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2004/04/26

mystical vo...



all poetry is a way of life, as well as a state of mind, right? don`t we agree? This is interesting. It reminds me of another quote of Eluard's. I don't know which poem it was from. But Sartre quotes in an essay he wrote. "There is another world, and it is right here." To me this was always a good example of poetic immanence. In poetry it seems the transcendence/immanence dichotomy is also "acted out" in different authors. Eliot is the poet driven to transcendence, yet his most famous poem -- the Waste Land -- is the most down to earth (get it! down to earth here in the mud and rack and ruin nobeyond etc above etc) piece of fragmentation written by an early modern poet -- who was a sortof schizo -- I mean here you have this man living with a



woman who is going mad and he is going mad -- he wrote part of the poem in an assylum in Lausanne --- he writes this pome which is wildy Dada in some ways -- yet he the man, the banker the budding about to be famous critic and most influential critic of modern literature is the reactionary conservative anglo-catholic -- He is the perfect sort of example of the line that runs between or the axis that gyrates between the schizophrenic-revolutionary pole and the paranoid-reactionary pole of the unconscious. It's as if Eliot embodies the conflict between preconscious and unconscious precisely. His poetry cuts a"revolutionary" innovative path into and through cinematic fragmentation etc etc. text collage,, yet his apprehension of these matters is far distant -- he runs as far from his creation as any reactionary would from such hot material.... how different from Artaud, Tzara and ELuard.... the split in modern poetry is exact. One has the poets of the left and the poets of the right.... and these categories mean different things in different countries at different times to different literary milieus... So Eliot's poetry is schizo-"left" yet his critical machines are only "left" to the extent that they serve his political vision of the meaning of literature which is the meaning of his politics.... in contrast to Andre Breton who is the surrealist who is always left yet in his interactions with fellow artists and poets is


known as the "Pope of Surrealism" and is completely stuck in power relations with three generations of poets and painters from around the world....and whose poetry also creates a "revolutionary" cathexis which is still being absorbed... he was the poet who never allowed himself to use even an accidental rhyme... it is all very fascinating and illustrates the many levels of conflict contradiction and differences each one of us lives if we live these things and think about them.... an intrigued formation ..In 1933 the poet Paul Eluard described Bataille's writing (specifically a ... where Bataille says that 'man lives with his own death') as
"mystical vo
mit"...