On/Off/On Topic

Impossible, rightly, to define these
conditions of
friendship, the wandering & inexhaustible wish to
be of use, somehow
to be helpful

--Creeley "For Rainer Gerhardt"

The poem supreme, addressed to
emptiness--this is the courage

neccessary. This is something
quite different.

--Creeley "The Dishonest Mailman"

Since photography cut loose from Whitmanesque affirmation--since it has ceased to understand how photographs could aim at being literate, authoritative, transcendant--the best American photography (and much else in American culture) has given itself over to the consolations of Surrealism, and America has discovered the quintessential Surrealist country. It is obviously too easy to say that America is just a freak show, a wasteland--the cut-rate pessimism typical of the reduction of the real to the surreal. But the American partiality to myths of redemption and damnation remains one of the most energizing, most seductive aspects of our national culture. What we have left of Whitman's discredited dream of cultural revolution are paper ghosts and a sharp-eyed witty program of despair."

--Sontag "America Seen Through a Lens Darkly"

Dear Lauren (and Catherine, if you are there, who have read "Despair")

Lauren's poems ask "How to live, what to do," and goddamit I have the answer. JK. You'd ask to start a 'square table discussion' about the idea of optimism, which, you know, is hard to do in October in most places. I guess things seem overwhelming. Bush, Kerry, war, $$$. Where does it come from? Certainly not certainty, as that article about Bush in the Times Magazine last weekend made clear. I have no idea about how to survive. Maybe Dugan:

As for the rest, left-left politics
was out of law, so I read books and bit
my thumbnails to the quick
in false despair: I am still here.

I don't know that I can say much for my own attitude, except that it comes from that poem ("On When McCarthy Was a Wolf.."). That Second Creeley quote seems to me the kind of attitude that gets people intro trouble: "the poem supreme -- addressed to emptiness" - that Stevens thing, that existential thing. Here and now cravenly, there isn't anything to live for exactly, except to do something interesting that one hasn't done yet.

I'm in danger of being weighed down by introductory quotes, but they're the only guide. The Sontag quote, from her article on Diane Arbus, is pretty effective in describing the bullshit of art, and also, the pain of living after Whitman. He gave us democracy as a religion, and all we can do is wish we lived before we knew that abstractions like corporations were more important than people here. But, oh well, what does one do? Spring will come again, and that's quite enough, ideals are alive, if only in books - but fuck, that's the only life we'll have in 150 years...