seasonal materialism

Carl Dennis, “To Plato”
 
I’m writing this for a friend, a painter,
Who wants to thank you for the contrast you’ve drawn
Between the frail beauty at hand and the beauty enduring eternally elsewhere.
It’s helped her to give a name to the challenge she feels
In confining herself to the facts before her.
 
To thank you and then to suggest a correction
To your attempt to connect the two
By calling the beauty at hand a shadowy copy
Of a bright, timeless original.
 
To her it’s clear that they're wholly separate,
One class containing no example she knows about,
The other containing them all;
One indifferent to whatever she thinks of it,
The other relying on her to protect it,
For a moment at least, from oblivion.
 
She wants to thank you for explaining the impulse
To climb the ladder from particular instances
To general truth. Can you thank her
For practicing the vocation of climbing down
To dwell among entities local and doomed?
 
Step close and look at her painting of peonies
In a Chinese vase on a cherry table.
Try to imagine why she considers this subject
Worth the effort, why she's given these items
The time required to catch the light
As it falls on glaze and petal, water and wood,
So that each surface looks cherished.
 
Open yourself to musing awhile on the difference
Between a longing for the eternal and a longing
To hold what vanishes in a grip that time,
However patient it proves, has trouble loosening.
 
Carl Dennis, “To Plato” from Poetry, vol. 185, no. 5, Poetry Foundation. Copyright © 2005 by Carl Dennis. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Bathroom Song”
I was only one year old;
I could tinkle in the loo,
such was my precocity. 
Letting go of Number Two
in my potty, not pajama,
was a wee bit more forbidding
—and I feared the ravening flush.
So my clever folks appealed
to my generosity:
“What a masterpiece, Evita!
Look! We’ll send it off to Grandma!”
 
Under the river, under the woods,
off to Brooklyn and the breathing
cavern of Mnemosyne
from the fleshpotties of Dayton--
what could be more kind or lucky?
 
From the issue of my bowels
straight to God’s ear—or to Frieda’s,
to the presence of my Grandma,
to the anxious chuckling
of her flushed and handsome face
that was so much like my daddy’s,
to her agitated jowls,
Off! Away! To Grandma’s place!
 
As, in Sanskrit, who should say
of the clinging scenes of karma,
“Gaté, gaté, paragaté”
(gone, gone, forever gone),
“parasamgaté; bodhi; Svaha!”
(utterly gone—enlightenment--
svaha! Whatever svaha means),
Send the sucker off to Grandma.
Gaté, gaté, paragaté;
parasamgaté; bodhi; svaha!
 
Reprinted with Hal’s permission (smooches).
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            If like me you’re allergic to this month’s hedonistic thrall to “stuff,” maybe we could look at our perception of materialism and tweak it a bit. Philosophically speaking, materialism is a physicalist orientation uninterested in the spiritual plane, which corresponds to the yuck of December’s focus on objects during a time that’s supposed to be sacred. The opposite of materialism, in this sense, might be the kind of ungrounded, escapist spirituality that refuses to acknowledge or reckon with the real world; what many of us think of as “woo-woo” spiritual bypassing. Might we find a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship of material and spiritual planes?
            We could start with Plato. Carl Dennis writes his direct address “To Plato” to re-imagine the relationship between matter and what matters. This elegant defense of artistic and intellectual work is an act of generosity—a kind of gift—upholding the vocation of his friend, a painter. Representing worldly phenomena on paper is a way of preserving the “frail beauty at hand.” Time’s grip won’t loosen, he explains, so everything in its clutches can only be saved by our witness and our care for it. The work of an artist is not to climb up toward the Eternal but downward into the cave of this world’s fleeting, earthly objects, “To dwell among entities local and doomed.” The poem argues for a shift in perspective away from an orientation upward to the spiritual plane of which our reality is merely a copy, and toward a celebration of human efforts that bring divinity down to earth.
            Perhaps Dennis shares Eve Sedgwick’s preoccupation with Neoplatonism, which is all about this shift. It wouldn’t be a stretch to read obscure philosophical influences into poetry by a guy who has written about Nietzsche and Hegel. And Dennis’ take on rebirth, like Eve’s, is also pretty Neoplatonic (in poems like “Former Lives,” “Eternal Life,” and “The God Who Loves You”). In any case, this school of philosophy is a useful one for reframing the aims of holiday shopping. From the thrall to high art in early thinkers like Plotinus, to the later, weirder rituals incorporating physical tokens, it’s all about pulling the divine down to our earthly gifts.
            Might we give new life to gift-giving by adopting a Neoplatonic view? What happens when we relate to concrete objects as talismans, elemental nature as manipulatable substance for ritual, and language as incantation? I want to borrow a word from Dennis, who argues that we save the material plane from oblivion by cherishing it: the paintbrush catches the light “So that each object looks cherished.” I’d like to linger with that word for a moment. My parents joked that they couldn’t figure out why the marriage vow would include both “to love” and “to cherish.” Redundant, no? In searching for a distinct meaning for cherishing, my mother decided it must mean that whenever the cat brought some gross, dead rodent to the door, it was my dad’s job to pick it up. And so small, furry corpses became “cherishes”—as in, “Sherman, there’s a cherish on the back porch!” There’s wisdom in this joke, as in most of their weird marital rituals: in learning to cherish our nearest and dearest, it’s helpful to practice on small things like fallen leaves and coffee cups. And half-eaten mice. In the place of grand expressions of art or thought, we can build our cherishing muscles through small, local actions, rituals, and practices that enact our care and concern in ways that make them real to us and to our beloveds. The low grounds the high: a 4-inch corpse stands in for a sacred vow. And according to the laws of symmetry in the Neoplatonic system of correspondences (as above so below), the lower the low, the higher the high.
            It makes sense, then, that Eve’s “Bathroom Song” uses potty training as a metaphor for the release of our mortal coil(s). This is a poem about dying. Convincing toddler Evita to surrender to the U.S. Mail her miraculous creation of “Number Two” required the perfect recipient on the other side: Grandma, the paradigmatic (Proustian) figure of the infinitely adoring, invested, tolerant fan. Its final lines borrow from the Heart Sutra, recalling the parable of crossing the ocean of ignorance to reach the banks of Nirvana. Jason Edwards, a British Queer Theorist and my favorite Facebook friend, gives a brilliant reading of the Buddhism of this poem in a book entitled Bathroom Songs. I’d like to add that this reference to Nirvana’s far shore ties back to Eve’s early mention of Mnemosyne, not only the Greek goddess of memory but also the name of another body of water to be crossed in the afterlife. This metaphysical sprawl reflects the 19th-century European mishmash of traditions that fascinated Eve, with its proliferation of deities from Asia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt. The Neoplatonic brushstrokes on this poem’s Buddhist canvas are part of Eve’s distinct way of drawing correspondences between complex psychological processes and the material plane. Poop, low on the manifest totem pole, relates to enlightenment, the top rung on the ladder of spiritual ideals. “Why would it be a scandal,” Eve asks, if the work of dying and toilet training were “not so different—were, so to speak, molded of the same odorous, biomorphic clay?” Just as with potty training, in order to let go of this world, Eve needed something intellect alone couldn’t provide her. Her “very hungry” hands found in silk cords and shibori dye what she couldn’t find in theory-making or even poetry. She called it a convergence between “making and unmaking.” Her interest in fabric art dated back to childhood, and it’s unclear (I join Jonathan Goldberg in wondering, as he does in his recent book Come as You Are) if Grandma Frieda was the same grandmother who taught Eve to weave. In any case, these later textile practices were a form of rendering thought in 3D. Jason Edwards notes the continuity between her poetic flare (for enjambment, parenthetical sentences, and strings of clauses or dangling ones) and her experiments with textile practices like marbling and enfoldment. I have written elsewhere about the profound transformations of self that couldn’t be enacted through thought alone, but instead had to be fondled and woven and stained and sculpted. Rather than focusing on Eve’s cognitive habits and elemental intimacies, we might instead borrow her process of transforming abstraction into real artifacts and experiment with what needs of our own might be met by “making stuff.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            One Christmas Eve, still inside the post-divorce shock of being without my children, I decided to make stuff. I cobbled together a Christmas tree ornament out of glitter and cardboard: a miniature package wrapped in parchment leaf, complete with a silver bow, inside of which I glued a kidney-bean sized stone wrapped in metallic wire, like a little silver Evita poo. It helped me reckon with letting go of the nuclear-family-holiday scene I’d always had, to make way for whatever divorced Christmas looked like.
             If material objects can stand in for subtle forms of human experience and connection, how might you craft, however crudely, some kind of talismanic gift? It might be for someone important, concretizing your connection, or it might represent a psychological task for transition, serving a more abstract function (like my weird ornament on the family tree). If the end of the calendar year resonates as a time of release, you might in fact work with excrement. And by that I mean, of course, silk, because, in the words of Eve’s therapist: “the silk and the shit go together.” I remember when I was writing about Eve’s obsession with silk, I fell into a fascinating abyss, down deep in the bowels of the Columbia library where I combed through factoids about mulberry silkworms and salivary enzymes and molting and stuffing and boiling and harvesting…. Here I’ll just say that if you want to work in the ur-medium of strange and otherworldly elemental transformation, work with silk. You could look into slow stitching, or if you need a straightforward idea, you might create an eye pillow, sewing a piece of silk (or silky cloth) into a sleeve for filler, which could also be symbolic (like pebbles from the creek behind your mom’s house, or sand from your favorite beach, or rice from your friend’s wedding). Whatever you craft, what different faculties are recruited in this kind of play? Remember, this is not painterly high art, but process-driven work that’s serving a ritual function. Resist the drive toward perfection and stay down here with the idiosyncratic, flawed entities of this realm, local and doomed. ​
                Allergic to art? Only got 3 minutes? Here's a combing practice to elicit an energetic shift down out of the head and back into the guts and groins, to reinhabit your materiality.