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November 15, 2003
Gary, you are setting such a cracking pace that I don’t think I’ll ever catch up, so excuse me if you add things to the conversation that never receive a reply from me.
I think it’s really good that you’ve so far added three Bukowski poems to the conversation. At least one of them seems to have become meaningful to you because of your own vicissitudes. That’s good too. It shows the power of Bukowski’s poetry even for someone who doesn’t connect with poetry. You’re living proof of what I’ve been arguing.
Some time back you suggested that Bukowski’s bar talk has poetic qualities and you introduced the poem ‘Cause And Effect’ in so doing. Once again, I was overjoyed. ‘Cause And Effect’ was also one of my favourite poems as I began to read Bukowski. I learnt it by heart I loved it so much. I think it’s a masterpiece: bar language, critical philosophy, and a powerful truth about life all in one – and in thirty words.
I’ll paste it again so any new readers can see immediately what we’re talking about:
the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them
The poem uses the traditional rhyming device to create its rhythm – hand and understand. Also, the length of the lines gives emphasis not only to certain words but also the ideas underlying them.
One book of poems that particularly impresses me is What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire. It seems to me to combine verse with autobiography more powerfully than others I’ve looked at, and I’d love to know whether he put it together or whether somebody else did it. Many of Bukowski’s books of poems were assembled by others – he used to write them and throw them into a cupboard. Editors came and pillaged the cupboard. If we happen to attract say an American reader out there somewhere who knows the answer to my question I’d love to hear from you. Who put the Fire book together?
A couple of nights ago Wayne and I spoke to the Goethe Society about Nietzsche. Given that good old Nietzsche is the guy whose ideas set this conversation rolling, I thought I might briefly report on what we said.
The talk was called ‘Fascist and Anti-fascist appropriations of Nietzsche’. Wayne began by saying that perhaps a better name for the talk would be ‘what is living and what is dead in Nietzsche’. I then briefly recounted Salome’s tripartite division of the intellectual life, setting the scene for what I would say later, before Wayne talked about several fascists and how they made use of Nietzsche.
There are lots of anti-fascist appropriations. In a sense the whole of the twentieth century has been influenced by Nietzsche, but what I talked about was Klossowski’s book, Nietzsche And The Vicious Circle.
The theme of the text and the key to much of Klossowski’s writing is the opposition between culture (identity & reality) and the tonality of the soul. I discussed Klossowski’s idea of the soul, that impenetrable depth that is trans-subjective in that it continues as long as one human being continues to exist. In its individual form, the soul is characterised by its tonality and its phantasms. The soul is an intensity without intention and its tonality and moods are its particular configurations – he’s a bubbly guy, he’s sombre, she’s thoughtful, she nocturnal. Tonalities are not determined by the environment. Phantasms, instinctual compulsions, are dependent on lived experience, although they remain intensities rather than intentions. Simulacra are simulations of the phantasms, their expression. The only thing we can know are the simulacra but we cannot know the phantasms that produce them. In a strict sense, simulacra are intersubjectively meaningless. They take on meaning when they become detached from their phantasms and become part of the code of everyday signs. They may even become stereotypes, taking on a symbolic function. Culture, which is the intention to teach and learn (the idea goes back to Kant) is built out of the code of everyday signs and its stereotypes. Intensities, on the other hand, cannot be taught or learnt.
As Ansell Pearson points out, Nietzsche’s thought-experiments are simulations of a ‘conspiracy’, that of an isolated individual ‘who uses the means of his class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole’. Nietzsche challenges both the identity principle (the authority of language, of the code, of the institution) and the reality principle (consciousness, the subject, the ego, substance). In the face of this double challenge, there is only the ‘tonality of the soul’. Demonstration is supplanted. Thought and life become ‘mute’. The limits of the principles of identity and reality are reached. The Sils-Maria experience in August 1881 ‘6000 feet beyond man and time’, which provides access to the tonality of the soul and the intensities of lived experience that are beyond knowledge and outside communication.
Nietzsche’s project becomes one of evaluating language, intentions, and willing ‘in a different manner than … hitherto evaluated … namely, as subject to the “law” of the vicious Circle’. The law of this circle has a specific non-sense to it, which is to do with the liquidation of meaning and goal. This is how Klossowski brings together the thought-experiments of the later Nietzsche:
The ‘overman’ becomes the name of the subject of the will to power, both the meaning and the goal of the Eternal Return. The will to power is only a humanized term for the soul of the Vicious Circle, whereas the latter is a pure intensity without intention… the Vicious Circle … is presented as a chain of existences that forms the individuality of the doctrine’s adherent, who knows that he has pre-existed otherwise than he now exists, and that he will yet exist differently, from ‘one eternity to another’.
Pearson notes that ‘this articulation of the doctrine reveals the enormous influence of Bataille’.
Pearson discussed how one fortuitous soul is dissolved in order to give way to another equally fortuitous soul. The experience of return is one of intensity… which ‘emits of a series of infinite vibrations of being’. The promise of this new teaching is the promise of a new creature coming into being, one that has gone beyond the established gregarious conditions of life and which no longer lives according to the ‘durable fixity of species’… ‘The day human beings learn how to behave as phenomena devoid of intention … on that day, a new creature [will] declare the integrity of existence’.
Klossowski sets up a kind of a priori antagonism between intensity and institution as an irreconciliability between ‘becoming’ and ‘knowledge’, within which eternal return is bound up with the ecstatic experience of intensity that escapes any attempt to fix and determine its meaning or significance.
‘For Klossowski, Nietzsche is not someone who thinks beyond the human condition but an exploding machine who dissolves this condition and who feels the dissolution of all identity and reality, and so is, in some quasi-mystical sense, beyond truth and knowledge, beyond metaphysics and science.’
‘The disjunction between life and knowledge condemns Nietzsche to isolation and solitude as his irrevocable destiny, playing the role of a simulator of thought, the supreme conspirator-actor in Klossowski’s stage production of the filthy lessons of philosophy, one who teaches the unteachable, thinks the unthinkable and who attempts to unthink thought and then falls, unsurprisingly, into complete … muteness and madness.’
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Fire is a posthumous release. it was put together by his wife and a few others.