And if we use this model, it’s not so far removed from how a myth works; both move in mysterious ways. But a myth is a) less personal and b) its meaning more completely crystallized, both these factors allowing it to be infinitely repeatable. As such, it needn’t be as imaginatively affecting as the symbol, much of whose intensity arises from its mystery - its curiosity value, if you like. In fact, as we saw in Part 1, the myth doesn’t necessarily announce itself at all. It’s simply there, like it or not, underpinning everything we do. So the journey we’ve made so far in this section is nearly over. From a writer’s world based on observation, precision of expression and discipline of language, we’ve now reached with the Symbol a less interventionist, more laissez-faire aesthetic where haziness and paradox are just as likely to be encountered as solidity and sense. The writer remains, of course, in control, (he still writes the stuff), but instead of saying “this means that”, he’s suggesting that “this may mean that” or “this sort of means that.” And he may not know why. So a symbol may not form part of a record of what the writer’s seen, thought or conceived, but what he’s experienced, felt and perceived. Through it all, though, there’s been some principles of ordering at work - meaning has had a focus, however brief, however fragile. In fact, the whole of this section is exquisitely summed up by Baudelaire in his poem ‘Beauty’ (translated here by Oscar Wilde’s friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, in 1909): Fair am I, mortals, as a stone-carved dream And all men wound themselves against my breast, The poet’s last desire, the loveliest. Viceless, eternal as the world I seem. In the blue air, strange sphinx, I brood supreme With heart of snow whiter than swan’s white crest, No movement mars the plastic line - I rest With lips untaught to laugh or eyes to stream. Singers who see, in tranced interludes, My splendour set with all superb design, Consume their days in toilful ecstasy. To these revealed, the starry amplitudes Of my great eyes which make all things divine Are crystal mirrors of eternity. “[I]n toilful ecstasy” is a brilliant and achingly poignant summation of the Symbolist’s quest for intensity and transcendence, yet Baudelaire doesn’t give us the slightest clue what his vision of beauty actually looks like. It’s as enigmatic as a sphinx, and it has a breast and eyes that owe more to formulaic metaphor than form part of any recognizable creature. Yet for all this imprecision, it’s “stone-carved”, “eternal” and quite still. It’s quite simply THERE. Make of it what you will, Mr Poet - but you’ll need to be in a tranced interlude first. Bring on the pharmaceuticals! Which is our cue to travel to the end of the road . . . and chaos. Time for some fun at the far right of the Meaning Line. l) From DADA to David Bowie “everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and . . . the writer is entitled to his boomboom . . . “ Tristan Tzara “Jedermann sein eigner Fussball” ("Everyman His Own Football") title of a Dada magazine from Berlin “DADA HAS NO MEANING” - so wrote one of the movement’s leading lights, Tristan Tzara in 1918. And it didn’t, right from the word go. The most widely accepted account of its naming centres on a meeting held in 1916 at Hugo Ball's Zurich nightclub, the Cabaret (Café) Voltaire, during which a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the word dada, a child’s term for a horse. So Dada’s approach to meaning started as it meant to go on. Randomly. Dada constituted a loose collection of writers, sculptors and artists spread around several European countries, most notably France, Germany, Switzerland and Spain, and there was even an outpost in New York. Somewhat absurdly, their art was rooted in the repudiation of art, and a desire to mock, overturn and destroy all the meaning they came across. This was a contradiction not lost on the Dadaists themselves: if they intended to translate their ideals into works of art, they realized they couldn’t stop people trying to interpret them and imposing meaning, however speculative, on them. So the idea was to make their art uninterpretable. As such, it would be what they called “absolute art” and “pure poetry”. The extreme of obscurity that no-one, least of all the bourgeoisie whom they so despised, could understand. But how to put that into practice? Naturally, they started with a manifesto - several of them, in fact. But as Tzara (who authored most of them) recognized back in 1918 when he was writing his first version of the movement’s ideals, the simple act of constructing a manifesto was riven with paradox, in the same way it’s difficult for anarchists to organize regular meetings. If you profess yourself to be against all principles, how can your art have rules? Well, of course it can’t. But that didn’t stop them. Even though “to explain is the amusement of redbellied numbskulls”, they’d have a go at telling you what Dada was all about. Which was . . . 1) Everything created is instantly transitory; 2) There’s no such thing as authorial control in literature. 3) “Art is a private matter.” 4) “Any work of art that can be understood is the product of a journalist.” The artist isn’t trying to communicate anything, because there’s nothing to communicate. So the ideal Dada work of art would be surprising, novel, purposeless, abstract and totally impenetrable by anyone other than the artist - he basically “does it for himself”, to quote Tzara. No jokes, please. So Dada was an extreme form of individualism - or a colossal ego trip if you prefer. At one stage in their evolution, the Dadaists ruled out creating formal art at all, resorting instead to “significant gestures”, which you might view as an early manifestation of Performance Art. Or some dickhead trying to draw attention to himself. The poet and novelist Louis Aragon, for example, forbade anyone on threat of violence to review his poems and novels. Tzara himself announced a public Dada gathering, during which he sat on a stage and read a newspaper article aloud while a rhythmic bell drowned out his voice. And pretty soon their loyal Parisian audience, which numbered several thousand, caught the Dada bug and decided to join in the fun; their supporters would play musical instruments to interrupt the artists, and at one event, they were pelted with steaks, eggs, vegetables and pennies. “It was a very huge success”, Tzara claimed afterwards in an article published, in of all places, the society magazine ‘Vanity Fair’. And events like these were, of course, the prototypes for all those “happenings” on the West Coast of America in the 1960’s so brilliantly chronicled in ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ by Tom Wolfe. So how did this translate into literature? Well, the Dadaists clearly agreed with the Symbolists: Þ that meaning wasn’t a democracy, but the perceptions of the solitary gifted individual; Þ that the less comprehensible meaning was, the purer they considered it to be. So the resulting poetry needed to be utterly chaotic, producing little, if anything, in the way of sense. And to achieve that, the Dadaists first had to deny the validity of all the art that preceded them, and start from scratch. With that in mind, Hugo Ball, organizer of the Cabaret Voltaire, claimed to have come up with a new kind of ‘anti-poetry’ in 1916: I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte, (poems without words) or Lautgedichte (sound poems), in which the balance of the vowels is weighed and distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence. I gave a reading of the first one of these poems this evening. I had made myself a special costume for it. My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk... I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor's hat. Which you’d never catch TS Eliot doing in a month of Sundays. Other exponents of sound poetry or “Simultaneist’ verse included Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janco and Tzara himself, all of whom collaborated with Ball on ‘L'Amiral Cherche Une Maison a Louer’ ('The Admiral is Looking for a House to Rent'), a work for four performers, all of whom contributed whistling, singing, speaking, and 'noises', often at the same time. This mixed-media approach to poetry which valued sound over sense gradually grew more widespread. A friend of theirs, Raoul Hausmann, developed a system of notating phonetic poetry in 1918 which he called 'optophonetics' using typographical variations to cue the manner of performance of the text, a technique that clearly influenced the artist/ poet Kurt Schwitters, whose ‘Ursonate’ is a set of words designed to be performed aloud, but with a complete absence of notes, tempo or dynamics to guide the singer. Here’s the intro . . . Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwii Ee. Oooooooooooooooooooooooo, dll rrrrr beeeee bö dll rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö, rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö, beeeee bö fümms bö wö tää, bö fümms bö wö tää zää, fümms bö wö tää zää Uu: Not exactly easy listening, but I suppose you could just about extemporize it in the shower. Then there was more conventional stuff. Try this - ‘The River’ by Paul Elouard, in its glorious entirety; The river I have under my tongue, Unimaginable water, my little boat, And curtains lowered, let's speak. It’s not dissimilar in form to the Imagist lyric ‘The White Dawn’ we looked at earlier - with the obvious exception that it makes very little sense, at least on the surface. But I do detect some shreds of interpretable meaning here. Is Elouard simply stating that he has a lot to say, and wants to say it privately? The jury’s out on that one, but I think he may be violating the movement’s central beliefs by tempting me into hazarding a guess at his meaning. Which, if that were true, reveals the difficulty faced by anyone who sets out to write something utterly meaningless. And even the Dadaists themselves eventually grew impatient with their routine iconoclasm, as is evident in ‘Spilled Blood’ by Benjamin Peret, which lurches in the direction of Surrealism; The ashes which are the cigar's malady imitate the concierges rushing down the stairs after their broom that fell from the fifth floor killed the gasman that employee resembling a bug in a salad The bird lies in wait for a bug and it's the broom that got you gasman Your wife's hair will be white as sugar and her ears will be unpaid bills unpaid because you are dead But why didn't this gasman have feet shaped like a three why didn't he have the lucid look of a glovestore why didn't he have his mother's dried-up breast hanging from his belly why didn't he have flies in the pockets of his jacket He would have passed away damp and cold like a smashed porcelain vase and his hands would have caressed the bars of his prison But the sun in his pocket had put on its cap Good God, there’s even some sort of recognizable plot in there amid the enigmatic imagery.