Unmaking the Man

I'm listening to a recording of Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

On the walk with the youngest child to school (actually on the way back home) I made my way uphill past a pavilion where two women appeared to be preparing to run or at least do some kind of exercise--there were two full water bottles for a "clue."  One was fully clothed and even seemed overly covered, the other was basically in what we call "athletic gear" that would easily be comparable to beach wear.  Her bottoms were painted on and were kind of a mint ice cream color with some white streaking.

It struck me finally that I was staring at a form, a thing, a visual/sexual aesthetic (?), and that when I came to awareness this section of chapter 3 of Herland was being spoken into my ears:


   The most prominent sensation was of absolute physical comfort. I was lying in a perfect bed: long, broad, smooth; firmly soft and level; with the finest linen, some warm light quilt of blanket, and a counterpane that was a joy to the eye. The sheet turned down some fifteen inches, yet I could stretch my feet at the foot of the bed free but warmly covered.

   I felt as light and clean as a white feather. It took me some time to conscientiously locate my arms and legs, to feel the vivid sense of life radiate from the wakening center to the extremities.

   A big room, high and wide, with many lofty windows whose closed blinds let through soft green-lit air; a beautiful room, in proportion, in color, in smooth simplicity; a scent of blossoming gardens outside.

   I lay perfectly still, quite happy, quite conscious, and yet not actively realizing what had happened till I heard Terry.

   "Gosh!" was what he said.

   I turned my head. There were three beds in this chamber, and plenty of room for them.

   Terry was sitting up, looking about him, alert as ever. His remark, though not loud, roused Jeff also. We all sat up.

   Terry swung his legs out of bed, stood up, stretched himself mightily. He was in a long night robe, a sort of seamless garment, undoubtedly comfortable -- we all found ourselves so covered. Shoes were beside each bed, also quite comfortable and good-looking though by no means like our own.

   We looked for our clothes -- they were not there, nor anything of all the varied contents of our pockets.

   A door stood somewhat ajar; it opened into a most attractive bathroom, copiously provided with towels, soap, mirrors, and all such convenient comforts, with indeed our toothbrushes and combs, our notebooks, and thank goodness, our watches -- but no clothes.

   Then we made a search of the big room again and found a large airy closet, holding plenty of clothing, but not ours.

   "A council of war!" demanded Terry. "Come on back to bed -- the bed's all right anyhow. Now then, my scientific friend, let us consider our case dispassionately."

   He meant me, but Jeff seemed most impressed.

   "They haven't hurt us in the least!" he said. "They could have killed us -- or -- or anything -- and I never felt better in my life."

   "That argues that they are all women," I suggested, "and highly civilized. You know you hit one in the last scrimmage -- I heard her sing out -- and we kicked awfully."

   Terry was grinning at us. "So you realize what these ladies have done to us?" he pleasantly inquired. "They have taken away all our possessions, all our clothes -- every stitch. We have been stripped and washed and put to bed like so many yearling babies -- by these highly civilized women."

   Jeff actually blushed. He had a poetic imagination. Terry had imagination enough, of a different kind. So had I, also different. 

In Carlyle's Sartor Resartus it is literally the clothes that make the man and here it seems this is the beginning of the interlopers' education, or "unmaking."

*********

I will note (stealing the idea from Douglas Crase in Amerifil.txt) this bit of comparative literature.  Also published in 1915 on the opposite coast of this nation and to much less fanfare then and now (we should note that Perkins Gilman was a popular and respected author), this, from possibly my favorite modernist poet, Mina Loy, "Love Songs."  These (1-4 of the songs that would come to be included in the sequence "Songs to Joannes") were published in The Others the poetry journal started by Alfred Kreymborg and frequented by Williams (and occasionally edited by him).

The pagination matters here and I can't find an easy way to reproduce it so if you simply go to this page at The Modernist Journals Project you can find a facsimile of the original journal.  And here also, quite wonderfully, is a handwritten ms image.

LOVE SONGS


I
Spawn of fantasies
Sitting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
" O n c e upon a t i m e "
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
There are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass.

II

The skin-sack
In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completions of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair
A God's door-mat
On the threshold of your mind.


III
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings.


IV
Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And wisdom's eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsanet ribbon
To her goose's wings
But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
For I had guessed mine
That if I should find YOU
And bring you with me
The brood would be swept clean out.

Hero Crime

I spent a few minutes (or more) with this little bit from Gertrude Stein and I think it's apropos to our robber baron culture. We lionize the Greed of Wall Street cuz goddam if I had the opportunity I'd keep those billions too...and you'd shittin' hate me for it but holy jesus want to be in my place.

Anyway, not too far from my writing desk, geographically speaking, is a museum dedicated to John Dillinger. We all seem to want to stick it to the man, but, guess what...the "man" ain't in charge no more and you and me, we're the ones getting stuck.

Do you see what I mean when I say anybody in America can be a public one, and anybody in America being able to be a public one it has something to do with the hero crime and so many people are always doing this thing doing the hero crime it gets into anybody who can have his picture where it is to be seen by everybody. Of course there are so many who feel themselves to be a crime hero that practically nobody wonders that there are any, their names are like the names of Pullman cars, they make them up as easily and it is no good. (From "American Crimes and How They Matter")

Yes, that was in Crase's AMERIFIL.TXT. You really should go steal a copy from someone, because likely you can apply any one of its entries to any news/blog item you come across dealing with politics and money.

Included by Fictions; Excluded by Real Life

The following is excerpted from a review by Douglas Crase of James Schuyler's Collected Poems. I thought it pertinent to our recent discussions about the inferiority complex fostered by Facebook as well as the "informational thuggery" of our "news" and entertainment (the melding of the two skewered nicely by Jon Stewart recently), and, well, just the irreality of our digital life.

When Jimmy first showed us "Dining Out with Doug and Frank," I didn't like it. It was the fall of I977, we were together in the sweaty single room where he was staying at 201 West 74th Street, and I remember thinking as I read the manuscript that although I could admit the glamor of poems about John Ashbery and Jane Freilicher or Wystan Auden (and on a first-name basis, too) I did not understand what our names were doing in such company. We had met Jimmy three years earlier when he was fifty-one and we were both thirty and new to city life. Could he now be making fun of us? But he never made fun of anyone I knew of, not in a cruel way. Gradually I came to understand that when he wrote about John and Jane and Wystan he wasn't name-dropping either. To Jimmy these were real people, and real people were the kind that counted. Readers of poetry are used to poems that are pumped up with references to Orpheus and Eurydice, to Bogart, and soon perhaps to Bart Simpson. Whether from education or exposure, a reader has some expectation of what these fictions signify, and it seems to be human nature to like poetry that invites us to bring our expectations to a poem and so to feel included when we get there. My own experience with "Dining Out" suggests that someone who brings such expectations to a poem that refers to actual persons, rather than culture heroes or movie stars, is apt to feel excluded instead. Imagine feeling included by fictions but excluded by real life: yet this was exactly the perversion I was being encouraged to reconsider. It was not important I knew who Doug and Frank were, only that as real people caught in real life they were representative not of something unattainable, but of something I had all around me. They stood for "friends." They stand for you. When Jimmy put our names in that poem it was a way of saying what to him was always obvious, that we must treat our friends and ourselves as if we were the stars, unalterable and moving as the stars.

*****

I used to wonder, and still do, if a receptive attention to "things as they are" is apolitical or, to put it more sharply, complicit....People who fail to regard what is happening as real, who know their experience only through mass-produced metaphor, get hurt. I cannot imagine Jimmy preaching. Yet "things as they are" is perhaps the last antidote we have to organized informational thuggery. In Washington, D.C., the world observed once a succession of governments whose sense of reality was so infirm they could waste whole nations, including their own, on behalf of an analogy to dominoes. Jimmy was in Washington while one of these governments occupied the city. It was before Frank and I knew him, but I take it he saw no dominoes. The city he did see was made of real things, and celebrating those he wrote in the face the deathly Vietnam War a masterpiece called "Hymn to Life".

John Ashbery
Jane Freilicher
Jon Stewart Skewers CNN

A Business Wholly Mistaken

Charles Koch spouting nonsense in the WSJ today:

Years of tremendous overspending by federal, state and local governments have brought us face-to-face with an economic crisis. Federal spending will total at least $3.8 trillion this year—double what it was 10 years ago. And unlike in 2001, when there was a small federal surplus, this year's projected budget deficit is more than $1.6 trillion.

I'm not saying this is true or false--just that it's "only" rhetoric for the WSJ audience and it's nonsense...first of all, what is "overspending" in this context? Why do we spend and why are there deficits? Here's the simplest formulation I know: Governments spend on what is "necessary" to uphold the duty of Provision for the citizenry. Governments, to balance this needful spending must take in money in the form of taxes. Without appropriate taxation we fall into deficits.

There are any number of arguments for and against taxation and what indeed is "necessary" spending. There are any number of arguments for and against government period. (That government which governs least is best--right, Henry?)

However, people like Charles Koch argue from a particular motivation and it's not one that includes the welfare of the "common man" (unless he considers himself common). Let me reiterate that there are no "free markets" and all things become "cronyism" when the Capitalist amasses enough wealth to buy the officials. In reality, most of us today NEED our government to protect us from the "free market" that wants to take everything we have from us.

Digby has a fine post discussing/dissecting this opinion piece.

Whitman, from Democratic Vistas, again in Crase, I think speaking to the Tea Party mentality that the Koch's cultivate to their benefit:

The true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort--a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth....So that, from another point of view, ungracious as it may sound, and a paradox after what we have been saying, democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and on those out of business. She asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank--and with some cravings for literature, too; and must have them, and hastens to make them.[my bold]

Perhaps, though, it's better to think of each and every single one of us in this way:

The whole object of the universe to us is the formation of character. If you think you came into being for the purpose of taking an important part in the administration of events, to guard a province of the moral creation from ruin, and that its salvation hangs on the success of your single arm, you have wholly mistaken your business. (Emerson, Journals 1828)

The Squalid Cash Interpretation

When the ordinary American hears of cases of injustice he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's understandable from the point of view of the parties interested"--but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That--with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success--is our national disease.

Wm James, "Letter to H.G. Wells, 1906" (quoted in AMERIFIL.TXT by Douglas Crase)