PRINCIPLE 5: Disorder: Dancing with Chaos (and Jim Morrison) “I was standing with me girlfriend Angie, and he [Bob Dylan] sang that line, “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face”. And I just went, “Fucking hell, that is the BEST line ever written!” And then I turned to her and said, “But I haven’t a fucking clue what he’s on about.” Even if it was all blag and he was writing nonsense, it’s still the most convincing nonsense you’ve ever heard.” Pete Wylie, musician “Songs are sometimes at their most satisfying when they confuse you - you don’t listen to them for information. It’s not like you read a recipe on a box of macaroni. If you listen to a song, you’re asking to be confused or mystified. You’re asking to get lost.” Tom Waits, musician This final section on how writers order the world travels to the far right of the Meaning Line, so we’re deep into the territory of Profound Disorder. Or perhaps Doctrinaire Disorder, for many of the writers we’re going to meet have made a religion out of actively stopping things fitting together. And this implies that meaning is, at best, a temporary or volatile phenomenon; which, if it exists at all, will soon be exploded and reconfigured to form something entirely different - certainly if they’ve got anything to do with it. That’s assuming it had meaning in the first place - which, in the case of the Bob Dylan lyric quoted above, is somewhat doubtful. But unlike the writers we encountered in Principle 2, these guys aren’t overly worried by the philosophical implications of this viewpoint - quite the reverse, in fact. A lack of stability doesn’t necessarily presage the death of meaning, or the decline of civilization as we know it; rather it represents the liberation of the imagination from the tyranny of form and structure; it’s the ultimate refutation of those bourgeois ideals of order represented by precedent, measurement, society, causality, authority - all the rational constructs that in their view shackle the human spirit. Yes, we’re entering the dreaded arena of literary experimentation, where the artist, not the politician or businessman, is KING. It’s the artist’s ultimate revenge on civilization. Which is why so many of its exponents have been lionized by the Young Turks in rock music. It’s all about REBELLION (Man). When Pop turned into the more self-regarding Rock some time around 1967, some of the songwriters who’d been to art school saw an opportunity to use the shards of what they’d learned on the few occasions they were paying attention as a way of uniting both media. So songs with titles like “Let’s Talk About Girls” were gradually superceded by epics called “Journey To The Centre Of The Mind” or “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night”, which allowed them to play formless, often tuneless improvised bollocks with lyrics that made no sense. And I mention this for a reason, because for once, literature was right out in front by over 100 years. Particularly in France in the mid-19th century, when waves of mischievous, unwashed Bohemians on drugs wrote poetry that aspired to the condition of music by breaking down traditional conceptions of meaning. And the rock stars of the twentieth century lapped them up. The Rockers not only latched onto the “Artists Behaving Badly” aspect of this period in literary history; they also liked the fact that lyrics no longer had to tell the conventional story of boy meets girl. So in the space of three years, John Lennon progressed from writing “She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah” to “Semolina pilchard dripping from a dead dog’s eye”. And where the Beatles went, everyone else followed. The three minute pop song was replaced by the ‘rock opera’ or the ‘concept album’, and there was a marked emphasis on mood rather than structure or concision. Some might even call it self-indulgence. But there’s a lot of good stuff in there nonetheless, which is why I also included a quote from Tom Waits at the start of this section. So that’s why there’s a fair bit of crossover in what follows, with the word “music” popping up quite regularly. Anyway - to the point. Literary experimentation has often proved most influential when it’s breaking down barriers, rather than creating anything particularly lasting or even memorable. Hence writers like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, who are more often discussed than read. And it’s easy for us at this remove to poke fun at their (often sophomoric) pretensions rather than acknowledge that they were a necessary force for change; as we’ve already noted, if meaning doesn’t continually re-invent itself, the prognosis for literature can’t be healthy. Period. And so the period from approximately 1870 to 1980 with its cliques and claques and manifestoes did serve a useful purpose by stirring things up and challenging some deeply-ingrained aesthetic assumptions. Even if it simply involved the writer ingesting huge amounts of Class A drugs and seeing what happened or being fisted in a San Francisco brothel and recording what it felt like. So if meaning can’t necessarily be resolved, ordered or controlled, the best we’re likely to get is an arrested moment that is the work of art. But that won’t remain stable for long, as it’s caught up in the general flux that is time and perception. And so we move onto the next set of perceptions, the next work of art. And so the artist’s career trajectory can be likened to a sort of aesthetic journey on which we, his readers, get invited along for the ride. But even amid this chaos, there can be certain points of stability. And your experimental writer is most likely to call them “essences”. It’s a word we’ve encountered a few times before in this book, referring to a sort of irreducible core that lies at the heart of meaning. If you’re looking at a dog, say, it’s the “dogginess” of dogs. Not a single dog, but all dogs. You might even call it the “mythic” quality of dogs, a constant set of doggy qualities that have endured through history. But in this section, we’ll be progressing from what’s gone before in our discussion of essences in one important respect: the essences these writers are talking about aren’t necessarily comprehensible or expressible; an essence may be what it is only at that moment it’s being experienced. For example, the poet Paul Valery uses adjectives like “instantaneous”, “fast-moving” and “free” to characterize this kind of meaning. More of which later, but we’ll begin our journey by taking a look at a couple of the better-known examples of experimentation which still hang on to physicality as their lodestar of meaning, hoping to forge new relationships between the outside world and the way it’s represented in literature. Then we’ll tread carefully in direction of surrealism, chaos and meaninglessness. i) Vorticism originated among English painters, whose self-appointed spokesman, Wyndham Lewis, was actually an expat Canadian. He also wrote novels, poetry and charged polemic which surfaced in the magazine ‘Blast’, which he published in collaboration with Pound. Pound wanted to add a dynamic element to Imagism. It had all got a bit static. And if art was to reflect the contemporary world as it hurtled towards World War One, it certainly wasn’t going to be static. So he decided that images should be conceived as nodes of “maximum energy” that different meanings should be able to pass through, like circus dogs through a hoop. The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing. In decency one can only call it a VORTEX. And from this necessity came the name“vorticism”. Nomina sunt consequentia rerum, and never was that statement of Aquinas more true than in the case of the vorticist movement. Ah Ezra, always ready with a slogan. Then Lewis offered his definition: Think at once of a whirlpool...At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist." In his catalogue for the 1915 Vorticist Exhibition, Lewis stressed “By Vorticism we mean (a) ACTIVITY as opposed to the tasteful PASSIVITY of Picasso; (b) SIGNIFICANCE as opposed to the dull or anecdotal character to which the Naturalist is condemned; (c) ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT and ACTIVITY (such as the energy of a mind) as opposed to the imitative cinematography . . . “ So Vorticism was all about movement, energy and intensity of “significance” (notice he uses the term in the same way we’re doing) in vividly-realized physical objects. It’s been argued repeatedly that it owed a lot to Cubism (despite Lewis’s jibe at Picasso in the above quotation). It wanted to look not just at a single idea, but multiple meanings expressed by the same object - because one object doesn’t necessarily mean just one thing. It’s as if meaning borrows a physical shape, then abandons it, like putting on a coat, then taking it off, then putting on another different-coloured one. So Pound’s vorticist images “swirl, whirl, flutter, strike, move, clash and leap”, always banging into each other, a principle he embodies in his poem ‘A Game of Chess’, where the pieces continually collide with one another, forming new shapes and patterns with their movements. This board is alive with light; these pieces are living in form, Their moves break and reform the pattern: luminous green from the rooks, Clashing with Xs of queens, looped with the knight-leaps. This isn’t the sort of chess game a Grand Master would understand; it’s rather a metaphor for movement within a highly structured set of parameters that are the game’s rules. As chess is one of the most ‘formal’ games ever devised, what better vehicle for counterpointing rapid and seemingly random movements? But note also how the pattern reforms after it’s been broken - Pound’s moving the pieces around but then putting them back in their places; he’s not transforming them into something else - rather he’s showing us what they can be while still being chess pieces involved in a formal game. Vorticism is all about potential. But there’s only so many poems you can write to illustrate an essentially simple idea like this one. And so, as usual, Ezra lost interest, packed his tent and moved on, leaving Vorticism behind and palling up with TS Eliot . . . and the rest is ‘The Waste Land’.