Scarborough Bluffs (Beyond the FluTrucksKlan)

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Scarborough Bluffs. 

The Power of the Dog, or The Power of the Gods

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The bible is a powerful text that has shaped a large portion of humanity's understanding of both itself and the world. The emergence of monotheism in humanity's history has been a force matched perhaps only by the influence of technology and its uses. I am not, however, a technological determinist in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and others. I much prefer the network theory of Bruno Latour. McLuhan has a point about the subconscious influence of technological innovation; however, his scope is too narrow and leaves little room for role conscious, creative innovation plays in the relationship between technology and humans. For McLuhan, television and electricity changed human consciousness irrevocably, thus giving objects power over the subject (the human). For Latour, humans interact with both the environment, non-human organisms, and objects in mutually productive ways. Monotheism itself was a kind of technology in human history. It was an understanding of the world that shaped, and continues to shape human behavior and endeavor. It encompassed a way of making that influenced art. The religious taboos against idolatry was a proscription of a certain kind of representation. In Islam, the taboo against representation has shaped its arts; that's why geometric and other non-figurative forms play such a large role in its arts and systems of representation. 

We do not necessarily have access to the first text of monotheism,  as it is axiomatic that our knowledge of the past is incomplete, relying on documentation, which in turn relies on the technology of writing or inscription. Despite that, we generally credit Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian king, with presiding over the earliest known instance. The people of his kingdom worshipped Aten, a sun-god. The Jews, enslaved in ancient Egypt, were liberated by Moses, and another instance of Monotheism began, although this chronology is not necessarily this linear. Their Torah, which in Christianity became the "Old Testament" began, as most epic poetic traditions do, as a repertoire of oral poems, told and retold by specialists in their communities. This group of texts is among the most fascinating I have ever read. As a sidenote, another fascinating book that explores the beginning of Judaism from a quasi-anthropological perspective, is Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. 

Let's first be clear: I'm agnostic. However, I have some esoteric interpretations of Genesis in particular that clearly support the book's claims as prophecy. It seems to me that the general philosophical maxim of "Know Thyself," attributed to Socrates, has always been more about the journey than the destination. Genesis encapsulates a kind of profound, but ultimately unconscious, self-knowledge of the human species such that it embodies the past, the present, and even the future. 

In the beginning was the word, and it was good. The seed of language became the source of fruitfulness. No argument here. Over seven days, God makes everything. There have been fascinating critiques of this creation story coming from Indigenous North American communities with regards to the absurdity of attributing all of creation to one entity, and their creation stories tend to reflect this with much more collaborative practices. It was the creation of humans that I find particularly prophetic, despite that very valid critique. God makes us from dust, dirt, mud. In the historical process of coming to know the world through science in the last few hundred years, humans have "decoded" material reality to enable them greater and greater control of that reality. One of the things we've learned is that silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust, and that 90% of this crust, the part of earth we inhabit, is made of silicate minerals. This includes the aforementioned dust, dirt, and mud. We were made from silicate minerals.

Do you know what else is made from silicate minerals, especially in the last seventy years? Circuit boards, computers, artificial intelligence. Hell, the global hub of computers, their software, and artificial intelligence, until recently, is called "Silicon Valley." We were made by God of silicate minerals (not precisely chemically accurate, but bear with me); we made artificial intelligence out of silicate minerals. Is there not an uncanny resemblance between these stories, one from the Torah, and the other the human history of technology? This story has perhaps always lived in our unconscious. The implications of this interpretation for time as a phenomenon itself are immense, but I don't have the time or the will to explore that right now. 

Another part of Genesis I have a heterodox and esoteric interpretation of is the fall. God gives us one rule in the garden of Eden, by this account a paradise of plenty. One rule. Compare this to contemporary situation of nation-states where only a small group of powerful people use jargon to hoard their knowledge of labyrinthine legal systems and wield power in the form of wealth derived from this specialist knowledge. We have thousands of rules now, and even different interpretations of those rules as they have been written, because of course, consciousness changes over time, and so does language. One rule: don't eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

But of course, Lucifer, that fallen angel whose English name has etymological origins in the Latin word for "light," takes the form of a snake in the tree, to convince Eve to eat the fruit. The anthropological analog to Lucifer in some Indigenous North American creation stories is Coyote, who is always throwing some kinks into creation. However, these stories are not nearly as catastrophic as the fall in Genesis: going from plenty to scarcity, ease to difficulty, innocence to shame. Rick Roderick has claimed that Lucifer's conversation with Eve represents a turn to interpretation, away from the "word" as transparent, direct communication. Lucifer eggs Eve on to interpret God's rule, and introduces doubt into her mind. Thus begins the hermeneutics of suspicion, which we still are struggling with today. 

If you take a step back, however, and consider what the Torah is as a whole, is it not a handbook of moral conduct? What is moral conduct if not a consideration of what counts as good and evil? Does this not make the Torah itself analogous to the fruit of the tree (it's written on paper, the skin of trees) of good and evil? Could this episode be a hidden message of God's to humans to ultimately disregard his messages? Or, in my agnostic interpretation, a message from our own collective unconscious to go, in Nietzsche's words, beyond good and evil? 

The background of skipping pebbles (by Trevor Cunnington)

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Round pebbles can be skipped

over the surface of water

whether a lake or a river

is not really the question. Rather,

we should be asking the rate

at which the pebble sinks

when it does,

after skipping.

 

Question the pebble

surface when water

sinks, it does, skipping

after asking a certain record

river of round when rather

than whether or not weather

co-operates, the bee

can fly over the water’s surface;

it slides down into the riverbed.

Spider Face (Drawing by Trevor Cunnington)

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Ibises in the Tree

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A Solar System (painting by Trevor Cunnington)

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Become a Patron of Trevor Cunnington!

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I have started a Patreon account. If you enjoy the things I post on this blog, please consider becoming a patron, as it is my only income. You will get access to premium content only available there. 

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Fungi in Gatineau Park

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Warping light

I was going through some old photos and I found this one. I have always been fascinated by pattern, and I love how the glass of the wine goblet warps the light. 

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Artificial Intelligence

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Kasparov, young and cocky 

from last year’s match

sits down at the knotted wood table 

on which the flat chess board 

sits, tessellated with white and black 

space

and the pieces glower in anticipation.

a man sits across from him, a cypher 

carrying out the instructions of a machine – 

Deep Blue – a black tower with silicon chips 

inside

that pulse with coded information. 

move, countermove. again. a gain. 

hundreds of millions of possibilities 

course through the computer’s circuitry. 

then, Blue forces Kasparov into a bad move. 

a shadow flickers across his face, a twitch 

he cannot be aware of. 

he sees it, the mistake played out 

in quadratic lines blurred by time. 

the recognition contorts his face; 

he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

he pushes the table away in frustration 

and stands up, walks away: one fluid motion. 

the people watching open their mouths; 

History has been made today. 

soon human dominance will fade

today chess, tomorrow the novel, 

the next day brain surgery. 

humans will have to stake their claim in a world that 

doesn’t need them 

any more.

White Guy Diary: The Cultural Appropriation Edition

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How can we reconcile the anthropological concept of cultural diffusion with the arising critique of the practice of cultural appropriation? I will never argue against the idea that systematic oppression exists, or that it marks with trauma wherever it goes, but the instinct to always protect against hurt -- a noble one surely -- is it always in our best interests? When I was hurt, I knew where my cards lay, where others' cards lay, so I could best play the hand I'd been dealt. The asymmetrical power of a host and a minority culture makes the profiteering off the minority culture certainly odious in a Marxist framework of understanding.

Critiques of cultural appropriation tend to be morally consequentialist. That is, they focus more on the outcomes of actions and behaviour, rather than on the motivations and intents of the actors in such actions and behaviour. They argue that the harm done to those traumatized by oppression by these images, by the act of appropriating culture, often rooted in rude parody, taken up by the host culture renders them morally suspect at best and simply morally wrong at worst. They tend to discount the intent of any member of the host culture as insignificant to their moral calculus, to use a term of William Vollmann's. Certainly the appropriation of cultural practices can come out of a place of respect, admiration, and love. But by sacralizing the trauma of the oppressed's experience, by prioritizing theoretical future pain against any notion of beneficial intent, they reify it and make it harder to overcome. I tend to lean consequentialist, but I must admit outright eliminating considerations of intent makes me uncomfortable. But who knows. . .perhaps this is white fragility, and perhaps they are right.

We cannot be killed with even a thousand paper cuts. On the other hand, pain is an obstacle to pragmatic organizing in anti-oppression work. Humans have always learned from each other; learning is always an appropriation. How am I, as a white guy, supposed to engage this great "shut-up and listen" exercise, without being somehow influenced by what I hear, by taking it to heart (too much, some will whisper to each other behind their backs). And hasn't this "taking it to heart" affected me, consciously and unconsciously, such that I might not appropriate that culture without any conscious intent at all, but simply through the processes of psychological sublimation and Freudian slips? Does this not produce a cyclical relationship between host and minority, where I listen, learn, appropriate, then lose the cultural war? Nobody likes losing all the time. Cultural diffusion: contact produces sharing, whether you like it or not.

One thing that irks me about cultural appropriation debates is how inconsistently they are applied. A straight, white man writing through the voice of a black woman is a no-no, but a Korean family in Toronto opening a Sushi shop is a-ok. Again, here is where the asymmetrical power card comes in handy, because we can aver that the Korean family is making a peer-to-peer cultural appropriation, whereas the white man, even if he is "raising awareness" of issues faced by black women,  is making a downward appropriation. No Korean family is going to chastise a white guy eating in their restaurant, no matter how blatant a downward appropriation it is because you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The irony cuts both ways. That Korean family could not give a flying $^$# about cultural theorists' arguments about appropriation, or they might have a college-going child who does, at most.

Cover art for bands that don’t exist 2.

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Cover art for bands that don’t exist

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The Daily Regimen - Trevor Cunnington

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The sound of aggregate activity

Breezy in the late, stabbingly bright blue

Of an afternoon

Soft yellows caress

The late-out-of-the gate lilacs

Smelling sensual, lurid.

What rest can be got from this swirl

Of smells overpowering

Malefactors everywhere

Actors and blinks, nods, and who’s hooligans.

Read them the Cactus riot act.

She flowers every seven years

Or if the new moon follows on the first

Friday after Easter infection,

Then, only then, will she spread her. . . petals

It was in a photograph, or –gram

Heavy metal pelt stain melt brain; ham radio

Operator; one caught in the electricity

Wires.

I saw him on my walk home from world.

Singing ‘ole glory to the world,

A face turned murderous

As if a cloud smirched the soulful sky.

In the corner of the photograph,

A figure in sticks, wrapped in the dangerous

Sourcery of the exorcism,

Darkness swirling off him in colour grids

Dextrous fingers of the toppling dominoes

In the foreground, under the table,

Barely visible.

Flim flam, hone it for the street corners.

In the hides of summer, wearing

Sun’s great glory on the sweat-sheened skin

We can write about life,

Or we can write about life.

Precipitating the “oh, not the ‘we’ shit again.”

II

The happiness of a single fuck not given

The apathy trickle-down vectors

Swerving high on unpredictable

Ever veritably new, improved

Dazzling desuetude.

III

Suet in a fur-trap.

A straw, balanced on a camel’s back,

Photographed.

For a response to a query

Responded to and refuted

From every corner of the crypto-verse.

The cacti, in a row, made a fence

To keep the cattle in,

Some do it,

Some don’t.

IV

The next time she appeared,

A blue streak ran rampant around

The orbituaries climbing out of the newsstands.

Surprise factor, attention disperser.

Social facts uncalled upon.

This is poetry’s rent.

Tantamount to a slope of fine powdered salt

To cushion our 20 feet jumps

Down a steep incline.

Don’t think too much

Or you will start to smell the cowpaste
Piling up in the meadow. 

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 Photo taken at Guildwood Park, Toronto

Filtered with Photoshop App

Valentine's Poem by Trevor Cunnington

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Life's Debris

love, a catafalque

decorated with celtic knotwork

bearing a loved one, soon to rest

under epitaph blankets

love, a flying buttress supporting

the ceiling of our aspirations, sistine

cages that entrap soul-vapours that

should disappear up the chimney's

conglomerate, the gates of sinuses

flush with that histamine rush

love, a dorian pillar embellished

by gargoyles, guardian angels

long since deserted, absent, on

a pilgrimmage to pleni-potential.

love, an arched proscenium, a window

between observer and observed

occluded by thick clouds, delicate

light grey billows weighing on

lungs during a scene change

love, the doorway you huddle in

during an earthquake, plaster hail

raining all around, plunging a trail

through floating, churning dust

love, that bitter metal taste

of carbonic acid after drinking

a vanilla coke.

 

love, the unending war

against dust.

love, that idol of idols,

that fire inside,

that phoenix

singing songs

that resound

through the ages,

ever anew.

______________________________________

Glossary

catafalque - a raised platform on which a dead body is placed
pleni-potential - a play on "plenipotentiary," a person with the authority to act on behalf of another
histamine - a chemical released by cells damaged or inflamed by allergies
conglomerate - a pebble and rock composite held together with cement

A Review of Frank Davey's Biography of bpNichol (2012), by Trevor Cunnington

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This biography, that connects the poet's life with his work, is a welcome addition to the corpus building around Nichol. It explores the relationship between Barrie Nichol - the living breathing human being, as excavated from conversations with friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances; from letters; and from archives – and bpNichol, the authorial persona created by Nichol to pull himself out of the dreamworld he inhabited, according to Davey.

It forwards the theory that Barrie's psycho-therapeutic work is a crucial tributary of his poetic work. While I am not qualified to evaluate this theory (I'm not versed enough in Nichol's poetry, having read only Zygal and some excerpts of the Toronto Research Group, bp's theoretical, albeit playful collaboration with Steve McCaffrey in a course I took with Christian Bök at the University of Guelph in 2002), I would still like to offer some reactions and thoughts.

My initial reaction to the book was “I think this is the first biography that has made me less interested in the person it's about than I was before I picked the book up.” However, I persevered, and I'm glad I did. Davey is an engaging writer, although his thoughts are sometimes muddled. For example, take this passage:

“He [bp] told Bowering he was creating the whole narrative out of a series of images that would constitute a two-week period in the life of a family, a period in which, as one would expect, nothing is resolved. The reader enters and leaves the narrative in the middle, and 'hopefully' will experience a resolution through the leaving of it. The images will be all that the reader knows about it. That's why he's calling the novel 'idiomatic,' he told Bowering, because it's the normal 'family' story. The explanation, however, seemed to say as much about Barrie's understanding of family, or about what is usual in a family, as about the novel” (238).

Um, what? Seriously, what just happened here? Some of the clarity problem in this particular instance may have been inherited from Nichol himself, as he's the one being paraphrased, but if you're writing a biography, you better have enough of a grip on your subject to clarify some of the subject's more incoherent thoughts. Nothing is resolved, but the reader will hopefully experience a resolution? Is he talking about relating to the aimless structure of life portrayed by the in media res technique as itself some kind of resolution? Furthermore, idiomatic is a word used in linguistics to refer to expressions in language that are “more than the sum of their parts,” so to speak. Translating each of the parts of the expression literally will not produce the intended meaning of the expression. How does this relate to “normal family experience?” Idioms, I guess, are common expressions. So if you consider “normal” and “common” synonyms, this metaphor works. Ok, so with some very close reading, I could figure out that much. But what Davey means by the next sentence (beginning “The explanation, however. . . “) needs more elaboration as the logic is unclear.

Furthermore, Davey makes a big deal out of Nichol's intent from the 1960s onward to subvert the arrogance of many poets' preoccupation with precious (with that word's pejorative connotations culled from writing workshops) wisdom as the occasion for the writing of poetry. To express such wisdom, as an author with the mastery of experience, Nichol objected to stridently, apparently. However, in the sections detailing Nichol's work at Therafields, the experimental therapeutic community for which he served as vice-president, and Nichol's discussions of this work, he adopted the founder's discourse of mastery. Lea Hindley-Smith, the founder, “had been moved by Bergler's book to 'change her own destiny rather than blame others'” (82).This contradiction between his lived experience as a therapist, proclaiming mastery of experience and himself in a privileged position to help his clients do the same, and his avowed poetic intent to eschew such arrogant language, is a thorn in the side of Davey's poetry-therapy theory.

Furthermore, some of his poetry contains some of these golden nuggets he finds so repugnant and arrogant. Take, for example, these lines quoted by Davey, from “Book V” of The Martyrology Book 6 Books:

moving reservoirs of cells & genes

stretches out over the surface of the earth

more miles than any ancestor ever dreamed

. . .

tribal, restless, constant only in the moving on,

over the continents

thru what we call our history

tho it is more mystery than fact,

more verb than noun,

more image, finally, than story.

These lines are redolent of the “preconceived notion of wisdom” bp (and others such as Charles Olsen) rebelled against in poetry. While it is true that people certainly change their views as their experience changes them, it is Davey's job to elucidate this development in Nichol's poetry. Instead, Davey returns to this youthful rebellion several times, making it a central point or major departure for his poetic work. For a dedicated avant- gardist, the first stanza of this quote in particular has a harmonious sense of meter and rhyme (if partial, or slant). Most of it is insightful and “wise” as well. . . until the last line quoted. I find the frozen associations of the word “image” do an injustice to his previous line about history being more verb than noun. A photograph, after all, is an image extracted out of the flow of time. I suppose you could argue that this line is a subversion of the “preconceived wisdom” of the poem, but I think it weakens its internal coherence. I also think he missed an opportunity for a playful self-reflection of the line “tho it is more mystery than fact” as itself a fact, considering the always incomplete nature of archives. And by extension, this line and its implications allude to the challenge of writing a faithful biography, which by and large Davey has done.

Criticism aside, I found this book fascinating because of the connection it explores between Nichol's deep involvement with psychotherapy and his poetry. It was also edifying to learn about Nichol's peripatetic childhood, his hermetic “dreamworld,” and his relationships with other Canadian literary figures. I was familiar with his relationship with Steve McCaffrey, but his relations with other poets and writers such as Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, and bill bisset came as a surprise and a delight to me.

I was also surprised at how high-profile his sound poetry projects were, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For a Nicholophile, to learn about how he felt like his creative input was constantly marginalized in that project is a must. The last chapter provides a useful summary of some of the main critical responses to Nichol's work: the “theological reception,” those that emphasize his “ideopoems” that merge comic strip art with conceptual visual poetry, and those that focus on The Martyrology as the keystone of his creative output. This summary is indispensible for those interested in a critical engagement with Nichol's work. Despite its shortcomings, Davey's biography was well worth the time.

 

Images from Zygal (1985), Coach House Press.

 

 

An Ecclesiastical View on Visual Culture (if you will excuse the pun)

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So it's been a while since I posted anything. If any of you are disappointed, I apologize. Sometimes the lemonade that life throws you can't be turned into lemons. Anyhow: busy is busy.  Here's something I wrote in 2009 about the "new" academic field of Visual Culture. Trigger warning: academic language ahead.

The Insufficiency of Linguistics in the Age of the Machine

Visual Culture is a discipline that tries to put in a comprehensible framework images, which are visual data that have been interpreted, endured in memory, become represented, and have accrued significance in the processes of interpretation, remembrance, and representation. It is somewhat analogous to Saussure’s seminal work on linguistics, but rather than focus on language as language, it analogically expands analysis of the structure of the communicable into the field of images, and their manipulation through techniques and technologies of seeing and looking. As culture is a way of life, as well as shorthand for organized and intentional sensual experience in the form of various arts, Visual Culture’s object is how visual data inform the practice of culture. How do configurations of visual data cohere as signs through structures of meaning? What kind of strategies do encoders use to enframe interpretation and to what ends? What strategies do decoders use to interpret, with what motivations, and to produce what results?

On the other hand, an image is fully communicable in language. Ezra Pound’s poem “In the Station of the Metro” or William Carlos William’s poem “The Codhead” are proof positive of this. Furthermore, in literate society the visuality of language irrevocably changes its use, as scholars from Eisenstein, Havelock, and Ong to Innis and McLuhan have noted. In Visual Culture, then, the problem emerges of the insufficiency of linguistics to interrogate visual data and its tendency to collect significance like a magnet collects iron filings. This metaphor is apt both because a sign, a certain distillation of sensory – in this case visual – data, starts off as many disparate parts, but in the process of encoding or decoding it joins parts into a whole, a whole which is greater than simply the sum of its parts. The magnet is consciousness. The extrapolation of linguistic concepts into a wider field of sign production, observation, and interpretation, such as that accomplished by Barthes, is the essential act of Visual Culture, and it is predicated on the irreconcilable hybridity of human, machine, and perception.

Is Visual Culture new, emergent, or any of the other modifiers that reveal the coy imbrications of academia with the market (new and improved!)? Emphatically no. The political cartoonist extraordinaire of enlightenment England, Cruikshank, in the process of observing politics and culture through various degrees of mediation – which necessarily implies representation – must have employed some of the same strategies, or at least trod in similar cognitive footsteps, as contemporary cultural critics have in their analyses in order to draw his cartoons in the first place. One must interpret visual aspects of culture at large in order to consolidate visual data and subsequently encode such a complex but simple-seeming formulation as a cartoon.

For example, in this cartoon, Cruikshank depicts people from various classes working together to export orphans to the colonies. In the nineteenth century, children were not guaranteed the same rights as they are now. Corporal punishment was the norm, and orphaned children were a social problem that warranted, to some, an easily solution: ship them out to the far reaches of the empire. It was common practise also to ship unwedded and pregnant women to the colonies in the interests of "social hygiene." With a nod to Jonathan Swift's satirical essay "A Modest Proposal," Cruikshank here lambastes the practise as dehumanizing. The top hat and erect stance of the man in the centre emblemizes "polite society," that of refined gentlemen. The other man's stance, slightly stooped, and his raggedy bowler testify that he belongs to the working classes. A woman, in the background, also pitches in. This cartoon shows the co-operation of different social groups, often in conflict in other arenas, all working together to rid their society of a group beneath them all -- unwanted children. The tension between the emblems of civilization and an obviously barbaric act -- shoveling children into a cart -- shows the active nature of Cruikshank's "reading" of his visual environment, and then redeploying its parts for persuasive purposes.

With regards to "newness," I usually side with the author of Ecclesiastes, who laments “there is nothing new under the sun.” To claim there is something new is at the same time to claim complete and total knowledge, an act of arrogance, and further, of ignorance of one's own ignorance. However, the pixilated milieu of contemporary existence, especially with regards to communication, has made it such that these liminally conscious processes should be brought into the foreground and conceptualized, following Marcuse’s notion that the image and its superabundance militates against conceptual thinking.

Letter from Tom Thomson to the world

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I have found enlightenment.

My body was never found

Because I absconded

To the muskeg

Further north

North further than the last road.

I am not rotting in the muck

In tea lake.

Ironically, perhaps,

enlightenment

Lurks in places

Unlit.

Thoreau is here,

We discuss

Our proud sons,

Lawrence Harris and Mahatma Ghandi.

If you wonder

How I got this letter

Through, if my

Situation is as I say;

Suffice it to remark

That here we don’t

Need any radio, laser,

Telegraph, phone,

Smoke signal,

Or even seanceer.

We live in your minds,

Which wrote this.