ of poetry) anarchist vegan pacifist feminist environmentalist pro-Indigenous rights

John Kinsella University of Western Australia Perth, WA, Australia

ISSN 2634-6052 ISSN 2634-6060 (electronic) Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-030-85741-7 ISBN 978-3-030-85742-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Ode to Disarmament

I am fairly sure that the leafhopper now on the bricks is not au fait with bullets, and likely never will be — small and still, mimicking the leaves it has hopped from — if only because its life is relatively brief, but still, so much longer than the flight of a bullet, the rapid-fire power-trips of authorities-worshippers-hunters-militias. Though the cuckoo-shrike branchhopping nearby likely will know gunfire, even if not directed at them, the valley an echo chamber, a gatherer of cause and effect. That violent delusion of revolution and humanity that fed Berkman’s adjustments of purpose: a question of what can or can’t be reached by a bullet as if provenance of the bullet itself is at a remove from the body it rends. Those symbols that brings blood into the open,

that end breath. No. Violence expresses nothing other than violence. The accuracy of the wielder is like the skill of the wealthy philanthropists revelling in their own largesse, their self-advertising goodness. They are never far away from the materials of armaments. And the percussion of hammer on detonator is not uncommon here, reaching into a concept of weaponlessness, where even knives might be considered tools that could never be used to inflict harm. But for some it’s not poetry, is it, if it doesn’t rouse deep out of the collective memory of death — that killzone? And sheep come into peripheral envisioning like clues to the Golden rip-off, the idea of their slaughter to make harmonious interjections into warfare — slaughterhouses don’t stop any more than armed conflicts as pandemics make herds dead and noted by Worldometer. Death in death. The brazen stats of empire made divisible and the gaming of the gunsmith is the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the hypnotics of ‘twitch’ in the ‘defence jobs’ revolution of consumer rights, headiness of greenhouse downtime. I am fairly sure that the leafhopper now on the bricks is not au fait with bullets, and hopefully never will be — its jaws testing air acrid with fumes, the recoil.

for the biosphere and all it ‘contains’ and nurtures

Contents

1

An Antifa Pacifist Poetics

1

2

Handwriting Protest

5

3

Marks

17

4

Privilege, Property, Oppression

25

5

Modes of Protest

35

6

Legibility of Journal Extracts Jan 2020—followed by Extracts from Handwritten Journal

55

7

Micro- and Macro-Aggressions and Social Contracts

91

8

Versions of Mallarmé

97

9

Against Competition/Against Winning… and ‘Consequence Theory’

105

Note on Journal Extracts 2017–2020: Followed by Extracts from Handwritten Journals

125

11

Palestine and Israel

145

12

On Injustice. On Peace. On Justice. On Peace…

155

13

Pandemic(s)

171

10

ix

x

14

CONTENTS

Choice and Whose Rights We Are Talking About? Cruelty and Animal Rights… Justice, Genetics and Consensus

179

15

Empathy, not ‘Property’

191

16

Conclusion

199

Index

211

CHAPTER 1

An Antifa Pacifist Poetics

Abstract Introductory comments on activism and the possibility of a pacifist antifa poetics. The question of legibility of rights and liberties is stated as subtext of the work. Keywords Rights · Liberties

This essay is of the now, and yet I interpolate into that now with rewrites, excisions and additions. Writing carries the impetus of its moment, but when is its moment? For me, it’s in the cascading accumulation and dispersal of notes and drafts, of snippets and paragraphs that push for entry into a text as the text struggles to remain relevant. But relevant to what? It’s as if the drillcore invasiveness of geological investigation that is watched closely by the mining industry is extending into the future we are making as we work, live, be. It’s hubristic and presumptuous, yet it’s also activist. What is activism? For me, it’s bringing generative change and halting injustices without using violence. It is a process in which the legible and illegible shift and are in flux—though our cause might be highly legible to us at a given moment, it will by necessity need to nuance itself as more ‘factors’ are brought to our attention. We operate from positions of certainty that are anything but; and what we pick up in a quick reading © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_1

1

2

J. KINSELLA

of the scrawl of a situation, might change rapidly. I was discussing with a friend today my position as an anarchist who eschews property and supports Indigenous land rights causes (passionately and emphatically): i am a total believer in Indigenous land rights — i can be that and also against all other forms of property and land ownership (anarchist position). it is a viable ‘position’, i think [and it should be noted that within these indigenous communities ‘property’ and ‘materials’ are held in common]. the very first protest in which i was involved in was a land rights protest — part of the noonkanbah protests in perth… i believe in non-violent tenets of anarchism of shared ‘property’/held in common, communalism, de-centralized living, consensus etc. and i always qualify my anarchism with ‘vegan anarchist pacifist’ because of the obvious need to nuance and also differentiate re belief.

Activism is about allowing that even the most committed position will need to grow in accordance with new understanding—most often entrenching commitment, but sometimes shifting the ‘position’ within an activism. This is especially true of protesting to support rights matters in which culpability is directly or indirectly connected with one’s own heritage, legacy or belonging (even when that belonging to, say, ‘settler’ white society, is rejected). Since drafting this essay, the attack by far-right supporters of US President Donald Trump on the US Federal Capitol in Washington DC has shifted ‘Global North’ public discourse into direct confrontation with the realities of rightwingism, and the appropriateness of discussing ‘fascism’ with a variegating immediacy. The conservative strategy of rejecting the present surge of fascism throughout the world as being similar to the 1930s in Europe has, as a consequence of that attack, in part been consigned to the obfuscation that it is—a case of disturbing protectionism of historical division and excuse-making (for the now). Fascism is real in micro- and macro-environments of state and societal construction, enhanced by social media to the point where, after the attack, Donald Trump’s social media accounts were suspended, and then cancelled. Astonishingly, but unsurprisingly, neoliberal/conservative/farrighter commentators (such as Sarah Palin) consistently called the populist right violence at the Capitol a ‘false flag’ event, looking to blame it on Antifa as a carefully planned manipulation by the left of ‘citizens’ for its own ends. Ludicrous as this has been proved to be, it remains part of the confusing of culpability. This issue of a legible event witnessed by

1

AN ANTIFA PACIFIST POETICS

3

many non-participants, by victims, filmed by an often-threatened media, being made illegible through false flagging as false flagging, disturbs the actuality to the point where the far right (be they individual or groups of part of the right of the Republican Party… which is increasingly far right across its representation), attempt to own the act of recording, of making the record. Illegibility suits their new ‘legibility’, their new telling of something that seems confirmed otherwise by the plethora of evidence. In some ways—as a pacifist antifa poet activist—it is the work of refuting these redefinings of legibility that compels me. To claim a complete legibility of the world is impossible, and even as I write down what I see, I realize people will not be able to decipher it until I type it up. But the words will still say what I intended them to. Specifically, the illegible is always legible if we attempt to look at it carefully and with different understandings of how to read. The far right, and their appendages and hyper-extensions such as QAnon, achieve their purpose of obfuscation, inducing fear and trepidation, and manipulation, via offering a false legibility out of the illegibility of a mass information that is also indicated as being secretive, ‘communal’, and bespoke—each participant is granted agency through eavesdropping, conspiring and possibly—ultimately—enacting. Untruths are made truths, and the capitalist-right’s version of ‘truth’ is a commodity, and as such a weapon which can be disseminated instantly. During the days after the Capitol attack, various far-right discussion boards were closed down on support platforms and the impetus of fragmented but overlapping violent right groups was blunted. In the same way commentators note there is no specific or locatable/identifiable core to Antifa (and its purpose can never reside in centralized organization), we might ask, what is an antifa poetics? Well, for me, to be anti-fascist in the now is to be specifically opposed to an individualist exceptionalism that refutes or actively works to deny the rights of personal-collective cultural identity, that seeks to undermine collective autonomy. To be anti-fascist in the now is very often to oppose government and corporate-based control over the fabric of people’s lives inflected through a national identity that places itself above other identity formations. To be anti-fascist is to be anti-racist in both its personal and systemic forms, and more than this, to act against systemic racism. It is to be anti-bigotry, and to define liberty through notions and acts of communal and collective responsibility. In this work, and in my activism, I attempt to make legible through the actions of protest the illegibilities of my poems: those points where response is nuanced and multifaceted and condensed and intensified to

4

J. KINSELLA

immediate usage. A poem is spring-loaded, even at its most didactic, and certainly at its most figurative. And underpinning all this is my belief that positive and enduring change can only come via complete non-violence. The issue then becomes how we read passive-aggressive violence, microviolence and tangential violence. The poem, when it is impacting, can be some of these ‘violences’ even when it is not intended, and especially when it is being written to stop an aggression, to thwart an oppression or exploitation. What follows is an attempt to open a version of a discussion of these issues, and on how poetry might pragmatically and in praxis be part of that discussion (and action)—more by illustration than via the scaffolding of ‘prac crit’. If the pacifist far left does not constantly articulate moments of crisis and circumstance, then there is no question the far right will provide the tags of discourse to a social media-saturated agora to capture language through events and use such terms as ‘The Great Deplatforming’ (referring to a response), that seek to place the loss of social media access by people such as Donald Trump within a crisis of personal liberty (that is actually part of systemic racism and state-business enabling of hate) to offend, harm and damage. Confronting the ‘deplatforming’ issue in the context of far-right assertion of its/their ‘freedom of speech’, as an element of antifa poetics, is a way of critiquing the platforms themselves as much as what is said on them while maintaining a de-centred semi-spontaneous response to sites of hate and bigotry. And I’d note that boycott is an implicit right of protest. The right wing speakers who target places of learning as their platform also expect no resistance to their ‘right to free speech’, even when they are speaking against the rights of others. In the past, I also have tried to stop right wing speakers in tertiary settings, and failing that, articulated a protest and boycott. The poem, for all its formal constraints and mannerisms, is ultimately a decentred site of protest that might adapt to different conditions. So, in this way, it can remain relevant when a report on the event might seem to be ‘dated’. A poem can move rapidly and concurrently, and adapt in the way it is performed and experienced to meet the constant nature of crisis. One of the concerns of legibility is to consider the hypocrisy of ‘liberty’ that manifests to the detriment of others, which to my mind is a false liberty. Legibilities of rights and liberties might also be considered a subtitle to this work.

CHAPTER 2

Handwriting Protest

Abstract The acts of writing and especially handwriting are considered in the light of this question: ‘Legibility is desirable for truth of interpretation, and illegibility obscures and denies access? Yes and no.’ Different aspects of ‘legibility’ are considered with regard to resisting fascism and colonialism. Texts by Murial Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks and Emily Brontë are mentioned. A binary of legibility and illegibility is refused; ‘Illegibility is not erasure, but it can be misused or deployed as erasure. Legibility can be a deception, a claim of authority through clarity.’ Keywords Handwriting · Fascism · Colonialism · Legibility · Illegibility · Deception

My handwriting is said to be illegible a lot of the time, which disappoints me. When I slow down, I tend to print-write, and maybe that helps. At school, my writing, whilst never ‘neat’, was certainly readable—many an exam paper attests to this. Taking lecture notes at university (before dropping out, and then going back), made my writing so rapid that I developed my own form of shorthand, and my writing ended up a hybrid. My mother was a very fast shorthand writer, and I reckon maybe she can still do it if necessary.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_2

5

6

J. KINSELLA

Legibility is desirable for truth of interpretation, and illegibility obscures and denies access? Yes and no. But the traces of writing are manifold and complex, and I feel that in my handwriting there are layers of access beyond me, and so I relish this on every re-encounter. But it’s not with myself —it is with the hand that wrote, which has a mind of its own or is embodied beyond will. For I say what I want to say, yet my hand— especially when writing fast—somehow doesn’t shape it on the page how I see it in my head. ∗ ∗ ∗ Silent corrections. ∗ ∗ ∗ Illegible fonts—the obscurities of the clearest print. The poorly cut wooden block, the lead type, the devil’s box, the printery. Yet, I write with pens that spur and flare, that smudge, and I am as knowledgeable as I can be about the ink that flows, the ball that rolls the point to page, and the paper it illustrates, merges with, wicking. The difficulty is not in legibility, but in the fact that word meanings change quickly, and are lost to all but the scholarly, or, indeed, readers inclined to at least partially unravel a period. Costume. But that’s okay—a poem you write now is, in a hundred years, read against its intention, because the words are so overwhelmingly different in meaning on encounter; at face value. But graphologists are, with the handwritten text, unravelling the personality of the writer, and whatever they are writing there are consistencies within the quirks. A malign thought expressed shows the same open letters and sharp loops as the most generous; the most supportive of those outside the self. So, we unpick the crossover, and make a personality portrait against the contemporary meaning of what’s said, of not what was written but is being read now; encountered. The writer is nothing in this. In resisting fascism, the anti-fascist gives up personal regard, and certainly any need for approval, to disapprove of their own role in the privilege of expression should it elevate above that of another, and should it speak louder, say, than the dispossessed on whose behalf it intends to advocate, or the wreckage of environment by capital and consumerism it resists, it calls out. Its calling-out is done. William

2

HANDWRITING PROTEST

7

Blake—himself an antifa poet in many ways (and yet not in others!)— is said to be ‘prophetic’ because he spoke ahead of his time (he spoke, like many others, against the oppressive tendencies of power in his times) but also because he self-declared this. Vision and visionary are not themselves activism, but rather allusion and illusion, and as such a glorious sidetracking of responsibility. In writing their fears and conspiracy theories in social media, post after post, and entangling search engines of capital and power-centre influences, right wing schemers tap into the clarity of concentrations and secrecy of power, but exonerate themselves and abrogate personal responsibility and self-scrutiny. They blame, they divert, they rely on the rapid spread of stereotypes—an ‘us and them’ in which the ‘them’ is inferior as well as dangerous. In grouping across slight differences of localized opinion, they create a state—a nationalism—of rumour in which the internet is their country of rights, their zone draconian law enforcement, judgement, and their summary execution without evidence; even without knowledge. So, whereas the “illegible” script is disregarded as unreadable, the crystal-clear screen font is readable, absorbable, and its meaning is the one forced upon/in/by/through the new fascist state of virtual convergence and criss-crossing: the kickback against intersectionality, in which the nodal point is subjected to harassment and bullying, especially flaking off from a ‘strongman’—sometimes strong woman—but a figure of polarized values, in which difference is only useful to vary the consumer market of hate, the tools available to exclusion, even elimination. The right wing armed patriot groups out of America—the Proud Boys and others—look for the signals from their symbolic commander-in-chief.1 The fragmented cellular nature of right wing ‘resistance’ relies on big symbolic ‘heads’ (many in the world at present) to justify the spread of their propaganda in legible and available ways. So, does poetry rely on legibility to counter fascism or does illegibility refuse a pinning down? Rudyard Kipling remains ‘useful’ as a source text of imperialism, especially his anodyne poetry, but is it only when he declares himself clearly (in almost basic English) that it lasts longer across time and ‘avoids’ entanglements of terminology under pressure. In other words, when he states an opinion or makes a declaration rather than 1 When I wrote this, that ‘CINC’ was Donald Trump as President, and now, it remains

Donald Trump as their imagined President…

8

J. KINSELLA

entangling it in imagery and allusion, does the literary act undo the right wing political will to some extent, or is that will always legible? As a writer, especially as a poet of the left, I frequently ask myself how much I gain and lose in an ethical–political act in making the poem which inevitably works through illegibility of expression to suggest and question its own role, the act of making and its rights of being. The poem that is not purely discursive and especially not only didactic surely has its own agency and so there is increased likelihood of evading the right wing censorships, and infiltrating (and hopefully thwarting) right wing thought and behaviour? Is the ‘ordinary speech’ (often of an imposed colonial or imperial monolingualism of nation, or if an officially multilingual country, ensuring a baseline consistency of expression and intent across languages) as constructed and mediated by media, government, business and other nodes of power—the language of populism—more vulnerable to fascist take-over? Yes and no. No, because the language that people develop to communicate the needs and protection of their rights is never more or less than it is, and circumvents the nodes of power as much as being caught up in them, even in non-articulation; but yes, because that ‘speech’ is at least in part a product of interference and control, and is adjusted in discourse to suit the anguishes of the times to turn opinion into zeitgeist and dilute its impact as a tool of social challenge and change. Speech is our legibility, and yet power-centres super-enhance that legibility to suits their own agendas. Antifascism, to my mind, relies on language escaping the imprisonment and control of the demagogues and influencers, of the ‘representatives’ and the salespeople—language, and especially figurative language, avoids constraint… but it will also suffer irrelevancy over time and need reinventing, or invigorating. What I write as a poet now against militarism, capitalism, racism, bigotry, consumerism and ecological destruction, will have little meaning when it has failed to help protect the rights it is working for. When the forest is gone, the poem is gone; when the next death in custody comes, the next police beating, the next act of racist bastardry, the poem I have written in an attempt to prevent has failed and is irrelevant—and time will reduce its purpose and readability than any loss of meaning through shifting language and lost referentiality: that is, the loss is the issue, not the irrelevancy of the poem. New poems will need to be spoken by others—and they might succeed where I have failed.

2

HANDWRITING PROTEST

9

This is the paradox of legibility: where rhetoric and lyric fuse to resist fascism: to speak clearly and delineate, but not to fall to phraseology and word-usage that is really just a mirror of the populist manipulation of clear speech to buy into suffering as if with sharing and pathos. No, illegibility is often where the poem can go further than its moment. Was all of Blake2 legible to the fine engraver? Did he always understand what he wrote (or was being delivered through him)? Hopefully not. And that’s where Blake has antifa meaning now—in the illegibility to the author, where clear or blurred script segues with future language usage and is utilized by the antifascist for the need of the moment, and not because it is a revered prophetic text of social (or ecological) purpose. Blake deserves no credit outside his time, but the protester of now who might use the text in liberating and antifa ways, is giving the paradox of the legible/illegible a purpose, an evasive strength that will undo the language of the tyrants. ∗ ∗ ∗ The protester who gives everything they can give to resist oppression in the now will be found wanting in the future. They will likely be scrutinized and possibly damned by those with whom they would empathize if they were also of that future. And the protester will have to accept this outcome in order to be effective in the now, because the language and ‘movements’ they have as tools in the now will be offensive to the future as it moves harder and deeper against oppressions, against dissimulations of knowledge via the gaming of social media, and the false ‘depth’ of the internet. The poet writing the now writes against their own reputation, against their being valued. But any poet writing to be valued by the future, and not to give to the future, is making artefacts, and not genuine art of resistance. ∗ ∗ ∗ I want to make handwritten books: not because it’s my writing, but because it challenges ideas of legibility. The printing press was liberty, yet also oppression. It was the basis for sharing radical ideas, and then overwriting them. But in the notes written in hand, reprinted (mass

2 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Edited by David. V. Erdman with Commentary by Harold Bloom, Anchor Books, New York, 1988).

10

J. KINSELLA

produced) in various forms, if we remove capital from the process (impressions on handmade paper; the stubble of organic fields), we have an elision, and an answer to the paradox. And that’s why together, even from isolation and distanced, our speaking and writing a language of now, a language legible in its antifascism and also illegible/unusable/’nonappropriate-able’ to fascists (also, to basic capitalists yet to find personal gain in fascism) will give to the peaceful, determined resistance in astonishing ways. And none of us will get recognition. There will be no copyright, no ownership of acts of liberty, or of making. ∗ ∗ ∗ Gwendolyn Brooks said: ‘Your effort should be in preventing the formation of a firing squad.’3 And to peacefully prevent such formations, the oppressors need to be denied everything. The state and its attachments and feeders, its controllers and directors, need to be denied our willingness—a deep anti-patriotism that is the liberation of peoples, communities, individuals. The poem is utterance of legibility to those who are willing to listen to its presentation of knowledges of speech, of language and illegibility to those who deny the liberties it works towards. The state-corporation reverses this: it makes its instructions of control legible and the scope of any inherent freedoms illegible, and easily revoked under obscure and elusive ‘data’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Dante and legibility—the poet who let go so we could inhabit his spaces to liberate ecologies, to resist injustices. He was so legible, and yet, his letters were more than themselves. They fall away, they indicate, they are part of the machine of justice, punishment and award. But we overturn this in the now, and remake it to serve liberation. Dante will always be many things he could never have intended, and yet in making such a work he can only have intended interpretation, reworkings of his legibilities, his public and also very private and obscured purposes. ∗ ∗ ∗

3 ‘About the Author’ (quoted by Hal Hager in end-material) Selected Poems: Gwendolyn Brooks, p. 9 (HarperCollins, NY, 2006).

2

HANDWRITING PROTEST

11

My handwriting began as illegible, became more legible under corporal punishment by early schoolteachers, then, when more humane teachers looked after me, regained illegibility, and became freer. But I wanted it to be free and still be legible to myself, at least—it is, mostly; and my mother and my partner can read it. Can I expect others to read it? Does the illegibility reduce its activist prospects or allow room for the activism of others engaging with the text? Does its general illegibility limit or even thwart dialogue? Or, does the illegibility actually create more room for interaction, more scope for interpretation and reinvention? Outside the records office is it resistant to control? In print, a poem ‘sells’ in small numbers, and from that I extract ‘a living’. And yet I am against monetary economies. I am for the poet as act of exchange, gift or action. So, what is done with that ‘living’? How is it shared or dispersed? It must feed others, be used to restore habitat against the monetary economy, against its own provisions for its continuance. Room is always to be made for others to come into the text, into their future, and not for one’s own script as a ‘permanent object’, surely? We write to forget what we’ve written, so we can write afresh to engage with the imminent crisis. If the writing is failed, it is lost—it is a fragment of collective knowledge to me remade in more useful, less serving of capital and nation-state forms; increments. ∗ ∗ ∗ When I am distressed, my handwriting becomes less legible, so I try to slow down and control my responses and hand movements, to coordinate against that feeling. At protests, I have in the distant past been arrested for vocality… and now I try to say more, but in a less aggressive but equally remorseless manner. So it is with writing in my journal: I try to let the words describe a situation, then ‘lose control’ entirely of my handwriting. I become aware of this loss of control, and try to slow down and make it clearer; not to protect legibility, but rather to create a gap between cause and effect, one in which to enter and consider, one in which to depart from my inclination, to modulate… I then race on again after the pause, and later revert to rapid scrawl. Handwriting—that guide to personality, graphologists suggest—can tell us little more than the words. But the act of reproduction of thought in relationship to the writing’s ‘audibility’ can be a potent activist tool—the handwritten sign of protest is always, to my mind, more self-implicating than the printed

12

J. KINSELLA

one, and as such, more communal and more sharing. It hands one over to the community, with its varying degrees of legibility (and possibly orthography). ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Deep State’? The state is always shallow and ‘deep’. That is the nature of the state—control by any means, and those who pursue power and wealth will use the state as they can. Business and the military and the state—individuals and groups within these structures working to get what they can for their own gain, creating pseudo-cultures of ‘protection’ and ritualized investment in manners, protocols and secrecy. It’s all deception and obviousness, all a twisting of legibility; accountability for its own ends. Encryption becomes the legibility to the few as the illegibility to the many. Nationalism is a product of a vision of self and selves—of exclusion, oppressions, labour markets and hierarchies. Racism and hatred of minority communities is integral to the smallest groups of people controlling via the bigotries of larger demographics. ‘Deep State’: nothing mysterious about it; the state is and always was that. The state is, and it oppresses: it controls versions of legibility. ∗ ∗ ∗ The tail-tracings of boomer, doe, joey show movement, even proportions of tail, but not really gender. The tracings might have pheromones, but that’s for them to know. And in different densities and compactness of soil and surface materials, the marks differ—same movements of tail and legs and even paws when leaning down, grazing, or resting. Body imprints: I can recognize kangaroos, but in no specific detail, or not always, and never entirely. Others probably can. I know monitor and bobtail lizards, I know the pawprints of possum, fox, feral cat… I know many birds prints in sandy soil around here. But I don’t demand legibility. How can I? But one might desire it for many reasons: to read for various outcomes, impressions, knowledges to be used in protection, respect. Others will use readers of ‘tracks’ differently—but the exploiters and destroyers for the sake of possessing their grounds, of selling off and profiting: they are the killers of sign, of script, of the line. There’s is a brutal legibility often ‘permitted’ by obscuring the legibility of animal tracks and

2

HANDWRITING PROTEST

13

signs, or of denying their identity through ‘uncertainty’. The poem can be the record of tracks, but that record has to be active to protect the trackmaking of now, the land they are made on. And then there’s the immense literacy of animal-track reading as part of belonging to country—consult Indigenous people’s knowledge of this, their country, and respect their interactions, their readings and writings of land: theirs is not by tradition an exploitation of capital-labour-materials; it is one of interaction. There are conversations between humans and animals that are an intense literacy of presence, an interchange of complex legibilities. Of the readable, decipherable, and protection of knowledge that is contraindicative to the illegibility of damage to country brought on by insensitivity and inability to read by colonialists. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the poem ‘From a Play: Publisher’s Song’, Murial Rukeyser puts the very paper great works are written on, and the script-print space they take up, in line with “pissin’ and shittin’” (a ‘lot’ of it!)… and John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley take up a lot of a brand name (1,000 sheet rolls). Shelley was radical, but fair copies were done so often by Mary Shelley. By then, he had a traumatized interaction with print in his life (manuscripts rejected, failing to appear in print after being posted, etc.), and the radical Queen Mab found its revolutionary life in pirated editions. His hand was the hand of refinement demi-rejected—incendiary within class but achieved via his class tools. What does this say about legibility? His formal control and constraints are almost total, and the radicalism must push against form because of the class he milks, uses and trashes. It took Mary to keep his fame growing, not his radicalism, and even then, it confronted the suppressions and attempted interventions of Shelley’s father, who held the purse strings (giving Mary only a small allowance) and the destiny of Percy Florence, Mary’s and Percy Bysshe’s son, in his hands (and Mary’s rights as mother, entangled with the issue of inheritance and aristocracy). Persuasion and the fate of poetry. But then, the poet Rukeyser as I read her in print is, of course, defending poetry against the disposable consumerism (the toilet paper trees). And what can I say? Rukeyser was a recorder and an activist, she knew shit from piss and the corruption of data by exploiters. Mea culpa as writer? In the journal, on the page, in the book… and the energy sucking reality of ‘online’. The Deep State? The deeper and deeper energy suck

14

J. KINSELLA

of the internet: companies and revolutionaries. A sad elision of legibility and illegibility and eligibility—to speak, to hear, to act. The irresolvable? Consume less and less, fewer and fewer… the impact of the few words, the intense weight a single word can carry, and the meaning for repair and affirming change it might carry. We repeat our signature, and it decays. Slippage as the poet’s persona lies ‘in the bath’ contemplating that toilet paper—the discomfort of comfort, of the act of writing, of the act of cleaning up the wastes, the residues of being: What a lot of pissin’ and shittin’, Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats — All the poems of Shelley and Keats.4

What is waste? The commercial product (the fallen trees), not the poems…? ∗ ∗ ∗ If legibility is more often an accolade than not—an approval for accessibility and clarity of purpose, even respect; illegibility is often fetishized out of the frustration it induces, seeming to privilege those who can decode/’read’ over others. Emily Brontë’s ‘The Night of Storms has Passed: A Ghostly Poem’ with its miniscule script on a small card is often spoken of (as with other manuscripts) in this way. Aids to reading such as magnifying glasses and the X-ray tomography that allows delving into the most illegible of artefacts of ‘scriptics’, the papyrus scrolls of Vesuvius lifted from their ashbeds, and earlier such tools of reading and interpreting difficult materials of (manu)script, but also script itself… so that privilege becomes a public availability (so often an act of funding and research accolade-ism, as well as, no doubt, genuine passion and curiosity to get at a ‘truth’ of meaning and context in terms of its times so it might reflect on one’s own immediacies). But last night, unable to sleep—as is often the case—I was thinking of these lines of Gwendolyn Brooks:

4 ‘From a Play: Publisher’s Song’, from Muriel Rukeyser Selected Poems (edited by Adrienne Rich, Tarset, 2013; p. 178).

2

HANDWRITING PROTEST

15

I am not like that. I pay rent, am addled By illegible landlords, run, if robbers call. (from ‘Strong Men, Riding Horses—Lester after the Western’)5

Aside from the necessity, I think, of eliding ‘landlords’ and ‘robbers’, I note that ‘illegible’ in this case is for a convenience of the landlords to enact exploitation—of registering that capital is using a language of its own to evade those it predates upon—not the ‘consumer’, but the person without choice. Without a choice: the bit capitalist apologists most coverup, most obfuscate. But the key here is the persona being addled by those obfuscating unreadable (wilfully, we know) landlords. How can she but be—they intend her to be so exploitation can continue. Of course, in the organization of the poem and of a language of evasive clarity, she is not addled (as persona nor poet). A form so often considered ‘illegible’ by many—the poem—becomes legible through its deconstructions of languages (implied—the landlord’s) of exploitation and profiteering. ∗ ∗ ∗ I write longer fictions in code, but hope they are legible in a variety of ways. Font size, font type, kerning, adaptable—even handwritten—I can slow down and try, but the writing, as noted, ends up going haywire anyway. I can print into legibility, but the hand runs and it becomes printwriting; then it’s lost again. I never kept to the lines learning to write, even when teachers were policing me and attempting to ensure compliance to the cursive, putting red marks through my loops, cutting through the extensions of my uprights beyond the thin blue lines. I didn’t dot my ‘i’s or cross my ‘t’s. I want readability, but other forms of reading implicit, too. Legibility adapts to the needs of protest. Future readings will protest every word I use, lose track of the codes which might well never have been. ∗ ∗ ∗ Illegibility is not erasure, but it can be misused or deployed as erasure. Legibility can be a deception, a claim of authority through clarity. What do we have from this? Awareness of purpose and reception in the 5 Brooks, p. 71.

16

J. KINSELLA

moment, and of meaning shift and loss in each piece of the universe added to our de-colonizing ‘block universe’ theorems… Our hopes to prevent the ongoing misuse of past crimes against peoples and land, and our awareness that the future might hide those crimes through distance, through loss of experience of that time. Memory can hide as much as accrue. Writing will shift with time and be reinterpreted, but it is a memory tool. And writing is all marks we make as speech-thought acts: painting, marks of the body that are replicated by generations, songs that are resung and resung, the making of signs.

CHAPTER 3

Marks

Abstract In the context of ‘just actions’ in text from a pacifist antifa perspective, this chapter considers: marks made on certificates and in forestry ledgers, the provenance of paper, animal markings, QAnon, Trumpism, property rights and Australian jingoism, and capital’s antipathy to social contracts, colonial renamings, and the tyranny of copyright. Keywords Certificates · Ledgers · Paper · Markings · Property · Copyright

Those birth, marriage and death certificates where you have to work hard to read the location, even the names. Tracy has become adept at following their vagaries, their internal logic, the digressions of signatories under pressure or excited, the officials getting the job done as quickly as possible, or just moving on to the next case/client/situation. Finding script of other entries of the time and place to compare with—to work out the characteristics of an official’s hand, helps unravel. Or, in the case of my maternal grandfather’s great-great-grandmother, of a probable Huguenot weaving family, X marks the spot. Or the confusion of records of my Irish ancestry in which records are made illegible by losses through imperialism, colonial rapacity and war. In general, imperialists may work through © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_3

17

18

J. KINSELLA

record-keeping, but records are often destroyed as an act of resistance, yet loss goes with reclaiming. Those paradoxes of legibility. In the bound volumes of forestry (my paternal grandfather, Claude, was a head state forester and the area of ‘Gleneagle’, which is still known as ‘Kinsella’ on forestry maps: an obscene piece of colonial imprimaturing) stored in the shed after my mother and father divorced—residues of my father’s time with us: from his childhood in the forest—records of tree plantings, growth rates, cutting downs and rootings-out, rainfall and temperature in my grandfather’s chest in the shed—written in indelible pencil, in a meticulous and pragmatic hand,1 that purple stain on the tongue, a historiography of colonial timbering, of love of trees and the expediency of trees. The job. And then my using the ledgers for other purposes, overwriting, leaving out so damp got into them, altering the legibility of records till the indelible is unreadable and says something else. Not a deletion, but a degradation, a loss? Not even a rewriting— they were wonderful bound volumes for writing small stories in, lines for poems, and also observations of tree and insect life around the house. My records of that ‘now’. Erasing the records of colonial erasure. Is the constant going back to this material these records this fact an act of recuperation, an act of legibility? In making the records more and more illegible, you added cross-writing and over-writing that was legible to you at that age and filled with great purpose. I’d like to think my own child writings had a legitimacy through context, though enacting, but maybe they actually became more participatory than deconstructive. Mentioned in memoir, it accords a point in personal development (and regret), but taken outside one’s own life, it is the conversion of one record of occupation into another record of occupation: from land to personal ‘settler’ subjectivity… it is a double erasure. I have been thinking lately of the provenance of the paper and manufacture of those ledgers of the 1930s–1950s… likely made using pulp from other ‘forested’ native old-growth forests—cleared then re-timbered with pine… hardwood replaced by fast-growing softwood.

1 Claude and one of his brothers won a handwriting prize at the Donnybrook Show as noted in the Western Mail newspaper (Friday 14th, March 1913): https://trove.nla.gov. au/newspaper/article/37955692/3479383 in the usual perversions of colonialism, the show was opened by Sir John Forrest.

3

MARKS

19

I search and find Vintage Ledgers from the Netherlands 1950s: lined, cloth-bound… they look similar if not the same, and I wonder if the trees that went into them were plundered from Indonesian forests via Dutch post-war colonial connections and companies. It’s possible, but I don’t know the source. They’re not illegible, but legibility of culpability is an act of research and assignation, and I am getting closer to a source. I trace this article and these lines: ‘After independence and until the mid1950s, Dutch foresters continued to exert their influence over the new state authorities.’2 Handwriting: Claude recording the fall and rise and fall of forests, marking observations in the fire-watch tower, and his son’s future fatherin-law copper-plating signwriting the city, an artist and calligrapher (Bob, my mother’s father). My father’s handwriting was (also) notable, and as state apprentice of the year, his workbook was… immaculate, whereas I scrawl, drop letters, work in that demi-shorthand which maybe I did really get from my mum via her training at Underwood’s secretarial school in the 1950s? Yes, I reaffirm that she can read my writing, and that my partner, Tracy, can, too. They are of the left, also. Writing is compliance and resistance, it is communication and illustration, it is participation and divergence. The politics of handwriting is active, not dead. It hides behind the keys of the web whose available layers are as ‘dark’ as any ‘dark web’—it is false illumination that no blue-light-blocking devices will resolve. ∗ ∗ ∗ Bobtail skinks give birth to live young. They mate earlier after winter now (not as late as early summer), given the illegibility of climate even across long periods of fluctuation in extremes. Even within those decades of fluctuation, there is an overwhelming general trend towards hotter and hotter, drier and drier, with anomalies. Bobtails can live for five decades—and they know. So, for days, we watched a large pregnant bobtail circling the house—its region—and today we saw a very small bobtail, no doubt one of its offspring. This newborn is working out the terrain and creating its topographical mental imaging—the chemical 2 Galudra, G., and M. Sirait. “A Discourse on Dutch Colonial Forest Policy and Science in Indonesia at the Beginning of the 20th Century.” The International Forestry Review, 11 (4): 524–533 (2009). JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43739830. Accessed 26 Oct 2020.

20

J. KINSELLA

trails, the visual impressions, the senses correlating to ‘map’, the writing and reading of topography… and food sources. Collecting and marking. When a violation of space is committed, they adapt, and sadly often they die (run over by vehicles, bulldozed, ploughed). But not here—we protect them, their habitat… an arrogance of protectionism, but what else should—or can—we do in the circumstances? Because legibility is circumstantial. I find it remarkable that the ‘properties’ that fly the Australian flag hereabouts, so often cleared and scraped down to barebones and filled with ‘stock’, are a constant source of gunfire, and if an enclave of vegetation is left, it is only to make illegible the activities of undoing the land itself (refuge—hiding places, covertness). Contradictions of readability are to do with audience—online, many far right wing preppers communicate as if they were sharing a compound and show images of their ‘spreads’ and coalesce into a legibility akin to a Trumpian ‘Stand back and stand by’ to the white supremacist Proud Boys. Australia translates into its versions of this convert/overt binary, and QAnon internetism congeals as the volatile materials of existence are consumed in the fires of routers and personal electronic devices. ‘Q’ patches show up along boundaries, making incursions. ‘Elite troops’ of the new literacy of rejection, suspicion, racism, bigotry and fear of difference make eschatological communities of remapping that await their time, their leader/s to resolve their angst, their death-wishings. Here, we live on grounds of theft and little or no restitution to Noongar people, whose country it IS, and in spaces of injustice conspiracy will equate with aggressive response to threat to justice for the dispossessed… the reality behind social media ‘outing’ is a deep hatred that connects with property, capital and authority: fascism requires nationalism and patriotism to mask its personalized hatreds. ‘First Nations’ as an idea is not contiguous with the ‘nation state’, but as affirmation of community and relationship to place that rejects nation-state-ism and affirms its contrary as collective of communities of Indigenous belonging and rights. First Nations is anti-nationalism. For me, an antifa pacifist, out here, the far right are a reality, and we see their leaflets outside the supermarket in the closest town; we see their symbolisms; we feel their nearness. Protecting the habitat of bobtails is not protecting a habitat of selfism—of exclusion of perceived enemies— but an acknowledgement of how little we can read the skinks’ ‘writing’, and share our own with them. Legibility is of all senses, and no single sense or experientiality has a monopoly: the many interfaces of script, most of which we have no idea of. Some people have far more idea,

3

MARKS

21

and their knowledge is ignored, stolen or exploited. Capital will always twist the best into legitimizing its own means of profit—and profit is its contract of self-protection. Capital does not want social contracts between people, between people and animals, between people and all other life, between people and the biosphere. It wants monopolies over contracts—it controls the humanities more and more (the military have a firm beachhead there now), and it controls that nature of teaching state ‘law’. And even the capabilities of medicine are, more often than not, tied to the health of the consumer, the taxpayer, the corporate tax-evader, and the body politic is the health that serves the market, or to the citizen that complies with and serves the state. Rather, as part of a family that is also a collective, we believe in an open-door policy of interaction and no ownership. We don’t own what we ‘own’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Blue crane vs. white-faced heron. The latter is the ‘officially correct’ colonialized ‘birdwatcher’s’ name for this wonderful waterway (and occasional paddock) bird. But growing up, sometimes a very blue heron would appear and we’d all call it a ‘blue heron’ (both terms outside local Indigenous namings). I have since met many others who have done the same (or the ‘more’ erroneous, ‘blue crane’). Seeing a very, very blue white-faced heron with Tim, who so loves birds and records them and has done so for years in his cautious and methodical record-keeping ‘printing’, I promised him I would write a ‘blue heron’ poem—why? Because the bird was so blue. Legibility of identification in the (ongoing!) colonial nomenclature (‘designed’ for broader legibility) is obscured, and that becomes an act of resistance. Bound to language-usage as we are, we use a signifier in ‘blue’, but other representations would work, too. For the moment—our moment of speaking and recording, but also the birds moment in terms of camouflage against sky and the low waters of the struggling saline trained and damaged river. Pastoral colonial trauma that Aboriginal knowledge can repair, if let be its own, and not with permission of colonial-settlement law control. The true namings are evocative on numerous levels of interaction, knowledgeable, and site-sensitive.3 3 The over-speaking of Indigenous namings is still omnipresent in contemporary Australian officialese. For a vital article on Aboriginal names for bird species (many ‘collated’ by explorer John Gilbert within the dynamic of colonial collectorism) see: Ian

22

J. KINSELLA

∗ ∗ ∗ I am appalled to see the copywriting market fetishes of ‘legibility’ (font/print/design clarity) vs. ‘readability’ (smooth transition and sense of language, ultimately, I think!), in website and advertising materialism. The hints come at a cost, and these ‘qualities’ are commodities. I get stuck on the expression ‘corpus size’ (for ‘x-height’) and as I wander up from the baseline to the ceiling of the letter (‘lower-case’) I get entangled in all the possible inflections of writers and collective interests mediated through an amanuensis for the ‘illiterate’, and I see many squiggles and sharp corners, many slippings back down below the line, and I register signing and semaphore, and I think of the privileges attested to each form of communication, and how we can break privilege down and be less ablest in our making, our writing. There is no room for conspiracy in finding justice through resolving legibility and illegibility—there has to be frank honest self and communal acknowledgement, a shared vision of fairness and consensus in which we accommodate all difference in nonviolent ways. We are search for an acceptance of the indecipherable as an act of legibility? The letter writer is trusted as much through the response as the act of transcription and/or recording. But that depends if they also read the reply—third parties required to safeguard integrity? The right wing thrives on aggressive secrecy—with signs and signals from its symbolic and literal strong-person figureheads to trigger and co-ordinate violent response: signs visible and legible to those searching for them. Antifa activists need to be aware that as far-right activists might reject change to language (that is, say, rejecting shifts in pronoun usage, rejecting more inclusive language in so many contexts), they utilize different ways of indicating, of motioning towards ‘action’. They want language to stay the same, but want to speak among themselves exclusively. This is part of their non-generative contradiction of secrecy and communication—it can be undone through open speech, direct verbal and written challenge, through bodily (peaceful) presence, and through creative upturns of their language stultification.

Abbott, Aboriginal names of bird species in south-west Western Australia, with suggestions for their adoption into common usage (Conservation Science Western Australia 7 (2): 213– 278 (2009)): https://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/images/documents/about/science/cswa/art icles/14.pdf Note the white-faced heron is called both ‘wyan’ and ‘boolong’ by Noongar people depending on region according to Gilbert (circa 1839).

3

MARKS

23

Poetry is an intensely active form of undoing these rigidities and smotherings of secret expression, and thus the far-right’s access to signs they can ‘read’ to manipulate as indicators of and for hate crimes. The poem that seems so illegible, so ambiguous, so difficult to ‘pin down’, is also (and not paradoxically) the route to revelation, transparency and a resistance to inimical secret communications. This is because the poem is a universal and the reader invents their own individual or participates in shared communal ways of decoding. The poet isn’t the decoder. There’s a layer of civil liberties in the reading of a poem that thwarts the far right making use of it as an effective tool—their bigotries too easily reveal themselves and encoding lacks readers in the broader ‘societal’ sense. ∗ ∗ ∗ The eye following the ‘flow’ of text is not enough—all the senses available to us (without privileging any one sense over another! and there not being a ‘correct’ number of senses—more or less doesn’t define fluency of reading!) might be used as suits the ‘reader’ and their being in the world. Antifa activists sharing ‘sense’ knowledge and working as a community will see the signs and know how to peacefully react to defuse and reclaim text for just, caring, respectful actions: for community wellbeing. The far right (and those who identify entirely as ‘right wing’, or behave entirely within a right wing worldview) can be defused if the deceptive dynamic of their legible/illegible communications are exposed, deconstructed and negated by positive, affirming and just textual actions from anti-fascists.

CHAPTER 4

Privilege, Property, Oppression

Abstract Privilege, poverty, oppression and issues of legibility. The writing of racism and potential racisms of some writings even where not intended. What is intentionality? Dante, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charlotte Brontë are mentioned, while Jean Cocteau’s interaction with the Nazis is scrutinised. Legibility and statues, inscriptions and slogans, and the anomaly of ‘the Voynich manuscript’. Where the left can risk becoming rightwing in its processes if not self-aware. Legibility and illegibility shifting in focus and meaning when controlled by colonial power. Translation and a personal interest in Chinese culture explicated. Keywords Privilege · Poverty · Oppression · Intentionality · Statues · Inscriptions · Translation

Privilege, poverty, oppression and issues of legibility. The writing of racism and potential racisms of some writings even where not intended. Someone who benefits from ‘white privilege’ might not be able to understand the nature of that privilege if they feel they have been denied wealth, social access, or the benefits of the white society they are part of (willingly or unwillingly), or that even rejects them, until relative privilege is made clear by ‘comparing’ someone without white privilege in an equitable situation.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_4

25

26

J. KINSELLA

Such privilege is a default that ignores demographics—a kind of baseline of injustice even inside gross injustices. White privilege makes itself painfully legible, and yet hides behind a screen of illegibility—a kind of mystic writing pad that blanks the slate when noted or referenced, though the reality is still traced on the sheet. But what is intention, and what are our responsibilities to it? How can a moment of seemingly benign intentionality and legibility become, especially much later, an event seen retrospectively as overt offence, a case of (at least) sublimated bigotry? The rearticulation of the past via social media to make that past event reactive in the context of a ‘now’ is an issue of shifting senses of legibility. Legibility, when offered as a factor of readability, ignores the changing nature of reading, the different cultural experiences, heritages and legacies taken to reading a given text (contexts), and the issue that reading will always claim ‘all time’ in the experience of now: exposure to a text implicates that text (and sometime unfairly, at least to some extent, the original accruers or formulators of that text) as an experience entirely valid and essential to the moment of response. Dante’s inscription above the gates of Hell: ‘lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’ was clear to the poet ‘hero’ (ultimately, Beatrice is and will prove the real hero… or God) and Dante’s poet-guide (Virgil come out of limbo), and remains clear to us now, it’s meaning seemingly stable. But we are assuming within the conventions of this act of writing you (and I) are engaging with, and that privileges certain assumptions about knowledge and language. An inscription is not always scrutable, even by those it is intended for. Ozymandius’s words (via Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet) are his words inscribed by another—an act of quotation or interpretation— and eventually the language of both will be lost, and the meaning and remnant statue becomes disconnected.1 ∗ ∗ ∗

1 As an aside, the statue of colonial rapacity, of militarism and state, often reduces the inscription to ‘facts’: dates and details, while displaying an intense imperative of compliance, of demanding acquiescence. The following poem was used against the neoliberal far-right bigotry of media using statues of colonial ‘heroes’ as fulcrums against those opposing the legacy (and ongoing celebration or acquiescence) of colonial rapacity (calling the hated the haters: the flip being a form of capsizing):

4

PRIVILEGE, PROPERTY, OPPRESSION

27

And those miniature fonts for miniature books. It is said Charlotte Brontë’s failing eyesight might be cited back to that. The citations of imitation. The presentation being the poem’s purpose as much as the content needing to be spoken? Is this the livery of middle-class manners without capital, not really—of, say, a governess getting the cultural crumbs while sustaining the machine of articulation, the reading of articles, the children to law or reading over title deeds or filing suits, if they are male? Male privilege is the attendant oppression, and the limitation to any activist reading. I remember when male editors used to discard

‘Statue Haters’ — Past & Present So, the right-wing newspaper columnist calls out the ‘statue haters’ — those who sign off on The Age of Exploration. These statues are as innocent as history. For him, they are factual whereas the Stolen Generations are a construction. O, the legacies of the printer’s hellbox. Contraindicative, we see the fusing of ‘refugees and terrorism’, we hear the denial of compensation for the brutalities of Manus Island. The Columnist — point blank — prefers statues over refugees, over Aboriginal peoples’ rights to their own country. But the statues have aged with the climate — changing, that is. Transforming. Assimilating? His readers might deny that also. The script of the navigator — observe what is useful to your patrons. Sink all rivals’ boats. And statues. Keep the sea-lanes open to The Crown, your protector — don’t sail over the edge of the world, but brave it out. The statues aren’t white, not usually, which is a flaw in the choice of materials — in the casting. ‘Statue haters’ should paint over statues with white paint only, white as pigeon shit — bring out their essence, the truth. John Kinsella, ‘Statue Hater’

28

J. KINSELLA

poems written by women because they seemed to be about ‘trivial things’, just because their points of reference weren’t male. Literally so. And as one who has never believed in or trusted the markers of gender, and felt them prisons from which we must escape, I have also noted that male privilege—as much as I rejected (and was on occasion assaulted) ‘masculinity’—was mine whether I claimed it or not. ∗ ∗ ∗ Though we might argue there is no real centrist or left-leaning form of the right… only right and far right… the right, nonetheless, in its unifications and controls, is not homogenous, and selfish capitalism is different from virulent racist exclusionism. In privileging the self above the needs of others, the right utilizes prejudice to give the individual a sense of intactness while ultimately absorbing it into units of control in which some selves have much more power and influence than other selves. This happens with any administration in which individuals have strong influence over the collective (and likely in varying degrees because of and within any act of being an ‘administration’), and a left wing collective that falls to cadre and individualist politics can easily become right wing inside its left wing facade: or purvey a legibility of left wing ideation while being illegible in its right wing internal reality (that eventually become legible as totalitarian control to the greater communities it administers). In an attempt to write through (or ‘strike-thru’) this contradictory notion of collective concern vs. individual ‘liberty’, libertarian politics are co-opted by right wing libertarians as justifications for broader freedoms when they are usually merely their own freedoms of expression (defence of guns and gun ownership, the tobacco industry and so on). Bold calligraphy of the propaganda poster is a declaration of encouragement and instruction, of enthusiasm and threat, and the scrawling of a racist comment on a noticeboard or as a sticker in the back window of a car works the same: the ‘rights’ of declaration working through confusions of common good and the self, threat and a search for companionship in rejection or assertion. Legible to some in certain ways, illegible to others in ways that might put them at risk. Inscriptions, graffiti, slogans, daubs—symbols carrying threat or resisting threat. The mode is not the content—but is the mode indicative of patterns of reading: desired patterns, and possible responses. Much graffiti speaks a private language of subtexts among like-minded if often competing and opposed groups, but some graffiti is a declaration of social purpose for all to read across differences of reading. But then we have Banksy and the notion of underlying big sales (the just social observation

4

PRIVILEGE, PROPERTY, OPPRESSION

29

as action is undone by the potential marketplace value of that graffitiart)—the anonymity that fetishizes that is not fiscal anonymity, not really, while pleading for peace and against poverty and social injustice. Whereas wealth and capital are the injustice. ∗ ∗ ∗ Dysgraphia is the generative space between thought and articulation. It is spoken and written, and neither is necessarily spoken nor written as expected. If the Voynich manuscript2 is difficult if not impossible to decode, it’s because of the elusiveness of not only its language, but the premise (of language and a context) the language was constructed from. An illustration is not a fact, and yet its properties might work as analogous referents to ‘the know’, the validated. And fragments and gestures of European languages, the issue of ciphering and decoding brim with the fear of absurdity. Legible script and illegible meaning, but in the pharmacopoeia and herbalism, the sense of purpose even if no ultimate purpose seems clarifiable. But there was clearly intent and purpose in the making/writing/illustrating/enacting of the ‘Voynich manuscript’— no throw-off ‘achievement’. There is a politics to this, and the value of it now is immense to the capitalist collector (and also part of the naming of an object of writing). But the real questions are, this object requiring great investments of capital in its making (time, skill, knowledge, even materials), is this information that could undermine or ‘enrich’? Is it entertainment? How does the object relate to wealth, to capital and to collecting and curating? Is knowledge inherently tied up in capital as a control mechanism? Is the legibility of an object an irony of the key to wealth: wealth being beyond scrutiny and accountability? Right wing conspiracy theories often gravitate around fears of ‘cabals’ sucking away wealth whilst violently defending the rights of the individual (and their family) to accrue wealth and to use it as they see fit—paradoxes within paradoxes… a contradiction of paradoxes. ∗ ∗ ∗

2 Cipher Manuscript. 0AD. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046.

30

J. KINSELLA

Are we searching for legibility in the use of motifs, in repetitions and refrains? Or are we more often hoping to push an illegibility to the point of familiarity where we expect and accept it? Advertising relies on this, of course, but so does the holism of an artwork that even in subterfuges expects the audience to have had an experience. Even the shocking experience in theatre relies on the coherence of theatre; of gathering. I think of 1938, Paris, and the first performance of Jean Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, and I think of ‘shock’ and ‘scandal’ that took time to generate, to seep through the right wing newspapers, spilling out of the (wellattended) theatre, then becoming cause célèbre, and then I think of theatre of publication of Cocteau’s support for sculptor Arno Breker in Comoedia, in 1942, and the efforts to rehabilitate Cocteau due to the fact he was oppressed by the Nazis as a homosexual artist, and that his lover was a member of the resistance, and so on.3 Even confronting these realities, and in an article that tries to ‘show it all’ while wrestling with context, Louise Gray struggles through grim realities of legibility and illegibility in her 2003 article in The Independent newspaper considering the Pompidou Centre 40th anniversary of Cocteau’s death exhibition, we read: ‘What are we to make of Cocteau’s blatant support for a fascist artist? Even after nearly 60 years, it provides scant comfort to recognize that life under enemy occupation is more complicated than history would like it to be....’4

Gray notes: ‘Italian artist Enrico David, who contributed to Chaimowicz’s Norwich show, suggests Cocteau may have been seduced, like many other artists, by the sentimental rootedness that fascism seemed to offer. “Is it attractive because of some fundamental sense of unbelonging?” he asks. Cocteau’s self-portraits—some with the face erased or covered in a single, elegant hand, bear witness to this: “They are,” David argues, “an endless way of 3 It is worth considering Cocteau’s seeming lack of action and glibness about his friend Max Jacob’s internment by the Nazis [regarding Jacob’s imprisonment by the Nazis, see Rosanna Warren’s recent Max Jacob biography]. 4 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jean-cocteau-beauty-or-beast80797.html.

4

PRIVILEGE, PROPERTY, OPPRESSION

31

questioning his own identity.” Cocteau was no fascist, but he had certainly been naive.’

I would argue, contra-indicatively, that it is because fascism creates a sense of belonging where, in fact, it functions on dispossessing minorities and any perceived as being ‘different’ from the blood-nationstate-corporate interests of wealth-power accumulation, and that fascism accommodated a belonging in which unbelonging could act out a form of public participation. If we follow the Gray questions of whether Cocteau did this for ‘protection’, or the arguments that he was ultimately ‘apolitical’, we still end up with issues of working with power to shift power. The issue of the self as figure of personal power (even in doubt), of creative energy, can so easily be adapted to render others unto that power. To be impressed by an artist can be a ceding of aspects of personal identity and liberty. The solo artist can break away from oppression, but can also hide and even feed, compel or ‘lead’. Legibility has been the key to exploitations under necessary social distancing and ‘isolation’ for the protection of individuals and communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. But capital and power-centrings have not ceased during this time—the planning for occupation, dispossession, and destruction has continued unabated as destroyers ‘work from home’, or still just go out ‘under cover’ and clear, mine and exploit. As I write, just such a situation has unfolded in Victoria—on the day the lockdown ends, a sacred tree is chopped down: the planning never stopped, the preparedness for the moment was heightened—a Djab Wurrung ‘Direction tree’ is cut down for a highway (as it’s outside an official agreement, but not outside the protest action, and not outside justice and ethics protections which are inherent rather than accorded by colonial law manipulations).5 The pandemic is real, its consequences are real, and yet we have to state and restate and confirm and ‘evidence’ the obvious as refrain against the denials that come as discourse of retrieving ‘rights’ which are in fact tangents to right wing controlism—the sense of inviolable personal ‘liberty’ that is claimed to exist against overwhelming evidence to the contrary (and which is only self-serving in its purpose), and which the actual business–government–military power-centres of the right

5 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/27/djab-wurrung-direct ions-sacred-tree-cut-down-victoria-western-highway-upgrade.

32

J. KINSELLA

latch on to as validation of/as a ‘vote’ of confidence in their protection of said liberties (which don’t actually exist beyond what serves the consumer-class-race-power constructs of those right wing power-centres). As QAnon discourse (and its mutating versions) aggresses and accrues against imaginary cabals, making a polyvalent narrative of elusive and abusive power, they reinforce the right wing elites that are amalgamations of legible and illegible discourse of control. The virus can’t be ‘seen’, but its effects can be—and the destruction of sacred sites and ancient biospherically-essential habitat is planned outside seeing and then is horrendously seen (the bits of tree in the back of a truck photographed), then is made unseen (moment gone, the pieces of the ancient tree burnt or chipped), and, the exploiters hope, eventually ‘forgotten’, lost to the written records of planning, but not to people’s consciousness, spirituality and breath-record. Legibility and illegibility shifting in focus and meaning as controlled by colonial power—‘law’ is not the ‘law’ that protected those trees for so many hundreds of years. The destruction of habitat, never mind a people’s sacred and cultural record and ‘placed-ness’, is at the core of the emergence of modern pandemics. An act of antifa reclaiming of the rights of narratives to exist without manipulation, exploitation and deletion seems essential to me, and I hear people calling out for this discourse—this speaking of clear stories of equitable rights, and also particular rights, but with depth and illegibilities of privacy and respect, not of subterfuge and jostling for power to take over, to oppress, to extract and erase rights of communities and their peoples. ∗ ∗ ∗ If we agree that readability and legibility can have shifting and often different political and ethical emphases, with temporal and spatial context being key along with availability of interpreters, say, of a different ‘era’, then we ask if we want to ‘take’ from a text all that was intended in its writing, or if we’re looking for an impression that will serve some purpose in the here and now. I often think of the translatability of ‘classical’ Chinese texts, especially as someone who has had a deep interest in English-language translations since my teens, but little access to the actual

4

PRIVILEGE, PROPERTY, OPPRESSION

33

language of poetry that so interests me.6 I read Joseph R. Allen7 write in his article ‘Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing’: What happens when we attempt to translate a text that is largely “unreadable” in the original? That is what we face in proposing a new translation of the Chinese poetry classic, the Shijing (詩經, Book of Songs). The theoretical and practical issues raised with such a translation may not be unique, but two things about this project are definitely special: the questions of distance and of intra-linguality. The intervening millennia, diachronic linguistic drift, and inherent qualities of the Chinese literary language have created conditions of extreme distance for the reader of this classic. (p. 69)

6 I have not only had lifelong fascination with Chinese culture, especially through poetry, literature, music and art, but also with the social politics of ‘China’ itself, and was also greatly affected by the ideals behind early Chinese Communism before developing an understanding of the traumas of the Cultural Revolution in my late teens. When my mother was studying as a single mother at university and I was a small child, one of her close friends had returned from China where he’d travelled ‘overland’ and had been allowed to enter to work on a Collective Farm (he was a microbiologist but has studied Mandarin and was a Communist). I spent time with him and he gave me a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (in an English version of The Little Red Book) and numerous publications on Marxism, Chinese Communism, and ‘official’ Chinese culture. They were formatted in the lush propaganda of the late 60s and early 70s and were in Chinese and some in English. I was so obsessed that I did my final Primary School project on Modern China and this later led me to read The Communist Manifesto and even Das Kapital when I was fifteen. Gradually, I moved away from communism (especially Leninism) to an anarchist (via Kropotkin) and pacifistanarchist position. The tyranny of states—whether they be ‘one party’ or ‘multiple party’ states (with internal party empowerments of public-driven ‘choices’ of varying degrees of ‘majorities’)—protected and underwritten by the constabulary and military, devastating the environment to enhance their own power as much or more than the necessary (and just) feeding and sheltering of people, became a clear contradiction to me. Small communities interacting with many other small communities in co-operative ways underwritten by consensus and non-violent communalism seemed the answer to me. Always appalled by fascism, I found the countering-negation to fascist realities of totalitarian states and corporate capitalism, of the military-business-state nexus, to be pacifist anarchism informed by equal distribution of ‘wealth’ and complete non-materialism. 7 Allen, Joseph R. “Translating Great Distances: The Case of the Shijing.” Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, edited by Maghiel Van Crevel and Lucas Klein, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2019, pp. 69–88. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctvs32rh7.8. Accessed 27 October 2020.

34

J. KINSELLA

And: It is assumed, however, that for early readers these qualities did not render the text unreadable or even ambiguous. If we accept these propositions, then we have to recognize that the language of the Shijing is a type of proto-classical Chinese, and not a language that is compatible with the reading protocols of standard literary Chinese. In many of its formations, the language of the Shijing is more akin to the language found on Zhou bronze vessels than that of the Mengzi or Shiji. This ‘bronze-script nature’ of the Shijing is masked, however, by the transcription of the text into standard script forms beginning in the Han period. At the graphemic level the Shijing may look like these other texts, but that impression dissolves when one turns to reading it. (pp. 71–72)

CHAPTER 5

Modes of Protest

Abstract This chapter is in four parts. Part one considers issues of defining the self through collective and personal protest. Problems with the terms ‘march’ and ‘marcher’. Campaigning against the death sentence. Participating in London Occupy. Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. Contemporary protest movements, poetry and ‘mass’ gatherings. ‘How we identify and how we use our identities as part of communal discourse is a dialogue between the legible and illegible that is both internal and external…’. Spinoza. Part two looks at Replacement Theory, definitions of terror ‘threats’ as made by ASIO, a comment on the fascist poetry of Ezra Pound and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Part three briefly considers ‘Some Fascistic Tendencies of the ‘Yellow Jacket’ Movement…’, while part four considers ‘form poetry’ in the villanelle as a tool of legibility against ‘global acts of hate’. Keywords Collective · Personal · Occupy · Aboriginal tent embassy · ‘Yellow Jacket’ Movement... · Villanelle

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_5

35

36

J. KINSELLA

Without Marching Bands I have defined myself through protests, but protest is bigger than selfdefinition. I also lose or deny ‘myself’ through the shared nature of protest. That right wing accusation of being a ‘professional protester’ belies the intent and commitment to an array of causes that share ‘common ground’ within the consciousness of personal protest; personal protest as part of collective concern. Some call aspects of this a form of intersectionality or ‘intersectionalism’1 (I often use ‘intersection’ in a different and almost topographical way, but in this context I am being more feminist-rights-specific), but as an agent of protest I act within personal responsibility as it segues with poly and proliferating communalisms, some of which I only became aware of in the act of protesting. Protesting can be illumination. Anti-fascist positioning is both personal and collective, and the poem itself is personal and yet always communal in its sourcing in language and utterance, and in its sharing, if it is shared. I have ‘marched’ for peace and against war, for environmental causes and against the rapacity of the mining industry, for animal rights and against vivisection and pro-Indigenous rights and self-determination calls. I have acted for gay rights and gender diversity, and have written about trans rights2 ; I have worked for women’s rights (an ongoing act of redress and also self-examination), and stood with anti-militarism, anti-nationalism, anti-capitalism and pro-human rights movements. But ultimately, I have been working towards a legibility of intent through an illegibility of often conflicting conditions. As a poet, I have watched discourse being manipulated to make ‘truths’ of over untruths, and seen precise statements being made out of imprecise and more often erroneous source material. The activist poem confronts this abuse of language by allowing language to reinstate its own causes and effect, be interpreted within the framework that invites interpretation and is yet porous and 1 I have recently been utilising a model of intersectionality that copes with significant differences in opinion, cultural background, identity concerns as well as commonality. I call this ‘disparate intersections’, and try to reconsider discrepancy and disparate alignments in activism. Queer politics and traditional cultures, workers’ rights and environmentalism, orthodox religious beliefs and, say, feminism, but all outside polarisation and binary formulations. I also ask if we might find generative intersectionalities wherein, say, individually differentiated identity segues with broader community and cultural ideations. 2 Among other statements, see my introduction to the Collected Poetry of Hilda Raz (Nebraska University Press, Lincoln, 2021).

5

MODES OF PROTEST

37

interactive. The poem might be fixed in the literal language of origin is uses or primarily uses to give semantic shape, but it also challenges and converses with the history and legacy of that language. A poem, for me, always contests. ∗ ∗ ∗ One of the strongest commitments of my life has been against capital punishment, which is state murder. The state is a most effective killing machine, and given moral sanction for killing, ultimately defines itself through the ability to ‘punish’, to enact public–private vengeance in such a way. It is always wrong.3 When I was young, I was regularly accosted (and arrested) by police, and described as a ‘professional agitator’, and a ‘professional marcher’. ∗ ∗ ∗ I always objected to the term ‘march’ and ‘marcher’, as it suggests an organized aggression, a militancy I feel is potentially centralized and controlling. It is good to be co-ordinated in a protest action, of course, but when a ‘central command’ thinking comes into the action, it too often takes on qualities of what one is protesting. And we all have different

3 I have been involved in numerous anti-death-sentence campaigns, and also actions to bring the failures of governments to account, such as that of Australia which does not permit the death sentence and yet in my opinion ‘allows’ it by proxy through not adequately supporting the condemned in other countries to resist their death sentences, and in failing to cut diplomatic ties (the lies of official trade-military driven dialogues) with nations that murder. For more on this, see Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2011), and poems in various collections of mine against death sentences being carried out in the USA, Singapore, Indonesia and wherever it occurs. Especially see ‘The Killing State’/The Murdering State’, a long poem in The Vision of Error: A Sextet of Activist Poems (Five Islands Press, Melbourne, 2013). State murder, and administratively and ritually sanctioned killings, are an issue to which I have applied a rare, for me, cultural and religious generalisation and form of ‘negation’ in that I can never see a just reason for killing, for murder. Never. The death sentence is the ultimate tool deployed by fascist organisations—a refinement of in the street thuggery and summary judgement. The process of legibility in terms of court processes hide a deep illegibility of purpose.

38

J. KINSELLA

‘levels’4 of commitment we can physically and psychologically encompass—if resistance is prescriptive and ‘policed’ it damages its own efficacy and potential to intervene in a wrong and either ‘correct’ or improve a situation. Tolerance in the act of protest is as important as working together to resist intolerance: overcoming intolerance is contingent on mutual tolerance. So, I support actions of justice and try to understand their immediacy and passions, and have been part of them, but if the ‘ranks’ need to be maintained to prevent the violent bursting out and taking revenge against the oppressors, I verbally intervene and/or shift the manner of my protest. My protest doesn’t stop because ‘Black bloc’ tactics come into play, and those deploying (the terms are, sadly, appropriately militaristic) not taking responsibility for their actions via a tactical illegibility that means kudos among their own cadre groups (who can recognize the manner of mask, the clothes and mannerisms of their ‘own’). The obvious need in the present pandemic for protest action segued with social distancing and health mask-wearing, is a very different thing, and in fact, a declaration of public respect and care, a personal and mutual enactment of wellbeing, as are protests held outside one’s ‘dwelling’ very distanced from others, or through participation via a physical nonparticipation (enacting in other ways—presence is a complex variable when one being at a site might risk others’ wellbeing… so we find a way of protecting others and still being heard). For me, the most effective tool I have found in protest is non-participation in the profit-making of capitalism. We ‘Occupy’ (and I participated in the London Occupy5 in a variety of ways), but if we are still consuming what the financiers and 4 This essay necessarily uses scare quotes to layer legibility—very few words and expressions that ‘label’ can justly define a subject/object situation. In using language persuasively, we are in the event, we are controlling the event whether we think we are or not. The scare quotes throughout are not an act of caution, but marker of multiple readings and how they might be directed within an argument, but also as a liminal space of contestation between legibility and illegibility. 5 Occupy London 2011—Saturday 15 October to Thursday 14 June 2012; I visited and ‘stood’ in solidarity on a number of occasions through that time and spoke in the one of the communal tents about activism and poetry. I was not ever resident overnight, nor part of the community of ongoing presence. As the ‘Church’ and city authorities tried to clear occupiers from the grounds of the cathedral, I wrote this ‘penillion’ and sent to church officials and others in an attempt to help stop the removals (i.e. to make a contribution to the mass effort):

5

MODES OF PROTEST

39

luxury-goods manufacturers churn out, then we are serving them while protesting. For me, the gadget/phone obsession and constant renewal (as with all personal electronics) are a huge part of this. Many fellow activists have said to me, ‘Well, we have to use the tools of the criminals to overcome them,’ but then sit down and play games on, or amuse themselves in some other way with, these same devices. ‘Marching’ is about order and control (negatives), and marchers of the left more often than not try to keep ‘ranks’ to maintain control and dignity in the face of great oppression, but to be by default a form of subcapitalist via keeping those ranks, and to fall into a control mechanism that mimics those of the oppressors (police, military, all forms of hierarchical organization), seems self-defeating in both its message and symbolism. The form is held as a voicing of co-ordination and commitment, a legibility that correlates to accountability; but I feel that to gather and move, to flow, to ‘be present’ is the legibility that matters, and the illegibilities (positives) of personal difference are allowed to be themselves.

God Without Borders: an address to the ‘owners’ of St. Paul’s… St. Paul’s, we will Not let words fail On your threshold, Nor world be sold Off to the rich Who will entrench In their towers Of selfish prayers. Witness the tents, See homelessness, Mark ‘industry’ In community! St. Paul’s, we will Not let words fall On your threshold, Nor world be sold.

40

J. KINSELLA

In some ways, what I am talking about is definitional, but it’s also part of resistance to imitating all manners of historical controls involving states and official bodies. One of the most effective protests in Australia in many ways illegible to white conservative forces, but decisive in its longterm commitment and its co-ordinates of re-occupying stolen land and ignored cultural integrity, is the Tent Embassy that has run from 1972 to the present day (2020) in Canberra, the Australian capital and centre of Federal administration, with a shift to the Old Parliament site during this time. A continuous protest for rights and acknowledgement, for the return of stolen land and the rectification of vast injustice to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, it is not a march (though marches have happened around it), but a statement of presence—a presence that goes back tens of thousands of years in its rightful claims. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Mass gatherings’ of resistance are vital, but have to be mediated in times of pandemic and scrutiny (not surveillance!) and diverse (and dispersed) actions have to be kept up. Black Lives Matters protests are not ‘a hashtag’, but an ab-reaction to centuries of systemic racist violence. Many ‘white’ protesters (and they are part of the oppression, even if by default and unwillingly—one hopes they are at least acknowledging this through participation) who join the actions have likely never thought about it till this moment, and no doubt the idea of breaking out of constraints of lockdowns and curfews gives them an enthusiasm to voice a resistance, but many of these protesters will gain an understanding of the issue by aligning their ‘affects’ with the substance of the moment. This is a real mass injustice that has many realities for non-whites in white privileged states. For Black America, it’s a case of being under threat, under siege, and saying it will resist systemic racism in all ways possible (and mostly and fundamentally, peacefully), and to concertedly commit to bringing change on macro and micro levels. African American poets are enabling community through their own work (and have long done so, and long been expected to do so by the white poetry systemics, as if it’s allowable, if containable within nation-state capitalist official literary discourse), but also through their advocacy for people of colour and CALD communities

5

MODES OF PROTEST

41

in the acts of making around poetry—civil rights is not only affirmation, it’s critical scrutiny at all points of social-official-business contact. My discussing of it is irrelevant, but my acknowledgement that even my ‘right’ of articulation is problematical in terms of poetic discourse and its aesthetic privileging, is, I think, relevant. In Australia, every year since colonial invasion has seen numerous deaths of Aboriginal people in and out of custody at the hands of the police. This is a fact, and we should every day, every one of us, not just a few, be working to stop this. The march against deaths in custody is an essential moment, and it might jolt certain changes, but ultimately unless a holistic understanding of the wrongs of privilege and underlying greed—desire for personal gain above peoples and cultural groups—and the indifference of the officials/system to the agency of the land itself is realized by those who perpetrate the crimes of oppression, the oppressions will become illegible to those outside the protest (and some of those non-Indigenous supporters who are not directly affected by these crimes against humanity) and be forgotten (‘we achieved that’ thinking, when we didn’t!), and moved on from. For families and community to have to keep up the rage alone is unacceptable. We are all implicated in their loss and their need. There’s a constant need to work through the paradox machine of legibility and illegibility, of private and public spaces, of available and ‘secret’ cultural knowledges that need to be respected; until this is taken on as an act of continual protest of conscience, no march in the world can achieve what is hoped for, what is demanded. In many ways, ‘petitions’ enter state mechanisms in ways they find hard to reject as systems are often in place to accept them, even if they are not officially binding. But a weight of verifiable signatures is an indicator of the mass actions that will inevitably arise if their concerns are not addressed. The petition has been a powerful tool for many Indigenous peoples, but then, the oppressing power utilizes its colonial language, its language of control and business, as a control mechanism, as grounds of rejection. Which does not mean more petitions shouldn’t be written, that they aren’t powerful—they should, and they are. ‘Marching’ hand-in-hand with numerous other actions creates a simultaneity that has an intense momentum. Poetry can work like this: the poems of Charmaine Papertalk-Green, Alison Whittaker, Jeanine Leane, Evelyn Araluen, Lionel Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and so many others, are voices that make a march something beyond the constraints of the social (police state) impositions that control it, that resist the

42

J. KINSELLA

problems of ‘the march’ itself and makes of them actions with a very different shape—a non-compliant shape, a non-militaristic shape that is in direct opposition to the ‘custody’ that is so egregious, wounding and murderous. A ‘settler’-colonial society infrastructure such as underpins official Australia, for all its contemporary claims to an official cultural diversity, fails to translate adequately, fails to interpret across cultural difference, and is quick to blame if not ‘understood’ in its instructions. Petitions are effective when worked in conjunction with presence—there is nothing as effective as a presence at a site of protest, especially when trying to stop destruction or incursion into a habitat or social space. An ongoing presence is possible even in pandemic—masked, social distanced, with great care to others, but present. Ongoing demonstration of a willingness to hold to account, to relay knowledge of a situation on to others, and if necessary, to peacefully intervene between the target of the rapacious and the rapacious itself. There are many such protests sites around the world that are focal points, but as we see most days ‘out here’, nearly every point on the planet should be an active protest site and can be even as we respect people’s health and wellbeing (in times of pandemic, of course, but always). Climate change implicates us all, and activism is everywhere, not just in Extinction Rebellion gatherings (whose originating organizers still refuse to include veganism as a core value when the pastoral-meat industries have such a big footprint in this)—if an action becomes an emotional venting, a social event for an expression of fear and anger, it will be ultimately less or even ineffective. In some ways, the micro-changes we make individually and within our communities is the most dramatic and effective—an Extinction Rebellion protester who ‘goes home’ and replicates the exploitations of capital they are criticizing is playing a role, not performing a ‘corrective’ action. In the same way, all big shifts of ‘correction’ in damaging behaviour, are bumpy (MeToo6 is an example of absolutely necessary awareness, with many causal consequences along the journey, but so are all hashtags that allow vicarious participation and claims without evidence and accountability, even when the essence and no doubt many of the actual stated cases are what they are said to be—corrective moments are always fraught 6 I do not use the hashtag because I do not participate in social media, but I acknowledge and respect the cause.

5

MODES OF PROTEST

43

and always imperfect… that is part of protest, as such protest is necessary, especially if in time in can distance and critique its own evolving modus operand). I have encountered many male left wing activists with deep commitment to a cause of justice, who have used their positions of influence and knowledge to attempt to persuade and exploit women—more-so in past decades. Furthermore, the dynamic of power within protest can and is used by some to exploit others in the movement in all sorts of sexual and gender ways, as well as in terms of influence and power in other contexts. Protesting for the liberty and rights of identity and identification doesn’t mean that injustices of oppression aren’t inflected within a ‘movement’. And though overtly celebrating an acknowledgement and increasing ‘Western’ public support for gender diversity and fluidity, the exploiters of others for sexual gratification will inevitably be prevalent and might be prevented through not valuing the presence of any one protester over another. The contesting of pronouns and the reclaiming of identity in how we describe ourselves and are addressed by others is vital, but we surely must be wary of the dialogue between word and action—the mining industry might be quick (in some ‘Western’ zones of consumercapitalism) to ‘adapt’ to appropriate-usage, but like the military, their existence is built on an ongoing condition of exploitation (and anxiety and fear). This makes what should be a macro-corrective, a micro-corrective so the companies can continue their macro exploitations in less legible ways. How we identify and how we use our identities as part of communal discourse is a dialogue between the legible and illegible that is both internal and external—activists must be aware that others make use of our attempts to rectify injustices so they can hide or distract from their own injustices. In other words, small actions must be cumulative and work to change the big (biosphere-destroying) wrongs. Causes have effects and can, taken together, go beyond the intersection into respectful solidarity, being ongoing just change and protection of difference and environment. Protesters who look to accrue power via a personal history or legacy of experience and ‘commitment—wielding their experience’—are inevitably destructive to any cause. They hide their greed behind their largesse. It has to be noted, if a left wing ‘protest movement’ irons out difference and intactness of every participant—their agency—in the name of ‘the cause’, then they erode the very essence of the left, which is mutual justice (and in my anarchist view, via Kropotkin, ‘Mutual Aid’). As Spinoza says in

44

J. KINSELLA

Ethics regarding affects being different between all living things (though he doesn’t go far enough in according difference, to my mind, and is prescriptive in his reasoning… still stating an ‘if–therefore’ case): Therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature, by which he is constituted, and is glad of it, nevertheless that life with which each one is content, and that gladness, are nothing but the idea, or soul, of the individual. And so the gladness of the one differs in nature from the gladness of the other as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other. (II/187; p. 102)7

And in looking for a just, contented life for all, whilst protecting and conserving the biosphere, a respect and acknowledgement of different senses and definitions of being needs to be an inherent part of protest action, within on behalf of and from without—we gather together in different ways, with often different micro-agendas, but the justice of what we work together for is clear. Poetry, though seemingly the most insular art-action, is, to me, a gathering place for the differences of language (we own no words, even neologisms are made from everyone’s wordage and utterances). Or, as I have described elsewhere,8 an ‘agora’ (meeting place/marketplace). And, I would add, a spatiality of overlap (if not ‘intersectionality’, which, I think, is too easily shifted away from its positive/generative core purpose by an unscrupulous right wing adding capital to each quality of difference) in which utterance can become supervivid, activated by its own affects, activated for its moment of encounter and action, even if it then becomes redundant. This is an issue of legibility, and even transparency (different qualities) that is placed under pressure by the confusions of personal need and desire—the unspoken, unrecognized, often illegible, even to ourselves, desires of the self. That is the tension of poetry I work through, and ‘scribble’ (as someone said to me recently) my writing actions of now. Yes, handwriting—which I am ‘erratic’ at, if persistent—is the core of my writing practice. I handwrite at protests, I handwrite into sand and with charcoal on rocks so it will wash off, vanish. I do not permanently alter or seek to damage ‘nature’ in any way. Its traces are in the action, but 7 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (trans. Edwin Curley; Penguin, London, 1996). 8 John Kinsella, Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017).

5

MODES OF PROTEST

45

hopefully they don’t possess or dispossess the space. And it’s through the hand, or any manner of marking and signing, that I move into protest— from being harangued by teachers for not being neat enough, to being bullied by other kids for ‘writing too much’ or ‘writing strange’, writing has always been an act of resistance to me. The issue of coded texts and legibility, and to whom and what the texts are speaking, has been vital. What I have written above and what I now write would be called an act of opinion, as is used by way of a marker in newspapers and news organisations to indicate the difference between supposedly impartial reporting and subjective pieces operating with a balance of viewpoints. I would argue that embedding tweets in ‘factual’ news reports as a sign of ‘balanced’ opinion—of representing different views—is a vox pop smashand-grab that doesn’t represent communities or people in any just way. Such reporting is participation in communication consumerism, with ‘evidence’ almost irrelevant to the act of editorial control of information. If ‘fake news’ becomes the tool of dismissal of evidence by right wing demagogues, so it is perpetuated by them not as opinion but fact. Opinion is communication, even if it utilises statistical data gathered by ‘impartial’ and ‘scientific’ means—we need to ask why it is being proffered, and what its ultimate intentions are. There is no neutrality. Citations and cross-referencing, illustration by examples, are a mode of ‘proof’, but so is the act of ‘close’ or ‘critical’ reading of a text. I see this as a hybrid text of reading, speaking and experiencing. Opinion? Well, it has to be, doesn’t it? But opinions can be responses to a mutuality that is larger than the self, and I hope that is this case with what I am enacting/actioning in this text. And in all our demonstrations, gatherings and peaceful but persistent resistances, we have to enable participants and not be ableist, insensitive or discriminatory in who can and can’t act, speak out and participate. Together (with emphasis),9 with respect for distance—‘socially distanced’ or by disposition or circumstances. Activism has consequences we must always take into consideration; non-activism is acquiescence and compliance which has consequences. And in a time of social media-driven reassurances that we are all activists (left right left right left… goes the ableist march… the protest needs to ensure access for all participants onsite and off-site), it 9 Emphatic language is pivotal to protest, but in the poem it can lose its intensity rapidly—I favour the emphatic, but find it most effective when counterpointed by ‘the lyrical moment’ or a figurative ‘tangent’… by allusion.

46

J. KINSELLA

seems to me to be a time to discuss a holistic activism of consequence, of cause and effect, of nuanced interconnectedness that stands up to scrutiny in its own terms (its own claims) and places the relationship between being and biosphere into inviolable focus. In this, we must succeed. The act of protest is not ‘owned’ by anyone or any group. The right wing protest as do the left, as do the non-aligned when their status quo and their collective sense of the quotidian is deeply threatened. But so often the right protest with state support or acquiescence (as do the centre), or ‘they’ protest against the state with the support of state machinery to enhance the powers of the state in ways that suit neoliberal notions of ‘liberty’. The far-right protesting in a centrist or leftist state will inevitably encounter more opposition, but so often have ‘silent’ cells of support amongst the police and military. It is not the purpose of this book to illustrate this (the activities at the Capitol after the 2020 US federal election are but one example in very long list—and we must always remember, the American conditions is not the world condition, and the Global North is certainly not the definer of protest in any way), but rather to show how the right will co-opt and empower a social protest movement against the state to enhance their versions of the state, to entrench their bigotries as de facto rule of fear, coercion and oppression (violence being their primary tool, but also creating apprehension through fear of ‘loss of way of life’).

Fascists not Liking the Term ‘Fascist’? In trying to realign the term ‘fascism’ to mean anything that impinges on an individual, group, or indeed ‘nation’s’ ability and self-permission to denigrate their ‘opposition’ or those they despise, the right seek to make the term anodyne. It cannot be made anodyne, and it cannot mean anything other than what it does. The push of the right to dilute and confuse the term ‘fascist’ and to realign and make new emphasis as trigger word, to trigger against the oppressed, to use as trigger against those who might complain of being triggered (‘snowflake’-ism and other denigrations performed by the right) against those who suffer under fascist regimes, they only need the smothering and invasive nature of social media to rush the word in a moment. It is the work of the poem to undo these textual corruptions and interventions into legibility. If fascists wish to change the nature of the term ‘fascist’ and to obscure its legibility and application, it will obviously be an

5

MODES OF PROTEST

47

oppressive act to many (and to the biosphere). This appropriation of legibility is best undone by refusal to acknowledge the shift, even though the meaning of words shift constantly. The head of ASIO saying that the ‘spy agency’ will no longer use the term ‘right-wing extremism’10 (nor ‘leftwing extremism’, though there has been none of this in Australia in terms of violence—their defining characteristic of threat—in recent times) has clearly come about (whatever the agency says) because of the discomfort of right-wingers being associated with terrorism. But right wing beliefs are so often versions of an extremism when it comes to respecting difference. We can prevent the denial by fascists of the relevance of the term ‘fascist’ to their beliefs and modus operandi, by constant maintaining reference to the historical facts of fascism (which offend many middleroad conservatives), and its consequences, but possibly as relevantly, by insisting that they are alienating their own core beliefs by eschewing the term that is actually theirs, and which epitomises what they represent. They actually are fascists, and they do believe in those values, and in shifting meaning to turn it back on their accusers, to wrestle terminology into ‘their court’ (tennis court oath inversions), to weaponize it against anti-fascists, they lose some of their (virulent) support base. Further, the far right throughout the world so often seeks to remake the fascisms of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler into ‘palatable’ versions of tags that disperse into unfounded and vague ideas designed to accommodate the disaffected in particular demographics, and to possess their ‘likes’ and attention as a distraction from the brute realities of their bigotry. And, most vilely, a belief such as ‘Replacement Theory’ (designed to evoke a response by its promoters) which purports that there’s a conspiracy of replacing whites with non-whites, a core fascist ideology that directly ideological links with Nazism, rarely brings with its public espousers a confession of fascistic beliefs. The irony being that there were active government policies in places such as Australia to ‘breed out’ nonwhites into whiteness (and if we distil this whiteness down to ‘witness’ 10 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/17/asio-boss-says-spy-age ncy-will-dump-terms-right wing-extremism-and-islamic-extremism (the article paraphrases the head of ASIO, Mike Burgess, as saying: ‘It was unhelpful to categorise groups as “extreme left wing” or “extreme right wing” because ASIO did not investigate people solely because of their political views, he said. The focus was the threat of violence.’ And quoting Burgess: ‘People often think we’re talking about skinheads with swastika tattoos and jackboots roaming the backstreets like extras from Romper Stomper, but it’s no longer that obvious,” Burgess said.’ I beg to differ!).

48

J. KINSELLA

we might think of how this process is also designed to remove witness to the truth of white supremacist activities). These far-rightists, these neofascists, these fascists, claim a legibility out of materials they themselves are ill-equipped to read—prejudice is beyond illegibility, it is a creating of it as misinformation, not as an issue of ways of reading or perception. Outside the moment of what they feel is ‘wit’ (turning the tables) in their public parrying, far right public commentators (from Fox News and Sky News to the even more hard-line online ‘news’ outlets), they leave themselves dangling. Fascism thrives on a reduction in the flexibility of application of language: the slogan substitutes for analyses and consideration, and the threat prevents needs for explanation. Considered in this way, the fascist poetry of Ezra Pound—in its protofascist and then overtly fascist manifestations—would seem to present a contradiction in terms of subtlety of language and didactic intention. But Pound knew both fascism and poetry, and that they are, as modes of interaction with people, as points of exchange, dramatically different and opposed.11 Right wing poetry inevitably comes across as limited and offensive when stripped back to its raw components, and ironically obfuscation and abstraction serve its infiltrations well—I say ‘well’ ironically, because such ‘qualities’ are so often decried in terms of right wing aesthetics. But it’s when the populist fuses with the artistic elitist, the believer in the inherent value of constructed arts-capital culturality, that the slogan works well with the metaphor, that ‘data’ (monetary data in the case of Pound) becomes mythologized and heroized through the lyrical lilt, the rhetorical flourish, and the embellishment of cruel, controlling, dictatorial meaning with flourishes of passion (less compassion), ‘love’, and other abstractions. As an antifa poet, I believe in witness and record, but not in co-opting and pillaging the agency and quiddity of what I am seeing—a witness might be implicated in a tragedy, and might feel its effects, but might also be outside that catastrophe/disaster (I am distending Blanchot in my mind’s eye). The antifa poet will create an internal linguistic ‘echo’ of responsibility in not claiming rights over what is seen if that is not a direct part of their own experience and suffering. Affinity, compassion, respect, closeness through distance, stepping back to make space, and not 11 It could be argued that historical fascism—certainly Italian fascism—actually had its direct organisational-linguistic ‘roots’ in a ‘decadent’ poet and his thinking—(the horrific) Gabriele D’Annunzio. How do we read the poet’s work given this?

5

MODES OF PROTEST

49

appropriating lives as one’s own, make undoing narratives rather than myths of blood and soil, of power. Pound gets the ear of the left with his Pisan Cantos , and yet, he remained a fascist whilst incarcerated. The poem becomes greater than the ‘politics’ and in the slippage we discover and extramural humanity, creativity that serves those he hated as much as those he didn’t? We need to question this.

Some Fascistic Tendencies of the ‘Yellow Jacket’ Movement One of the most followed, supported, imitated across different countries, and internationally reported protests movements in recent times (in Europe and beyond) has been the Mouvement des gilets jaunes, or ‘Yellow Jacket’ movement, with its cross-section of protest demographics with a strong tendency towards centrist and right to far right support base protesting against economic imbalance, elitism and deprivation. Driven largely by a disaffected middle class and arising out of protest/petition to the increase in fuel tax, the movement became the vehicle for many typical right wing protest annexings, without concern for environment or other social injustices. It is said that the movement is embraced from across the ‘political spectrum’, but its tendencies have certainly appealed consistently to the far right and with anti-Semitic fascist tendencies. It is also, in the age of social media, a self-documenting and adjusting to media conditions movement. Yellow Jacketism would by and large certainly set itself away from fascism, but the ingredients of fascist populism are inbuilt into its precepts. As I said to a friend in an email: the yellow jackets [...] began out of opposition to any constraint on oil usage and are fundamentally anti-environment. the core of it is middle class rightwing consumerism that then appeals to workers who are part of the energy industry who suffer because govts aren’t replacing what they source their incomes from with renewables... this is the new politics of the right that veils itself in part to appeal to an older left. we need to be aware of this and that any left that is not ecological in its core is anti-humanity because the planet dies and we all die, s. (21/12/18, 3:32 pm) and more re ‘gilets jaunes’: further yellow vest problems — at their heart is the far right. this: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2018/12/23/gilets-jaunesune-enquete-ouverte-apres-une-scene-antisemite-dans-le-metro-parisien_ 5401633_3224.html

50

J. KINSELLA

...is a case of yellow vests using the quenelle salute and then ridiculing a jewish woman after she told them her father had died at auschwitz. they repeated the gesture later. this has also been used by other yellow jackets in paris and is becoming associated with them. also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenelle_(gesture) this is the most worrying movement of our time in europe. it is antienvironment, anti-semitic, and [driven by] white middle-class consumerist commuters appealing to ‘working class’ bigotries (anti-immigration etc.) along the lines of britain’s brexiteers. it needs careful scrutiny. (24/12/18, 4:34 am)

Being Legible Against Acts of Hate To be legible against an act of hate, to be legible against an act of extreme violence, leads me to the use of a readily readable and recognized form, to type it, to offer it to those who have suffered so horrendously as a result of fascist violence. The villanelle is a form come of hierarchies, like all poetic forms that have resolved through the courtly, the privilege of literary and the refinements of ‘learning’ and have a receptive, largely aristocratic and, much later, bourgeois audience, and come out of a language of colonialist expansion and territorial acquisitiveness, itself arising out of the territorial machinations (and standardizations) of competing power points of territorial rivalry (and acquisition), a language come out of the discrepancies between warfare and pastoralism, out of class dysphoria. As a form that already states a positional privilege, it can become a tool to wield against control and oppression by undoing its own conventions— by partial participation, and where participating, to speak against what is expected if maintaining conventions. For me, as maker of poems, the villanelle will always speak against its origins as form (not place), and will always be a mode of breadth, tolerance, iteration of justice that build to move us closer to peace and harmony, but never avoiding the brutal realities of global fascism. The villanelle that follows is an elegy and a lament, and also a call for solidarity against hate crimes (in this case, claimed by Isis, an extreme ‘religious’ movement)—it is a poem that murmurs its hopes and respects for the victims and their community/ies, but also calls to work against

5

MODES OF PROTEST

51

such crimes ever being able to happen.12 Linguistic awareness is part of this: finding that space between rhetoric and lyric that is open for different spiritual belief, different customs and rituals, different senses of self, but not a space for hate to build its own forms (strings of word that build towards violence, slogans and declarations of hate and violent intent— postings on far-right websites that foster language as fragments to build towards hate events, that dissolve all possibilities of poetic language: it is such uses of language that chain together micro-aggressions in public to extreme over macro-aggressions in ‘private spaces’ that become violent events in ‘public’). Alain Badiou in Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy says: It is not for nothing that poetry, for this unheard-of invention, uses the maximal resources of the difference, including sonorous, between the names from inherited language. Either poetry is a thought, as philosophy declares, and then naming must be reintroduced into thought, or else naming, as Wittgenstein wishes, is not a thought, and then poetry is stripped of all thinking functions and is nothing more—something I find extremist and unacceptable—than a verbal instance of silence. (p. 109)13

Badiou is correct, but a poem can be both, and there are times when it must be both (Paul Celan and Miklós Radnóti, of course)—and sometimes the ‘name’ cannot be inserted as one does not have permission to name or to enact naming. A poem as vigil and speaking of respect through silence that can (must) also be a denunciation of the crime that lead to the need for elegy, for lament. I think of this as a poetics of reclaiming, and reclaiming is an enactment of a legible-illegible flux, a recognition that these aspects of articulation are not stable, and can be used and 12 See Chapter 9 for another discussion and villanelle about hate crimes and rightist-

driven mass murder. One has to be very wary about deploying terms like ‘Islamofacism’ (even if Isis has fascistic tendencies, Islam in itself doesn’t) which are often anti-Muslim applications used by non-Muslim fascist groups and fascistic individuals to de-culturalize and demean spiritual belief and ritual. Fascist behaviours can attach to religion, but no religion is intrinsically fascistic. There are fascist Hindu nationalist movements, fascist nationalist Christian movements, and there are fascist nationalist Islamic movements— the religions themselves are not intrinsically fascist but when segued with nationalism, it’s always a risk. The term might be relevant in the context of the Young Egypt Party (1933–1953). 13 Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy (trans Bruno Bosteels, Verso, London. 2019).

52

J. KINSELLA

misused, deployed in contradictory ways to serve very different ends. But the recognition of this instability in meaning and use is pivotal to finding an antifa language of refusal and of care for those who suffer.

Villanelle of the Grasses for the victims of the bombings in Sri Lanka, Easter 2019 The crepitation of grass seeds sprouting is the stir of green emanation — that’s the underwriting of a grassland rousing itself from sleep just as a lamb calls fiercely for its mother rousing the dog across the ravine. It’s an unbearable weight to bring to bear on the ground as the sudden chatter of familiarity, the co-operation of seeds, their ‘go now’ forms its inland neap, the crepitation of grass seeds sprouting is the blur of green emanation. It’s tense knowing the grass is coming, programmed in—a rerun of last year though this year’s not the same, this summoning from the not-so-deep, just as a lamb calls fiercely for its mother rousing the dog across the ravine. We walk roughly then suddenly soft as news of a further extermination of people at prayer turns the freshly risen grass back to the hurt soil’s grip, the crepitation of grass seeds sprouting is the blur of green emanation. The fear of who might possess the last breath, who knows the seen and unseen, the sounds that reverberate after the grass retreats from its hope, just as a lamb calls fiercely for its mother rousing the dog across the ravine. But faith is woven through faith—a spirit path through grass’s patterns of grass, and the intricacies of call and response, of the grass’s sudden leap just as a lamb calls fiercely for its mother rousing the dog across the ravine, the crepitation of grass seeds sprouting the stir of green emanation.

Fascists and anti-fascists sharing anything seems incomprehensible, and to me, it is,14 but they share modes of protest and that in itself is 14 A friend has noted in private correspondence: it’s ‘perhaps all the more despicable because we share so much’ in terms of say, ‘appreciation of art, classical music, landscapes, forests, dogs… vegetarian dishes’… ‘poetry, philosophy, cinema’ etc.; though

5

MODES OF PROTEST

53

disturbing and needs scrutiny. The moment violence becomes a part of an act of protest (even in response to the frequently violent response of the state and sometimes the violent incursions of counter-protesters), the tenets of fascism come into play. Violence is the tool of oppression, and oppression is never alleviated by using aggression against aggression. Systems replace systems and oppress the vulnerable in similar if different ways. So when we protest we need to differentiate ourselves from the violence of the state and other violence-based protest groups (or individuals).15 Fascism feeds on violence, and ‘strength’ is its calling card and assurance to its followers. The mode of protest I favour is consequently never about strength and certainly not about violence, but about committed legibility if purpose that is also full of enough self-doubt over the illegibilities of the text of ‘world’ to ensure one/the group never becomes ‘judge and jury’. Even the most determined poem of protest has to have some room for doubt because, if nothing else, changing language will change meaning over time. The poem in its protest moment can have a different effect for the same cause further beyond the moment and in this have unforeseen consequences. We need to be open to this possibility and to be conscious of the mode of now and the mode of the future.

I’d say all those overlaps are differentiated by the way these aspects of life are perceived/used/implemented and reconstructed to suit a far right ideological purpose. 15 As I clearly differentiate the version of pacifist antifa poetics I describe in this work from those who would militarise Antifa beliefs and essentially become violent gun-toting exponents of terror in doing so. For me, weapons and ‘armed resistance’ equate with fascism regardless of the name and ‘values’ it attaches itself to: https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2018-01-15/redneck-revolt-and-the-hard-lefts-call-to-arms/9303758?nw=0.

CHAPTER 6

Legibility of Journal Extracts Jan 2020—followed by Extracts from Handwritten Journal

Abstract Handwritten journal extracts written in Rapperswil, Switzerland around the time of Davos World Economic Forum of 2020 ‘as it edged and burbled on the distant rim of the pandemic’. Includes an ‘introduction’ regarding legibility and the text, especially with regard to my ‘life-long’ Graphology poetry work and the notion of dysgraphia. Includes a series of photos. Keywords Davos World Economic Forum · Pandemic · Dysgraphia

As I write across ‘genres’—or more accurately, as I document and articulate in shifting and often unstable forms—I move from handwriting to typewriter to the fonts of word-processing in both ‘planned’ and circumstantial ways. But what I write with and on matters to what I am writing, and to an overall ethical positioning: the provenance of paper and ink, the impacts of digital technology. For a couple of years, I went largely offline but still used a computer. This is something I am working towards resolving.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_6

55

56

J. KINSELLA

Since the mid-90s, I have been working on ‘Graphology Poems’ as a mode and means of eliding and merging different writing practices. Intended to be poems of observation in which a process of self-critiquing is also happening, they are often poems in my handwritten journals (which I have been keeping all my writing life, and before) that are transcribed into a legibility of ‘print’, but more often than not, they are an ongoing unseen glow within the screen of my head. I see poems visually, and I transcribe them from what I see inside my head—a double-seeing as I walk, take things in from the world. They are a rolling script, they are the paper scroll Jack Kerouac wrote on, but enscribed on/of neurons— they are certainly different content but they share ‘exposure’ to world and working through it. My handwritten journals are what led to Graphology in the first place— my hard to read almost illegible handwriting that I try to force into legibility, but ‘let go’ once I am flowing and thought becomes its own freedom, are the script of poems. These entries are handwritten poemnotes and often poems worked through from transcription within my own internal seeing. But they are also activist texts, to be shared, to be shifted from the immediate to the conversations of now where they might fit, or, indeed, be ignored or rejected. The journals are workbooks, but they are also the ongoing poem—handwriting analysis not as pseudo-science (necessarily), but as continuing engagement wherein rash things might be said, thoughts expressed that have no resolved into ‘statement’, but they remain active because the reader (or just me, the writer) can re-encounter them. Journals are private entities, but I stand by the public nature of mine. It has always struck me as odd how different poets are in what they see poems doing—especially in the context of ‘teaching’ the writing of poetry. To show a sharp contrast, take these two quotes from David Citino’s book The Eye of the Poet 1 on ‘practical advice’ (back cover) to students. The first, from Billy Collins, I entirely oppose and find pointless—for me, poetry is never entertainment, and always activism: ‘The poet is, above

1 David Citino, The Eye of the Poet: Six Views of the Art and Craft of Poetry (OUP, NY/Oxford, 2002).

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

57

all, a song and dance man, and he invites his readers into a kind of ballroom whose dance floor is the site of the poem’s rhythm and sound,’ (p. 3). The second statement is from Yusef Komunyakaa, with which I am in accordance: ‘The ideal poetry workshop becomes a small, instant community of shared ideas, and it is also a way station for nurturing. This isn’t a stage or arena for a cutting contest…’ (p. 134). And for me, out of the consensus and sharing, the nurturing and non-competition, is an implicit activism of textuality. I mention this because the journal for me is just such an intensely private–public coming together, as indeed are all the poems of my Graphology ‘cycle’. My handwriting might seem rebarbative or just indifferent to a reader (even to myself), but it’s not—the ‘dysgraphia’, if it is this, I feel contains the intention of clarity of purpose, of stretched flowing lines that will also appear in compacted, parsed forms (‘poems’) at some stage. In the extracts in this section, the journal is following (in opposition) the Davos World Economic Forum of 2020 (as it edged and burbled on the distant rim of the pandemic), and works in conjunction with my typing an ‘experimental’ novella entitled Fever Chart, which looks at modes of story-telling at times of crises, and follows the thread of ‘a little prophet’, an antifa activist-speaker, and the repulsive capital excesses (and denials or lip-servicing—especially of climate change issues and reality) of the Davos meeting. The events are legible as far as promotion goes, but illegible in their brute realities. However, protesters working against the Davos capitalists, work (and walk—not march, walk) to bring an accountability, a witness, a recoding and a different way of reading, a new legibility around the exploitative forces at work behind the scene, beneath the ski-slopes and inside the luxury hotels. And always the helicopters. And always the injustices—micro and macro—that go on as ‘day-to-day life’ simultaneously. The journal is part of poems, fiction, record-keeping, photographs (taken as protest—and photos in themselves are complexities of observation and accountability in many ways), all intersecting, all working together not as ‘authority’ but as an act of participation and responsibility to all that exists outside the writing self. So, strangely, if a reader can ‘be bothered’ deciphering the handwriting of these journals—work through the problems within ‘illegibility’ of orthography—that process might reflect, if nothing else, on their own

58

J. KINSELLA

acts of writing, especially as handwriting becomes far less common. For handwriting is an activism, as is speech and signing, as is the mark of the body in the world, as is the breath and the loss of breath. I offer these pages in the spirit of enactment and reflection. Not as Cocteau’s mirrors, but as an absorbent surface that holds marks and signs in place for a while. As long as not written on the killed corpses of old-growth forests (though it is too often an ‘act of trust’ because so many journals claim to be from ‘sustainable sources’ without adequate scrutiny of wood pulp’s origins), as long as not written in animal ink or ink whose manufacture has meant the declining health and ‘life quality’ of those who worked to make it (not the owners, the workers), and the health of the natural habitats (however ‘damaged’) they came out of. And scanned and printed in book form offers different concerns, different layers on layers of responsibility, of cause and effect. In the background of these entries is the large medical technology factory that dominates the town of Rapperswil on upper Lake Zürich. And just across the lake, across the reconstructed wooden bridge Holzbrücke Rapperswil-Hurden (Seedamm), an echo of the Jakobsweg pilgrimage route, and over the bridge one of the financial zones of Europe; small, yet controlling vast wealth. And that subtext all writing made while in that locale, and flows in all directions, even out through the human-induced climate-change-cracking mountains. And then there are the errors arising from writing rapidly (and sometimes ‘errors’ in the case of détournment, which does happen, especially in the poem-entries)—some painful, like ‘reverance’ instead of ‘reverence’— but here they are, unedited:

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

59

60

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

61

62

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

63

64

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

65

66

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

67

68

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

69

70

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

71

72

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

73

74

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

75

76

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

77

78

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

79

80

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

81

82

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

83

84

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

85

86

J. KINSELLA

6

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

87

88

J. KINSELLA

An example of right wing anti Greta Thunberg propaganda in Switzerland

6

John Kinsella protests in Zurich

LEGIBILITY OF JOURNAL EXTRACTS JAN 2020 …

89

CHAPTER 7

Micro- and Macro-Aggressions and Social Contracts

Abstract From ‘realpolitick’ to reading aloud sections of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World we trace a way through to the breaking of social contracts and consequence and the false dichotomizing of ‘carbon’ vs ‘nuclear’. Keywords Social contracts · Carbon · Nuclear

Today, the Indonesian military are accused of a ‘crackdown’ against secessionists in West Papua (which is a zone occupied by an invading state), another 50 hectares of koala habitat has been approved for destruction at a Port Stephens quarry in New South Wales by the Federal Environment Minister, and a Swedish/Russian research team working in the Arctic Ocean off the east coast of Siberia have said that the mass release of methane (the so-called ‘sleeping giants of climate change’) has begun, meaning massive acceleration of biospheric collapse through global warming.1 All of this reportage flows in across different media platforms (the Australian Broadcasting Commission in this case), and the irony of energy-suck and materials required for advanced technologies of 1 https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/sleeping-giants-of-cli mate/12825096.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_7

91

92

J. KINSELLA

communication are literary excursions into the machinery of languageusage. An hour ago, I was reading aloud with Tracy and our son, Tim, this excerpt from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which we have in print-book form and can access online: Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found. “We condition the masses to hate the country,” concluded the Director. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks.”2 (Chapter 2)

Micro-aggressions are implicit to any irony, and elevating an awareness above an ignorance is tantamount to an elitist act. But it’s wilful ignorance, of making easier choices, an act of self-irony that cancels in the rhetoric of the literary gesturing of ‘life’, of reality. The divergent realisms the web offers on real incidents can have stunningly disturbing consequences. The use of mass shooting events—mass murders—for pro-gun propaganda3 (and even denial of the events and their causes), is a case in which rhetoric resolves as reality into images that fit a way of seeing a story inevitably programmed and conditioned by mass visual and sensory medias. If the poem is to be a screen as many have argued (and we find a version of this in Jonathan Bates’s Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World’ when Bates talks of The Prelude’s ‘And afterwards the wind…./As at the fountain’ lines: ‘Sigmund Freud would have called this

2 https://www.huxley.net/bnw/two.html. 3 Appallingly, a movie is being made

in Australia on the Port Arthur Massacre. See: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/01/the-community-ispretty-upset-port-arthur-film-widely-condemned.

7

MICRO- AND MACRO-AGGRESSIONS AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS

93

sequence of The Prelude a “screen memory”’4 ), then a ‘screening’ has an issue with audience and perception of exposure/experience. But the screen memory, and indeed ‘spots of time’, are also tropes in postmodern and late modernist poetry outside the act of memory (and memorializing canonical or ‘sacred’ texts), as in the poetry of Paul Muldoon,5 where he so often makes motifs out of literary tropes and conventions, that exist in the ‘now’ of looking back not to move across time and place conceptually, but to highlight the irony of this fetishization (in the capitalist sense). Muldoon is not known as a poet of the far-left, but his poetics are certainly liberal and anti-colonial and ultimately about tolerance with a freedom of meaning and diversion. ∗ ∗ ∗ We are seeing cascading failures of social contracts wherever the language of the contract is under complete control of state-military-corporatism. Overwriting values of equality and justice, and respect and protection of minorities (not on condescending fashions, but as equals within equals— difference as an equal value to be respected), is the placebo of virtual freedom, so championed by online activists as a reservoir of truth and liberty, as a vehicle for access to privilege hitherto available only to the super-rich. Under the stresses of dealing with Covid-19, the super-rich have got richer, which is showing up on list after list (those obscene competitions run by financial and acquisitiveness-stirring media outlets, also reported by light-left media with prurient astonishment),6 and the internet and the materials around having to work from home to maintain a global capitalist economics of consumerism, travel and adventurism. The Independent newspaper7 actually ran a campaign for British tourists to visit ‘low-Covid’ areas to make the best of things with no concern for the possibility of the tourists bringing the virus to the locals. It was sold as a logical quid pro quo of capitalism, leisure, entitlement and privilege—the 4 Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (p. 35; Yale University Press, USA and UK, 2020). 5 Paul Muldoon, Dislocations (edit. John Kinsella, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2020). 6 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/29/gina-rinehart-rockets-backto-top-of-afr-rich-list-as-pandemic-proves-kind-to-ore-ligarchs. 7 The Independent is entirely an online newspaper now!

94

J. KINSELLA

colonialism of travel that so entrenched itself among the more financially able during the Industrial Revolution, and, prior, among the landed and power-owning aristocratic and military elites. Viral-legibility changes and decontextualizes syntax. We move into parataxis as both inoculation and position of action. Vast flows of visual and aural information—text—are enabled to reassure availability of ‘real’ experience. There’s nothing new in this observation, but the fact there’s nothing new is the lament, the elegy of any poetics of the now—we accept it as we critique it, we add pollutants to the biosphere, we collude in the endgame of our making. And then, desperate as it seems, ‘environmentalist’ media figures such as George Monbiot offer the nuclear card as an answer,8 when the literal fallout from this industry is so massive, so changing of the geology and biology of the planet, we wonder if the internet of the UK were not substantially powered by it, and his voice was of the site rather than the site-ism of the screen, if he’d say such things. Floundering in tritium— unseen and making itself manifest—changes things. Dumps of radioactive materials change things. Leaks change things. Nuclear weapons change things. The playing off of carbon against nuclear becomes the legibility of carbon pollutants vs. the illegibility of radiation (and all the damage its many mining and production and disposal processes entail), and in the rush to offer the definitive answer—the solution (a word I refuse in all its contexts and manifestations outside the chemical)—an urge to make the illegibility of endgame into a set of steps to be taken. It’s dumping the paradox machine for the end of the world machine. That’s not poetry, it’s a frenzy of epitaph writing sold as participation through streaming services. Atomic Swans, Switzerland The Aare River rises as steam & fallout & the swans sail through our lingering body’s signature, their movements purposeful & site-specific, 8 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fuk ushima.

7

MICRO- AND MACRO-AGGRESSIONS AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS

radiating endemicity around the leaky boat of atomic imperialism. Atomic swans patrol their zone, neck movements peculiar to twists in the river, a cooling tower cupola mimicry au naturel across languages, swan-talk filigreeing the pretty smoke from village chimneys.

95

CHAPTER 8

Versions of Mallarmé

Abstract Stéphane Mallarmé, J. H. Prynne and Emily Brontë and handwritten manuscripts—a politics of orthography leading to a (re)consideration and affirming of slippage between legibility and illegibility in a search for justice. Keywords Orthography · Justice

In her translator’s note to Divigations, Barbara Johnson says of Stéphane Mallarmé: ‘The materiality of the page, ink, paragraph, and spacing is often just as important as the logic of syntax, figure, and sense’1 (p. 299). This is, of course, true, but is it not true of all poets? Are we not talking about a performative act here, and one of presentation and possible stages? Is not the salon a form of presentation as much as a process of sharing and interacting? The poet J. H. Prynne cares deeply about these issues, too, but I would argue for a different (obsessive) political purpose—in being read accurately in layout and font, the ‘density’ of his texts are permitted to be just that without obfuscation, for all their apparent ‘difficulty’, and the 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Divigations (trans. Barbara Johnson; Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2007).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_8

97

98

J. KINSELLA

intensity of their (political) meanings are enhanced by that focalizing, by the richness of their reference and involvement in their subjects. Prynne poems2 are poems of total linguistic and political commitment. For the symbolist poet whose essence we locate in the total project of Mallarmé, the reaching for the ineffable is an act of obligation to artistic integrity, a reaching beyond into an activated ideal, a crisis of the ideal and a persistence of the desire for this, in the same way as C. J. Brennan, his Australian follower, decried any pollution of ‘Eden’ or the violation of the integrity of the wanderer, who cannot resolve a search for some indefinable purity. These very different aspirations—of two poets I greatly admire—might seem inimical to one another and to my purpose, but they are not. We move between poets and their poetry. Emily Brontë’s poetry has been a mainstay of my creative life, but her politics absolutely at odds with how I position my own, and my making. But there’s also a politics of the spirit at work, that pushes through conflict (and literal war imagining) and becomes embodied within one’s own voice, whether one likes it or not. Her voice becomes an anticolonial hyperextension of early reading and learning patterns for me—I can undo better through being confronted and undone by her works. Her handwriting (in her notebook cited) is seemingly sharp, regularly arced and sloped, it compresses and carries a range of variables that defy the eye, and ink blotching blooms with hesitation and reflection, and the writing shifts from more copybook to a ragged intensity from page to page; it is confronting and activating to my eye. Emily Brontë’s handwriting seems primarily legible (even with its crossings-out) and yet, for all it clarity (when not miniaturized!), it carries a hiddenness (not secrets) that enhances the poetics, makes poetry of the act of handwriting.3 Legibility is clearly apparent, but has a shifting, even elusive ‘quality’ if taken in the broadest meanings of this essay. I read no ‘personality traits’ in any handwriting (an anti-graphology which is the basis of my Graphology poetry sequence that has run since the mid-90s), but I do note political, ethical and social (private/public) intent in the calligraphy as it relates to what is said and its orthography.

2 J. H. Prynne, Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, Tarset, 2005). 3 See https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/emily-bronts-poetry-notebook.

8

VERSIONS OF MALLARMÉ

99

Glasstown Peace Accord I had toy soldiers, and toy tanks, planes, battleships. Strategy game terrain. Hedgerows. Sand drifts. Camouflage. Correlations to battles fought & lost were real enough outcomes changeable. Local factors. Temporal dynamics. But the wars stopped as I got more aggressive. And then the war in myself stopped. I hear a gunshot and it breaks down the code of my works & days. I spend a lot of time systematically walking the block studying scats without touching them. Just to know what has been, what might be. Sometimes I see bloody feathers, bones. I am less of a wanderer than I was, watching over home.4 4 From Volume Three, Collected Poems of John Kinsella (UWAP, Nedlands, due 2024).

100

J. KINSELLA

Prynne’s ideal is social justice, and a text he works doesn’t augment or co-opt that, but rather calls for closer analyses of things ignored and unnoticed hidden amongst the crimes sold to the world as past before they are over, and resolved by the act of reporting. Be it exposing the crimes of Apartheid South Africa, the horrors of the imperialist vacuumfilling of the Iraq war(s), or confronting the denial of the existence of mass poverty, all these traumas are compacted into the small spaces possible (even in long lines and blocks), because there is no simplifying of the details of each trauma: they all need to be told via a different way of telling. Prynne’s handwriting can be ‘immaculate’ when used to write a personal dedication in a book—consistent, indicated by his scholarship, and characteristic—jagged, pointed, but also subtly curved and flowing to order, but each letter locked into the other via its spacings. However, his poetry drafts often show irregularities, more ‘flow’ and more upright rather than sloped right script, with juxtaposing uses of the space on a page to make blocks of commentary or text. There is order even when the handwriting seems to be getting ‘away’ in the drive of composition (always left political and always knowledge committed).5 It seems largely legible, even to the ‘untrained eye’—contrary to ready availability of ‘meaning’ (which is emphatically there). Mallarmé’s handwriting6 is mostly regular (especially when making a ‘final’ holograph text of a poem), lyrical, upright, with ‘ink points’ at pauses, thicker capitals on occasions, and has idiosyncrasies of letters sometimes unjoined (especially ‘y’) and if it borders on flourishes never falls to them. It is readable. With his corrections of manuscript material for Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,7 there’s a beautiful chaos— an organized meticulousness of red pencil and print in which the spread of the page is a bloody field of textual reckoning, but not of its implications in the colonialist reality of middle-class capital that ensures the persistence of such art, even if it nominally opposes ‘brutality’. In this work of ‘chance’, the plays of numbers (12 and 7) are not illegibilities, but an architronics of manners towards the ideal which no one enjoying

5 See reproduced page here: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6807/the-artof-poetry-no-101-j-h-prynne. 6 For a layout enactment, see: https://historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=2169. 7 http://chroniques.bnf.fr/archives/fevrier2007/numero_courant/collections/acquisiti

ons.htm.

8

VERSIONS OF MALLARMÉ

101

privileges of access and interpretation of knowledge structures in Paris of that time (or any time) should prioritize, to my mind. But since the day I encountered the C. F. MacIntyre’s Selected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé bilingual edition8 in the old Perth Library—two days after I came down from the country at the end of 1980 from the distant coastal/rural/mining town of Geraldton on the west coast of Australia to attend university, discovering it on an upper gallery shelf… I sat in the library and struggled with the original (I was trying to teach myself French and my Auntie was giving my occasional lessons on Wheatlands Farm)—the translation and original ‘Cantique de saint Jean’ had me and never let go. However, also within a short period of arriving in the city, I was part of protest gatherings, and marches, post-Noonkanbah land rights dispute (1979–1980, and the ensuing protests I was involved with in 1981) which had reached a head in August as the autocratic premier of Western Australia and his conservative government pushed hard to allow AMAX to drill scared sites of the Yungngora Community on Noonkanbah Station (1,750 kilometres north of Perth). In joining that stand with Aboriginal peoples I knew that Mallarmé could be useful as a mode and manner of movement, but not as an answer—his search and angst over the failure to make real the ideal was irrelevant to real world injustices: he could be useful in technique, but meaning was irrelevant—his transitions between states could be a useful vector for identifying the colonial, acknowledging personal culpability, and learning how to reject it by undoing it. I scribbled over Mallarmé, and even recently did so again after seeing a copy of it ‘in the flesh’, and feeling a need to confront its legacy and my own relationship to it as a disclaiming of art in itself and a reclaiming of its language as activist tool. So here are three personal engagements with Mallarmé in the context of above, and as movements towards an antifa reconfiguring—disappropriating through an infringement of ‘copyright’, an act of rebellion to destabilize the eminent text, but also to give it back to language and offer it to protest. I am not claiming it works as such, but that was the compulsion through these different phases of address and Bakhtinian dialogics underwritten by various illegibilities of multiple and polyvalent searches and reachings for justice:

8 C. F. MacIntyre Selected Poems of Stéphane, Mallarmé bilingual edition (California University Press, 1957).

102

J. KINSELLA

Stéphane Mallarmé L’Azur The eternal Azure’s unclouded irony Overwhelms, indolently lovely like flowers, The impotent poet cursing his artistry Over a sterile desert of sorrows. Fleeing, eyes shut, I feel it investigate My empty soul with the intensity of a ghastly Remorse. Where to flee? And what wild night To throw, shreds, to throw over this distressing mockery? Smogs, arise! Pour your monstrous cinders With long rags of mist into the skies That autumn’s livid marsh will smother And raise an immense ceiling of silence! And you, leave the Lethean ponds and gather The sludge and pallid reeds as you surface, Dear Ennui, so as to plug with tireless fingers The large blue holes made by spiteful birds. Still more! let the dreary chimneys smoke Without respite, and let a wayward prison Of soot extinguish with the horror of its black streaks The dying yellowish sun on the horizon! – The Sky is dead. – Toward you, I hasten! grant, O substance, Amnesia of the cruel Idea of Sin To this martyr coming to share the blankets Where happy human cattle are bedded down. For since finally my brain, emptied out Like a jar of make-up lying on the ground, No longer has the art of dolling up the weeping thought, Dismally I wish to yawn toward an obscure end. In vain! The Azure triumphs and I hear its melody In the bells. My soul, it’s becoming a voice to scare us

8

VERSIONS OF MALLARMÉ

Even more with its malicious victory, And from the living metal emerges as blue angeluses! It rolls through the mist, ancient, and thrusts Through your innate death-pangs like a true rapier; Where to flee in useless, perverse revolt? I am haunted. Azure! Azure! Azure! Azure!

And Graphology Proximity 3: Geneva

103

104

J. KINSELLA

And Villanelle Against War via Mallarmé’s ‘Azure’ no wars are just wars war is not a point of view pacifism is not a posture plugged into the binoculars of data flow the chatter of the crew, no wars are just wars the spectacle a spectacular weighing up and erasing counterview pacifism is not a posture as a kid i collected ammo boxes, bullets and army surplus clues = no wars are just wars but now, so much older… to encounter adults who claw away at rights by displaying death as azure…? pacifism is not a posture! how raw the nerves how raw umanisti strategized as ‘worldviews’ — no wars are just wars pacifism is not a posture

CHAPTER 9

Against Competition/Against Winning… and ‘Consequence Theory’

Abstract The oppression of competition and competitiveness: the crisis of ‘winning’. The nature of competition. Perec. What are ‘values’? Patriarchy as it pertains to a failure to achieve biospheric justice. Offering a theory: ‘I call this “Consequence Theory” (and the capitals are a problem): an inclusive act of dialogue between the legible and illegible in the context of biospheric mutuality…’. The poem’s mutability, rejecting property and copyright, the consequences of land clearing, and poetry as an activist tool. Hannah Arendt and poetry. Refusing to allow the far right to co-opt Dylan Thomas’s poetry for their own ends. Keywords Patriarchy · Mutability · Copyright

The oppression of competition and competitiveness: the crisis of ‘winning’. Ever since the time I fell on my face and twisted my ankle after being forced over hurdles at primary school (like so many others), I saw that competition was built on a conflict between violences—pushing or being pushed to outer-limits, pivoted between controlling and thwarting the potential catastrophe within one’s self in terms of not succeeding (for the self, for the team, for the institution, for the nation, for the self), and the unleashing of catastrophe by degrees (those second, third… not placed acknowledgements of ‘participation’). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_9

105

106

J. KINSELLA

Competition is sold in pedagogy as an act of good spirit, fairness, acknowledgement of others and reward for talent and effort. It’s part of ‘character building’ on more liberal curriculums, and part of a success/get ahead story in more ambitious/draconian and controlling curriculums. And this applies to studies and all rankable gradable ‘pursuits’—I made up my ground with an academic competitiveness which I told myself was the way I could distance myself from the controls of bullying and the sports field. The ‘feeling good’ from success in some ways balanced the failure in social and sporting contexts, but led to an increase in bullying. So, a different sense of what constitutes competition came into play— some aspects of academic success could be melded with public approval, and others were to be hidden (success in literature and history). That was my experience, but it was and is an experience. Competition, even as a way out of oppression, was self-defeating and a lie, because it served the authorities (official and social) while allowing for a kind of social, intellectual and physical mobility. Discovering (late) that this success-making fed the status quo—the rules of competition that attempted to reach across class and bind inequalities into a nationalist consumer market—it seemed better to publicly lose than win. But that was after years of trying to compensate through ‘getting the marks on the board’ as survival, and becoming even more complicit. This contradiction inevitably, solipsistically, leads to a questioning of the nature of winning, of the permanent competition that uses ‘resources’ to compel rivalry and create a sense of purpose. I remember reading Perec’s W as a bullied seventeen-year-old (and that bullying that accompanied my school life was following me into the alcoholic swirl of degradation and violence), and thinking I was on an island, a small island, being forced into perfect competition and the corrosion behind the ‘ideals’ was bursting through. And I understood what Perec was conveying via that island, and was unsure if I had the right to identify with his allegorymaking. It’s so long since I read the book, I can barely remember it—but I remember that. I will reread it, but it’s rereading is not the purpose here. The purpose here is not to ‘prove’ a knowledge of the text, but to acknowledge it as a reference point in a discussion against competition. The point is not to cite, though I will as a gesture towards context, but to evoke. And evocation is the contrary to competition—it is eliciting ‘value’ from being, rather than defining being as an increase in worth through proving against ‘less worth’, or, even in the best-case scenario, proving over already proved ‘worth’, the ideal of elite sporting and intellectual

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

107

competitions: to improve on bests, on personal and official times. Rightly or wrongly, I equated such ‘sportsism’ as a form of fascism. But the problem is also in the notion of ‘value’ as it highlights aspects of morality as utility in common, as ‘achievable’ or ‘holdable’—as meritorious, or at least practical and ‘worthwhile’ in the social sense. To achieve such (false) ‘value’, to win, purports to become both a demonstration and an outcome to being. We can be said to have our own values, but values in common mean a hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which can place those very same values into competition with each other, rather than allow them to co-exist as essences or qualities of behaviour. In other words, to avoid ascribing to capitalism a morality (it can’t have), we need to de-value values, to ‘hold’ them as worthy notions that don’t seek to place themselves about others’ worthy notions. A value of ethics is not the same as a value of a goods, and yet, the word does for both, and this is an issue of etymology and linguistics, but also an issue of association in a globally capitalized ‘world’ financial environment of competitive market-driven ‘outcomes’. Values are often merged with ‘principles’ and ‘beliefs’, and the right so often take hold of values as absolutes which we aspire to and will ‘win’ if we perform in the appropriate manner. Ode to Underlying ‘Values’ Selective authority sharing Natural selection. Choice. Range of mildness. Adjustment. Variation. Application. ‘Measured approach’. Valueadding. Added to good measure. Steady as it goes. Flows. Each response. Each differing value. Each integrity and virtue. Contractually bound to code of extraction and armour — love for fellowship, love of one another, lovely economies. Conventions of integrity at the coalface and conflict zone — starvation trade technology mining know-how officer values. Easy to riff on a statement, declaration, refrain, chapter & verse, anthem, meme, chorus, motto, catchphrase… apophthegm. Codifying values some swap a phoneme for a ruling, a phrase for a judgement, an action for a discipline. Whistleblowing blow blown away values blowhards high-pitched annoying ear rustle go away ear rustle anguish away away! low level of wellness and cherish healthy decision-making and bothering courage quotas bothering brave industry standards in mining defence technology related areas of high standards integrity deep values well-

108

J. KINSELLA

oiled true tried and tested against extinction across the board. Measured egalitarianism measured justice measured values measured integrity measured behaviourals measured. Stress value values tenses valued customer valuation of frightened few mocked mass behaviour mocked and ridicule of people by people by values by measured regular rhythmic bowel movements of nation names on cenotaphs sunrise language deletion. Heaven scents. Natural discriminatory choice over a range of discriminative stimulus adjustments discriminating taste between qualities. ‘Measured approach.’ Value relaxation value mildness value being among the eighty percent as surely all voters and people of value with values are, surely as steady as the eighty percent which can be expanded/adjusted to fit one size for all enabling the markets to do what the markets do and value propositions.

Tangentially, it brings to mind these sentences of Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society, speaking of ‘institutions’: ‘Everywhere these bureaucracies seem to focus on the same task: promoting the growth of institutions of the right…’ and ‘At stake between the institutional right and left is the very nature of human life. Man must choose to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them. He must choose between alternate styles of life and related production schedules.’1 Apropos of this, the total removal of institutions seems to me the most just way of creating freedom, and even then, ‘things’ that go beyond the entitlement to a sustainable and healthy life seem to me to be redundant. Our identities are a massive ‘thing’ and they necessarily require a freedom to function, to be, to express and affirm themselves. That seems, to me, to be the only form of materiality beyond the items required to sustain that claim to identity that is necessary. I believe in the equal distribution of wealth (and redistribution to alleviate wealth as well as poverty: no ‘wealth’ beyond what is needed to live justly, fairly and freely), but not in wealth. I believe in holding ‘things’ in common, but not in forcing people to behave in ways dictated by others. I don’t believe in violence or cajoling or coercing or intimidation in any way, which are all, ultimately, extreme (and, sadly, often ‘acceptable’) acts of competition. So, how is it possible to thwart accumulation of material goods and thus power? How is it possible to have an open-minded society of difference? How is it possible to respect the immigrant and refugee (which I deeply do) and 1 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (p. 62).

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

109

respect and acknowledge Indigenous rights and separateness (if they wish it)? And how do differences intersect and co-exist in parallel—both as common ground, and also with nothing in common? For me, the answer resides in the primacy of the health and wellbeing of the biosphere—without it, despite Elon Musk’s capital-tyrannical utopian visionism of space conquest, and despite its state-military brother (I use the word knowingly) in arms, Space Force, the earth is it, and it is the answer. Colonialism and imperialism have been the twin pillars of damage to the planet and all it contains—they are the antithesis of migration which is a conversation of movement held in conjunction with those ‘already’ in a place, and they are a fundamental cause of refugee displacements. Refugees are a compelled and necessary movement of people under duress, and their presence must be welcomed and nurtured, and the dialogue about any ‘complexities’ of shared presence enacted later, always to wellbeing of refugee and local, who both need to become cohabitators of the space (of refuge). The notion of colonizing space is essentially a capitalist drive making use of fascistic ambition and pride—the conquest of materials (minerals— mining—energy) and the control of potential ‘living room’. It’s not about liberty, fraternity and equality (I use in a non-violent iteration), but about control of transport, real estate and resources, with capacity for increase only moderated by levels of technological ambition and ‘success’, built out of sciences in which individuals compete, companies compete, nations compete, even spiritual belief systems and religion compete. Further, efforts to prevent the loss of biodiversity are thwarted by patriarchal, racist capital, not only in literal terms, but also in illegible ways, especially by perpetrating marginalizations and demeanings, especially of women across world communities. It should not be forgotten that the basic structures of power across the planet remain patriarchal, and the patriarchy is (as histories have shown) is rapacious and consuming, competitive and destructive. As Vandana Shiva notes in her 1993 essay ‘Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation’: The marginalization of women and the destruction of biodiversity go hand in hand. Loss of diversity is the price paid in the patriarchal model of progress which pushes inexorably towards monocultures, uniformity and homogeneity. In this perverted logic of progress, even conservation suffers. Agricultural ‘development’ continues to work towards erasing diversity,

110

J. KINSELLA

while the same global interests that destroy biodiversity urge the Third World to conserve it. This separation of production and consumption, with ‘production’ based on uniformity and ‘conservation’ desperately trying to preserve diversity militates against protecting biodiversity. It can be protected only by making diversity the basis, foundation and logic of the technology and economics of production.2

I think Vandana Shiva is entirely right about patriarchy and ‘global interests’, but I reject even the ‘technology and economics of production’ as a residue of capitalist-colonial-patriarchal notions of living through materialism to advance quality of physical, spiritual and intellectual life. Protecting biodiversity needs go hand-in-hand with an immediate cessation of clearing the remaining forests and ‘natural’ vegetation, but also the necessary elevation of all other life-forms to human rights status. Not humans, but living entities whose rights are fully respected. I feel that all the actions for justice across all human interactions with the biosphere need to converse, dialogue, make for an interactive mutually supportive modus operandi for biospheric justice. So, maybe we need to evoke a de-colonial antifa positioning of what is so easily called ‘eco-activism’ or ‘environmentalism’ as an inherent part of dialogue and exchange? A language outside of language, and a recognition that environment is the tree of almost all language-systems, that it is language (in all its forms). Earth is speech, utterance, sign, writing, awareness. Maybe what I am talking about is inclusivity of responsibility—to what’s held in common by all of us, whilst retaining and respecting difference and absolute equality of being (biosphere existentialism). For want of something to refer back to when I process ‘things’ (the usage of this noun is specific, and not always as a noun—there is a different grammar at work when pushing against the colonial language one is parsed through), I call this ‘Consequence Theory’3 (and the capitals are a problem): an inclusive act of dialogue between the legible and illegible in the context of biospheric mutuality (without a notion of ‘intersectionality’ as its basis, 2 Vandana Shiva, ‘Women’s Indigenous Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation’, in Ecofeminism, edited by Marie Mies and Vandana Shiva (p. 164; Zed Books, London, 1993; 2014). 3 As a poetics of activism this usage of the term ‘Consequence Theory’ is not related to ‘consequentialism’—rather, it is the expectation that consequence will inevitably move beyond our perception; that we write to try to minimise negative consequences through an intense reading and receptivity to this outcome over time. In other words, this theory

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

111

it cannot reflect on broader and more distant connections that can be more inclusive and more generative against fascism—I am not trying to usurp a discourse that seeks a legibility out of the obfuscations of bigotry). This inclusive enacting (constant) in which overlapping concerns (ideologies, beliefs etc.) are not enough in themselves, must be part of an ongoing and permanent activism (the permanent peaceful revolution of ecology). Many people are not in the position of making their every act one of ecological respect or restitution because of state-military-corporate control, because of poverty, because of the pressing circumstances of their lives, and because of the waste-driven realities of global market capital. In possible response to this, or, as a consequence of this, those who are in positions of, say, denying themselves the comforts of a consumer item might do so to compensate for those not in the position to do so. The consequence of even relative privilege is to pass that privilege on to those with less, or to work for their freedom. Acting out of consequence is the mutual aid that underpins the process of human and non-human justice as it accords to the maintenance and protection and respect of biosphere. This seems to me to be an essential aspect in the agreement between poem and reader—the text is read or spoken (or remembered aurally or visually or as a feeling), and as a consequence the text might pre-empt is own possible complicities, with the reader considering the possible contexts of its creation, and adjusting the process of reading accordingly. But that is not enough in itself, because the poem is not a competition—it is not competing for a reader’s (or readers’) understanding, to prove it is worthy of the politics and ethics that led to its making (the beyond or even outside aesthetics), it is not an object of value, it is inherently a freedom and not an object of wealth, it is a representation of an idea that does not have to be encased in non-renewables extracted from a fragile earth. A poem’s very mutability is what makes it relevant, and the consequence of its being a form of non-invasive material is a contextuality that allows it to be reused even after it has ceased to have its original purpose (intention), of being recyclable into something poignant and useful at a given time. So, from its original legibilities, through the illegibilities of lost context, to a new set of legibilities through its reuse via a different can only be about intent not certainty, about integrity and not control. ‘Consequentialism’ is readily used as a moral imperative by the right and readily segues with corrosive deployments of utilitarianism, and I strongly oppose these ‘philosophies’.

112

J. KINSELLA

mode of contextuality. This does not work for all poems, of course, and it is entirely wrong not only to appropriate materials of cultural contexts outside one’s own and remake them for common use, but also to vicariously appropriate (conceptually) any future reading culturality. But in terms of the poem offered to a wide audience for consumption, it does not seem inappropriate for its potential future to be one of pragmatic and generative activist use. This is an issue of rejecting property and copyright. As I say in the front of my books when acknowledging traditional owners and custodians of land, theirs is the only form of ‘ownership’ I recognize because the relationship between land and its people is complex, exists conceptually, and originates outside capital (traditionally, and often also in the present whatever the contemporary beliefs of the community are). And this ‘exception’ to my position on property is for me to dialogue with when dialogue is appropriate (and offered), and not to instruct or impose an antifa poetics on. But that’s also because I believe that Indigenous communities with various internal evocations I might not necessarily accord or connect with, do not accord or connect with the grand narratives and the ideologies of the movements of power and capital across the globe, and often seek to refute the appropriation of their beliefs and knowledge (and materials) into global capital. I deeply respect such positioning and its reality. The key to resisting fascism is not to deny that one’s own belief system has in part been formed by arrays of both liberties and oppressions which accrue across various constructions of ‘history’. We develop a language of protest out of our own experience, but also as a result of the wrongs we perceive others to have experienced (familial, communal, and in terms of our relationships to ‘nature’), which we often call ‘witness’. Terminology and modes of samizdat between activists has always been pivotal to their effectiveness and their ability to continue their actions while under intense official surveillance (and sometimes official backed by private, or private operating in a quasi way on behalf of the official). Less a case of ‘secrecy’ such as the nation state deploys, and not a cryptophasia, but often a sharing in minimally visible ways. Organic language adaptation arising from trauma of witness and experiencing, of having to be confront by the very things that cause most psychic damage to the activist. I do not personally work or communicate in covert ways. Most activists I work with function very much in the open and declare their positions clearly. However, this is not always possible, and some conversations are necessarily had in more selective and closed ways to prevent them being

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

113

stopped before they have begun. A tree-sitter is not going to tell the forest destroyers they are about to climb a tree—and I agree with that level of hiddenness. I do not consider that covert, I consider it prudent. We develop ways of talking about what we’re doing just to cope, and to prevent often violent intervention on peaceful protest activities. And the poem is a heightened means of coping while communicating. It is not a private language,4 and even the Old English riddle poems (Exeter Book etc.), expect a hearer to find an answer. Riddle 32 A myriad ecology is planetary diversity, the baubles we hang our comforts on. Like all anniversaries, that failed Apollo Mission: Houston, we have a problem, across the divide. Here the gravel driveway is a semi-natural watershed. What hops that boundary is nothing you’ve seen likely. They bifurcate images to make sense of new genetics. The random tree branches are its anatomy. The entire property is incorporated. It could make a body out of anything. It appears at night but wants its day’s worth. We are supplicants, it counts our fealty. Wealthy of belly while we stare on hungry. Most learned colleague, please identify.

4 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, §243 of Philosophical Investigations: ‘The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language’ [https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/private-language/].

114

J. KINSELLA

And this poem more recently shared with a protester I didn’t personally know, while they were up a tree trying to stop bulldozers: For Tree-Sitter Sarah You are where the nightbirds daysleep and where they duskwake and where they watch and hear and make timeless records of the movements of interwoven life. Without you, Sarah, the nightbirds’ calls that delineate the wetlands will be lost with treefall. You keep their points of reference growing. You sense with them.

Sometimes I will use a term or expression or ‘form’ that has been used by other activists and by using it differently, it might seem I am misusing or disrespecting their positions—that is rarely if ever the case. It might be out of ignorance, but not out of disdain. My purpose in deploying terms is always to stop oppression and to let people speak, not to overtalk them. I do not believe in the right wing ‘all’ arguments, of course—that we are all humans, that we are all entitled to a fair go (Australian patriotic lingo), that one should not be ‘privileged’ over another, for these arguments are inevitably about privileging a dominant culture itself or, rather, a dominant mode of market capitalism or military-state control (and the overlap between them). We are not ‘all’, but we are equal as living beings, we are not ‘all’, but we are all different, with groups of people sharing deep held beliefs and commitments. Subtle inflections make massive differences. When the idea of ‘winning’ (Trumpian obsession, but all electoral processes rely on this mindset and behaviour, as does climbing the single party ranks—it is a feature of any system of control: rivalry, defeat, victory… oppression of some more than others, entrenching of long-term oppressions etc.) is the key to ‘all’, because ‘all’ in such contexts actually

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

115

means a right to get ahead, to dominate, to make choices that benefit ‘them’ within that ‘all’. It’s the ‘equality’ of the internet, it’s the ‘equality’ of consumerism, it’s the all ness of then open market. It doesn’t mean all of us at all. Consequence Theory is a notion that no creative text can ever know its future, though as writers we work hard to stabilize its message, to resist political and ethical misreadings—we like our ambiguities to exist in the abstract, in the ‘feelings’ rather than political meanings (what anti-racist poet would want a poem understood as anti-racist in its day to be seen as racist in two decades, though the poet might not have been aware of micro-aggressions in language-usage, or where language has shifted? That is not to say that sublimated racisms weren’t there and have become clearer through discourse). ‘Consequence Theory’ means a poet/poem ‘knows’ there will be potential re-readings and mis-readings and tries to pre-empt these by being hyper-sensitive to the inevitable shifts in language. But it’s caught between legibility and illegibility of purpose—in the textual paradox machine we inhabit, we can’t know, can’t pre-empt; but we still need to act as if we are working towards a good, towards a biospheric antifascism. The text assumes it cannot ‘see’, that time and circumstance will inevitably reveal its limitations—all literary texts are ‘vulnerable’ in this way. But maybe we can write towards a generative ‘likelihood’ of reception, to ward-off, say, fascist usurpings of the text to serve their purposes (Trump is a specialist at this, as is the Republican Party as a whole in the USA—e.g. misusing creative material of musicians). Maybe the text can be encoded with an illegibility added to its clearer utterances, so that even in the most self-evident (it would seem at time of writing) poem, that ingrained illegibility undoes potential misuse by the right? I believe this is possible, and have encoded my body of work for decades for this reason—not as an act of secrecy, but as an attempted act of preventative linguistics. Can we avoid consequences of culturally offensive usage while never being sure we are ‘correct’ in the first place and that all cultures shift in their self-perception as well as ways of reading over time? A poem cannot predict the future; or can it? A poem about pollution can certainly predict (and hopefully help pre-empt) the consequences of pollution. And what of over-confidence (or pessimism) in our message? Maybe the key is self-doubt in the making of the poems even if we are sure of our cause(s)? Maybe a poem that mocks itself as much as its capitalist-fascist

116

J. KINSELLA

‘targets’ is the only way in the same way searching for liberty we mock the history of privileged poetic forms? Maybe it’s the ability to critique the robber barons and also those who work for them for taking the filthy lucre? But the latter is more complex because working out of necessity of keeping one’s self and one’s family/community/group alive is very different from being an employee using people to increase profit. A poem requires a certain amount of self-irony no matter how serious its concerns? I am not sure. I am always on the side of the workers, even if I object to industries or activities they work in. However, when the worker politically aligns with the cause of the ‘boss’, and sees the system that benefits from their labour as being one to become aggressively pro-active over, I will also speak in opposition to them if they are acting as, if not a willing tool of capital, a compliant and active participant and defender in capitalism. There is something grossly condescending in universally separating the agency of attitude of the worker from that of the boss. I have talked previously of reading poetry in the early 80s in front of bulldozers and stopping them because a driver wanted a yarn about the issue, and feeling a kinship because of labour issues and because at the time I was writing many letters on behalf of a friend who felt his writing lacked legibility in spelling and meaning, though he had ‘immaculate’ handwriting, for far-left political causes centred around militant left trade unionism. The bulldozers started again the next day, but my arguments for protecting the environment were helped by discussing the consequences of ‘work’ and ‘no work’ with a driver. Other drivers were just getting into the destruction—I have heard many drivers gloat over their skills and ‘knocking down a useless bit of bush’. Utility is part of it, and so is an architecture of purpose—to clear bush is to then ‘construct’, to cover over, to keep the work cycle happening, to build the famine roads within the wealth of colonialism. It’s how grotesquely wealthy miners manage their affairs—largesse and exploitation playing off in versions of public and private legibilities. The poem has to be able to deal with these contradictions, these uncomfortable alignments of class and wealth, of boss and worker. Can it be done? Maybe by shifting the legible into the illegible (or struck thru), or maybe by granting agency to all players and only respecting the antifa pro-biospheric evocations? The protester, especially if obviously unemployed or not employed in conventional ways, will always be portrayed as a ‘loser’ or a ‘bludger’ or a ‘drain on society’ by media, state, business and bosses, and too often (though never always!) by workers who

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

117

are part of the devastation, whatever their needs and motives. Compassion and irony? Can they go hand-in-hand? Sometimes, compassion has to underwrite all anger. Hypervillanelle (with almost an extra stanza for free*!) So this is a stick shaking ethical deflections this toss in a heap more sense than money deflation of grim reality and rise with a new marketing campaign against the profit-limiting scheme to ‘virtue signal’ exploitation out of existence? Oh, you lusty capitalists, you dyed in the wool red-blooded meat-eating wise ones, you captains of industry, you robber baron trickle down sharers of pain, so this is a stick shaking ethical deflections this toss in a heap more sense Who are we to stick in the mud, who are we but dust on your ‘defence’? Job-create as you walk over our bones, sell yourself as the consciences on our stain, against the profit-limiting scheme to ‘virtue signal’ exploitation out of existence? In inflation of self-worth in the afflatus of forecasting you swap for the no-nonsense oomph of the stock exchange, the leveraging and insurance payouts per tribulation, so this shaking a stick this ethical deflection this toss in a heap more sense. Yes, we are the wankers your workers bellow at passing by in their V8s because you do more for them and their families than protectors of their domains — job benefits the profit-limiting scheme to ‘virtue signal’ future jobs out of existence? On the job training skills development stemming from governments in sacks with adventurers of product desiring and each second on earth an act of accumulation; so this is a stick shaking ethical deflections this toss in a heap more sense. Work your way up to the satellite moon, work your way up through the flocks of geosynchronous birds, crisp and unflappable, from glops of radiation to… well, radiation… So, this is a stick shaking ethical deflections this toss in a heap more sense against the profit-limiting scheme to ‘virtue signal’ exploitation out of existence? *Conditions apply

Justice and rights are to be supplemented and not to be pillaged by ‘creativity’. The poem cannot win because the competition is the ruination of the poem before it is spoken. Would we have had more or less ancient Greek drama if this were the case? We would have had different drama, and likely a different ‘Westernism’. And I write this as I help judge

118

J. KINSELLA

a poetry competition—a grim reality of ‘the arts’ that people feel the need to compete in order to make a living, or ‘make a start’ in a capitalized zone-ism. And like most such competitions, the rules declare that the poems should be typed in a certain font size with a certain line space: they should be legible. No handwritten versions will be accepted, even if they are ‘legible’. Handwriting is dubious, ambiguous and to be doubted, even if it is written in a ‘copperplate’ hand. Entries are online-only, with rare exceptions (contact organizers). Handwritten versions cannot be scanned and uploaded. Digital legibility behind secure firewalls and encrypted password protected site-ism. The safehouse for poems that don’t meet each other but certainly converse with each other, unseen and unheard, but in juxtaposition, read across their differences. The paradox machine of the internet, the competition, the global market economy, monetary survivalism, and saying something one hopes to be heard in a winning way and still retains all integrities. ∗ ∗ ∗ The consequence of colonization in Australia has been the devastation of Indigenous communities and country, as well as the destruction of biodiversity and intactness of the land itself. Aboriginal people in Australia had (and have) managed the country for millennia with far more scientific precision and effectiveness, along with spiritual care, than the colonialists were even capable of envisaging (and to this day). There is no doubt of this—it is fully evidenced.5 And yet, the vast Indigenous knowledges of climate and fire-usage held by Elders and others are paid lip service (if at all) and only on the very distant edges of ‘policy’. And yet, Australia experienced one of the world’s extreme fire catastrophes over the ‘summer’ (‘settler’ terminology) of 2019/2020. Human lives lost, billions of animals dead, whole forests vaporized beyond their normal fire-cycle germination regimes. The conflict in Australia over ‘controlled burns’, land-clearing to prevent fire, and many other anti-environmental acts sold as a strange ecological awareness, are tangled in a discourse of equating Aboriginal firestick farming and burning regimes with the climate changedriven conflagrations resulting from non-Indigenous approaches. There

5 See Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (Magabala Books, Broome, 2014) and many other works, including those by Noongar Elder Len Collard.

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

119

are no similarities. The clearing of country for development—farms, shopping centres, housing estates (that could be built on the massive amount of already cleared and damaged land)—is a significant part of the cause of climate change: in wheatbelt Western Australia, the diminishing rainfall aligns with the cleared scrub line—less vegetation, less rain. I have written about this extensively in other places, but I bring it up here because of the sad inevitability of capital and its representatives in government constantly pushing for more and more habitat destruction (increasing heat and lessening rainfall outside extreme weather/flood events) in the name of ‘jobs’, GDP, and ‘progress’. After the devastating fires, there have been cases of remnant acres of unburnt bush being targeted by developers for clearing in New South Wales, a state with an appalling lack of protection for bushland and forests. Over the last decade, a vast amount of clearing that was once illegal has taken place with official sanction and much less ‘green tape’, which ‘small government’ conservative and right wing ‘libertarians’ contest as an infringement of a landowner’s freedoms. The issue of liberty being connected with controls over property serves the right wing purpose of the state, as with all states built on capital—an ongoing colonial contract with squatters on stolen land. In all presences on country, Indigenous communities should be consulted. And though koalas are now, after the massive fires of the summer of 2019/20, genuinely on the edge of extinction, we see this: The New South Wales government will allow rural landholders to clear up to 25m of land from their property’s fence line without an environmental approval, a move it says will “empower” property owners to reduce bushfire risk.6

And this is my response, a villanelle refutation of a propertied concept of space7 :

6 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/07/nsw-will-allow-land-tobe-cleared-up-to-25m-from-property-boundary-citing-bushfire-concerns. 7 The villanelle form has fascinated me since first reading William Empson’s ‘Missing

Dates’ in my late teens and memorising it. I have my problems with Empson these days for a variety of political reasons (mainly to do with his ‘monarchist’ tendencies, which seem so at odds with his anti-imperialist socialist attitudes), but as with Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, the rhythms of his ‘Missing Dates’ (much more than ‘Villanelle’) are residual for me.

120

J. KINSELLA

Forests as Space These are dilations that happen before eyes are upon a scene, the edge of forest as obscene to certain landowners as fire because fire takes space and yet space remains. But such space is seen as emptiness to fill with production— in the name of safety a boundary stretches out further and further — these are dilations that happen before viewing the scene. And safety is not the space inside a fence line? And there’s no difference between forests and pasture? because fire takes space and yet space remains. The anger over having to conserve koala habitat brings a reaction — the sop to Cerberus, the land deed rewritings of traditional borders — because fire takes space and yet space remains. So many types of burning, so many fuels to the fire, so many reasons to play Squatter and thrive on ‘tucker bags’, ‘sheep tokens’ and ‘improved pasture’ — these are dilations that happen before eyes are upon a scene.

Each shifting of fence beyond fence line is a shift of reason — safety should be inside an existing fence line if safety is a force majeure — but these are dilations that happen as eyes consume a scene, because fire takes space and yet space remains.

And a more direct poem: They Just Keep on Chopping Despite the Conflagration Deep into the Pandemic On the continual logging of remnant forest that actually survived the NSW 2019/20 Megafires and Where Cornered Species Now Shelter Nothing to do with refuge or care, this retreat into fragments, but the loggers keep on logging strains of economy, the Sydney-Canberra money-flu of the furnace that light’s the city’s and the nation’s aspirations. Fall down on mouse-house, take out the sky’s supports: satellite pics of shredded lungs, x-rays of this violence of denial, refusal, ‘management’. Maybe this is the Prime Minister’s call of ‘Timber!’, that the life of country won’t knock us a blow ‘As long as Australians keep being Australians’?

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

121

Living here at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in Western Australia is an open door to my mind, and we should love in accordance with Indigenous landusage and without ownership (which resides in Indigenous hands). But even the naming of ‘where we live’ is a problem, as colonial acts of renaming (wilfully or out of not knowing) will act as linguistic diversions for dispossession or stand in place of restitution. Our attempt was to overlay the settler ‘name’ (it was renamed after a nineteenth-century farmer and then renamed after that) with a reference to the natural vegetation (which Noongar people call mungart—acacia acuminata… ‘jam tree’ is the colonial ‘casual’ naming): Graphology Restoration 17: name rename name… term No claim in the name ‘Jam Tree Gully’ — rather, a personal and familial association of presence which is neither assertion nor acquiescence. There are jam trees. There is a gully. No names displayed on gates. Just prior to this configuration, or approximating, it was named ‘Sleepy Hollow’ by a horse person, a name which could not work for us — distant literary associations aside (the irony), it was too abstract, though there is a hollow in the valleyside, true. But then again, the name on the gate as we arrived was hung with animal skulls as well. Removed immediately. I checked with Marion Kickett about the boundaries here — this still-Ballardong boodja close to edges of Yued and Whadjuk boodjas—and we ‘name’, or maybe more accurately, ‘term’ our occupation as ‘Jam Tree Gully’ only to answer for this family’s presence, not to name over the name, not to delete true names and the language of here deep in here,

122

J. KINSELLA

not to rename, not to close off to the names the valley’s linguistics have worked with branching and layered consultation. ‘Jam Tree Gully’ doesn’t refer to a house, doesn’t refer to ways of naming, as ‘jam tree’ is only a rough approximation of ‘mungart’, not a renaming, not an alternative name, not a system of classification.

Poetry can help bring just change, and it can be misused as an expression of harm, too. It has no immunity to misuse, so the reader of poetry becomes its protagonist, its active representative. Often this becomes a case of retrieval, recontextualizing and reclaiming of intent, and of what a poem should be doing… and what it’s not doing and can never do. A poem about loss should never be vulnerable to discourses of hate that would seek to manipulate meaning to express subtexts or overt declarations of hate. Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1953 notebook: ‘When poetry and not philosophy absolutizes, there’s rescue.’8 This might be true sometimes, but I fear it’s often not, as much as I wish it might be. Though I acknowledge Arendt means something specific regarding speech, violence and singing (and ‘goodness’ rather than evil, of knowledge above all else). Fascists of the internet age are increasingly skilled at distorting intent, of shifting context to suit their context, as happened with Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’9 being used by the Christchurch

8 For a fascinating short piece by Patchen Markell from The Hannah Arendt Centre

for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College on the semantics of Hannah Arendt’s observation, and about rescue and the ‘in-between’, see: https://medium.com/quote-ofthe-week/hannah-arendt-the-case-of-poetry-ae2def780670. The full extract in Markell’s translation goes: ‘The accusative of violence, like that of love, destroys the in-between, crushes or burns it, renders the other defenceless, strips itself of protection. In contrast to this stands the dative of saying and speaking, which confirms the in-between, moves within it. Then again there is the accusative of the singing poem, which removes and releases what it sings from the in-between and its relations, without confirming anything. When poetry and not philosophy absolutizes, there’s rescue’—Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, vol. 1, p. 428 [August 1953]. 9 The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (edit. John Goodby; W & N, London, 2016).

9

AGAINST COMPETITION/AGAINST WINNING… AND ‘CONSEQUENCE …

123

mass-murderer to open his manifesto of hate10 —the absolute twisted into another absolute, where unforeseen consequences led to the poem being co-opted and ‘becoming’ a far-right declaration. In resisting this coopting, and by way of showing solidarity and empathy for the victims of the Christchurch massacre, I wrote both a villanelle11 of refusal to allow poetry to be co-opted into the language of hate, and also a commentary of resistance to accompany that poem’s intervention and lament12 : This is a poem written first and foremost as an expression of support for the Muslim and refugee communities of New Zealand and Australia. I feel strongly that it is a time for all Antipodean poets to stand up and speak out against barely suppressed far-rightism. Since the 1980s I have been writing against the racist far right in Australia—in the present day, the ‘alt-right’ white supremacism of the US and other colonised countries is as prevalent in Australia as it is elsewhere. Of course, there are many people working for harmony and mutual understanding, but in public life the voice of intolerance is heard too often here. This poem refers to anti-Muslim pro-white leaflets that occasionally appear outside the small supermarket in the town nearest us (about 12km away)—the shock to us is not that the leaflets appear, but that they remain there for more than the few minutes it would take to bin them. In this poem I reject and resent the far right’s misuse, as a motivation to their anger, of Dylan Thomas’s poem about raging against death to keep life, which they distort for the ridiculous idea of a white purity and white vision of life. This misuse is vile, and Thomas, always of the left, would have found it so too. A poem has its own life, but no poem of life against death should be abused in this way. We write against violence, we write against intolerance, we write in solidarity with human life and all life. Fascist hatred has no part in it.

10 I am not going to provide a URL to anything conveying the text hate document. The murderer (whose name I refuse) also used other poetry to ‘illustrate’ his vile purpose, including Kipling (which has a different kind of speaking, but still no speaking that can be referred to in any meaningful way for all of Kipling’s imperialism). 11 See: John Kinsella, Brimstone: A Book of Villanelles (Arc, Todmorden, 2020). 12 See: https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/literary/john-kinsella-on-racism.

124

J. KINSELLA

Free Villanelle Against White Supremacists Co-opting Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ Lines taken out of context can make darkness burn For those who want to burn the world, but darkness Is their slow burn, white lies their eruption. And when leaflets fostering discrimination Appear outside a wheatbelt supermarket, they gloss Lines taken out of context and make a darkness burn. But what most disturbs is that such leaflets remain Or are browsed as the town broods under a glaze of tolerance — Is it a slow burn before white lies trigger an eruption? We share breath and relish the health to rise each day in turn, Each day shared in sameness and difference, But lines taken out of context can make darkness burn. Every word of intolerance sold as ‘warning’ is the crimson Shade of the day-to-day accretion of a rage that is not the rage for existence — A slow burn, white lies their corruption. Let words of life that urge a life continue to be a lexicon Of day and night, light and dark, of overlaps in time’s ingress — Lines taken out of context can make darkness burn, A slow burn, white lies their corruption.

CHAPTER 10

Note on Journal Extracts 2017–2020: Followed by Extracts from Handwritten Journals

Abstract Introductory note followed by extracts from handwritten journals 2017–2020. Witnessing and recording environmental destruction, the trauma of fire events, the attempts at recuperative acts via poetry. Keywords Environmental destruction · Fire events · Poetry

Francis MacNamara (‘Frank the Poet’) A Convict’s Tour to Hell1 Composed at Stroud A.A. Co. Establishment Station New South Wales. Nor can the foremost of the sons of men Escape my ribald and licentious pen. –Swift Composed and written October 23rd day, Anno 1839 [an extract:] 1 Francis MacNamara (‘Frank the Poet’), ‘A Convict’s Tour to Hell’ (in An Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella-Volume One—To 1930… UWA Library Special Collections).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_10

125

126

J. KINSELLA

Prostrate I beheld a petitioner It was the Company’s Commissioner Satan said he my days are ended For many years I’ve superintended The An. Company’s affairs And I punctually paid all arrears Sir should you doubt the hopping Colonel At Carrington you’ll find my journal Legibly penned in black and white To prove that my accounts were right And since I’ve done your will on earth I hope you’ll put me in a berth

∗ ∗ ∗ What follows are scans from my journals of 2017 to 2020.2 Those journals occupy multiple volumes, so these are brief snippets. Going through them, I resisted adding missing punctuation marks (that annoying absence of the possessive apostrophes in ‘Coleridge’s’ says as much about my own rigidities of language ‘structuring within structure’ as it does about acts of consistency in communication and the controls it places of transmission and reception) and, as I am implored to do by others, dotting my ‘i’s and crossing my ‘t’s… one might add ‘f’s as well!. That’s my ‘scrawl’ (as I have been insisting), often written fast between things. I notice over the years, as one would expect, that not only my ‘hand’ changes, but so does my use of the page, and the field of the page. In more recent times, in an attempt to save paper (even recycled or ‘sustainable’ papers) I have been trying to include more words on the page. These extracts are included to convey a few of the sadly recurring themes across the decades of journal-keeping. If they are conveyed with tones that swing from ‘rant’ to ‘data’ (temperatures, rainfall figures, birds sighted etc.), they are not essentially (or only) acts of ‘opinion’, but also acts of processing experience and being. A journal, whatever its ‘audience’, is an act of encounter between what is happening, has happened, and might happen—a temporality—with a coming to terms with the act 2 The expression ‘per se’ is underlined etc. in the entries as a cross-conversation with pieces I was planning on writing (and did in various ways) for a collaborative book with Russell West-Pavlov. All my ‘work’ is in constant conversation directly, indirectly, and maybe even ‘intuitively’.

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

127

of making a record, and of discussing it with an internalized ‘other’ of self. A politics is extant in this act, but not a specific politics. What is written is specific, even when barely legible in meaning (working it out), and even less legible in its graphology and orthography. I look back on old entries not for proof of who I am or how I have or haven’t changed, but for the details of what I have observed: data of presence and its consequences. Over these decades, I have traced clear increases in temperatures even averaged across decades, lower annual rainfall measured over years, more frequent droughts, and the loss of species in the vicinity, and/or changing patterns of presence. I have recorded the planting and loss of trees, issues of erosion and the poisoning of world through agri-chemical farming and false ecologies (‘weed control’ through herbicides and so on). This is the purpose of the journals—my opinions and ranting are superscript or footnotes to these issues—but they are an interface of raison d’être to activism: a record of motivation. One of the threads/themes/concerns of these extracts is the witnessing of environmental destruction and also points of resistance—the afters as much as the befores and during as part of an effort to take ‘witness’ and action into record to be cited against future attempts by the rapacious to destroy habitat. Another is the issue of ‘post-coloniality’ in a place and time of virulent colonialism, of efforts by some to push towards decolonization, but also to record the reality of macros and micro colonialisms undercutting at every step. There’s species loss, extinctionism—deadly markers of the so-called Anthropocene (a term I reject because I think it centres as much as critiques human rapacity, rather than giving the age to the earth and calling rapacious human behaviour out as anomaly… humans collectively are not a geological age or a measure of anything beyond any other creature). And there’s fire, as fire is what we live with here during the increasingly long hot/heat/dry. Fire is part of Australian habitats—many seeds require fire heat to germinate—but the extreme fire events brought on by climate damage has changed the very nature of ‘fire’. And, as I said recently to a discussion group (Warwick University), the actual meaning of ‘fire’ is changing—places that don’t usually burn, burn, and though catastrophic fire events are not ‘new’, they are inevitable and part of the normative. Aboriginal fire-usage had and has a functionality and sensitivity to all other factors, but industrialization and the toxifying of the planet have changed conditions and thus the effectiveness of fire-usage by any measure. And the repetitive regimes of ‘preventative burning’ imposed by

128

J. KINSELLA

governments destroy diversity and introduce carbon into the atmosphere, but when extreme fire events come, even the burnt-off areas are annihilated. Clearing leads to carbon and the deletion of carbon-extracting trees and the heating continues unabated. Extreme fire events so overheat the ground and atmosphere, that seeds are destroyed that would have germinated from fire. Rainforests that rarely burn, burn entirely. This is across the continent, and we live with fire here, too. It has come very close to us, and part of the region was burnt out a decade ago destroying forty houses. A fire was stopped last year just a few hundred metres away—I had to rush back home, collect Tracy who was waiting with ‘essential papers’, and we were gone until the all-clear was called. Fires are so often started by prescribed burns that escape or smoulder, by angle grinders, barbecues, campfires, cigarettes thrown out of car windows, machinery, military exercises and by arsonists as well. It is a regime of fire. It is colonial fire that destroys what it has robbed. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound comes up, and that’s because I have spent a couple of years reading through Promethean literature in writing my own Prometheus ReBound. The other vital issue is the Edward Street Roost (roosting trees of endangered cockatoos), which the very government who got into power because it promised to stop (and essentially did) the notorious Roe 8 highway extension in the city of Perth which carved through rare remaining sacred bushland, became, in itself, an environmental destroyer, and a deeply pro-defence manufacturing and support services government. It’s also the government that has popularly succeeded in largely keeping Covid-19 out of the community/ies across a area (up to the point of this being written). The contradictions of government, of power, of control always echo through my journals. But maybe the main purpose of these journals is to act as a record of life: an affirmation of being, diversity, sharing and respecting. The following poem was pinned into the journal as an interlude of typography amidst the handwriting as activism: Villanelle of Hell Down on the Plain: the McGowan Government are As Efficient Destroyers of the Environment as the Barnett Government Was! Not that long ago we felt the reassurance of a marri tree’s bark as a jiddy jiddy retuned the air around its ambience—alive! Now images of tree slaughter are reaching us in the Valley.

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

129

The Edward Street Kenwick cockatoo roost has been consigned to nothingness by Linc developers and the EPA, and its spirit struggles above — not that long ago we felt the reassurance of a marri tree. Such betrayal of growth undoes us all, and the patterns of canopy and feathers are more than flights of fancy—far far more than aggressive acts of tree slaughter that are now reaching us in the Valley. So when we come down to the once-roost, come down to the remnants of cityheld bush, we will see the legacy of greed and profiteering—a grave where not long ago we felt the reassurance of a marri tree. Each subterfuge back-slapped into being, each epiphany of outflanking the destroyers whipped-up around the table… to connive — now images of tree slaughter are reaching us in the Valley. A line in the sand they expose to the air—its veinwork of roots torn away — a line in the sand garlanded with decortication. Enough! No deals! Don’t believe! Not that long ago we felt the reassurance of a marri tree — though images of tree slaughter are reaching us in the Valley.

130

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

131

132

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

133

134

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

135

136

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

137

138

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

139

140

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

141

142

J. KINSELLA

10

NOTE ON JOURNAL EXTRACTS 2017–2020: FOLLOWED BY EXTRACTS …

143

144

J. KINSELLA

CHAPTER 11

Palestine and Israel

Abstract An antifa pacifist communication with Palestine and Israel while considering the antithetical nature of the state with regarding to liberty and justice. A refusal of military responses and actions, and an attempt to offer a decolonizing position from outside the ‘situation’ and remain actively committed to placing non-violent pressure to bring justice. Mutuality and difference break the paradox. On writing a version of Milton’s Samson Agonistes as an anti-violent text of justice-seeking and communalism. Keywords Palestine · Israel · Decolonizing · Non-violent · Mutuality · Communalism

‘I walked on what remains of the heart Toward the north….’ Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah)1

1 Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), The Butterfly’s Burden (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2007; p. 291).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_11

145

146

J. KINSELLA

Graphology Restoration 40: Semitic Languages The poets’ voices sing in my head across distance, sing to reconcile to make peace through counterpoint but can’t work as they should. For those poets are divided from each other with each line obfuscating the other’s as impelled by more firepower forcing it along. Response is shattered by a chasm of rights—the land’s voice usurped and usurped and usurped As for one rule for… and another rule for… such fragments share sounds and words in common, while roots they deny shift from right to left over the page burnt by airstrikes and ground assaults that kill children who would be poets, are the poets.

Conflicting loyalties, a foot in both camps, both sides of the fences… these are no liminalities, but an anxiety of evasion. This is the interior space of doubt working through certainty, and the exterior space of diplomacy. It is not impossible to have coefficient of responsibility, to have more than one ‘view’ that accords to a more intense (or broader) view of world. I can be pro-Palestinian, and also support the rights of Jews living in the region, I can be pro-community and anti-colonial, and support a mutuality of presence—I can work for justice and oppose the state, and oppose no individuals. I reject all states, but I fully understand the Palestinian need for a ‘state’, to reclaim, as a path to the notion of a completely stateless world. I have never considered myself part of a state, though I am entitled to statehood, and rejection is a starting point of privilege in opinion-forming and attitude. If I fail to critique the position of my pacifist anarchism that think in terms of communities rather than states, then I

11

PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

147

will inevitably serve the interests of one party over another. Maybe ‘serve’ in a just cause, but ‘serve’ nonetheless. Community will replace states as a more equitable means of mutual support—alternatives to nodes of control, come into being at the cessation of capital which cannot be sustained in a degrading biosphere. Capitalists will sell arms to both sides of a conflict (or any participants for all their ‘ethics’ of arm sales), and they will provide products to best survive the destruction of the biosphere, till consumers cease to consume if for no other reason than it’s obviously the only way to draw another breath. I recognize the reality and extreme pain and wrong of dispossession and disenfranchisement, but see the corrective in a rejection of the occupier’s patriotisms and loyalties, and also a rejection of one’s own. If you believe, as I do, that violent actions will always bring violent responses (however long it takes), and that nation-states and their inherent patriotisms require a violence to sustain their values of indivisibility, then refusal to participate is the most effective refusal of occupation. But inside a struggle where people are being killed and pushed from their homes, perspectives are necessarily different, imperative and bring shifts in perspective under pressure. This does not, to my mind, exonerate any action of violence, but it can explain the use of language to define autonomies and intactness. In the way that Indigenous peoples utilize the term ‘nation’ to bring a legal and conceptual understanding to the way the move across, situate, dwell, locate and are involved in spatiality, in place, with ‘borders’ that should be negotiated before crossed, the word ‘nation’ (or its equivalents) is often used. Organization of resistance and sustaining emerges within the framework. There are risks in any centralizing of diverse locale-spatialized interests, but it’s most often a needs-must rejection of larger dominating administration with an attempt to correct a power-differential, to gain rights back and affirm collective identity, rather than a power-centring that will at any stage project (colonially) different usage.

148

J. KINSELLA

Maybe we could say the same of Mahmoud Darwish’s (translated) use of the equivalent of ‘patriotic’ in this passage from Fady Joudah’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ to Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden: Around 1988, during the first Intifada, Darwish was a member of the executive council in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Along with Edward Said, he was assigned the task of drafting a new charter toward peace. It was a prickly and odd time for Darwish, ‘for what is a poet doing there, there in the executive council?’ he asked himself. In an essay titled ‘Before Writing My Resignation’, Darwish became uncomfortably aware how ‘the creative Palestinian is prohibited from the luxury of vacated and dedicated time for the sake of creativity, because this is bound to a direct cessation from patriotic activity. Yet prisoners grow flowers in their prison yard. And in front of the zinc huts mothers plant basil and mint. The creative person must create his flexible margin between the patriotic, the political, the daily, the cultural and the literary. But what am I to do? What does a poet do in the executive council? Will I be able to write a book of love when colour falls on the ground in autumn?’ (p. xii)2

It must always be remembered that real people are being discussed in this, and people who experience displacement and unsettlement know a reality of ‘presence’ that will be unknown or hard to know to one who hasn’t—it’s easy from a distance in all things, but the conversation necessarily draws us in from a human rights perspective, and through it being a discourse of ‘opposites’. I have never been to Israel, though have been invited—I pre-recorded a poem for the poetry event which was created to bring Israeli3 and Palestinian, Jewish and Arab (and other peoples) together through poetry. But though I am troubled by the language of vilification of Israel, I will not support the Israeli state, but I do support Israeli people as I support all people without making people ‘all’, without supporting the states that define a collective legibility that in doing so makes so much illegible and unaccountable. This applies to Australia as much as Israel.

2 Mahmoud Darwish (trans. Fady Joudah), The Butterfly’s Burden (Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2007). 3 Identification as an Arab Israeli citizen brings its own dynamics, and any ‘binary’ reading of belonging is inevitably problematical, but I mean this in an inclusive not excluding way—i.e. across all communities.

11

PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

149

My attempt, as a pacifist, to rewrite Milton’s Samson Agonistes 4 as an antifa text was dedicated: ‘For Israel and Palestine and lasting peace, justice and equality in all things’ and my author’s note (‘The Argument’5 ) went: Which version of a story are we being privileged to hear? Which version is this? And told with what emphasis, what distractions, what purpose? What are the agendas behind its telling? Milton’s Samson is naturally a piece of propaganda. But why and how? Well, here it is intertextually retold. The narrative is similar if the scene-setting both more generic and more specific. This is a tale of conflicted belief, values and desires. It is a paradox in which other paradoxes multiply. It undoes ownership, nation, systems of control, the primacy of the human over nature, and especially militarism. It is a pacifist text in which dispossessions are confronted. It is a pacifist text in which denials and exclusions are confronted. It advocates equality, egalitarianism, gender liberation, gender justice, a flexibility of identity and respect for different belief systems. The story is told – Samson, destroyer of an army, is blinded and enslaved. He considers his position in conversation with his father, with others of his community, and with his wife Dalila whom he blames for his downfall, the robbing of his strength (embodied in his hair, which is dead cells) through betrayal. But Samson’s bonding with ‘the other’, the ‘foreign’, is also a path to fairness and justice. And it is in this that we find Samson deviating from the role expected of him. As Crass once sang, ‘Big Man, Big M.A.N… develop your muscles, use your prick like a gun…’ Well, Samson becomes aware. He also becomes aware that he had been used as a violent extension of the state. Not a specific state, but all states. Samson here is lifted out of cultural, ethnic and spatial specificity to become symbol. But as the narrative unravels, symbol and event become ‘confused’. Samson does not intend the violence on the gathered crowd, the crowd gathered to relish his servitude, but cannot control the violence that has been instilled in him. The pillars are symbols of a nuclear accident – or rather, maybe, a dirty bomb or a radiation leak. There’s a witness, but he leaves the scene knowing something ill will happen, and watches via camera from a distance. Samson, after all, is a cyborg – how much of him is human anyway? What are the 4 John Kinsella, Samson Agonistes: a re-dramatisation after Milton (Arc, Todmorden, 2018). 5 It is important to consider that the state of Israel as a concept of ‘return’ and ‘belonging’ (and exclusion through its persistent colonialism) is tangential to the state of Israel as self-defining autonomous military power and heavily militarized state, and as a ‘by proxy’ enforcer of US interests in the region.

150

J. KINSELLA

rights of AI and what are the God-particle motives for creating it? It’s complex, and sometimes contradictory, and the text attempts to confront this, and the limitations of creative textual conventions. What is it saying, and what has happened? The damaging of people is a brutal conceit for the damaging of the biosphere whose death is death of us all – total death. This is a text of pacifist resistance, against ownership and profit, against possession and exclusion. It suggests a redistribution and faith that’s diverse, intact and anti-colonial. It suggests, it reports, it struggles with the machinery of state, company and media. It is inside the fake news it tries to undo. It knows the devices and infrastructure of information are a paradox that damage as much as heal, and that there is a cost to the planet. A paradox machine that seeks to be organic, to breathe, to be part of without excluding. What it does know is that the arms industry serves only death, and only its own desires for wealth, control, and deletion to increase itself: it is the endgame, it is only death, nothing more.

In this, I did not resort to the refuge of ‘paradox machine’ as ‘having it both ways’, but having aspects of different ways in the context of demilitarization and peace. For me, colonialism might be driven by ‘belief’ but is always underpinned by capital (though that capital might be ‘pushed aside’ as was achieved at least to some extent on many a kibbutz that operated outside capital and nationalism—though, admittedly, still function under the ‘protection’ of the state), and capital is always linked to force to protect its interests. As many of the Israeli-left know (and might argue), there are issues of class and property that need addressing in the hopes of reconciling different culturalities, allegiances and identity selfdeterminations. The material fact of (limited) land is tied up with multiple strands of persecution that reach out through history. To separate the right out from Israel and equate all Israeli’s with this, is as absurd as equating all Americans with Trump. My point is that its systems and mechanisms that are wrong, not people. People are not wrong—we are all biospheric; but accretions of greed and belief in an exclusivity that places other human life as ‘less than’ (there are many exclusive belief systems—I mean any that delete the rights of other lives), are what the antifa resister needs to address and undo, non-violently. Intervention can happen in many ways and in consultation with those experiencing the brunt of the suffering, or being the focus of oppression. In working with poets or the work of poets who operate in overtly oppressive and highly controlled regimes, often ‘fundamentalist’ in socialreligious belief but still aspiring to wealth and consumer capital, I have

11

PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

151

learnt never to equate a state (or religious organization) with an individual, their spirituality and their evocations in life. I write all this because, as an antifa writer, I support all oppressed peoples, and such support also grows more viable and real in its effects if a polyvalent view of people, communities and the systems that compel them to behave in certain ways are taken into consideration. To ‘illustrate’ this—recently, I had cause to write to the Israeli Ambassador to Australia: To the Israeli Ambassador to Australia June 2020 Dear Ambassador I would like to express my strong, determined and peaceful opposition to the Israeli Government’s push towards the annexing of sections of the West Bank. Not only is this a violation of Palestinian territorial and human rights, it is a violation of all notions of justice and a just world. I say this as a poet and an academic, and I say it as one who cares about my fellow humans. This is a gross act of colonialism and shames the Israeli people as well as destroying the hopes, aspirations and lives of Palestinian people. I am a strong believer in the peaceful and mutually supporting co-existence of Jewish and Palestinian peoples, with respect for difference and common humanity. I plead with you to hear the cries of opposition regarding this prospective annexation from around the world. You have a deep responsibility to human rights and justice in NOT carrying out this desecration of rights.

Sincerely, After sending this, I swapped emails with the Ambassador, and without revealing his side of the correspondence, I include extracts from one of my messages back to him: yes, we must all treat each other well. as a pacifist, i am against all forms of violence—wherever they come from, no matter what. one form of state violence is not undone when met by other forms of non-state violence (or other state violence)…

152

J. KINSELLA

i communicate with compassionate, humanitarian non-militaristic writers and thinkers who live in israel (or have lived in israel) who care as much for peace, social equality, and a plurality of society, as i do…. the constant encroachment of big military issues in the world between super-powers sweeps aside the nuances of locality and culture, and tensions are escalated from outside the local. the far-right all over the world jump on these schisms they see as opportunities to create more division, more hatred. they can’t be allowed to succeed. peace is absolutely possible, and different peoples (and people) CAN live in proximity, and actually gain and benefit from each other’s presence, without it being an incursion or invasive act. as i said to a friend yesterday, concurrent histories can live in proximity and mutually benefit and protect each other in spirit and body…

This is an issue of consequences—of being able to work against colonial oppression and support people in the crisis of rejection and even participation. Colonialism is colonialism and is always wrong. The wrong has to be rectified, but how it is rectified is everything. This is not a validation of a position, a saying, Well, your country is doing wrong but don’t worry, I am not bigoted towards Israel … rather, it’s a matter of trying to express all the ‘conflicting’ evocations of activist commitment to justice, while acknowledging one’s own (plentiful) limitations, but also exposing vulnerabilities. All I said in my letters—public or ‘private’—is how I feel. And to say otherwise would be dishonest and also manipulating of a cause to a personal ethos. Antifa poetics is about self-accountability, even when working with other poets. Denkmal: Tübingen6 This won’t be held by a template. No Blake, no Dante, no Hölderlin can grasp it. If I had Hebrew I would write a sonnet. I would take the few words of Hebrew Dante uses and liberate them from their model. Nothing can prepare one for the impact of the site, a monument 6 John Kinsella On the Outskirts (UQP, St Lucia, 2017).

11

to absence. An apartment sits on the site at the Synagogenplatz, just up from the hydroelectric plant on the Neckar River, water falling fast through, lower, lower. And thirty mute swans facing upstream, still as the quiet expected on a Sunday afternoon. When Nazis came with their backers, they burned the synagogue from the flank of the Österberg, a flurry of activity down the Gartenstrasse, the Jewish community made to pay – literally pay – for the destruction. Some critics says Dante was above the medieval Christian habit of distorting Jews, of blaming them for sins of a material world. Absence speaks louder? Reading the names of people driven from their homes, or murdered in the orderly buildings of the camps, names cut into rusty metal plate, the fountain dry with winter, I collapse all history of the town to this site. As creating the university in the late fifteenth century, the founders ensured Jews were driven away, separating part of their own identity, the answers to purpose and eternity. And to repeat the crime. Red

PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

153

154

J. KINSELLA

as any tint in a Blake illustration. Even the songbirds alighting from the peak shimmer and blur in the absorption. As after the war retired Nazis favoured the monastic village of Bebenhausen, god and the hunt, great antlers on barns and over front doors, bristling with their mix of charm and luck and bloodlust. And that was only last week. This Denkmal, which so many pass without registering. The massacre sites of the world are in constant communication: the sparks that pass between are the essences of all prayer thrown about, all prayer left hanging in the air waiting to collect somewhere. To pray without naming death?

CHAPTER 12

On Injustice. On Peace. On Justice. On Peace…

Abstract Personal acts for public/community ‘causes’. ‘The underlying principle of my work — of the exchange, tension and contradictions of legibility — has been a consideration of issues of violence and nonviolence, with a deep belief that only non-violence can ultimately and for a continuing period — extended duration — answer and negate injustices.’ The Australian military in Afghanistan, and its alleged war crimes, and poetry making legible the apparent ‘illegibilities’ of war. Dante, Derrida and memorializing. Witnessing a crime in a lock-up after a protest and what poetry might do in confronting and declaring this. Robert Duncan’s and Denise Levertov’s correspondence, and the nature of protest in terms of instigating and/or refuting violence. Keywords Duration · Military · War crimes · War · Memorializing

The world is not, and shouldn’t be, ‘white and male’. The world is not about owning property and accruing goods. As if the act of writing it might change it. And the provenance of the writing? Personally speaking, I acknowledge a privilege inherent in my writing position, accrued over time. Once, and for a long period of time, I was an addict-alcoholic ‘on the street’, I had few ‘rights’ in the eyes of many; some would say I had forfeited them—I hadn’t. But even on the streets, as the police © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_12

155

156

J. KINSELLA

were kicking my head (literally), they would do even more harm to the Aboriginal guys I was ‘associating with’. Part of my life’s purpose is to articulate what I experienced and what I saw, heard, felt—violences done by officials against others, as well as myself. But I am not interested in personal retribution—it’s contrary to my pacifism that arose out of rejecting my own aggressiveness as a young adult, rejecting my interest in military history, guns, hunting and military tactics as a teenager and child. My pacifism was a rejection of those ‘values’ (and that’s why I doubt ‘values’), which I can see now arose out of long-term school bullying (across three schools); my interest in the military was interior, and ‘played out’ on my own or with one or two other kids over the years (‘playing wars’). I was trying to prove a version of masculinity to myself which could not exist for me. Then I was attacked at schools for being a ‘poof’ and a ‘sissy’ and ‘dictionary’, but there was no discourse for me to connect with. I felt entirely alone. And addiction, when it came in my mid-teens—especially hanging out to score, sometimes led to frustration and aggressive behaviours. I acknowledge that. So many actions of resistance I was involved with, even after I’d tried to reject all manifestations of aggression, were angry events (I was angry, but ‘controlled’), with my yelling and swearing often counterintuitive. My actions for peace have since been, and for decades, more peaceful as interiority as well as in the public presence—as part of the mass where relevant, in all ways of living, as a writer, but also in numerous ‘on site’ micro-protests, often entailing speaking or reading poems to a ‘passing’ public. The site of protest being so vital. One example is an ‘of the moment’ reading I did outside the Tate Modern in 2017,1 filmed by a poet friend with whom I had been visiting the gallery, and at a time when the civil war in Syria was being manipulated and participated in by Britain, USA and other ‘Western’ countries, as well as Russia, with Turkey always on the edges (and later making deep incursions into Kurdish-Syrian ‘territory’). I had been writing, reading, and speaking against the violence in Syria for years, and in this moment felt compelled to read, with the support of my fellow-poet as ‘recorder’. I rarely centre poems, but I felt the centring of the text on the page was

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtTn2ZNcd3U.

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

157

a kind of legibility out of the liminal evasions of policy, much media, and the gap between reality and protest actions: Peace Lullaby as the Bombing Continues2 This invocation is no tautology as sleep comes with bombs — death’s ecology. And soothing language does and doesn’t work, and soothing language does and doesn’t work lulling lulling lulling lulling

a a a a

false sense of peace sense of peace sense of peace false sense of peace.

The notes that don’t follow our croons and murmurs, and the smashed melodies as you’re cut to pieces. And soothing language does and doesn’t work, and soothing language does and doesn’t work And so we sing a sleep from which you’ll wake, and so we sing a sleep from which you can’t wake lulling a false sense of peace lulling a sense of peace 2 This poem is from my unpublished Peace Poems (which will now appear in Volume Three of my Collected Poems ) and is dedicated ‘for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and my children’ and carries an epigraph quote from George Oppen.

158

J. KINSELLA

lulling a sense of peace lulling a false sense of peace and soothing language does and doesn’t work, and soothing language does and doesn’t work This invocation is no tautology as sleep comes with bombs — death’s ecology.

The underlying principle of my work—of the exchange, tension and contradictions of legibility—has been a consideration of issues of violence and non-violence, with a deep belief that only non-violence can ultimately and for a continuing period—extended duration—answer and negate injustices. A violent act might pause an oppression, it might act as an intervention that ‘saves’, but it also takes as it gives—for me, violence is the irreconcilable and irrevocable paradox of being. To imitate the violent, to replicate their acts, even in ‘just causes’, inevitably leads to a systemic violence even among those who had been oppressed. Evidence? Sadly, ‘history’. Illustration is so redundant it’s tragic, because every illustration should and does count, but looking for validation of the evident, of what we all live in and around, is an excuse. Much anticolonial, postcolonial and decolonizing literature of resistance confronts issues of liberation from great oppression via acts of violent resistance (things pushed too far to contemplate life under any conditions, and this being the ‘last resort’), with a tacit support implicit in the support for the need for change. Often, when a colonial tyranny is violently overthrown, the necessity of telling the stories of liberation compels narratives to exonerate violence by showing the extreme and continual acts of colonial violence that led to the choice of violence as the only viable resistance. Over the decades of independence, or even after driving the invaders out, the narratives may shift to a more reflective view of violence, and questioning of acts within the rebellion itself—there is space, and, we might assume, relative safety to do this. However, unless this is done (which it often is from exile) with a critique of any state that came into being and utilized the devices of capital super-injected by the colonialists, the oppression of capital will

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

159

have continued, including gaps between rich and poor, between the ‘voters’ (or people) and the elites of power. I am not talking about overt dictatorships, which are their own ab-reaction to the tyranny of colonialism, and continuations of violence of oppression by making more direct use of the tools of the colonial oppressor, and often calling on precolonial structures, belief systems, and familial and community loyalties, and, above all else, the military that was instrumental in the overthrow of the oppressors (or, often, the military constructed out of isolated and dispersed units of resistance). A literature of rejection of violence, a literature of record, a literature of declaration, a literature of legibility that also is willing to consider the unspoken contradictions and confront and deconstruct illegibilities of violent ‘rectification’, seems generative and the most effective tool of an ongoing decolonization and anti-capital anti-rapacious pro-biospheric ‘literacy’. And this ‘literature’ of refusal of violence written from inside the event, might also work for the reader from outside the specific experientiality, or for a reader with little or no ‘cultural rights’ to comment on the events of resistance—i.e. ‘little or no moral ground’. But for me, peace is an absolute, and not a negotiable variable—it is an end and a beginning, and it’s not an opinion. What rights do I have to say this? No more than to never respond violently to provocation no matter how severe. Can I ‘impose’ this on others? Of course not, but I will always attempt to staunch, halt and block violence. I will always voice my opposition to its use, will always oppose the arms dealers and manufacturers, and the nations that consort with violence and the tools of violence. And that includes in places of learning. At the bottom of my university email is this: ‘for the complete demilitarisation of universities, schools, and places of learning’. Humanities departments in Australia and elsewhere are increasingly coming under the sway of ‘Defence’ who/which provide an array of funding opportunities. It seems concomitant, that ‘Defence’ encourages the teaching of military history and international relations in such a way that they are covers for an active recruitment to ideas of ‘military answers’ to broader problems (social, political, environmental etc.). Military thinking often seems to be closely linked with the mining industry (look at who sits on boards and committees), and with government. In Western Australia, the submarine programme and desire for ‘defence jobs’ underwrites research funding. Defence ‘intersects’ itself with ‘values’ of ‘minorities’, ‘gender rights’, fairness in the workplace, and so

160

J. KINSELLA

on. Plenty of overlap (actually, a counter-intersectionality of militarycolonialism) with areas of ‘ethical’ research within a university humanities department. This is not a particular problem, it is a global issue. It is an issue of preparation for conflict under the guise of ‘working to prevent conflict’. It is the ‘balance of terror’ writ in more subtle and social media like or dislike ways. It is that gruesome. A lot of my poetry work has centred around resisting the pastoral and its ‘Golden Age’ adaptations into a modern agri-chemical cult of the farmer as feeder of the world—taking pastoral motifs, countering them, and using pastoral as pro-environment tool of resistance to capital and industrialized agriculture. Here is not the place to describe that process and radical positioning as I have written about it extensively in many places,3 but it is relevant here to say that part of my undoing of the ‘song contest’ aspect of pastoral and my revamping the pastoral eclogue has entailed an anti-arms industry (swords and ploughshares) anti-military thread, to undo colonial myths of land-usage that are linked to an aggressive, acquisitive nationalism and corporatism. That thread leads to a mix of two legibilities in the ‘anti-pastoral’ and ‘peace poem’ that necessarily require knowledge of events, of ‘news’, of ‘information’, to unravel and to enact their non-violent textual resistances which I always hope contribute to bringing about real-time change through participation in a broader action. So, a poem that seems illegible through its subtexts and references is actually legible if the reader reads ‘deeper’ and ‘further’ and develops an ‘opinion’ based on supplemented information—that is to say, the poem becomes a prompt. Below are two urgent examples. The Special Air Service is a much-venerated highly-decorated and ‘elite’ arm of the Australian military, with a strong mirroring of the British SAS, but also with deep inflections from the US special forces. Having known people who went from school into the army and eventually the SAS, I can say at least in one or two cases, the cult of the warrior seems even greater than the cult of nation and the country’s military history—fused with a cult of the body (mimicked in proto-military reality performance television programmes driven by personalities and competition) and the

3 For critical works see Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism (Manchester University Press, 2007), Polysituatedness (Manchester Press, 2017) and Beyond Ambiguity (Manchester University Press, 2021).

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

161

most extreme form of competitiveness, there are all the ingredients for a frightening force to unleash on others. The Australian SAS publicly prides itself on discipline, loyalty and professionalism, but the other factors I mentioned above are obviously strong correlatives in this violent pastoralism that operates at the whim of foreign policy objectives. For all its most contemporary and effective military equipment money can buy (from ‘allies’), it is a service with the potential for personal warrior obsession to act out its fantasies with less accountability (even by those soldiers deploring the actions of others) because of the loyalty inflection and obsession. Add claims that some members had been ‘flying the Confederate flag’ and cross-referencing this with the overt ‘white’ underpinnings of the force, and you have a legibility of ‘heroism’ (lauded in art, writing and official Australian culture) and an illegibility of war crimes allegedly committed by some members on the ‘battlefields of Afghanistan’.4 In a Wheatfield: An Eclogue In a wheatfield a soldier executes a man — a wheatfield in Afghanistan — camera vision shows what an expletive can unleash in such crops of prayers, hands over face to plead against the hunt, the smack down. Australian pastoral — expeditionary force. Imperatives. Quick. 4 This recent article, written after the poems included here (below), is a classic critique with caution and apologia—the exposé that is cautious… an ongoing problem with whatever discussion goes on around the SAS (fear of legal actions?): https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/16/australias-specialforces-problem-why-the-sas-is-facing-a-crisis.

162

J. KINSELLA

Gone, gone. I went to school with blokes like these, blokes loving guns and uniforms, patriotic opportunists, death’s farmers. Pastoral and the SAS Killings of People by the Tractor5 Rural validation of outdoors of the field is the recruiting from furrows of Australian farms and ‘training areas’ and a boustrophedon’s hunt for blood-fertiliser the Western civilising mythology of dragon’s teeth and warriors to grow crops of flourish and lament the wilding special services whose euphoric sputter of bullets the flashes of engagement over harried ground that is language is memory these trials in ‘combat-zones’ and all innocence killed as witness to a harvest 5 Again, this article has been written later than the first articles that prompted this poem, but it contains the details to which the poem reacts: https://www.abc.net.au/news/202007-14/australian-special-forces-killed-unarmed-civilians-in-kandahar/12441974.

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

163

without leaf, without ears, the tractor pulling its weight the weight of bread, the wheels of faith, the grinding stones.

And I shall repeat that all violence is wrong. All war is wrong. War itself is a crime. And arguments about the ‘fog of war’ are never an excuse, because there is no excuse. Violence to meet violence engenders violence. Computer gaming that simulates acts of violence desensitizes and instils modes of ‘passively’ being violent with attendant ‘rewards’ and ‘satisfactions’, right down to their makers excusing such ‘entertainments’ validated via ‘skills development’, with arguments about the developmental health and necessity of ‘twitch’ responses and spatial organization. The game is competition, is an act of winning via ‘skill’ and familiarity with the programme. ‘Theatres of war’ are theatres of death, and nothing else. As the ‘fallout’ from the investigation into alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan is managed through the idea of containment of blame to individuals and the operational processes and military culture in two specialist/’elite’ units of the army, the military, government and some media (the big media) are often at strains to validate the notion of honour, noblesse oblige, and ‘duty’ as core values that over-ride such aberrant violence within the theatre of violence. It’s vile to read disclaimers like this in a major Australian newspaper: ‘The laws distinguish professional soldiers from criminals, and they are central to military honour and to the mission achieving its goals. Ensuring the Australian Defence Force’s conduct is legal helps foster local support for counter-insurgency and peace-building missions.’6 So, we make war ‘legible’ to make it legitimate? War is an act of illegibility that requires legibility to legitimize itself in the eyes of those 6 https://www.theage.com.au/national/what-is-fog-of-war-and-what-are-war-crimes20201111-p56di8.html (article by Nick McKenzie, The Age, 19th November, 2020) [accessed 19th November, 2020].

164

J. KINSELLA

enacting it. A war crimes commission doesn’t condemn war, it legitimizes war through defending the ‘law’ and ‘values’ of war, through ensuring those who haven’t upheld the rules of engagement are punished. They are the criminals (which they are), but not the war (but war is criminal to my mind). Poetry might take the illegibilities of war into the (legible) light of scrutiny and also offer a different form of illegibility of conflicted interests that are resolved through dialogue, mediation. That is, allowing for contradictory attitudes to co-exist in peace while moving towards articulating justice in its various forms. Poetry of war that valorizes war is an act of war, not an act of poetry. Poetry is also a calling-out, a challenge, an addressing of the hypocrisies. ‘The poet’ (solo or collectively) is inevitably deeply flawed, of course, but the enacting of a poem can address the lies, misinformation, overt fakery, and deceptiveness of official language through dismantling it, and reassembling in varied morphemes, lexemes and contradictory syntax. Recording acts of violence might seem anathema to a poet of peace, but peace only comes through investigation, exposure, commentary, and refusal to allow it to happen again. The poem, as a medium, is far more fluid that people might think—fragments and lines, gestures it makes, might find their way generatively into a conversation, bringing more legibility. Of course, they can be misused and reused in different ways as well. Poems have consequences, and as poets and readers we are constantly engaging and disengaging with them as decaying and accruing entities. The thing is, if they become part of a militarized engagement they cease, to my mind, to be anything more the empty structures. A poem is a rupture in time and space and will have consequences. As I wrote in my introduction to the Paradiso canticle of my ‘distraction’ on Dante’s Divine Comedy—Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography: The cantos that follow offer an encounter with a ruptured Paradise. One doesn’t have to be a believer to experience the full effects. The willingness to look carries a certain material and spiritual recompense. I would argue that Dante’s original is a bleeding across the categories in any case. What makes this ruptured ‘space’ so different from the distracted Purgatorio is that I keep celebration, affirmation, and even ‘perfection’ in mind. While none are ultimately realizable as absolute values in themselves, and while there is no ‘end’ to the journey or truth to be realized, this ‘keeping in

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

165

mind’ is what compels ‘me’—’I’—the persona to struggle to extract or at least understand the positive in the negative, the affirmation out of trauma.7

And I think, now, of Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference in the ‘context’ of ‘decentring’: The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this paper, presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was a repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it became necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a centre in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence—but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. The substitute does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre, that the centre could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.8 (p. 280)

This accords to the de-pastoral de-centring and restructuring poem of peaceful protest against manifest and accruing forms of violence as I understand it and them. As the SAS soldier allegedly ‘murders’ or ‘kills’ in either ‘the fog of war’ (see Guardian article noted—official excusemaking) or as an act of ‘blooding’ (or similar), harm and death is the result, is the reality. But there’s a grim further truth—the bullet, the weapon, the unit, the training, the projection of force, all impact the biosphere in accruing and widening ways—the alleged murder, in fact, is a rupture across the entire structure of biosphere and of its structurality. This is not Derridean ‘rupture’, but to process the enormity of a single

7 Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography by John Kinsella (p. 161; WW Norton, New York, 2008). 8 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Routledge, London, 1995).

166

J. KINSELLA

murder we need to decentre and acknowledge that all centres of power are not natural, are anti-biospheric.9 Of course, I adapt Derrida to my purpose here, but I do so in the context of his greater argument, and in the sense of ‘Signature Event Context’ and that meaning works outside and beyond context. The problem with so much ‘war poetry’ written on the battlefield, in the horror, is that it is so readily co-opted by the very forces of militarism it opposed, that it lamented, and that provided its syntax of horror. I find it strange that Wilfred Owen (and many other anti-war poets—not pacifists, not conscientious objectors, and not rejectors of war, but lamenter-observer-participants of war) is ‘remembered’ in Westminster Abbey,10 a place in many ways a symbol of the violence-machine’s conscience, a faux reflective interiority arisen out of empire, and a structure of imperial desiring, and territorial consolidation and acquisition. But more disturbingly, maybe it’s not so strange as a legacy of patriotism overt or suppressed (via the horror of experience and witness). Does war make pacifists, or do pacifists stop wars? It’s a leading and maybe selffulfilling question. It’s not play, it’s not a game, but it is, and ‘twitch’ and ‘co-ordination’ and skills-building to mask entertainments of violence in online/electronic gaming, is a deception, is a lie. Footpath Between Madingley Ancient Woodland and the American War Cemetery The path is shaded in later summer and moisture clings in the lean tunnel even in dry weather—exposed to the east side of the forest with its more recent growth — elm, elm suckers, ash, blackthorn, and an understorey that has made its 9 Since writing this section, the alleged ‘illegal killings’ committed by Australian special services troops, and acts of disrespect by Australian soldiers in general (such as the infamous image of the Australian soldier drinking from the artificial limb of a slain Taliban fighter), have become the focal point of a ‘national’ examination of conscience. There seems to be a desperate desire by authorities, and many citizens, to separate the ‘good’ troops historically from the ‘few rotten eggs’, whereas the act of war is an act of serial killing. 10 https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/ poets-of-the-first-world-war.

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

167

appearance and diminished: dog’s mercury and bluebells, though always the residual moss. On the west side, well away from the path, the most ancient woodland with its oak and hazel, ash and sawflies, its blue tits and hummingbird hawk-moths. They venture throughout, of course, but you feel their origins. On the left side, the American war cemetery. The dead with their origins, eternally here. The soldier-surgeon’s deathcall: ‘to you from failing hands we throw/ the torch’ proclaimed from the base of the flagpole wavers over chalky boulder clay and drops away into the glare of mowed lawns and pristine white crosses: 3,809 headstones and the remains of 3,812 men. It’s clean and impressive. It makes you remember or wonder. Each tree reaches deep with nurture. Sun breaks into the tunnel, over the path, infused with smog stuck over the county, and on the edge of transplantings a gardener places a poison spray-pack in a garden shed. Nesting boxes hang along the edge of the wood, and outside the recruitment call, I sense a flitting across the leaf litter into the green; before the branches are laid bare and the wood’s soul is revealed, in part at least. The absence of poppies an adjustment come with time, the specificities of locale and its bequest.

There is a very telling passage in Albert Gelpi’s introduction to The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov wherein he tracks the gap between a politics of aesthetics and a politics of action, that reminds me

168

J. KINSELLA

of the condemnation of Dareen Tatour for her poem ‘Resist, my people, resist then’ (and accompanying visuals)11 —Duncan’s reaction to Levertov over her speaking at an anti-Vietnam war rally, with its use of Hindu sacredness, deconstructs itself: In Duncan’s eyes, an image of her, filmed as a speaker at an antiwar rally and shown on the television news, exposed the capitulation to violence masking as resistance. In her tirade, he told her, she looked not like a moral reformer but like Kali, the Hindu Goddess of destruction, triumphant in the spectacle of death… Hurt and angry, Levertov tried to explain in the long letter of October–November 1971 that her agitation had come from the circumstances of the rally. Some of the more moderate organizers had perceived her as radical and wanted to keep her from speaking, but suddenly she was thrust onto the platform and told that she had only three minutes to blurt out seven minutes of remarks she had written for delivery. As for ‘Revolution or death’, the refrain Duncan had excerpted from her journal poem for his own purposes, the phrase represented ‘neither “threat” nor “vow” nor “ultimatum” but just a statement of the problem’. (p. xxi)12

In the mid-1980s I was filmed by television being arrested at an antinuclear, anti-7th Fleet protest—with dreadlocks and an unkempt look, I was part of a face of disrespect. Not on film is the assault just prior to my arrest by far-right Australian National Movement foot soldiers counter-protesting the left, and breaking the foot of the woman I was standing alongside. We were loud and swearing, but physically, entirely non-violent and non-threatening. The far-right foot soldiers were not arrested by Western Australian police, as the American military watched on. In the lock-up, a well-known anti-nuclear senator appeared and bailed out a number of women who were part of the anti-nuclear group but not protesting US foreign policy as such. When they were bailed, I asked, 11 Regarding the imprisonment by Israel of poet Dareen Tatour, a ‘Palestinian citizen of Israel’, for ‘incitement to violence’ over her poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’, the accusation (or declaration) of violence in the poem—or the prompt to violence—is an issue of legibility to some, and illegibility to others (the prosecutor even contested her legitimacy as ‘real poet’). As a pacifist, I would not choose to take the poem as incitement to violence, but rather as an angry lament for violent acts of the Israeli state against her people. 12 The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (ed. Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi; Stanford University Press, Standford, 2004).

12

ON INJUSTICE. ON PEACE. ON JUSTICE. ON PEACE…

169

‘What about me?’ and was told laughingly by the cops that the senator has said I was nothing to do with her group (I wasn’t—only in overlap, of cause), and that she wasn’t assisting any Trot revolutionaries (anarchist pacifist vegan, not a ‘Trot’). I was also protesting US foreign policy— invasive, controlling, and protecting of its capital and compelled to create new ‘opportunities’ for its capital. That night, in the lock-up, I witnessed and vehemently protested the horrendous violent abuse of an Aboriginal prisoner, and swore I would commit my life to speaking of this as and when I could. When I tried to bring it to the attention of the magistrate when I eventually appeared before HIM, he said, ‘Do you want a long stint in jail? If not, I suggest you be quiet.’ Does this have a room in poetry? Yes. Does it have room in aesthetics? No. I am anti-aesthetics. The event needs to be remade—across all the events of that day and the next and the next. Can it be written as verse novel? Fiction is narrative (or undoing or decentring of narrative), and narratives are a way of exposing truths, even if only in their moment of first articulation. I am trying to do that in a new work (a verse novel that is a factual novelizing): Cellnight. Violence or non-violence is the sole preserve of none of us, but some of us do and will experience violence more than others. Conflict zones are often domestic households, the streets of a city ‘at peace’, or schools. Violence is too often the default we work out of. In ‘early’ and ‘later’ feminist conflict theory, presence is a defining aspect of understanding and thwarting violence. Annette Webber argues that ‘For a feminist theory on peace the analysis of war and conflict is essential,’ and though there is obvious empirical truth in this, it is also an argument that can be co-opted by a prurience of interest and a validation of studies of conflict that can be absorbed via an institution of learning into the administration of the (always military) state and its corporate affiliates. Webber continues: The variety of approaches range from historical accounts of women in war to the psychological scrutinizing of gendered upbringing of children. Critical writings by women in liberation movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia as well as the critique on Western feminism by working class, Black and lesbian scholars has further shaped the discussion. Feminist Peace and Conflict Theory reflects on the need of visibility of women in conflicts and has led to a broader understanding of security issues. FPCT introduced the interconnectedness of all forms of violence: domestic, societal, state

170

J. KINSELLA

based and inter-state and its gendered dimension. It critically discussed the collaboration of the ‘Beautiful Soul’ (Jean Bethke Elshtain, 1987) in the machinery of violence.13 (pp. 1–2)

Webber’s is a survey of views on women’s rights in terms of war/conflict and masculinity from a feminist critical perspective, and as such performs a scholarly critical role that assesses shifts and changes in Western perceptions of rights through inflecting knowledge of other experiences outside the familiar (‘freedom fighters’, ‘suicide bombers’, the changing nature of Western military—primarily American—activity…). The state and its institutions of violence, to my mind, can only be changed be compete rejection of their administration and bureaucracy, of the patriarchy of capital in which these acts of communication entangle us.

13 Annette Weber—Feminist Peace Theory—Routledge Encyclopaedia 28.07.2006 One of the many interesting points in Webber’s survey is this: ‘However, the tendency even in feminist peace and conflict theory is to portray female warriors as individual exemptions, as temporary transgressors. The myth of Jeanne d’Arc could be mentioned here as one of the prime examples of male structures of power decorated with a female icon in the Western context.’ (p. 7) and ‘For a large number of feminist conflict theorists however, women’s active role in the military was not the answer to a less militarized-masculine and dichotomic society.’ (Wendy Chapkins, 1981; Ruth Seifert, 1999)’ (p. 8).

CHAPTER 13

Pandemic(s)

Abstract The disjunctive narrative of pandemic and the concomitant narratives around the destruction of the biosphere. Mutual aid and poetry. Bio Level 4 labs. The problem with discussions of ‘origins’ regarding pandemic. Hubris and empathy. Keywords Pandemic · Biosphere · Mutual aid · Bio Level 4 · Hubris · Empathy

The narratives of the Covid-19 pandemic are disjunctive, constrained, smothering, bursting out and eschatalogical. For those who haven’t fallen sick, or have had ‘mild doses’, the narratives tilt and change in emphasis, for those who have been health affected for life or lost someone close, or a distant associate, it changes the nature of how they relate to community and individuals. The conspiracy theorist who falls ill and starts to understand the reality sends messages out warning others not to doubt, not to be taken in by false stories, manipulated information, or to be drawn into discourses driven by numerous underlying prejudices and also fear of loss of the minimal ‘power’ people actually possess as ‘ordinary’ citizens (or those without citizen status—even less ‘power’)… the regret on discovering the horrendous reality exposure to such a pathogen can have sparks

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_13

171

172

J. KINSELLA

briefly then is lost in the swirl of denials and refusals to admit a harsh truth.1 Destruction of the biosphere will lead to more, not fewer, of these realities, as many virologists have been warning for decades (for differing reasons). What has astonished (and saddened) me over the course of this pandemic, even beyond the denials of government (never forget the ‘masks don’t help and might make it worse’ utterances of various authorities early on), the suppression of ‘community transfer’ details, the encouragements to travel and take holidays by many governments, the whole gambit of capitalist rationale that economies matter more than lives, and the belief that ‘jobs’ define people (which they actually do in so many ways) is an appalling indictment of market economics in which labour is equated with identity and wellbeing, and worse, that labour is purpose. Labour is about sustaining a holistic life of interconnected wellbeing, and to have been reduced to working to maintain existence as right is oppressive. We work together at being, we mutually aid each other in our work to ensure equal rights and respect for difference, we work to live— but working to live is not labouring to survive while others profit from our work. We work because it is sharing, not because we can ‘get ahead’ because we all have the right to be ‘equally ahead’. The pandemic is a time of mutual aid, and mutual aid means mutual respect as well as non-competitive support. It has been encouraging to see the unifying and restorative enactments poetry has been part of during the pandemic, and that a change in perception of what it can achieve as both consolation and activism has taken place on an international scale. Poetry is implicit in any corrective of injustice—it is the language which augments or undoes addresses in ‘law’, and it is, like legal jargon, there to be interpreted, but it does not bind, it does not control if we refuse to let it. It can be device of speech and sign, not a device of the market.

1 Since writing this chapter in October 2020, vaccines have become available to wealthier countries with varied effectiveness of ‘rollouts’. The discussion of vaccines and selective liberties around these (for the vaccinated as opposed to the unvaccinated due to unavailability rather than choice), the issue of wealth and availability (Global North and Global South alternate realities) and the side-effects of vaccination (e.g. Astra Zeneca Oxford vaccine and blood-clotting) that have changed the discourse around ‘immunity’ and wellbeing is not the provenance of this discussion due to time of composition. Otherwise, it is very much the provenance!

13

PANDEMIC(S)

173

Poems go a long way instantly in the age of the net, but they also travel within small groups in lockdown situations without devices. We must work to preserve ‘breath’ because breath is life, but it’s also the poem which enhances life. One of the many hypocrisies of the ‘First World’ or ‘Global North’ or wealthier ‘countries’ has been in the slippage between their treatment of West and Central African countries during the Ebola outbreaks—the complete othering conceptually and physically— whilst often behaving in patronizing and derogatory ways towards very poor communities struggling to come to grips with an horrific reality in part triggered by the depredations (communally and environmentally) of ongoing mining (and other) colonialism; the colonialism of capital sees the old Western colonialism in awkward juxtaposition with the mining colonialism of the Chinese Government. Too little respect was given to the incredible achievements of community to adapt to the crisis, cooperate (sometimes under duress, often not) and shift culturality to deal with the crisis before shifting back. Many in the West have been far less self-disciplined, seeing their ‘freedoms’ as clearly different from the freedoms of West and Central Africa. A case in point, and I say this with respect and I hope compassion, is the issue of funerals—so much condescending reportage and community opprobrium came out of the touching/washing of bodies and the spreading of Ebola, that people ‘there’ had to understand… when anger and the search for exemptions for funeral bans and limitations in Western countries during the pandemic are far from rare. I do not say this as judgement, as these things are specific and complex, but as a highlighting of hypocrisy in discourse, certainly as I have seen it. All of us necessarily have an opinion on what, to varying degrees at different times and in different contexts, we are all experiencing (around the world). So, really, these comments and those that follow only ‘speak’ in the array of contexts and crises of contexts I present in this book as a whole. The issue of legibility is one of ‘testing’, ‘masks’, social distance and quarantine, of gaining control over what has crossed over, and what needs to be dealt with before full attention can return to the crisis of climate, inequality, injustice and deprivation of Indigenous rights. The illegibility is that of denial and obfuscation for personal gain, it’s the continuance of ecological destructions ‘under cover’ of the pandemic (concern is elsewhere, but capital grows in the hands of the few: dramatic increase in the wealth of some of the very wealthy outside travel, service and such industries), but it’s also, as the paradox will generate, the

174

J. KINSELLA

samizdat awareness regarding the impact of capital in increasing the likelihood of such pandemics, of inequality, of shared fates. Out of this scribbled palimpsesting of life and purpose, out of mutuality, will come a clarity, a collective conscience of imperatives. In pieces I have written about the privilege of capital and unrestrained approaches to the pandemic I often single Sweden out as an ‘official’ hypocritical act of false ‘liberty’ ideation (mixed with pre-vaccine ‘herd immunity’ discourse), but that the same might apply to other countries and certainly to many market economy highly militarized and conflict profiteering countries. Of course, America under the Trump Administration had been the supreme example of federal official hypocrisy. Though having its specific hashtag origins in July 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter movement’s direct participatory action and reach intensified after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, as did the large scale worldwide protests that ensued.2 Amidst the extra pressure and confusion created, the bigoted Administration’s retrograde handling of the pandemic, racism and killing of black people by white officials in many different scenarios across America was shown in the context of the disproportionate suffering under Covid-19 of those people identifying as black or minorities, over those identifying as white.3 Living with many versions of official racism, and a racism that kills as well as degrading wellbeing, is an ongoing reality for many people living in America. The effects of pandemic and systemic racism are not disconnected, and the result of the brute realities of monopolies and oppressions, but also imbricated in the pressure of a questionable future of health and wellbeing in the most basic sense. The health risk to communities increases with exposure, and this irresolvable paradox is the endgame of colonial capital, of slavery and its toxic residues, and conflicting notions of ‘liberty’ is that to resist being murdered by the state, one protests against

2 And in Australia, Aboriginal people have directly linked the horrendous reality of deaths in police custody with the impetus and determination of Black Lives Matter as a world event and address of systemic injustice: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-0410/aboriginal-deaths-in-custody-protests-marches-around-australia/100060724. 3 See https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/23/914427907/as-pan demic-deaths-add-up-racial-disparities-persist-and-in-some-cases-worsen.

13

PANDEMIC(S)

175

the state and suffers (generally poorer healthcare, living conditions and rights to wellbeing for many).

Bio Level 4 The issue of Biolevel 4 labs and the gain of function (GOF—a ban on this in the US was ‘rescinded’ in 2018) research that might increase the threat to human health of a pathogen, is one that has been pushed to the background because of Chinese Government propaganda, but also among antifa activists because of the deep and real concern about the possible revelation of this as fact when the suggestion in itself has disturbingly led to hate crimes and overt racism to people of Chinese ancestry (or perceived ancestry) around the world. Whether or not Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab,4 or ‘case zero’ (the harm such terminologies have: witness the AIDS accusations and trauma caused by this) was infected by bats in or near a cave in the South of China, or if, as the Chinese Government is trying to construct as ‘real narrative’, the virus transferred from animal to human somewhere else in the world,5 the fact remains that Level 4 gain of function research, especially in military contexts (though they are most often denied), will always be a threat. It is a global issue of

4 See this article in Nature that talks of fears among some Chinese microbiologists that a string of Bio 4 labs might lead to an ‘escape’ and have dire consequences. It is interesting to see a 2020 update pointing out that the Wuhan Bio 4 lab is not considered the cause of the outbreak. The contradictory feed is a control mechanism to try and prevent the vileness (and absurdity) of racist accusation, but also to protect the industries and actions of the professional ‘science community’, which is global: https://www.nature.com/news/ inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487. 5 See this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/dec/04/wa-museum-boola-bar dip-denies-changes-to-china-display-were-due-to-political-pressure. Wherein the Western Australian Museum insists it has not been pressured by the Chinese authorities (at a time when Australia is involved in a regionalised ‘trade’ and ‘ideological’ struggle with China) in its display about the pandemic that does not show Covid-19 originating in China (or, rather, does not attribute origin which is a contested narrative of ‘culpability’ and ‘blame’), which is true insofar as WHO’s ongoing investigation is yet to ‘determine’ its origin (and the entangling of health, capital, influence and power: the Trump Administration having withdrawn US funding and Chinese funding having increased). But what is more telling is the marking of Taiwan as ‘China’. [Since this note, the WHO report failed to find origin and was deeply criticised for being stage-managed in various ways by the Chinese Government.]

176

J. KINSELLA

responsibility, and disarming research from high-threat profiteering activities (be it for patriotic reasons, financial gain, kudos or satisfaction of curiosity etc.), is pivotal to biospheric survival. The main concern of all discussions around ‘origins’ is to place it in the context of human impact on the biosphere (and broadly, international exploitation of animals and habit) and never lay the responsibility or ‘cause’ on a particular people or ‘ethnic group’ or religion of gender or sexual ideation or identity—to do so is to obscure real ‘causes’, to distract from mutual culpability through blame, and to refocalize the language of bigotry-hate as an outcome of causation. Capital, rapacity, exploitation and injustice, as well as, often, ‘misfortune’, are the culprits, not any people or peoples. Racists will always exploit trauma and seek to blame. And origins of ‘pandemics’ are increasingly geographically widespread and will occur in spatialities placed under pressure by many forms of exploitation. It should be noted that there are seven BSL-4 labs operating in Europe, around a dozen in the USA, and they are also located in many other countries including Australia. The slippage between ‘diagnostics’ and gain of function seems vague. Pandemic Companion Villanelles: Hubris and Empathy [March, 2020] Hubris As the March flies tune into ‘their’ month that doesn’t really fit here. and fits less and less each year, our sweat teases the humid dry — the failure to decipher brings official castigations of ‘panic’ and ‘fear’. Some will ask what the air quality is like out beyond their perimeters, will ask if there’s room to walk and breathe, to look a bird in the eye — as the March flies tune into ‘their’ month that doesn’t really fit here. I counted five different species of insects between the front door. and the first tree to the right, and thought, from this I would normally scry. the failure to decipher brings official castigations of ‘panic’ and fever. It amazes me how analogies are just devices in poems but active hardware. in the displacement of lives with words, of the twenty percent by the eighty; as the March flies tune into ‘their’ month that doesn’t really fit here.

13

PANDEMIC(S)

177

The stench of a mulch fire across to the west is a reminder. of the parallelism of world and its contents—grim smoke of irony. whose failure to decipher brings official castigations of ‘panic’ and ‘fear’. Personified, the flock grazes the low sky, reaches high for clear air, a travel permit beyond reassurance, beyond relegating the aged care facility. As the March flies tune into ‘their’ month that doesn’t really fit here. the failure to decipher brings official castigations of ‘panic’ and ‘fear’. Empathy I have seen both brimstone moths and brimstone butterflies. in northern climes even as those zones were altering fast — an almost pandemic of breath, then no breath whatever its course. The patterning of dust and hairs and colour, the actions of dicots. and monocots together, the roadside verge the field edge the chalk the karst — I have seen both brimstone moths and brimstone butterflies. A leaf lifts in a hot wind that could be the sign given, or a mimic’s. co-ordination—either way, a sensitive response seems prudent — an almost pandemic of breath, then no breath whatever its course. Many years ago, I was sent a photo of winter mist of cross-season mists. from a poet-friend in Wuhan, and now I search it out but can’t find the past. I have seen sulphur up on The Peak in Hong Kong in the wings of its butterflies. I have seen sulphur in the wings of butterflies angling up rockfaces. at Jam Tree Gully, and the sulphur in wings on Réunion and in American forests, an almost pandemic of breath, then no breath whatever its course. And as the Covid-19 virus flits from breath to breath, as it twists. its way into people’s lives and afterlives all correlations spread and shift; I have seen both brimstone moths and brimstone butterflies — an almost pandemic of breath, then no breath whatever its course.

CHAPTER 14

Choice and Whose Rights We Are Talking About? Cruelty and Animal Rights… Justice, Genetics and Consensus

Abstract Who gets to define and discuss ‘rights’? Issues of who and how knowledge is controlled. Violence towards animals in movies and moviemaking. Cruelty as contiguous with loss of rights. State controls including the control and profiteering from ‘genetic’ material(ism). Darwin and Lamarck. Consensus, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. Mutual respect and mutual aid leading to rights and dignity. Keywords Animals in movies · Cruelty · Genetic material(ism) · Consensus · Faith · Belief · Rights and dignity

Who gets to discuss another person’s or community’s ‘rights’ and how ‘rights’ are envisaged when difference is spoken across by an external arbiter, is an issue of legibility. Overt wrongs committed by humans on humans create an international sense of rights, of the inviolable, but these too often exist separate from rights of regional nuance. When I speak of ‘regions’ I refer not only to geographical localities, but conceptual shared spaces of mutuality, of tacit or overt agreement on the relationships people have with each other and their environments. That extends out to the international not necessarily by direct routes of movement, but also tangentially and in imagined ways—routes that might seem illegible

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_14

179

180

J. KINSELLA

or non-readable by one culture or community, might be very readable by another. Choices of means of traversing rights issues made by one group might be very different from another, though the sense of ‘rights’ themselves seem to form common ground. But declarations of rights have to be space and community specific, and sit alongside each other and not be consumed by a dominant legibility which is actually only a legibility of power-concentration and effective dissemination and application. Choice against fascism is a universal, but fascism can only be done by mutuality and the respect of regional-local-communal choice (and the individual is inflected through this and in this). An extreme version of exploitation of choice is the use the tobacco industry makes of ‘free choice’ with regard to killing one’s self, without ever taking responsibility for the loss of choice by those harmed by passive smoking. Libertarian ‘laissez-faire’ capitalism with minimal constraint becomes absolute constraint to those who experience the fallout of such ‘choice’. The contradiction is along the lines of ‘God and Guns’ or ‘prolife’ while defending the right to ‘bear arms’ and to take life if one’s own life or property-dwelling (unbelievable!) are threatened. Cease. Desist. Order… This is what the oppressors expect and rely on, and are the tools they apply to their conditions of ‘rights’ which obfuscate rights. Rights become clear for them, illegible for others. Of course, the state is an ongoing act of public, domestic and interior violences and its behaviours contributes to enclosedness and obfuscation of witness. During the first Covid-19 lockdown in Australia in 2020, numerous cases of domestic violence were recorded (above, the appalling, ‘usual figures’), and undoubtedly many remain illegible beyond phone calls and messages out of the confinement. ∗ ∗ ∗ Values, as said, are not evocative of belief, they are distillations of positions—some of these are negative, some not. Values come out of gender or racial oppression, are not divisible even by the manipulations of capital. They stand in themselves as absolutes of rights: bigotry is wrong under all conditions. But the willingness to use the propaganda tools of capital means at least a conviction that the cause is greater than the means, that a willingness to make use of such vehicles is worth the damage such vehicles cause.

14

CHOICE AND WHOSE RIGHTS …

181

But as antifa activists, we surely ask, how much does our participation—if we have the opportunity, if we have ‘developed’ inside such trajectories—contribute to a machine of business-state-capital that is as damaging, if in different ways, as the bigotries we are hoping to address by participation in protest? How we view and experience is part of our legibility, our reducing our hypocrisies. For example, in a Hollywood movie or an Amazon series, or whatever version of capitalized entertainment we might cite, the credits show part of the damage, but not all. And yet we watch, content with information provided and thus information not provided? And moving into animal rights and the spectacle of capitalist entertainment, movies such as the Alejandro González Iñárritu directed Babel and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,1 with their direct depiction of animal cruelty in the former, and direct cruelty through disregard (as well as the abuse of making animals perform in the first place) after filming (job done and then neglected), counter any critique or ‘message’, allegorical or otherwise, these films might have about the injustices of the world we participate in. They are entertainment designed to profit to pay back investors and ensure the continuance of the medium, of those working in this medium. What do we learn? We learn that knowledge is validated through consumption, and through discussing what we’ve seen and experienced in the marketplace, the artificial and natural modes of meeting and conversing. These works seek our validation to be. The ‘great’ director Jean Renoir can dissect the manners of the middle class in The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu, 1939), and destroy animals to make a point— his camera obsessed with the death-throes of a rabbit, with the killing of birds; showing the carnage brought by ‘leisure’ and manners/style, and perpetrating it. I have always felt his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (both father and son were anti-Semites) did it with his lush and reductive portraits of too many of his female models, his canvases absorbing and almost consuming their bodies, the clothes they wore, their being. Not cruelty as such, but an intrusiveness that is certain of itself, and the position of artist and the gaze which can so easily cover up, make secretive or impose control. Andrei Tarkovsky can ‘warn’ us of the zone, but then again, in Andrei Rublev (1966) he can push a horse down stairs.

1 See: https://www.peta.org/features/hobbit-unexpected-cruelty/

182

J. KINSELLA

The most perverse aspect of this was that the horse was ‘rescued’ from a slaughterhouse so it could die in this manner instead. And, as Paul Muldoon has traced in his poetry, the horrendous case of Topsy the Elephant at Coney Island being electrocuted and filmed in its agony by Thomas Edison. Science, art, patents, nations, progress, demonstration… control… cruelty. Cruelty is the irresolvable quality of being and unbeing that propels the benign consumption and apparent indifference to biospheric collapse. Indifference deployed by those who are cruel is at the core of fascism. Animals existing for human abuse and leisure? Regionality of rights likely overlaps here more than one would expect—very few cultures (if any) would laud cruelty as a right, but would rather condemn the willing infliction of torment/cruelty on human or animal. Cruelty is the tool of control of fascist—it is where fascists turn to gain the ultimate control: not only the willingness to inflict torture, but the willingness to excuse it as ‘science’ and to enjoy their ‘work’. Such willingness to be cruel elicits the most terror and fear in their opposition and becomes their most effective tool of repression. People being cruel to animals is fascism. Humans are intrinsically implicated in animals’ lives, as animals are in people’s lives. But the degree to which that implication relies on control and exploitation is the issue in all negotiations of interaction. Indigenous usage within a space of long-term interaction in which animals have ‘freedom’ and are interacted with for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, is not mine to comment on; but in all cases cruelty—pain and anguish inflicted for the sake of pleasure or with an indifference to the agency of that creature—is, to my mind, always wrong. Cruelty does not underpin Indigenous systems of human-animal interaction, or of Indigenous use of animals. Totemic understandings of human-animal relations necessarily shifts understanding into zones of empathy. That does not mean there aren’t ever cruelties, or that cruelty is not something that Indigenous systems of animal-human interaction don’t have to deal with and negotiate. Of course they do—there’s nothing exceptional about people and it is bigoted to expect there to be (or hope there to be) from outside. But whereas cruelty underpins nation-state fascism and the new privatized versions of fascist grouping (and its socially media/web lines of communication), it certainly doesn’t form a system of thought in any Indigenous system that I know of. Cruelty is surely ultimately about intent. Within any community, there is language of presence and ‘totemism’ to negotiate and mediate the relationship between humans and animals that

14

CHOICE AND WHOSE RIGHTS …

183

is just in its law and understanding of human-animals interactions. As life moves between work, leisure and spirituality in very different proportions for different people and peoples, we might ask at what point humour, say, ceases to be a response to a surprise or an unusual occurrence, and tips into a malice of laughing at suffering? Again, this is a question of legibility. Humour might be illegible, but suffering is not. Without seeking to impose or ‘judge’ social and cultural difference, there has to be and I believe there is a universal notion of the essence of life, of being— animal or human, and also vegetal and biospheric. It is what constitutes any ontology in all its variations. State control of difference in relationships between human and animal is not the answer to perceptions of cruelty, but natural justice and a universal sense of the essential nature of life is. That’s a conversation, not an imposition. It is a conversation that will always reveal cruelty as what it is, and call for its end. In no cultural understanding of being I know is cruelty considered just. Unless it’s the capitalized residue of something like French gastronomy that torments animals to bring them to taste, or the dairy and meat industry and the process of ‘veal’, or any other industrial agricultural magnifications of acts that some farmers, traditional or otherwise, would have considered cruel, and others would have seen as valid. The ‘traditional’ use of animals in such food production adapted to industrial methods, focus a cruelty as an exploitative rather than ‘cultural’ act; the industrial techniques of the fur industry and other animal goods industries, especially luxury goods (which involve specific levels of cruelty such as inserting hot poles through minks2 to prevent damage to fur with killing) and the beauty (across genders—animal abuse is a universal) industry, and the vivisections of medicine (there are always alternatives), are examples of blatant systemic cruelty. If it is appropriate for humans to think of themselves as ‘separate’ from animals, and also appropriate for humans to think of themselves as animals, then the logic leads to an unfortunate notion that humans 2 For the links between abuse of animals and the spread of viruses that have made the leap (or potentially been encouraged to in the case of Level 4 bioresearch labs) we are lead more often than not to think of ‘wet markets’ or other such interfaces of slaughter and sale of animals, and especially of the vectors from say ‘reservoirs’ (e.g. bats) and ‘bush food’ markets, but intensive animal farming brings its own logistics of spread and also mutation. Consider the mink farms of Denmark (world’s biggest farmers of mink) and the mutation of Covid-19 late 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/ 05/denmark-lockdown-north-mink-blamed-coronavirus-strain.

184

J. KINSELLA

are special animals. But they are not. They are beings as animals are beings, and as Spinoza might suggest, have their own affects that are inherently necessary in themselves. As an anti-racist, I do not see people as racially different and separate, and see the commonality of being (and body outside genetics) as the universal signifier of being human, and also being animal. There are no gradations, just differences within sameness. Genetics3 has been a tool of medicine and a tool of control: to correct, to alter, to trace… all invasive acts of differentiation or connection or a homogeneity. I would never use a genetic test (DNA) to trace my ‘origins’, as I would personally consider that a self-defining ‘racist’ act (not applying this as a principle to those whose lives have been disrupted by oppressive regimes/colonialism etc.). Heritage and inheritance are not ‘acts of blood’ for me, but markers of awareness and choice: they are a cultural connection, a sense of received awareness that may have been broken by migration, dislocation or dispossession. ‘DNA’ is not a truth of who we are, but it might come to represent a tragic disconnection in psychological and sociological ways. Recovery as an act of definition and identification through biochemistry is not a social reconnecting that might heal a past loss or damage. To ‘find one’s people’ as an organic act of rebecoming is very different from searching genetic records to ‘reconstruct’ an identity (which often brings claims to access). Who we are is defined by how we live, not by rights given by ‘blood’. The social protections against genetic problems caused by reproduction between close relatives are encoded in social knowledge and rituals of family, not by blood. If those connections have been so damaged and lost that, say, two close relations can enter into a relationship without any knowledge of such an affiliation, then that is a matter outside judgement and natural law. Journeys of discovery to recover what has been disrupted by authoritarian intervention are vital to justice and wellbeing of individuals, communities and biosphere, and assistance to put back the pieces of a broken narrative of identity an essential right, even a necessary desire 3 From the outset, in this discussion, I wish to differentiate clearly between the racist false science of eugenics so readily wielded and manipulated by the Nazis, from the ‘science of genetics’ across its history, but indicate the potential racist usage of genetics. The so-called ‘Father of DNA’, James Watson, is an example of the elision of fields—of ‘hard science’ being the companion of irrational racist and bigoted ideology: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/james-watson-rac ism-sexism-dna-race-intelligence-genetics-double-helix-a8725556.html.

14

CHOICE AND WHOSE RIGHTS …

185

or compulsion. But that is different from using genetic testing to map journeys of inclusion and exclusion, especially across colonial lines of movement, and to reach back into mythologies of conquest that might define self-belief as having inherent power, or majesty, or strength… in other words, as a theoretical underpinning of real applications of eugenics. Fascism is eugenics. Alternatively, to ‘travel back’ or rediscover one’s ‘origins’ via returning to specific places, connecting with distant relatives, reading old papers and gravestones, following family stories and other inherited information of earlier connection and belonging, can be an act of connection as well as accountability. The ‘discovery’ being an act of finding answers that give clearer insight into, say, why one has a ‘settler’ or ‘colonial’ culpability and what, if any, circumstances one might investigate to give answers that will help with restitution to those one’s family, group or community has dispossessed. Or, in a very different way, children stolen by colonial authorities, or by nations from orphanages and sent overseas, or lives stolen by religious institutions that need to gather their own stories back, are clear and essential examples of tracing heritage that has been broken and that has rights and demands in itself. But again, these are not ‘acts of blood’, but acts of belonging and the rights of the displaced. The use of ‘advanced’ and capitalized stages of medical research as a kind of benign (targeted) panacea while ignoring the digressive histories of its making (knowledge taken from torturing animals and humans, of unethical behaviours or behaviours protected by ethics committees with an invested interest in outcomes conceptually or materially), is tantamount to saying the ends justifies the means (which is, to varying degrees, the claim of all modern technologies). The means is never justified if it is exploitative. The means is accountable always, and as we ‘forget’ origins of research and making, as we justify our needs in the now over the realities of our tools to ‘answer’ how those ‘needs’ got to us, we entrench a colonialism of being as a default position, adaptable and mobile. The origins of knowledge are built into the knowledge itself, as who we are is part of us; but obtaining knowledge and embodiment of identity at the expense of other lives seems to me to be an irresolvable contradiction. Again, we want the legibility the tools of research will give us, the tools to ‘fix things’, but too often an illegibility over the real sources of that knowledge. Governments of control, whatever their form, are acts of illegibility about their own origins, even when they are a consequence

186

J. KINSELLA

to revolution and removal of a tyranny—crimes are covered up or called heroic, the stories are altered, records changed or lost, knowledge stolen from Indigenous peoples, and the trail altered or erased. Discrimination can best be diminished by holding knowledge accountable in all its forms. Most centralized narrative stories will have different ways of telling, and sometimes completely different applications—the same mechanism being useful to those searching for justice, and those wishing to oppress. A belief is only as good as its application. With regard to this ‘duality’ of application, Hannah Arendt makes this point about social Darwinism: Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies.4

We might add that no science is neutral, though it is sold to us by its makers and protectors among scientists as neutral, but Arendt is talking about it as a social inflection of a scientific idea and its ability to be used as ‘neutral’. It is not neutral, and even use of it in pacifist contexts will mean at the very least irresolvable micro-aggressions, and at worse, a peace of control and suppression (an oxymoron of the post-victory wordism). Every aspect of Darwin’s colonial journey of discovery is embedded in its science, as is previous discourse, who he was and how he acted, and how the material was presented to the world. Cause and effect. Legibility being the theory, the illegibility being the referents to ‘his’ making and the reception of that making. And, likewise, a legibility of choice to say the imperialist who sees it as a clear tool to scientifically justify oppression and control, with the illegibility being other readings. There is no binary in textuality nor its applications. Many years ago, I wrote an ‘opinion piece’ on what I call NeoLuddism for the Australian Broadcasting Commission,5 and it was met with an outraged response. Reader-responses ranged from arguing that it wasn’t Darwin but Lamarck I should be discussing, through to ‘Let me go around to his place to teach him how to operate a VCR!’ and 4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (p. 232; Penguin, London, 2017). 5 See Polysituatedness (pp. 411–413).

14

CHOICE AND WHOSE RIGHTS …

187

included overt hate messages, the like of which I hadn’t received since writing in favour of refugees and against their cruel treatment at the hands of the Australian Government during the Tampa Incident (I received death threats against myself and my family).6 My dismissal of technology beyond what we need to maintain health and wellbeing was unacceptable to most readers (and I discussed the irony of mode of presentation of reading—it was written just before I went offline for a couple of years). But really, what struck me, was that the invocation of the brute realities of Social Darwinism could bring such a ‘tooth and claw’ attempt to retrieve Darwin as either ‘neutral’ as science, or to dismiss it as a relevant factor in such a discussion. No science is without ethical implications, and as such I consider ethics and politics inextricably connected. The industrial panaceas of central planning are an oppression of being, of biosphere. In creating an apparently collective wealth (it’s not), power accrues in administration and those who monitor and direct administration—and compliance requires enforcement, and secret policing to ensure diminished knowledge of surveillance (to catch the worker out), and that becomes the play of the illegible and legible in productivity and reward in the sustaining of life, and, if compliant enough, ‘comforts’. This is not liberty in any sense of the word—not individually, nor collectively.

Scanning Consensus The inked fingerprints and then a separate thumbprint in the lock-up after being charged circa 1980 and 1990s.7 The digital scan thumbprint read 6 For the poem, along with my comments that accompanied its appearance in an online discussion forum that brought the threats (from outside the discussion forum—such positions travel fast among the fascist accruals), see Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (pp. 54–58). 7 When I started a process I didn’t complete for Irish residency, I had to have my fingerprints taken digitally and was told my fingerprints had vanished (‘Do you work with books?’ I was asked!). Fingerprints Lacking in Bantry

To register a presence, the ancestral fingerprint irrelevant to the Garda, you place a finger on the glass glowing red, blood offering, and the officer says try again,

188

J. KINSELLA

circa 2000s—a widening variety of applications. The face scan passing through immigration. The surveillance cameras supplemented by the surveillance of those with phones who wish to scan, or scan as consequence of their filming something ‘else’. We trust to consensus, and the consensus we are told through marketing, government, and ‘each other’,

roll your finger, take some natural oil from behind your ear and press on the glass again, roll your finger. And still no print will show. Decades ago your prints were taken in ink when there was still enough of you to show, confirm what they didn’t want. Have you worked with chemicals? Laboured on a farm or in a factory? That will do it, she says. I’ve seen prints of a bookish man of seventy that are so beautifully preserved he could still be a child. But yours aren’t even a shadow of what you were, burnt off and never coming back. Great storms a fortnight ago threw waves and seaweed up into the Garda station, picked away at the seawall. The tidal surge that will reach to the bay’s elbow, main town of the region. Mountains hold it in place, but denuded of their copper souls, they too have lost their prints. And the old forests have gone. Little is left of the stretches of oaks. And I have these blank fingers, these shiny hands, made of the emptying out, the tendency to go elsewhere and wear new worlds to the bone. We’ll deal with this situation at the next stage, she says, when residency wants more than prints, when you’ll pay.

14

CHOICE AND WHOSE RIGHTS …

189

is to be ‘free’ to capture, interpret, game, GPS (those satellites, that Starlink, that occupation of space so as to possess Earth), those tags and trackings we allow. But not me. I don’t agree. There are others. Some will abjure, some never ‘joined up’. So, no consensus? What precisely is consensus? In a small control group of people from the same demographic and sharing the same interests and identifying in ‘generally’ the same way, or a familiar way at least, consensus might be easy to reach. And that might be ideal for communalism, but the smallest communities have to relate to larger communities, in which consensus is more difficult to achieve. Consensus is manipulated in discourse to mean ‘a general agreement’, which implies leeway for difference, but it is underpinned by a sense that a course of action or status of ‘something’ is endurable, tolerable and possible between people. However, the land itself, the biosphere, all nonhuman life is too often not part of that act of consensus. And consensus should surely take in potential impact and fallout on those outside the group of consensus? In other words, an interactive and polyphonous and proliferating consensus that is a ‘sequence diagram’ that denies ‘business’ and capital, that shows consequence and movement of collective decision-making in its temporality. Consensus that serves groups of selves that don’t take into consideration other groups of selves is a definition of micro-colonialism and frontierism: of preparing to impose one collective will over another. A case in point is the Danish decision after the outbreak of a new strain of Covid-19 on horrendously cruel intensive mink farms to ‘strongly encourage’ citizens of the primary affected region not to travel, not to interact with others. That is sold as a protection of liberties, but it is actually a protection of the idea of liberty as the right to breach in order to define a liberty. Consensus across groups would determine such travel would put other groups at risk. Choice is an act of consequence and consequences, and freedom of movement is contingent on the prevention of harm to others, surely? An impasse? An irresolvable contradiction of competing freedoms? It’s not. It is resolvable through an equal distribution of wealth to a level of sustaining with a ‘quality’ of wellbeing equal for all, without excess and accumulation of goods beyond what is being used (and is sharable), and a realization that biosphere matters as a life itself, an entirety of life. In other words, the biosphere should itself share in the equal distribution of wealth and well-being. The biosphere itself should be part of a consensus.

190

J. KINSELLA

Does this entail an act of ‘faith’ or ‘belief’? Yes, it can, it can be a ‘spiritual’ choice, but it’s also a pragmatic material and empirical choice of justice and survival. We do not need to be ‘traced’, because we are parts of interactive communities of respect wherein consensus is understood as a variegating and culturally differentiating agreement of collectivity. Difference is what compels us to mutual respect and mutual aid, it also compels us to a sense of justice in equality of labour (what we can do, rather than what we are told to do), dignity, intactness, autonomy of identity within the collective, and a sense of responsibility to the biosphere which sustains all life. It is not adequate to address the past as ‘colonialisms within colonialisms’, it is necessary to remove the impetus for all macro and micro colonialisms and to turn histories of conflict into future histories of ecological address, redress and restoration. Aspiration measured not in goods and comfort because we all have an equal share in what is sustainable (a word of control, but I use it outside government mining industry propaganda); we all have an equal say, but we are also all responsible and culpable in terms of protecting the biosphere. We are all custodians.

CHAPTER 15

Empathy, not ‘Property’

Abstract Manipulations of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ are often about control. ‘Rights’ become subjective to some people’s notion of ‘freedom’. Empathy. Figurative language and its potential regarding non-violent activism. Accommodating everyone’s needs. Ivan Illich. Keywords Conspiracy theory · Control · Ivan Illich

The right wing, especially the far right, essentially lack empathy for any outside ‘their own’. Empathy is the path to justice and wellbeing. Empathy with ‘boundaries’ which represent and delineate where a collective empathy comes into focus more than individual empathies— as activists, we have to care about the wellbeing of individuals, and also communities, and also the biosphere. Empathy for the biosphere is a defining ethic. Mutual aid is mutual concern. Mutual aid is also co-operation. As we ‘govern’ ourselves we make choices for mutual benefit. If we are to get through the ongoing disaster of our making, if we are to correct the tilt we have forced, then we must act empathetically. I see a forest one week, and then the next a patch is gone; a few weeks later, another three patches. The forest was ‘owned’ by a developer (or private party), subdivision into ‘lifestyle blocks’ was granted by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_15

191

192

J. KINSELLA

government, it was sold off, people cleared on weekends when in other circumstances such forest would be protected (shown empathy), and they build dwellings, then have to clear more land due to fire risk, and then you see a paddock and a horse where there was forest six months ago, and it is familiar, it is ‘a right’, it is a fact. This is the pattern of society countering and preventing possible resistance, of ‘they have it’ so ‘it’s our right to have it’. The biosphere can’t take this any longer. Un-having is one thing, having is another. Sharing is leaving what’s left intact and replanting. Sharing what has already been damaged is just. Now we stop. Now. We all make do with what we have, and some of us make do with less and much less. Biosphere is us. It is the only ‘all’ that has moral authority and is not controlling, not exploiting. Graphology Surroundings 56: an ongoing memorialising of Jacques Derrida Across Stoneville Road where forest ‘blocks’ are suddenly cleared and housed-over on the edge of calamity not recognised by each home-owner each property-owner’s patch of interest whatever they think of what’s happening further afield; context is departure or escape and it shifts in accordance with what’s left to leave and what remains to go to, or so it seems as we watch the shimmering quills of a great echidna rock and sway in folding and merging parts crossing road to under a fence through leaf litter, though even the felled trees chipped or burnt

15

EMPATHY, NOT ‘PROPERTY’

193

with not a skerrick left for termites to digest, for the echidna’s food, what we know and what we will allow, permit? Signatories.

It is the right wing that frequently and loudly demanded ‘herd immunity’ (pre-vaccine) approaches to the Covid-19 pandemic (a capital-medical lie), and it is telling that Nigel Farage and the UK Brexit Party wished to become an anti-lockdown party to be called Reform Party.1 They entrench the racism and social divisions in Britain first, and focalize antiimmigrant bigotry to get their ‘freedom from Europe’, and now turn to focalizing the choice of those who refuse all self-constraint, those who know they or people around them will suffer if they contract the virus. They operate outside science and the possibility of the virus mutating in dramatic ways (which it has since writing this), and they align it with an us-and-them reaction to consequence. It is astonishing how much right wing libertarianism frequently aligns with imposing other fears and aggressions that develop their own illogical and often bigoted narratives. I do not believe the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is effective or often relevant, because it can be used to damn a likelihood as much as confirm an absurdity. Fears about government-capital-military manipulations of pathogens is a reasonable one given the evidence of development and production of many lethal agents over the decades (especially during the Cold War), but the idea that a virus can be caused by EMR (which actually damages tissue in its own ways, not virally!) is far from reasonable or provable. Many of these claims are truly bizarre. But they are not theories—they are beliefs in many cases, and the word conspiracy is a social control mechanism that serves whomsoever deploys it. Antifa activism most effectively focuses on specifics, and is not distracted by a discourse that makes a narrative both intentionally illegible 1 For an example of the disdain and disregard for the wellbeing of others the

Brexiteers deploy in real-time, consider not only the obscenity of the Christmas Holiday 2020 ‘Brit Mass Escape’ from the Swiss ski slopes, but also Wigmore’s comparison between his family ‘fleeing’ for France and the Von Trapps fleeing the Nazis: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/28/dozen-britons-remain-in-qua rantine-in-swiss-ski-resort-verbier-covid.

194

J. KINSELLA

(the specific makers or originators of a theory who put it out there and let it run), or figures who have taken aspects of such narratives to boost their own fascist urges towards violence. ‘Lockdown’ is a term that engenders totalitarian fears, but the principles of reducing and minimizing contact, of staying ‘indoors’ and halting commerce outside essential services, should be a choice of all and not need imposing. But it’s not, because the unified selfism of capitalconsumer Western subjectivity is all about liberty to do whatever one will. Many with such views would agree with the basic tenet, ‘Unless it harms others’, and yet many do not see that restraint is often part of not harming others (and certainly the case with pandemics). I accept that confinement and, say, a necessity to ‘home-school’, can lead to many other social and mental health issues, but any community of care can take these issues into consideration and still maintain periods of sustained less or no contact if support is provided for those confronting major health issues. It has to be accepted in all contexts that climate change is a brutal reality that will mean conditions in excess of anything we are experiencing today (and every day to come). Unless self-constraint is seen as a liberty, rather than a loss, unless we pull back from our consuming lifestyles, there is not much of a half-life outside toxicity and despair, with the wealthy insulating themselves for as long as possible. If schools are mostly institutions preparing students for compliance, for a sense that there is no other worthy existence outside the one they are either taught, or define themselves (socially and ideologically) through rejection, then the system of knowledge-control for how we live our lives in an under-stress and abused biosphere will continue in the same way. Even ‘rebelliousness’ will make alternative paths to personal gain and ‘happiness’ (though few will actually be happy, with most likely feeling more stressed and marginalized), or to an angry—even violent—rebuttal of a system that did not take their specific needs and oppressions into consideration. Understandable and regrettable. But if we dismantle hierarchical education (I look to Ivan Illich and others, but mainly to eco-pacifist anarchism), and if we do not see ‘school’ as the essential element of socializing as well as (obviously) education—education which contains a moral conditioning to suit a capital-military world that either works alongside various ‘faiths’, or doesn’t—then we might think outside schooling entirely, and think of non-progressing (but obviously thinking

15

EMPATHY, NOT ‘PROPERTY’

195

‘progressively’ against schooling) non-hierarchical non-consumer proenvironmental modes of knowledge accumulation and independent and collective decision-making. As one ‘selects’ an ‘outcome’ for one’s self (many people will never be able to select anything), it is always done in the context of how it affects others. This can be done with respect to difference in faith, gender and sexual identity, ethnicity, culturality and all the other threads that make someone who they are at the point of decision-making, and then who they are when they are able to make decisions outside the controls that made them who they are or are not. A poem is an act of personal labour; but requiring readers or being co-written, or in acknowledging that a poem is uttered with interconnectedness, with precedence, it is also a collective labour. It is work, and work matters. But it both controls the means of production and allows that it loses control of them as well. This is never an excuse for the worker not being able to possess the means of production that serve their own being, but rather, an organic sense that ‘nature’ has its own needs and directives on a meta level that signals that fairness must always involve it, as it is us and we are it. The ‘means of production’ is our involvement in cycles of transpiration, in living and dying, in recycling and restoring, in waste and growth. When the waste is made so toxic it can no longer belong within the cycle, it damages the cycle, it damages the ability to construct metaphors. Metaphors in themselves are always problematical evasions of commitment, but their illegibilites can also be intense legibilities through bringing into focus what seems obscure in its defined parts. I have shifted in this over the years, and now see figurative language operating in line with the recorded, the verified, with consensus as a means of enhancing a knowledge—but as ‘illustration’ it seems irrelevant. I am interested in its potential for a non-violent activism that is, nonetheless, jolting, even alarming, because alarm is what we need to be sounding. But we also need to be able to interpret the alarm within the networks of selves, despite their having been corrupted by capital in their abilities to experience and process and respond in a decisive ethical way. In other words, so many of us know we need to cut back on consumption, but too many of us are disappointed (and some maybe even outraged) at the diminished travel opportunities, to be entertained in familiar ways, to live as they desire to live to give their lives ‘fulfilment’. Climate change will necessitate this in extremis, and ironically, as has been shown, the cutbacks in industrial activity due to the pandemic has

196

J. KINSELLA

cut emissions so much it’s registerable. This is the reset—not one to be desired in terms of how it has come about, and in fact, one to be resisted by ‘distanced’ and wellbeing-conscious collective ‘behaviour’, but it does present a dramatic learning curve regarding even the short-term future of the biosphere. Western capitalism has coped very poorly with the pandemic—selfrestraint is not a characteristic of either Western subjectivity or consumerleisurism. Work is not ‘jobs’, which are an organized relationship between labour and production, work is the labour put into sustaining ourselves and the biosphere which we need. Work is self-restraint, and work is also a choice we make about our relationship with those who govern and control us. As an ‘aside’, I have never recovered from hearing as a child various ethnicities described as either ‘lazy’ or ‘hard-working’, as if the ethnicity of position this was said from was either arbiter or ‘neutral’. This was a binary that was established to qualify access to the dominant privileged community in which though there might be lazy individuals and hard-working individuals, was presented as a homogenous entity (of rectitude)—legitimate in its own colonial eyes. Being a ‘democratic’ construct, it was constituted of many demographics and the whole gamut of human characteristics, giving it ‘social depth’. But it excluded outsiders until they proved themselves eligible via hard work, as defined by the construct itself—that is, it accepted those who were prepared to serve the majority and eventually become part of the majority. I was appalled when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked of ‘the British’ being a freedom-loving people and that’s why they refused to collectively ‘lockdown’,2 when I think of the consequences of empire. It just can’t be put that way. Further, Johnson citing it as reason for declining self-restraint became a self-fulfilling policy of numerous enforced lockdowns and a negation of personal and collective freedom. ‘Lockdown’ is a profoundly disturbing expression used by governments to impress a point—i.e. for varying reasons, but often it is the most indifferent to wellbeing governments that suddenly have to resort to it because they’ve kept the market running at all costs and avoided restraint early on as part of their economic rationalism and pragmatism. 2 I argue against the term ‘lockdown’ and policed versions of its imposition, but not against the collective choice to protect the wellbeing of all—which I see as an antifascist act.

15

EMPATHY, NOT ‘PROPERTY’

197

It is easy to forget in the ‘general’ crisis, the crises faced by the homeless, and indeed any others constantly in crisis, those with little access to security and confidence in eating, shelter, the space to process issues. In Western Australia there is a housing crisis and also a rental crisis brought on by ‘bidding’ for rents—an advertised rent is outbid by wealthier ‘customers’ till they have succeeded in getting the property, often well above its going rate. After the recent end of a rent moratorium imposed during the height of the pandemic, rental prices have been driven higher, and lower and middle-income earners, unable to compensate for the increase, have literally been forced into living in tents and on street verges. The idea of ‘reporting’ on those who breech community solidarity because it is difficult for them to manage (in ‘lockdown’ or in being driven from their homes) is odious, and the use of police to enforce is frightening and oppressive, and often leads to abuses of power. Rather, we should assist while ensuring the health and wellbeing of all parties, but never abandoned any people. In working to save environment, we can accommodate all people in the process because it is everyone’s need. Once we place our own needs above those of another, we participate in an act of marginalization. We need to treat ourselves the same, not because of the uniqueness of ourselves (which we all have as ‘qualities’), but because we are not unique! Work is the act of being, and labour is the theft of work—being is the purpose of body as much as notions of spirituality or art or hope or desire, and all of those as well. We share being as we share the biosphere, and that sharing should be a consensus of empathy.

CHAPTER 16

Conclusion

Abstract Dante and Rimbaud and reconstituting literary texts to suit urgent ‘rights’ needs, including biospheric rights. Layers of legibility between and across crisis of meaning—the paradox machine and the failing of ‘Western Civilization’. Finishing with a handwritten note. Keywords Biospheric rights · Crisis of meaning · Failing of Western Civilisation

I have written much elsewhere—and continue to write, solo and with others—on acts of collaborative creativity, as well as collaborative activism. All activism is by nature collaborative at some level, but creativity is often an insular and interior activity. Since the late 80s, I have been deeply committed to bringing works into public discourse through working with others. This has been the case across all artforms, and collaborative activity can take place in many different ways. I see the ekphrastic as a collaborative process, though sometimes its antithetical, it is a challenging or a diversion, a disruption or distraction with and on an original, and a problem arises when an originator of a work of art cannot respond beyond the evidence of their work, and its contextualities. Frequently, though, I am working with artists, musicians and writers who have common purpose in mind in terms of the act of creating, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4_16

199

200

J. KINSELLA

necessarily some overlap in mutual concerns. But always these collaborations have their boundaries and personal agencies, which are to be respected, while we hope to create a ‘third party’ of work that generates and elicits its own potentials of meaning. But, in concluding this essay, I want to discuss the ethics of collaborating across ‘time’ in order to create an antifa environmentalist poetry that resists the snuffing out of the biosphere, while attempting to take diversity and difference into constant consideration, and adapting to shifts in unique and mutual concerns. I have rewritten Dante’s Divine Comedy three times, with the most recent being through the effect music has on me while reading Dante, or the effect Dante has had on the composition of music by others. But through this is a deep environmental concern, that though not Dante’s concern per se, might well have been were he able to ‘shift’ his poetics into the context of the injustices of biospheric dissolution induced by capital and human rapacity. Now, given Dante’s politics of his city faction and time, and his experience of exile (and of conflicts—as soldierperpetrator and as victim) and attempt to reclaim (as official and exile, as poet and influencer of politics of regional—and wider—language), we might well question how he can be reshaped into an antifa poetics. Well, I feel he can. Further, this conversation (continuing) across time is also inflected by the fact I work with an Italian translator who also has a strong social, environmental and political conscience, who takes the poems I create back into Italian. This de-hierarchizing of language seems essential to the act of creating a peaceful antifascist resistance in making. I also need to be conscious of the integrity of the music I ‘tap into’ and ‘respond to’—there is an active ethics of response that should operate against the system of capital that is the ‘music industry’, but be conscious of the intactness of each artist or artistic community being brought into the ‘conversation’. I would argue that it’s a different process from working with capitalised music, because the poem is a space of consultation, exchange and argument, and not a fait accompli—the pieces of music, and Dante, remain free in themselves. They are not cited as points of view or having particular views, they are taking into the node of discussion as, indeed, points of discussion. And taking this issue into the translation ‘out of’ rather than ‘into’, I want to consider Arthur Rimbaud, an obsession of mine from my mid-teens to the present day, but one whose politics were confused (understandable, given his age when he was writing poetry) then became

16

CONCLUSION

201

deplorable (guns, colonialism, slave-running etc.). His poems contain revolutions of independence of determination, as well as racisms within passages where he sees ‘himself’ speaking against white colonial selfsatisfaction (what he ultimately became, even if he ‘failed’ it—too often a means of excusing him). His poetry is a mess of contradictions that dissolves into defences or damnations, and the scatological and imperious voicings of his often ‘sublime’ visions is so contradictory that only as a ‘pure’ poetry can we find a way through to a genuine poetry of ‘rights’. It’s a messy path. I undertook a ‘translation’ eventism—activism—through ‘creating’ a version of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell via conversation with Delmore Schwartz’s much-earlier American-English translation.1 The issue of rights to talk with other poets and texts is an issue of intellectual rights and copyright, but I feel the political act of following through on possibilities for an antifa outcome the primary driving reason for these undeclared, ultimately one-sided and self-privileging demi-’silent’ collaborations. In usurping and templating, is one appropriating in a way that undoes the push towards a reconfiguring that aims to bring out other possibilities that might assist in resisting bigotry, environmental devastation, the rapacity of capital? That is a question each reader (and writer) and activist will answer for themselves, or within their ‘collectives’. I first read Rimbaud in a bilingual edition when I was sixteen in Geraldton, up the coast in rural Western Australia. I have translated his work in quite a literal sense before, and also done “versions” and “distractions”, many of which can be found in my book The Jaguar’s Dream. What I am most interested in with “translation” is interpretation rather than rendering, and in this digression and distraction—maybe interruption—of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, I’ve added a further degree of separation by creating a three-way dialogue between Rimbaud’s original, Delmore Schwartz’s2 surprisingly literal and matter-of-fact translation done in the late 1930s (and published in the 1939 New Directions edition I have used), and my own sense of deep disturbance and often outrage 1 Arthur Rimbaud, Season in Hell (with translation by Delmore Schwartz, New Directions, Norfolk, 1939). 2 Delmore Schwartz’s (1913–1966). On a personal note, Schwartz was the basis for an extended paratactic and partially ‘legible’ poem I wrote in the early to mid-90s. And this is the way I’ve always seen Schwartz—a shaper of words and ideas that cross the boundaries: clear, but with illegibilities as well.

202

J. KINSELLA

(still pacifist!) at the endgaming of life on earth by rapacious governments, companies and individuals. I have tried to create a consciously decolonizing text, but one ‘aware’ of its own colonial antecedents and contradictions (and contra-indications). How can language erupt into a new space and retain its energy and change to re-energize; how can we lift the deeply personal utterance into a collective consciousness? Is it textually ethical to take the iconoclasm, the “howl” of the original, and re-orientate it into a different kind of iconoclasm? This is a metatextual version of the original, and engagement with Delmore Schwartz’s translation, that subtexts numerous contemporary political and ethical confrontations and, I hope, ultimately resists the endgame. If we are in the pit with the devil, it’s time to get out of it and rethink the dynamic and its oppressions, its bigotries, its tyrannies. It was through discussions with the editors of a US literary journal3 (well over a decade ago) about my doing a translation of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell that this version started to germinate. This poetry inversion maybe confronts rapacity with an irony-feedback loop that, for all its bravado, leaves the self exposed and vulnerable. And with this, I finish this essay of legibility, but quoting a section4 to ‘illuminate’ what I hope is a gesture towards a textuality aware of its on complicities and also responsibilities to decolonizing readings, to consider consequences of bigotries that have no real or stable context, because wrong is wrong and the attempts to legitimize fascism and its multiplicitous antecedents and threads is an act of curatorial excuse-making. Acts of retrieval and rewriting, I feel, are legitimate attempts to address issues of meaning and effect, the gaps that are exploited by those trying to affirm some sort of ‘glories’ from ‘Western civilisation’ while constantly excusing and ignoring the complexities and contradictions of this—the paradox machine is not an excuse, it is a reality of confronting our own lack of responsibility in creating a antifa art that has application, and this acknowledges that it is less than the search for justice, knowledge and respect that underpins its ambiguities. The scrawl across the collective psyche might be hard to read, but it has its layers of legibility, and the tension between the legible and illegible is a place of crisis and resolution.

3 New England Review. 4 John Kinsella, Aftering Delmore Schwartz’s A Season in Hell (Equipage, Cambridge,

2021).

16

CONCLUSION

203

from Mauvais Sang (Aftering Delmore Schwartz’s Translation of Rimbaud’s Season in Hell) If ancestors had France the history of whatsoever would enforce pointscorings! But no, one, on. I accept that I am at the bottom rung, clinging. I can’t kickback. This plunder/ous colonial toolkit I clank around in: those wolves not killing the beast as you’d expect, but hanging around, snuffling. Old church daughter France comes to mind the storyline. Clown of I, saintly voyager of earth; word order is the head and ‘routes dans les plaines souabes ’, okay—souabes.. what has become of specificity, how to we -elate from the not-there to the rangefinder of Byzantium, bastions/ramparts of Solyma: Marianism, the blossoming folkloria of Christ’s passion. Crosshatching#—#, Bodyrot of the Age, parked on trashed cell-phones, tentacles of circuitry slowly (de)composed by the sun.—All the efforts of the German car industry camped out nights of less than clean, composited air. Ah! encore: transcribing the trance dance into ‘red glade’ witchy bitchy stuff, the accoutrements/baggage of hags and kids. What patriarchal country shines through as pre-Christian better deal for me? Past deals of see-me once always. Pity alone me, sans family; searching personal language all will get and praise? How can I conventioning Christ; or accepting Lordly honours;—robbers of Christ, genius open-slather. Last century and code of the I? Emptying war over vagabondage. This ‘inferiority’ complexing, this race allotting—populationists, Eugenicists, Nationalists, Reason’s profiteers. Oh! THE Science! On a tout reprise. Body-soul,—le viatique—medical philosophizing,—Misogyny’s almanac of aerobic memes choreographed for hand-helds! Geography, Cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! — Science, the new nobility! [More than a rough approximation] Progress. [ditto] Onward world [‘Advance Australia Fair’/MAGA, All things bright and beautiful … etc.] About face? [Volte-face!] Numbers make the vision. We travel towards the Spirit. The dictionary makes me an oracle. Given I can’t steal the pagan words I require to reveal what I claim as true nature, I should settle quietly.

∗ ∗ ∗

204

J. KINSELLA

16

CONCLUSION

205

5

The rich and powerful want to protect what they have and to obtain what they don’t have but desire. We are part of that desire—the rich wish to possess us and everything we occupy by our presence anywhere and everywhere. Fascism is a yoking of such cravings with motifs and stereotypes of the other, of hate built out of encouraging notions of ‘race’, especially racial superiority, of a ‘purity’ common purpose among particular groups, of the right to rule, and as a ruling group to have a hierarchy of rule and control within, of enhancement of the power of the group projected through its leaders (captains of industry, political and authority figures who substitute for parents, mentors, friends…), a biological determinism and eugenicism, a control over public morals and reproduction that serves the state and ultimately its leaders, and a control over the nature of knowledge and creativity. The rich, inevitably, don’t want to lose their wealth, and even when they are ‘philanthropic’ it’s usually an act of control through persuasion (buying influence, credibility and sometimes even doing deals for control). This quid pro quo (with bonuses for the ‘benefactors’) some 5 Transcription for the sake of legibility: Some of us must be involved in ongoing, perpetual/persistent protest because it’s not just ‘separate’ issues, but an organicism of justice. And underpinning this is the primacy of the biosphere—for all the collapse, there is no possibility of viewing of viewing restitution/repairs as separate from each other, though they might be autonomous. Only through renouncing material wealth and power, through enacting mutual aid and co-operativism, can we ‘bridge the gaps’ and bring a varied but equitable justice across the planet. Aware of its own consequences, poetry in the flux [interpolation: Arendt’s in-between could be this?] of legibility and illegibility might have an affirming ‘role to play’.

206

J. KINSELLA

researchers at Harvard University refer to as ‘self-interested giving’ and others as the ‘self-interest’ of philanthropy. From tax breaks to making one’s self feel better by making others feel better, and numerous other inflections of this propaganda through to charity as tax concession, ‘corporate advantage’6 etc. Capitalizing conscience as knowledge-control. Or a desire to be positively remembered by the very people they have exploited. ‘Philanthropy’ of the wealthy is the ability to control what ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be funded, and therefore make proxy and quasi wellbeing decisions over their ‘subject’-targets, and to enhance their own control. In this it becomes a tool of the oligarchy, utilizing ‘wealth’ that should be held in common, and wealth that is usually extracted from the people themselves or from exploiting ‘natural resources’; directly or indirectly. And fascism ‘works’ when people become convinced they are at the epicentre of a (false) myth that has appropriated and rerouted earlier mythologies, often mythologies used to disdain other mythologies outside the ‘Volk’ of their own. The state easily works with philanthropy and so often in education encourages it to manipulate modes and outcomes of learning. Philanthropy becomes the corruption of knowledge. ∗ ∗ ∗ How we use the signs and inscriptions—written, spoken, marked—of the discourses investigated or considered in this book-essay in their incipient and manifested forms in relation to our protest and demonstrations is pivotal to the ability to resist them. It is so easy to misuse and further their cause. It is so easy to be caught-out by seemingly benign participations in, say, the activities of the liberal democratic state that is too often a front for the interests of the wealthy. Poetry can be an antifa act of resistance, but also de-surveillance. No phone on and no signal, not trackability, no belonging in their controlling possessive sense of belonging. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a legibility of responsibility and communalism—we do. We know how to act, how to mutually aid. We know how to move through the legible-illegible dichotomy to discover non-colonial and caring axioms.

6 See Harvard Business School and Harvard Business Review—I refuse to give these views of what I see as toxic benevolence as idea and research symposia any space via URLs. It’s there if you want to find it. And if it’s gone, let’s celebrate.

16

CONCLUSION

207

As I finish this book-essay, Trump has ‘fallen’ (and anything that constricts Trumpism is to be celebrated, but even out of ‘office’ Trumpism remains a highly destructive hate-filled motivator for fascists), and maybe, just maybe, the biosphere will get another couple of decades—but the capital-military-state-consumer system remains in place, and even a ‘more just’ America (which so imperially affects the world) still resonates back and forward through time with the horrific MAGA drives, with ‘White grievance’ race hate, with inequality that can only exist because of the propaganda of ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘everyone can become President’ and the ubiquitous and pernicious ‘American Dream’ which is predicated on the ability to use a flow of cheap labour (or to replace people with technology leaving the poor stranded) to climb the pile… that system is still in place, and it is armed in the homes as well as the barracks. That America is and will continue to be the military machine (the winning scenarios), the epicentre of modern capital, and one of the major controllers (along with China, Russia etc.; we know who they are) of global discourse, seems obvious. The affairs of many others will still be interfered with in the name of American Security and American Interests. And as I see thousands of people crammed together celebrating the electron of Biden-Harris as Covid-19 devastates and prepares to ride new vectors of ‘opportunity’ into as many places as it can ‘manage’, I am saddened. The election/s in the United States seem to have made the pandemic even more conceptual, more illegible as the death-toll climbs by thousands every week, as it becomes increasingly (in reality) reified and appalling. The hopes of many people are stuck in a reality of the loss of connection between rulers and ruled—the moment someone separates themselves off to seek power and to influence the actions of the state for whatever reason, and many of these reasons are overtly and obviously just, they enact micro and often eventually macro forms of aggression, and if they attain ‘power’, they are always compromised because power is compromise. Consequences of States. Consequences of capital. Consequences of consumerism. Consequences of the give and take of ‘deal making’. Consequences for and of legibility. Denying the state any claim or cohesion over our lives is the most effective way of breaking the state into smaller overlapping communities that might function through cooperative acts, through sharing, through interlinking senses of justice, and ultimately a nuanced respectful form of consensus. We best address the

208

J. KINSELLA

global crises we have induced by dealing with them locally, collectively, interactively. The state will only ever be an embodiment of the violent histories that have made it.

CODA I am just back inside from starting the next vegetable garden, planting cuttings (that can cope with drought) of flowering plants for bird habitat, and watering younger trees. Many of us, for different reasons, don’t have the circumstances and conditions for being able to do this. But support for tree-planting, revegetation and the sharing of what we can grow (organically) is in the reach of most people—through less power usage, through purchasing fewer goods, and especially eschewing luxury items if they are available to you. Indirect actions like this are like planting forests as they help what remains remain. And to ‘sign off’, I do so with two poems of the last few days. One celebrates a community of the increasingly rare and primarily ‘solitary’ blue-banded bees which have found refuge in a nesting/burrowing zone for their tunnels in the sand of the old ‘horse arena’ (which we have treed in an attempt to return it to some kind of natural habitat, not keeping domesticated or any other animals other than what freely comes and goes here, often escaping from hunters and desolation elsewhere). This ‘nesting’ is all the more remarkable because the lines of their burrows are in the ridge of sand pushed aside for the firebreak. The other poem recalls yesterday, when we heard and saw a goshawk which eventually perched in an old York gum behind our ‘dwelling’—they are not common here now. So, in solidarity, peace and resistance, here are the two poems from those moments in the restoration of habitat and, hopefully, eventually, justice: Graphology Surroundings 577 Blue-banded bees having found a place to call their own

7 Both poems are dedicated to our son, Tim, who spends so much of his life looking out for the birds, and for rights of ‘nature’ to function within its own agencies. Dedication is more than a ‘gift’, it is an acknowledgement, and acknowledgement is the key to respect, mutuality and also justice.

16

to reclaim home & contents — the firebreaked edge, low-ridge of sand on old arena — a fluted line of burrows… dozens of holes precisely aligned and intense with activity in their relative troposphere — conjugal, familiar for all their comparable ‘solitariness’ — exchanging data on flowerings, prevailing conditions, loyalties — and each singular burrow egg-laid with a stash of pollen for their cherished to emerge to without a gender reveal — all bands of blue to be — four or five per — without conditioning.

Graphology Surroundings 58 Find goshawk with its songbird fastening call over buzz of wasp close to ear as entry point to mudchamber in dryness to fill with spider corpses and eggs, but no, no, it’s goshawk seek-call get under feather and skin, through scale shaking world against soil or rock or leaf litter or branch or leaf or in air, exorbitantly plein air but with a subtlety, nonetheless, as nests quaver or the par-slip of snake across gravel and the failed veneration of mowed oats goshawk attracts interest deep committed interest — intrigue—as I locate on out-stretch of York gum heavy with leafery and undropped fruits in clusters goshawk watching and sonically scouring between calls to few

CONCLUSION

209

210

J. KINSELLA

and far betweens, as red shed ticks with expansion red in full blaze of sun, perfectish timing, stretch, stretch, stretch and with better time keeping than that old kismet of noisy timepieces, that subterfuge of liquid crystal. Warily, warily—listen-touch.

Index

A Aare River, 94 Afghanistan, 161 Africa, 169, 173 Agora, 44 Alighieri, Dante, 10, 26, 152, 153, 164, 200 Divine Comedy, 164 Allen, Joseph R., 33 American, 177 ‘American Dream’, 207 American Security, 207 American War Cemetery, 166 Anthropocene, 127 Anti-7th Fleet, 168 Araluen, Evelyn, 41 Arctic Ocean, 91 Arendt, Hannah, 122, 186, 205 Asia, 169 ASIO, 47 Australia, 40–42, 47, 98, 101, 118, 123, 127, 148, 151, 161, 163, 174, 176, 180, 203

Australian Broadcasting Commission, 91, 186 Australian Government, 187 Australian National Movement, 168 B Badiou, Alain, 51 Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, 51 Bantry, 187 Bates, Jonathan Radical Wordsworth: the poet who changed the world, 92 Bebenhausen, 154 Bhaktinian, 101 Biden-Harris, 207 Black bloc, 38 Black Lives Matter, 40, 174 Blake, William, 7, 9, 152, 154 Blanchot, Maurice, 48 Bobtails, 19 Bobtail skinks, 19 Breker, Arno, 30 Brennan, C.J., 98 Britain, 50, 156, 193, 196

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Kinsella, Legibility, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85742-4

211

212

INDEX

Brit Mass Escape, 193 Brontë, Charlotte, 27 Brontë, Emily, 14, 98 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 10, 14 C Canberra, 40 Celan, Paul, 51 Chaimowicz, Marc Camille, 30 Chapkins, Wendy, 170 China, 173, 175, 207 Chinese texts, 32 Christchurch, 122, 123 Citino, David The Eye of the Poet , 56 Cocteau, Jean, 30, 31, 58 Cold War, 193 Coleridge, 126 Collard, Len, 118 Collins, Billy, 56 Crass, 149 D Danish, 189 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 48 d’Arc, Jeanne, 170 Dareen Tatour, 168 Darwin, Charles, 186, 187 Darwinism, 186 Darwish, Mahmoud, 145, 148 Das Kapital , 33 David, Enrico, 30 Davos, 57 Davos World Economic Forum, 57 ‘Deep State’, 12, 13 Denmark, 183 ‘Deplatforming’, 4 Derrida, Jacques, 165, 166, 192 Writing and Difference, 165 Disparate intersections, 36 Djab Wurrung ‘Direction tree’, 31

Duncan, Robert, 168 The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, 167 Dutch, 19 Dysgraphia, 29, 57

E Eckermann, Ali Cobby, 41 Edison, Thomas, 182 Edward Street Kenwick cockatoo roost, 129 Edward Street Roost, 128 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 170 Emphatic language, 45 Empson, William, 119 Europe, 49, 50, 58, 176, 193 Exeter Book, 113 Extinction Rebellion, 42

F Farage, Nigel, 193 Floyd, George, 174 Fogarty, Lionel, 41 Fox News, 48 France, 183, 193, 203 Franco, Francisco, 47 ‘Frank the Poet’. See MacNamara, Francis French language, 101 Freud, Sigmund, 92

G Galudra, G., 19 Gelpi, Albert, 167 Geneva, 103 Geraldton, 101, 201 German, 203 ‘Gleneagle’, 18 Global North, 2, 46, 172 Global South, 172, 173

INDEX

Graphology, 56, 98 Graphology ‘cycle’, 57 ‘Graphology Poems’, 56 Gray, Louise, 30, 31 Greek drama, 117

H Harvard Business Review, 206 Harvard Business School, 206 Harvard University, 206 Hitler, Adolf, 47 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 152 Holzbrücke Rapperswil-Hurden (Seedamm), 58 Hong Kong, 177 Huguenots, 17 Huxley, Aldous Brave New World, 92

I Illich, Ivan, 194 Deschooling Society, 108 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 181 Indonesia, 19, 91 Intersectionality, 36, 44 Iraq, 100 Irish, 187 Irish people, 17 Israel, 148–151, 168 Italian, 200

J Jackson, Peter, 181 Jacob, Max, 30 Jakobsweg, 58 Jam Tree Gully, 121 Johnson, Barbara, 97 Johnson, Boris, 196 Joudah, 145 Joudah, Fady, 148

K Keats, John, 13 Kerouac, Jack, 56 Kickett, Marion, 121 ‘Kinsella’, 18 Kinsella, Claude, 18, 19 Kipling, Rudyard, 7, 123 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 57 Kropotkin, Peter, 33 ‘Mutual Aid’, 43 Kurdish-Syrian, 156

L Lake Zürich, 58 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 186 Land rights, 2 Latin America, 169 Leane, Jeanine, 41 Levertov, Denise, 168 London Occupy, 38

M MacIntyre, C.F., 101 MacNamara, Francis, 125 Madingley, 166 MAGA, 207 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 97, 98, 100–102, 104 Divigations , 97 Markell, Patchen, 122 Martin, Trayvon, 174 MeToo, 42 Milton, John, 149 Samson Agonistes , 149 Minneapolis, 174 Monbiot, George, 94 Muldoon, Paul, 93, 182 Musk, Elon, 109 Mussolini, Benito, 47

213

214

INDEX

N Nationalism, 7, 12 Neckar River, 153 Netherlands, 19 New South Wales, 91, 119, 120, 125 New Zealand, 123 Noonkanbah, 2, 101

‘Replacement Theory’, 47 Réunion, 177 Rich, Adrienne, 14 Rimbaud, Arthur, 200–203 Roe 8, 128 Rukeyser, Murial, 13 Russia, 156, 207

O Occupy, 38 Österberg, 153 Owen, Wilfred, 166 Oxford vaccine, 172

S Said, Edward, 148 Schwartz, Delmore, 201–203 Shelley, Mary, 13 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 13, 26 Prometheus Unbound, 128 Queen Mab, 13 Shelley, Percy Florence, 13 Shelley, Timothy, 13 Shijing (詩經, Book of Songs), 33, 34 Shiva, Vandana, 109, 110 Siberia, 91 Sirait, M., 19 Sky News, 48 Social Darwinism, 187 South Africa, 100 Spinoza, Benedict de, 184 Ethics , 44 Sri Lanka, 52 Starlink, 189 Stéphane Mallarmé Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 100 Supervivid, 44 Sweden, 174 Swedish/Russian, 91 Switzerland, 94, 193 Syria, 156

P Palestinian, 148, 151, 168 Palin, Sarah, 2 Papertalk-Green, Charmaine, 41 Pascoe, Bruce, 118 Perec, Georges, 106 Perth, 2 Perth Library, 101 Port Stephens, 91 Pound, Ezra, 48 Pisan Cantos , 49 Proud Boys, 7, 20 Prynne, J.H., 97, 100

Q QAnon, 3, 20, 32 ‘Q’ patches, 20 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung , 33

R Radnóti, Miklós, 51 Rapperswil, 58 Renoir, Jean, 181 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 181

T Taiwan, 175 Tampa Incident, 187 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 181

INDEX

Tate Modern, 156 Tatour, Dareen, 168 Tent Embassy, 40 The Communist Manifesto, 33 ‘The Great Deplatforming’, 4 The Pompidou Centre, 30 Thomas, Dylan, 119, 123, 124 Trump, Donald, 2, 4, 7, 20, 114, 115, 150, 174, 207 Trump administration, 175 Trumpism, 207 Tübingen, 152 Turkey, 156 U UK, 94 UK Brexit Party, 193 United States, 123, 149, 156, 168, 174–176, 202, 207 V Victoria, 31 Vintage Ledgers, 19 ‘Voynich manuscript’, 29

W Warren, Rosana, 30 Warwick University, 127 Washington, DC, 2 Watson, James, 184 Weber, Annette, 169, 170 West and Central Africa, 173 Western Australia, 101, 119, 159, 168, 197, 201 Western Australian Museum, 175 Westminster Abbey, 166 West Papua, 91 West-Pavlov, Russell, 126 Whittaker, Alison, 41 WHO, 175 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 113 Wuhan, 175, 177

Y Young Egypt Party, 51

Z Zimmerman, George, 174

215