Perhaps not exactly choosing a problem, but choosing a puzzle, finding a curiosity. Triangulating from the shiny green heads of ducks and the loops made by metal things and bicycle chains and shoelaces on rainy roads.
The pain of returning to a marriage bed still marked by a rival’s presence can be distanced by concentrating on the technical evidence. Fear of the coldness of the universe is balanced by the comfort and pride of succeeding in the stunning feat of measuring the universal temperature.
The selection of facts presented in Ulysses, and in its contemporary science, involves warm and personal choices: which of the innumerable aspects of the universe should be examined; what possible interpretations exist; which of those interpretations should be accepted; what should be done with the results? A cold intellect suffices to catalog answers, but a totally human act was necessary to select the questions.
Who asks the questions in Ithaca? The selection of subjects for inquiry and the mode of response are entirely human choices. Leopold Bloom's accommodation to a universe of bitter facts is made through a dignity and calm he finds in the style of written science. His needs are met with limited but significant success. The science-minded questioner of Ithaca is no less a human than the impressionistic-, romantic-, or dramatic-minded humans who illustrate the limitation and successes of their styles in other parts of Ulysses.
- Einstein as Myth and Muse, Alan Friedman and Carol Donley
I'm spinning down again, and it's boring. No sooner had I mentioned that life was sweet than I started falling. Wanting to turn out the lights. Interpreting every little thing as a sign that that would be the best thing to do. Although I can't see the size of this, can't see the edges of it, I know roughly where I am and what to do and when to do it. When to go back to the counselling service, where to go for help, what to do to crawl back out and how not to embrace the lovely black stuff. I always knew it would come back from time to time, in less and more vicious forms.
But I can't be arsed with it. I've had enough of the way that there has to be a problem in my life. If things are good then I'll make one. I've been brewing one over the last few months and now it has sunk its teeth in. Decided to let my needs have their way & get myself laid as often as possible, with whoever was on offer. That in itself is an excellent policy. But letting the outcomes of this plan become the final arbiter of my existence on this planet is not. So I can't get any for a couple of weeks (three actually). So that becomes a monstrous crime perpetrated by the universe (& all its unwilling occupants) against me. Hello!
If there has to be a problem then I want it to be a more constructive and less self-destructive one. I want to choose my problem. Is that possible? My problem this week, month, whatever, will be inspired by Adrienne Rich because it seems like a bit of a challenge (problems have got to be tough) and feels necessary (can't have problems that just wander away. What use is that?). Rich asked, 'What is the connection between Vietnam and the lovers’ bed?' One equivalent question is to ask what the connection is between the relationships I experience in my daily life and the fact that a quarter of the British Army is on its way to the Gulf right now. What has that got to do with the things that wind me up or make me happy in my relationships? These are the kind of connections that have enabled Rich to find a new language and a new way of being a woman in the world. The British Army in the Gulf is not inspiring me right now (more luck with the navy perhaps :p) but I'll keep them in mind.
In the Guardian today there's a column on Leroy Jones: 'Slavery, Jones argued, robbed blacks of every means of cultural expression. All they had was the banjo, their rhythms, and their voices. Out of this they made America's richest art form: the blues.' I'm unspeakably grateful not to be a slave. Nor do I crave being locked up without pen & paper by Stalin. I have no wish to appropriate the experiences of oppressed peoples. That would be grossly insensitive & insulting. And I think that the idea that depression and madness leads to genius is mostly crap. But if there are connections to be made between the ways in which parts of my mind are getting all squashed and things that are happening out there in the rest of the world then I need them. Connections of this kind have got to be made or I am going to lose my mind, my place.
As the years go by I get more familiar with the way depression and frustration work, but I also realise that I'm not getting anywhere, become increasingly aware that my soul is stagnating. Maybe there is no where to get. Not having any where to get could be a contemporary ailment or it could be just the way things have always been. Realising it could be just what is needed to do and write things that really have an impact, or it could be the most banal thought since sliced bread. What makes the difference? Finding an audience? Blogging into a void? I need to find out ways of dealing with this, and of choosing my problem. Or one of these days I won't be able to walk out of the door.
The poet laureate has spoken out - in searing verse - against the war on terror. And now there is a concerted move to dismiss him. He does not speak for his country. No room for traitors on Parnassus. For his part, the laureate disobligingly declines to resign or apologise. A poetic standoff.
Relax, Andrew. It's the other one I'm talking about - the bearded laureate with the Islamic name, Imamu Amiri Baraka. Baraka, previously Le Roi Jones (and before that "Leroy"), has had as many careers as names - all of them headline-grabbing. As Mr Jones, Baraka wrote the best book ever written on African-American culture: Blues People (1963). Slavery, Jones argued, robbed blacks of every means of cultural expression. All they had was the banjo, their rhythms, and their voices. Out of this they made America's richest art form: the blues.
In 1968 Jones embraced Islam - a faith that was attractive for its virulently anti Judaeo-Christian fringe. Many bebop musicians had done the same (to the despair of jazz discographers). In his 1964 play, Dutchman, Jones's black hero exclaims, just before he is lynched on the New York subway: "Charlie Parker wasn't a 'tortured genius'; he just wanted to kill white people."
The angry young men in Britain grew up and cooled down. Baraka stayed angry - homicidal even. Like Louis Farrakhan, the object of his anger has focused, over the decades, less on "white people" than on "Jewish white people".
None the less, the honours came. He was, no one could deny, America's greatest living black poet, even if he didn't, like Maya Angelou, deal out great dollops of verbal syrup for the white audience. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And in July 2002 he was given a $10,000 stipend (beats Motion's pipe of port) by the governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, to serve as the state's poet laureate for two years.
Baraka had long been a favoured client of the Mabel R Dodge Foundation (Rockefeller loot). That sweetheart relationship ended, last October, when New Jersey's laureate chose to read aloud, at a Dodge-funded arts festival, his ode to 9/11, Somebody Blew Up America.
The poem is a long interrogative rant on the theme of "whodunit?" The culprits were not, Baraka implies, people of his faith. The listening crowd at the festival were at first amazed then booed as what their laureate was saying sank in:
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion?
Who knew the World Trade Centre was gonna get bombed
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who? The Elders of Zion, of course. The Anti-Defamation League went ballistic. McGreevey discovered, to his chagrin, that Baraka could not be dismissed. And Baraka defiantly refused to turn in his laurels. On his website (www.amiribaraka.com), he explained: "I was not saying Israel was responsible for the attack, but that they 'knew' and that our own counterfeit president did too."
He was, he asserted, a former antisemite who reserved the right to be anti-Zionist: "You want 'real' antisemites," Baraka said last Thursday, "then go look at the poems your schoolkids are reading: Ezra Pound and TS Eliot." He turned ferociously on the luckless McGreevey, whose political career is now imperilled by his misconceived act of artistic patronage. "Hell," said Baraka, "this is New Jersey. You fear poetry and you don't fear gangsters? This state is run by Tony Soprano. You don't think that he's dangerous?"
Now I think of it, a word to the wise at the Bada Bing might be the only way out for the governor. The New Jersey way.
