[images from http://homepage.mac.com/richardrecord/Blake/blake3.html]

THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL

(An essay in progress on progress)


O PROSE, THOU ART SICK



In the good ol’ days of yore, like the succession of thrones from Father Heaven to Kronos to Zeus, we believed we lived better than our forefathers, knew more even. They had the stone wheel, we had the automobile. They had rocks on the riverside, we had washing machines. They had Aristotle, we had Jacques Lacan. They had Homer, we had Homer Simpson. They had Shakespeare, we had Rod McKuen. They had the medicine of bleeding the sick, we had medicine to stop hemophiliacs from bleeding. They had the music of the spheres and the science of atoms, we had the science of Harry Potter and the atomic bomb.

We believed our way of literature is better than our fathers’. We believed in progress. Postmodernism put an end to all that. It said, since we can’t overthrow the government that the people voted for and institute a new government that the people would really want if we forced it on them, then there must be no meaning in the world. Or it said, since the Nazis killed millions in concentration camps, the old philosophies must be decentered and deconstructed.

Paul Hoover in _Postmodern American Poetry_ complains of Robert Pack’s complaint of the new poetry’s “laziness and passivity” and also complains of Suzi Gablik’s argument that “innovation no longer seems possible, or even desirable.” The blame for this can be firmly laid on the shoulders of the art itself, which fails at Joseph Conrad’s litmus for art: “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

Hoover holds as an emblem of the new art David Antin’s “instant of speech.... The haltingness and repetitiveness... are part of project’s allure, as is the risk that his utterance will be ill-coceived or intellectually thin. Present at the very moment of creation, the audience observes the fragility of invention in every pause and stammer.”



Why not listen to every mumbling bum in the subway? The same fragility can be observed there as in the speech of the supposed artist. Art is a distillation of life, bringing together disparities and incongruities that we never knew belonged together, giving a product of enlightenment to our existence. Why live if we don’t attempt to answer the question of why we live? The real problem behind Gablik’s and Pack’s statements is that they missed the entirety of the true art behind the art: whoever (be it Hoover or Antin) created the theory behind Antin’s “art”, created beauty, created art.

Another Hoover emblem of the new art is Ron Silliman’s _Tjanting_ which has an eighty-five page paragraph, “mosaic structure by means of seemingly unrelated sentences and sentence fragments. This progression of non sequiturs frustrates the reader’s expectation for linear development at the same time it opens a more complete world of reference.... broadly distributing wealth in the form of words, the author acquires a more trustworthy authority. Because the words are so freely given, they may seem scattered and disorganized. It is therefore necessary for the reader to participate actively in the creation of meaning.”

Cool as the literary theory behind the art may be, it begs the question of the reader who reads nothing into the text. Does that mean the text has no meaning? What if a reader actively participated by bringing the baggage that the author is a racist, skinhead bastard? Hell, why bother reading at all? Why not simply stare at a toaster or a urinal on the museum wall for the same effect? Besides, this art was already invented by Jonathon Swift’s scientist of Laputa who mixed all the vocabulary he had ever learned on a “contrivance [that] the most ignorant person... may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.”

The other problem of the “Postmodern” lies in a name projecting into the future as if the present were the past and meaningless and that it has no center when most of us see focal centers in all of our lives. One need only look about to see that society does not lack any center of authority. But the center is not a central center but a decentered center--much as an ellipse does not have an obvious center. One can point to the Internet as a source of decentering but even there, not all sites are equally visited and not all sites are considered equally reliable or “authoritative.” Even the act of decentering is an act of centering. Decentering tears down authority by some other authority, which reminds me of Love and Rockets’ “No New Tale To Tell”:

You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
is part of nature too.

ART AS A TOMATO: FRUIT OR VEGETABLE? KETCHUP OR SALSA?

Like it or not, art is life-giving sustenance, nourishes us, gives us purpose for living. Art stands against the inevitability of the second law of thermodynamics, chaos, the inevitability of not-meaning, the inevitability of death.



You can package art. You can fill it with empty, sugar-coated calories and put it on the big screen. But without nourishment, that way leads to chaos and death. You can wrap it in fancy and bright wrappers or box it like boxes of sugar cereals with plenty of mazes and games on the back, but if the box is empty, that way leads to chaos and death. Art about nothing is about as exciting as breathing in a vacuum.

Art needs to be a tomato. But even tomatoes need structure (plot) or it tastes like mush. Plot adds texture to the taste. Character prevents it from tasting like cardboard. But who knows what shape art must take? or what the tomato must take? fruit or vegetable? It can be ketchup or salsa. Once ketchup was popular. Now it’s salsa. Should you abandon all ketchup stocks? Nah. The pendulum may sway to ketchup again or maybe the tomato will find another purpose in another age. Art needs to be flexible, or it will break. Art would not need so many bloody revolutions if the system allowed for periodic revolutions. Where is the vent for art that society has with the voting booth?

Do I sound like I’m firmly ensconced in the Modernist or Retro-Realist academic throne that has gathered many layers of cobwebs over the past thirty years? Please pardon my harping on the only damn experimenters in the English language. Drunk on Vodka, the Russian Structuralists let themselves be bricked alive in the catacombs of their own theory that the text should have it all when language itself is an acquisition required to enter the text, let alone use an allusion to, say, someone like Poe.

I affirm and deny both Modernism and Postmodernism, am both for and against them. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. Like William Blake, I believe we need Songs both of Innocence and of Experience, both Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.” The only way to move art forward is to continue seeking new ways of thinking, much as the lateral thinking of Einstein and McClintock pressed science forward though many initially disparaged their theories.



Jerome Rothenberg writes in _Poems for the Millennium_, “Often unrecognized, unpublished, or scorned in their own time, these would become the major forerunners for the century ahead.... clearing the way for the discovery of new forms, the exploration or new behaviors, and the opening of new possibilities.” Are you an academic who doesn’t happen to like Rothenberg, the new, or change? Very well. Try Rimbaud’s “The invention of the unknown demands new forms.” Blake, who is now firmly ensconced in academia but was once one of the scorned in his time, writes in _Milton_:

“Who creeps into State Government like a catterpiller to destroy
To Cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge; whose Science is Despair,
Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy, whose whole Science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous Envy.”

THE NEW MODERNISM



Too many ages reject the wisdom of their parentage, their elders who worked so hard to reinvent wisdom after rejecting their parentage. This new age embraces their wisdom while rejecting only what does fit the new age. So through Blake, we can shuck the old Kronos-beats-up-Heaven-&-Zeus-beats-up-Kronos-ad-infinitum paradigm of the ages. All three may coexist, shed of their stewpiduhtease--a friend and arm-chair philosopher said I needed to coin new terms like a proper philosopher--such as the belief that due to the holocaust there is no meaning or no God or no whatever. Humans have been cruel to their fellow humans since time immemorial. Do we have to blame philosophy or God for the cruelty and flawed reasoning of the Nazis? Let's place blame where blame is due. Yes, you can use reason to come up with any faulty conclusion so long as you ignore as certain variables. Like the many worlds of Amber, the more variables you ignore the closer you approach a reality akin to chaos. I'm not sure any imperfection living in an imperfect world could approach Amber through reason, but should that stop us from trying?



The Stewpiduhtease Movements of yore reject the valid accomplishments of what has gone before or presently or embrace purposelessness in art or life, i.e. The postmodern meaninglessness in Gordon Lish’s fiction is meaningless and, therefore, as an art form is meaningless, tasteless, and full of empty calories (which is not to say I am not full of admiration for his experiment or his editorial expertise--perhaps the latter twentieth century's greatest, a tremendous role model. I think he'll go down in history--or at least he should--as one of the few who changed the face of fiction. What more could you ask for?) Likewise, other members of the Stewpiduhtease Movement include "Modernists" who reject minimalism simply because Gordon Lish invented it, or "Modernists" who reject all other modes of fiction than Retro-realism.

New Modernism, on the other hand, has something to say through art, accepts legitimate art forms--using art as a medium to connote (if it does not connote, i.e. it is meaningless, then it is not art). Gordon Lish, thank God, invented minimalism for literature, a new way of retelling the old meanings.

All the ages are with us today (romanticism, classicism, post-modernism, modernism, whateverism you've got in your pocket). Karl Marx is as alive and dead as Adam Smith. Francis Bacon holds as much sway in how society truly functions as Jean Baudrillard. In fact, in some realms of society, even though he has interesting theories that sometimes reflect my own view of society, Baudrillard is drivel compared to Bacon (i.e. the scientific laboratory). I personally think we're fools not to recognize the power of, say, Jesus or Buddha in society TODAY--not artifacts of a movement millennia ago. What about Shakespeare? And my God, what about Edgar Allan Poe? How many writers still claim him as an influence!? Walt Whitman claimed and Ray Bradbury claims the
King James Bible influenced their styles. Humans don't change or evolve nearly as much as they think they do. That's how we still relate. Mary Shelley in "The Mortal Immortal" describes a female doing to the protagonist what females still do today ("Bertha fancied love and securities were enemies...").

I suppose this later is what writers of realism today rely on when they write, maintaining Shakespeare and Chekhov as eternal ideals to strive after until the end of eternity (the end of which to them, no doubt, looks much like today with a few changes in fashionable clothing in between). But the moment of the eternal now interests me more than the plurality of thought which exists only as a function of the now--a continuum along which every "now" becomes a "then" that is carried along into the ever present now. The actuality is that we all still live in an age of post-modernism, modernism, realism, naturalism, romanticism, enlightenment, etc. (ism). But we pretend to have progressed beyond them all. Perpetuating only one view of reality skews the actuality of reality. If we didn't have technology or science, then Sven Birkert might have been correct in his assessment of SF not ever being a Literature with a capital 'L' and Retro-realism would be the end all be all (how funny for Birkert to proclaim that then hail an SF novel--but it's easily understood if we assume Birkert is unaware of what SF is and does). Any one view like Birkert’s can be distorted past applicability. Eventually, their views breakdown--perhaps even within the same essay. Likewise, Liberals and Conservatives, who don't ever listen to the opposition with an open-mind, have a skewed sense of reality. Psychologists have told us that isolated like-minded groups tend toward extremes. By embracing the whole, we come closer to viewing the full range of possibilities and, possibly, reality.

Why “New Modernism?”

Modernism as a term was outdated before we even came to the age labeled Modern and yet it exists to describe a certain period in history. What matters is its content, which is new. Everything's been done to death. Why bother doing anything? Why bother getting out of bed in the morning? That sounds postmodern, defeatist, chaotic and anti-art. How could anything but be more appropriate than redefining the eternal "now" that attempts to take into the variety of the now as opposed to the narrow limits of any one particular movement? When I talk of a “New Modernism,” I’m talking of redefining is what it means to be modern and the meaning of modern, which means "now" so it, as an age by definition, cannot be aged. Because modern has been modern for some time now (modern ~ "now") like buoys that remain with each passing wave. The now becomes always becomes "then" but the once new "then" is still with us, is always with us though we cannot see it because our eyes have long since adjusted to the light of its idea, adjusted to the tinny ring of its bell. The waves just delude us into thinking there's such a thing as movement or change. Robert Heinlein is no longer with us, but the effects of his thoughts linger in the consciousnesses of the flower children of the sixties, who then passed on similar versions to their children through behavior or its contrary anti-behavior.

What is new here is that there is some validity to it all, to every age. So let's quit saying my age is better. Do it my way. Plato, I'm certain, even had he read every philosophy that came after him, would still have valid points to make about the human condition, points that every human being should understand. We cannot reject Plato or Andy Warhol, but integrate them into our society--just as they are in reality. Just because Nietzsche said God is dead doesn't make it true. And it obviously is not, in art or reality, with a few billion believers all over the globe. Yet Nietzsche is very much a part of our societal consciousness, so we cannot reject him either. The question of God will forever remain in that realm of the unknowable, a realm that people will continue to argue about, anyway, probably because it is unknowable. What this New Modernism proposes is to pursue the knowable. Not that God is rejected, either, because He is too much a part of the societal consciousness, but like the position of the electron in the uncertainty principle, the yes-no existence of God is unknowable and is, therefore, meaningless to art unless you choose the path away from Amber toward Chaos.

To make sense of the "now," one must study the many "thens." Not every interpretation of now can be valid, either. We overlay reality with its many accumulated theories and cut 'n' paste for one that most matches. Knowing the "thens" facilitates coming up with original concepts & styles & plots & characters & structures. All that's necessary is to keep hitting against the "thens" until you have your very own now.

POSTER CHILD OF THE NEW MODERNISM

Not that Retro-realism isn't as much part and parcel and not that this genre is always successful by every standard, but in theory science fiction exemplifies what I'm describing. SF, by definition, integrates art and science, connotation & denotation; and, therefore, exemplifies my point.

Integration: a grand, unified, integrated theory--only discard what is obviously hot air and keep what is true. No relativism unless it applies. The Uncertainty Principle applies to electrons, not atoms, much less people or art. The electron is one miniscule part of an entire atom, which is part of a larger network of atoms that become human beings. Moreover, if understood properly, the theory doesn't mean that the particle itself is uncertain, but that we are incapable of measuring or knowing it. Being unknowable at present, it cannot be art unless it can enlighten the dark path of our existence.

You can also see it in society: through intermarriage, race in America is becoming less meaningful; and as we approach world peace of a sort, the notion of unity will also spread. As the world is integrated by computer and internet, the unity will spread.

This is why it will be an age to end all ages (although transcendental ages will no doubt exist) because it integrates, interfaces with new ideas. Retro-movements like 21st century realism is not rejected. Satire is not rejected. Post-modernism is not rejected. SF is not rejected. But that doesn't mean that anything goes as in relativism, but art sets up and requires standards that it must adhere to.

Science Fiction lies at the heart of this new age to end all ages: being influenced by science which seeks to denote and by art which seeks to connote. Moreover, science fiction has roots in low-brow art which now has practitioners in the high-brow realm--a combination of Modernism & Postmodernism.

SO HOW CAN I DO MAY PATRIOTIC DUTY BY MAKING IT NEW?



Through bringing back stylish entertainment? Michael Chabon's Thrilling Wonder Tales and Jay Lake’s Polyphony are already accomplishing that. For style to serve as experiment, I'd have to see something like Al Michaud's use of regional dialect in his recent story in F&SF, but the story itself was a little too straight forward (if somewhat problematic). Much literary experiment, when present, relies on the kind of sleight-of-hand craft that Nancy Kress manifests in the second section of "Savior" (Asimov's June 2000: http://www.sfsite.com/08b/sa110.htm). But the mantle of Donald Barthelme’s bold experiments have yet to be played upon. You can also experiment with the content, with outlandish philosophies no one's yet pondered--consider Yeats or Blake. Politics without bias is a relatively rare phenomenon. Or even unusual, biased politics that puts the old issues in a new light is an experiment.

Queries should in some way run with an idea: "More than ever, overpopulation is a problem that should be resolved by mandatory abortions of all first born children. In fact, let's make the law retroactive...." or "Stories today are not addressing the needs of the blind, deaf and dumb. Therefore, only the senses of smell, touch and taste should be addressed." or both. Whatever it is, it should be something you have not seen done before; or if done before, in the way you intend to attempt.

Regarding revision: it's your story. I will make zero, zip, nada changes. But since I have a serious financial stake in the anthology, I will be very demanding. It's possible I might buy a couple of stories without a revision request, but as with all editors, revision is no guarantee of purchase, either.

I'd like the anthology reinvigorate both the genre and the literary industry as a whole. I want the AGNI editor who wrote that SF will never be a literature with a capital "L" to read it. I want to break down prejudices literary and political. It's a steep, perhaps impossible slope to climb, but that's it in a nutshell.

An idea story means you really need ramp up the idea. Because most ideas are old, you have to examine all that has gone before. You will need to examine your idea and plot out the idea-branches in detail so that the idea differs VASTLY from the preceding. Most of all, challenge us! Make us think in new ways: think laterally. Make us think: gee, I never thought of it that way before.







This image reminded me that I was going to speak on how the creator is the Prolific, the editor the devourer, and how they needed one another to create art. But I'm tired. Another day, maybe.