Wednesday, March 11, 2009

First impressions upon reading William Gass's "On Being Blue" -- Allism as new world style

Allism is the Style

                I wish to instill a style and in this I am irresistable: I have sharpened my stylus against every sharp stone, very brick of wit, every scalpel and prudery—yes my pen is balanced and graceful, but torqued in a new direction. My predecesor is Emerson.

                With every music we bring close to our heart, and the weirdest music that draws near to us only after a decade of tolerance, all these musis are melted and melded in the metaphorical heart of man in to the life-theme we live. Music restructures the brain, the flow of blood, brain waves, ideas, or, in a word, soul.

                I do not call it group spirit. Spirit is mere breath, and that is fine—all these words are spirit, a sort of cleaving in the air of your mind’s throat—but I am interested in the sea-soul of that sole man Emerson: I feel him as near as my jugular, as dear as my pupil in my eye.

                And now I take up another America—lately its only Americans, I grow weary of translations, even sublime Nietzsche in translations, and will study a postmodern, toilet-art artists like William Glass.

                So far so good. As is typical of the pomos, e his as thoroughly obscene, crude, gross, perverse, subversive as he can be, and yet he is a little allistic in that he takes this content and mixes it with a long-breathed spirituality. There is a style here: I can learn.

                As a pomo-feminazi-projew-save-the-whales postmodern artist, he is peevish—they all are. His writing is “revenge against his parents”—and isn’t all pomo art? This is our womb, kids: this is where we grow from.

                He praises Gertrude Stein, who, from the sound of her, I will never touch—tabboo! hideous!—in the way I picked up Joyce’s Ulysses for an hour, and than for 5 hours had to absolve myself, purge his effect, wash my eyes, my mouth, my hands, and my genitals, painfully clean as I needed them to be, bury him in my car’s trunk, and vow never to touch a modern artists again.

                I had already read too much Freud, who wishes to atomize and then anarchize the instincts into a great hideous IT. This IT had to be the innermost for Freud, the seething Hinduistic ocean it all sits upon. Not us. We look at the world wars as absolutely necessary for making us what we are, could not be avoided, in their way, beautiful. They come from the writings of Nietzsche,  the cacaphony of Stravinksy… Let me stop. I will say that Nietzsche is the arch architect of the fall of Christianity and Modernism—his aphorisms are solvent: nothing survives them. He is not elemental chaos and yet his writings reduce all else to elemental chaos. He talks of us, you and me, his ubermansche. And yet he never spoke straight to us. We had to look at him rather than his Zarathustra and his superman, to see what he was really after, the same way Rand means more to us than her goofus Roark, the way Emerson shines brighter than the representative men he paints—since he stood eye to eye among them The Jewish style was “edit everything the Bablynians, Egyptians, and we thought into a book that barely hangs together—that anthology called the Bible. That is not us. We prepare something new, and we do not merely edit, circumsize, castrate and annul the past. We affirm all of it. We affirm all people, all things, and we move past them. That is the allistic style.

                Gass is obscence but he is better than Derrida, who is hopelessly tedious. Derrida generally wrote ten times to one what he should have—and he is the center of the decentered pomo style.

                It will be seen that Nietzsche was not romantic, was not enlightenment, was not modernism, but was a hinge of history. After him…no it is too soon to say that and yet be understood.

                The Allistic style refers to many objective correlates we will see around us before more than a few generations turn inwards: one world language, one world government, one world currency, one world environmentalism, one theory of physics to explain them all, and if you can believe it yet, one world religion! and finally a world style, the true cosmopolitan, as Diogenes called himself.

 

quest?ON

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

\\ Perfection Is Easy //

 

1 comment:

raketsius said...

please teach me how to write.