When will I learn my lesson?
Internet “chat” rooms are for losers. In my experience, they tend over time to become dominated by failed pedants and people who tend to read the pedant’s opinions and find isolated and outlier targets, mindlessly repeating the most pedantic views. The isolated-outlier, especially if she manifests originality or creativity, is then forced to dance herself to death on multiple fronts.
At this and this link, I’d decided to defend a target of bullying, an older gentleman with a strange, but harmless Swedenborgian theory about Masters who throughout history have shown us the way.
I decided to reply almost completely in verse, roughly but not completely following traditional forms.
One of the pedants, distinguished only by publishing some obscure work analyzing Shakespearean metre using questionable and post-hoc rules, made the all-purpose claim that the poetry didn’t “scan”, which was picked up by the cybernetic mob.
However, when a few mob members tried to post some hatefilled poems in return, they were laughably short and unrhythmic owing to the limited vocabulary and aliteracy of the posters.
I kept on posting more and more pastiches of Pope et al. without bothering to do much technical analysis of scansion, rather reading the poems out loud to make sure that when read by one with a literate and global-English accent, they had some sort of beat, even if that might change with the meaning-direction of the poem.
For example, here’s a response to the all-purpose charge that Adorno, writing on reversal of subject and object (in the context of showing how “objective” and administrative rules replace engagement with substance as in the case where some post-facto “rule” is mechanically applied to poetry), was a left wing verbosenik.
Let me see if I can your logic haruspicate
And Ignoto, I think I can your “logic” scry.
If a text an issue doth in any way complicate
Of course this must be a left-wing conspiracy.
My words offend the Common Man
The self-appointed leaders of the gang:
They cannot parse can only scan
And favor violence as in bang, bang, bang.
Clearly we cannot have this,
It is not at all an entertainment
We need our pitchforks and our torches we miss
And someone needs his punishment.
“I am Cinna the poet” was Cinna Minor’s cry:
“Kill him for his bad verses” was the mob’s reply:
For to a mob, whether Roman or cybernetic
ALL poetry is bad amidst the universal wrack.
Now, Houston, we may have a problem, because in the first line I use a word I’ve never heard spoken, and have seen only once: meaning, “to determine the future by occult means” it occurs in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry …
The first line’s metre assumes that the stress on haruspicate is on the second syllable, not because I wish to conform to a predefined metrical pattern (one that on first use was “free verse” in the sense that the great poets who invented, for example, the “Shakespearean sonnet” did so by violating the rules of the previous form) but because it sounded right when read in an urbane voice.
But, of course, this is not the typical sort of person you’ll find on Google Groups, whether he’s a thought-leading pedant or a mob-following thug, the two predominant groups. He may have never seen the word.
For this reason he will use, following the leading pedantic thugs, a pastiche of academic language to mask his ignorance and find the most apt rhymes and the best metre unpleasant, either because he reads it wrong or skips reading it because of its density on the page…something even the “educated” classes today, perhaps especially the “educated” classes since so much of “education” today is mere certification of docility. His pastiche will claim that it’s wrong to rhyme “Pindaric” with “satiric”.
In the demi-sonnet, I refer to Cinna the poet, fully aware that this is a detail of a Shakespeare play which even British A-level students might miss: in search of Brutus and the conspirators, the Roman mob come upon Cinna who they suppose the conspirator, Cinna:
Cinna: Truly, my name is Cinna.
Mob: Teare him to peeces, hee’s a Conspirator.
Cinna: I am Cinna the Poet, I am Cinna the Poet.
Mob: Teare him for his bad verses, teare him for his bad Verses.
All poetry is bad, and it seems a fraud to rhyme Pindaric and satiric. So, Cinna the Poet’s verse is bad to a mob.
My verse wasn’t good: I merely write in it as an experiment in communication (one that I’ve decided to terminate) and also because in my writing classes I make students write verse, and I refuse to be like one of those gym teachers who’d make us run a mile, and sic the bullies on the laggards, who themselves were unable to run a step. But it was much better than the vile doggerel that was fashioned in reply.
Astonishing levels of ignorance in other words existed, and I bailed when the most vicious and out of control respondent posted a crude “poem” claiming I teach “Engrish”, of course a racist slur on my students.
The crudest kind of language and threats were pure projection, for anyone (and I do not except myself) who participates in Internet conversations is a subaltern victim of social anomie and isolation. Therefore I was characterized as what the posters obviously feared and felt themselves to be: the male horror-figure, the “loser” that most men today feel themselves to be owing to the objective fact that people in developed countries are being steadily deprived of economic and social rights.
Adorno keeps on coming back because he encountered early forms of this phenomenon, which is unnoticed because it lubricates dominance and subservience in organizations, but in “tough baby” in Minima Moralia he saw the character armor of 1930s man as constituted by cigar smoke, shaving lotion and leather, whereas today the character armor is of course completely different.
It is the presumption that
(1) Any question can be resolved by mathematical rules that can be administratively applied
(2) However, smart cookies and tough babies know how to game these rules
(3) If the rules are shown to be phony, someone must be bullied to preserve the applicability of the rules
(4) Above all, no-one shall claim special insight in this country of the blind: the one-eyed man isn’t king, but he is the Chosen One in a reversion to barbarism (started in Modernism by Stravinsky): he shall dance himself to death while we watch
The mythos is one of freedom, the reality is one of slavery. The Internet enables widespread theft of intellectual production (as opposed to Holy Private “intellectual” Property) and norms the deviant as long as the deviant directs abuse down rather than criticism up.
Because of corporate surveillance, where people who lose discussions on points are certain to search for the company employing or contracting with the Chosen One and threaten to get her fired, the “safe” personality on the Internet is the anonymous Tough Baby, the normed Subject who in order to be certified as a Subject, has made himself into an Object by any one of the universal processes of apprenticeship, in which Tough Baby learns to game the rules, not questioning them in any case, but cynically conforming.
It fucking breaks my heart to see my own sons effectively conforming to the Tough Baby code, especially the younger, who never blogs sincerely. He’s a music lover, but we know this only because of his rather perceptive comments on bad or commercialized bands.
Nothing can be said seriously, least of all anything like “I miss my father” or even “I have a father”.
It reminds me of the thought-leaders in a university bookstore where I worked to help my own father pay for my schooling. One had lost HIS father because his father had asked to speak with him: he couldn’t be bothered: so his father went into another room and blew his brains out.
He was a thought leader because he could take nothing seriously, or so it seemed. Mere humanity to him was a joke, and more human individuals admired his “cool”, not seeing (or seeing, but not caring) that even in 1971, corporations were preparing to use coolness to keep people in line; coolness today is a new model form of what Fromm called character armor and the inability to love.
We are, I understand, supposed to use irony to understand that Tough Baby “really” has a heart of gold, merely “talks that way” because he’s been wounded, and that we should just reverse what he says in a logical operation to discover his essence, his humanity. Women do this all the time, and it gets their ass kicked. Of course, the Nazis proved, as the ultimate Tough Babies, that this doesn’t always work, even though they were interpreted in Weimar as speaking hyperbolically and ironically.
Mike Godwin thinks it’s some sort of hoot that on the Internet the probability of being compared to Hitler converges to unity, and if it’s a joke and a fantasy that if Fascism keeps coming back as a perversion of socialism, and domination is delegated to the dominated, we should not all become either Hitler, or else Stravinsky’s Chosen One in le Sacre who dances herself to death rather than become part of the mob.
But that’s what people become, in my experience, in open-access chat on the Internet. Because of corporate surveillance, they mask themselves as the Tough Baby without illusions who never makes mistakes, and who knows all the administrative ins and outs. By finding the Chosen One they reassure themselves that they’ll survive by ensuring that others go to the gas chamber first.
One winds up being stalked, obsessively. You represent the vulnerability people fear, a vulnerability that only starts with fear of physical death but ascends to eternal damnation (where God himself becomes the biggest baddest motherfucker on the block, who’s set his face against all the little losers). You represent ultimate risk: of being the one-who-is-wrong, the Chosen One, the Isolated One, the Blasphemer, in a society regressing past the memory of William Blake’s realization that we must take the risk of living on its terms. God hates fags, and he hates you. Plus you’ll never get a job.
I am hounded by people who see in me a broken Coriolanus with a residual humanity who’s not afraid to be vulnerable, to make mistakes, and to learn new things. I am abandoned by my children who are being made victims by a sick and dysfunctional society which never gave them a fair chance because they were raised by a single mother. But ten years ago, I stopped drinking and traveled to Springfield to see Lincoln’s grave, and this is what Lincoln said:
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
