Hi Edward,
As always, an authentic observation, perhaps this text will also guide
us through the current terrain, of DIWO and the Dark Mountain.
I would like to respond to this with more depth and context, will do
towards the end of the week. From tomorrow I'm knee deep in editing for
a publication which needs to finished pretty soon - gulp!
wishing you well & much thanks :-)
marc
> My problem with this is not so much to do with the ideas behind the
> Dark Mountain Project as the language and manner in which they are
> expressed. Let's have a look at some typical bits of phraseology:
>
> Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories:
> on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and
> destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the
> stories we have told ourselves about who we are... Our literature has
> been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan
> citadels... There is an underlying darkness at the root of everything
> we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our
> civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control,
> lies something... upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced;
> which feeds the machine and all the people who run it...
>
> For one thing the language is rather old-fashioned ("the tales told",
> "destiny", "citadels"); for another it's rather grandiose ("there is
> an underlying darkness at the root of everything"); and it also has a
> strong tendency towards rhetorical devices, such as repeating the same
> thing several times with variations instead of saying it just once
> ("outside the cities... beyond the blurring edges... at the mercy of
> the machine..."). Furthermore it tends to deal in symbolic
> generalisations rather than specifics: "a precipice", "citadels", "the
> machine". Not a specific precipice like the chalk cliff at Dover, or a
> specific city like Birmingham, or a specific machine like a
> lawn-mower, but their non-specific counterparts, which are charged
> with a kind of gloomy grandeur and super-significance, precisely by
> virtue of the fact that they seem to insist we should interpret them
> symbolically rather than imagine them with any precision.
>
> One problem with this is that it's directly in conflict with the call
> for specific and detailed observation which is made in the "Eight
> Principles" - "By careful attention, we will reengage with the
> non-human world" and "We will celebrate writing and art which is
> grounded in a sense of place and of time". And although the Dark
> Mountain manifesto declares itself to be set against human
> self-importance ("Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet.
> Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble")
> it does so in such grandiose and self-important language that it's
> hard to take it seriously. "Our words will be elemental" declare the
> authors. For "elemental" read "archaic and pompous".
>
> For a project which seems to have initially regarded itself as mainly
> literary in character - its first planned offering being "a
> book-length collection of uncivilised writing" - the manifesto seems
> extremely long on sweeping pronouncements about the state of
> civilisation, and extremely short on ideas about literary style.
> Contrast, for example, Ezra Pound's very definite ideas about style at
> the time when he was associated with the Imagist movement: "Use no
> superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Go in
> fear of abstractions. Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don't
> make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line
> with a heave." By contrast, the Dark Mountain project has the example
> of its own style, and one talismanic figure - the American poet
> Robinson Jeffers.
>
> A few details about Robinson Jeffers himself will help to set both the
> literary style and the cultural ancestry of the Dark Mountain project
> in their proper context. Jeffers originally studied medicine, but then
> enrolled as a forestry student. He soon gave this up, but when he
> became a successful writer he was, according to Wikipedia, "famous for
> being a tough outdoorsman, living in relative solitude and writing of
> the difficulty and beauty of the wild." He lived in Carmel, California
> (now, of course, homeplace of the equally gritty and outdoorsy Clint
> Eastwood) in a house called "Tor House and Hawk Tower". Tor is the
> Celtic term for a large outcrop of rock. "He built a large four-story
> stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower, based on similar structures
> he had seen while traveling through Ireland... The romantic Gothic
> tower... was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish
> literature and stone towers." All of this identifies Jeffers as a
> disciple of the Celtic Revival, and in particular W B Yeats, who also
> lived in a stone tower and wrote poetry with lots of allusions to
> fierce heraldic beasts such as hawks.
>
> Yeats himself was fixated with the importance of willpower, and with
> the idea that history was shaped not by mass movements or
> deterministic forces but by strong-willed individuals. The hawk is
> symbolic of this viewpoint when it is projected into the natural world
> - it gives us a particular idea of nature as fierce, amoral and
> merciless as well as wild and beautiful - in contrast, for example, to
> the idea we might receive from poetry about mushrooms, hedgehogs or
> ants. Yeats was influenced, in other words, by the ideas of writers
> such as Carlisle and Nietzsche, with their interest in heroically
> nonconformist individuals and their contempt for conventional social
> values and morality. Robinson Jeffers clearly ploughed much the same
> furrow: according to Wikipedia, in the nineteen-twenties he "began to
> articulate themes that contributed to what he later identified as
> Inhumanism. Mankind was too self-centered, he complained, and too
> indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things". Jeffers's longest
> and most ambitious narrative, The Women at Point Sur (1927), startled
> many of his readers, heavily loaded as it was with Nietzschean
> philosophy." Jeffers' poetry, in other words, asks us to set aside our
> conventional values in favour of a re-examination of the natural
> world: but it is the natural world seen from a particular angle: the
> natural world as the arena of unfettered willpower, the amoral,
> unsentimental and merciless struggle for existence. In "Hurt Hawks",
> one of his most famous poems, he mentions "the wild God of the world"
> and adds "You do not know him, you communal people, or you have
> forgotten him;/Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him..." The
> words "intemperate and savage", it will be noted, can be equally well
> interpreted as applying to the hawk or to the "wild God" the hawk
> remembers; the savagery and intemperance are held up to us as a kind
> of virtue; and they are contrasted, by implication, with the
> conventional virtues of "communal" people such as ourselves - ordinary
> people who live communal lives, most probably urban lives, instead of
> lonely, wild and individualistic ones.
>
> This kind of writing isn't necessarily bad. Its most famous modern
> representative is Ted Hughes, and I'm a big admirer of Ted Hughes'
> poetry. But the weakness of writing of this kind, because of its
> emphasis on willpower and thus clarity of purpose, is that it finds it
> very difficult to convey certain types of experience - for example
> hesitation, misinterpretation or ignorance. Those who write in this
> style never seem to be plagued by uncertainties about their own
> beliefs and intuitions. Their descriptive style is limited because it
> seems to lack a certain type of honesty - a fidelity to what it
> actually feels like to inhabit a world which we only partly
> understand. In a way, despite its attempt to get beyond the
> limitations of the human bubble of self-importance, it is simply
> moving that bubble to a new place.
>
> What I would advocate is a style which is less sure of itself,
> something more hesitant and provisional, more multifaceted and
> fragmentary, less grandly unified. More specifics and less bombast.
>
> - Edward Picot
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
_______________________________________________
NetBehaviour mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
