Despite the urgency with which the need presses upon me of continuing my line of thinking about Julius Caesar, or of responding in some way to Patrokleia’s recent article on postmodern poetry, and the discussion of it on the blog of frequent Grackle adjunct Rimwell, or of contriving new failed schemes to expand the readership of Grub Street Grackle, I feel compelled to write here regarding Batman. Don’t worry, I promise this isn’t about how scary Heath Ledger is as The Joker. It’s the theme of the elite over the masses which I found so irresistible that I am casting everything else aside to chase down the scent.

But I find myself unable to write about the theme of a drama without immediately getting entangled midstream in the stirrups of my other hobbyhorse, which is the question of whether and in what sense a drama makes an argument. This problem is thoroughly unavoidable in the case of Batman: Dark Knight. For if this movie makes an argument it is something like the following: there exists a class of men whose strength is such that it requires them to rise above the law, whether as wanton opponents of order or as its dedicated and principled auxiliaries; if a man puts his elite strength at the service of good by combating evil, this kind of heroism will be interpreted as villainy by the masses, whether or not he is successful in vanquishing evil; for the elite champion of order invites the presence of his chaotic counterpart; by supplementing the law with his own force, he makes a case for the illegitimacy of the very order which he is working to uphold, and can always be interpreted in terms of a gruesome and not-at-all-funny parody of his true character; confronted with this exposure of the limitations of law, the masses who take spiritual shelter in law will be led to despair; the only thing that can preserve them from utterly losing faith in the legitimacy of order and morality is the image of a white knight, one who keeps his elite strength within the bounds of laws both conventional and natural, and yet remains efficacious against crime; so that if this man, too, crosses outside the limitations prescribed by law, if his purity becomes tarnished (which it will), nothing can save the masses but a lie: no one must know what happened; the elite man whose action brought about the situation in which the white knight was indispensable must take on the blame for the white knight’s error; the hero must become a pharmakos, the dark knight; only this illusory arrangement can preserve order.

The above argument is not only worked out by the action of the film, but also made explicit in the concluding speech of Commissioner Gordon. It is practically impossible to deny that the above series of statements both summarizes the action of the drama in general terms and outlines the conclusion to be drawn from the action (not without reason the summary of the action of a narrative is traditionally called an “argument”). However, at the same time as the action of the drama makes this argument, the very fact of the drama contradicts the argument. For Batman: Dark Knight is unquestionably a movie for the masses. Everybody goes to see this movie. It presents the argument manifestly to the very masses who, according to the argument, cannot keep faith without the illusion. But in the course of making this proposal to the masses, it necessarily destroys the very illusion which it claims they need.

This contradiction puts the film in an egregious debt to the masses which is either financial or moral. For either it belies its own argument, in which case it is nothing but a bare-faced lie (and the public should get its money back), or it takes away the illusion which they need to preserve their condition, while withholding the strength to live in the bare and unsheltered world outside the law.

How does a playwright sign his work? A novelist can ensure that a title page be bound together with his writing. A painter can put his mark on the canvas directly. But the public face of a playwright’s medium is all words and motion, with no other material place reserved for the author’s name. He must depend on producers to distribute a playbill, unless he can devise some such contrivance as working the words “will shake” into the last line of Act I, scene ii. If it seems like a merely amusing tidbit to have pointed out that William Shakespeare identifies himself in this way, in the text of his “Julius Caesar,” that is only because due attention has not yet been directed to the fact that this very manner of signing a work is itself a sign of Shakespeare’s work, that is, of his profession, which could be summed up in the phrase, “playing with words.” For this is a man who is famed for what can only be the product of a deep idleness: a condition in which what is called “work” is nothing more strenuous than the arrangement of that which is of the slightest consequence–mere words–and not even into a politically influential form but into play; he coaxes words to dance in time and makes them call back and forth to each other as in a child’s game. Here, the words “will shake,” which in their immediate significance are as serious as regicide (”And after this let Caesar seat him sure; / For we will shake him, or worse days endure.”), are wrought into play by the playwright’s work.

Lest these considerations seem to depart too much from the substance of the play, allow me to refer you to the first scene of the same play, wherein one might reasonably hope to find an exposition of what is most at stake in the work. In this opening scene, two commoners are chastised for their idleness, and for failing to display any “sign of [their] profession.” One of the two obediently and directly states his trade as a carpenter. The other commoner, however, is as it seems incapable of giving a straight answer:

Marullus: You, sir, what trade are you?
Second Commoner: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.
Mar.: But what trade art thou? answer me directly.
Sec. Com.: A trade, sir, that, I hope, I may use with a safe conscience; which is indeed sir, a mender of bad soles.
Mar.: What trade, thou knave? thou naughty knave, what trade?
Sec. Com.: Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me: yet, if you be out, sir, I can mend you.
Mar.: What mean’st thou by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow!
Sec. Com.: Why, sir, cobble you.
Flavius: Thou art a cobbler, art thou?
Sec. Com.: Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s matter, but with awl. I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I re-cover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neats-leather have gone upon my handiwork.
Flav.: But wherefore art not in thy shop to-day?
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?
Sec. Com.: Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work. But indeed, sire, we make holiday, to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph.

This cobbler is not a poet; nevertheless, his series of speeches is a sign of the poet’s profession. For the cobbler himself professes to be nothing else but a cobbler. But the speech with which he makes this profession, or rather, the side of his speech with which his audience is faced, identifies him as both a bungler (”cobbler”) and a skilled workman whose business is with all (”awl”)–that is, as a master of nothing and of everything. He means this only in jest, of course. Truly, he only says it for the fun of twitting his superiors. But indeed, there is a man who could say in earnest that he is master of nothing and everything: the poet. Yet exactly because it would be true, he cannot earnestly say this of himself. For the poet–and particularly the poet who is a playwright–is the one who never speaks but in play (he has that much in common with the commoner) and who never speaks for himself. He lends his voice to characters and lets himself be spoken for by them. Thus, the very way in which the poet is indicated by the tradesman’s speech is a sign of the poet’s trade–that is, of his skill in trading places, with anyone whatsoever (whether with commoners or with “as proper men as ever trod upon neats-leather”), while becoming, to all appearances, no one himself.

Later this week:

• What any of this could possibly have to do with Julius Caesar.
• The Austen-tation of Forgetting: Mr. Darcy’s Heart of Darkness.
• Some other third thing!

Stay tuned.

If one may legitimately identify in the instructive central to the nihilism of St. Francis not only the embrace of utter poverty but also the reception of a superabundant poetry, then one might perhaps with comparable legitimacy identify in the impoverished poetry of postmodernity an instructive toward Franciscan nihilism. Such a progression of identifications might even be deemed a natural progression, when we consider with other astute observers that “in some way the spiritualist movement which saw in St. Francis the end of history was not entirely mistaken. In a way that may become clear in time, his insight into the origin of things in nothing is a view only accessible from the end of all things.” Grubby here speaks coyly of Francis’ eschatological implications as something which may still “become clear in time.” It is all to the point however, that what is to become clear in time is a clarification of time itself, and indeed, in terms of the end times. The need for such a clarification, might be considered an essential task assigned to the one called to be a poet in the present age; the postmodern poetic vocation seems to demand a capacity for a hidden didactic, namely, to read for those who would listen the signs of the times. Such a directive has been famously given in the first lines of Frost’s poem by that name:

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss

And so an education begins, an education–in history and its nihilism–which commands its student in urgent imperatives: back out and back in, retreat and remember. What do the signs of the times indicate? That the time of today is uniquely out of joint. What is now is too much for us; we are too late in coming to what it is, and so we are instructed to back out of it and back into a time of loss, a time that is lost, a time that is passed away, the past. It is all to the point that such stepping “back in a time made simple by the loss” is not an historiographical combing over the past for information from and about it. Rather this direction “back in” issues naturally from the the fact that today what is present is too much for us: the men of today arrive late to their time, and can therefore only truly find it when they learn to recall what has passed. An education for late-comers. Eliot too, speaks of this education, again famously, in his most widely read poem:

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth gardern
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
Looking into the heart of light, the silence

Here what is pointed to is nothing, and indeed nothing is known. Muted, blinded–such is the audience for which nothing seems to come, and yet the view of its arrival is an enlightening one; when there is “nothing to have at heart” then there is “the heart of light” still to be looked into. We are told that the time leading up to this moment of sightless vision is “late,” but of the time that properly belongs to the heart of light Eliot here remains silent.

Finally, To draw from one last fragment of present day poetics, Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. The education of Ike McCaslin does not begin with what he already knows; rather, it begins with nothing. But just how this beginning begins with nothing is an issue which Faulkner forces his reader to stumble over from the outset of the “The Old People” –indeed, one need not read further than the first two sentences:

“At first there was nothing. There was the faint, cold, steady rain, the gray and constant light of the late November dawn…”

The immediacy of this stumbling block lies in the way the first sentence is conjoined to the second. The first sentence tells of what there was “at first,” but the second sentence, unlike the third and the fourth of this opening paragraph, does not make its transition by some notation of sequence; it does not say “Then there was the faint, cold, steady rain…,” but simply “There was the faint, cold, steady rain….” The “steady rain” or the “constant light” do not replace something with or add something to this “nothing” (how could they?), but the “nothing” adds everything to them: they can only be what they are if they appear from out of nothing-–if, that is, they remain emerging out of this backdrop of nothing. Faulkner does not conjoin these first two sentences sequentially because they cannot be thought chronologically. They are simultaneous and reciprocal. The nothing can only be there “at first” if there is something there (i.e. the “steady rain” etc.), and the “steady rain” is there because there is nothing first of all there before it. Thus the way in which nothing is there first of all, the way in which it marks the beginning of Ike McCaslin’s education, is found by way of remembrance-–a remembrance that reaches farther back than any representation of past experiences, farther back than the memory of anything, and therefore a remembrance which looks ahead of all things into the place where they come into and remain what they presently are.

If the strange winds of digital transfer have not yet delivered the latest episode of the Grub Street Grackle Podcast, it might be because you haven’t subscribed. If you’re not into subscribing to things, you may wish to download the new episode directly. These two paths lie before you, but besides these there is also a third path: the way of unknowing, which leads only to an infinite darkness in which you will never hear Ezra Pound accompanying himself on beatbox.

The choice is yours.

(Thanks to Luke Donald and Phil Murphy for their momentous archaeological work.)

Later this week, on the blog:

• Patrokleia on “the Franciscan Habit of Postmodern Poetry”
• Grubby’s gropings towards a thought about William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
• some other third thing

Stay tuned!

Update: The linked website is not the place to order the handwritten book. For that you should email Mr. Payne at skyisacanvas at gmail dot com.

If any of you enjoyed Eric Payne’s “A Blue a Bell a Hi” in the Dec/Jan 2006/7 issue of Grub Street Grackle, you might take a look at Along the Lines of Causerie, his recent book. He’s asked me to pass on this information about hand-written copies of the book available by special order:

This book is going to be handwritten by myself on special order only. It will include sketches and notes from my original novel files (which have been saved in an archived folder that is almost four years old) along with some drastic alterations to the story’s content, which includes major cuts. Even if I don’t receive any orders, which is highly probable, I want to at least practice the idea, and thusly have a couple books to sell in the future.

I am hoping, if anyone is interested, to receive orders now, as I am in limbo between two jobs and have some time to kill before a plane ride in four days.

The published novel, Along the Lines of Causerie, if you have not clicked on any of the provided links, features journal entries from a mentally unsound man named Abe who is attempting to write a children’s book. A natural disaster, schizophrenic tendencies, and a heartbreaking sentimental affection for animals lead to some life changing decisions based on irrational objectives– including purchasing a farm and talking to animals, eavesdropping on families in public restaurants obsessively and copying down their conversations, and being confronted by the visions of ghosts when visiting his old abandoned home. Many of his accounts are either fabrications or exaggerations or just overly poetic descriptions of normal events. His only real friendship comes with a stray cat and a homeless sand sculpting artist named Moses and his uptight editor, Elissa. Finally the novel comes to a faster, steadier, more realistic pace and tone as Abe gets married to a strange woman and has a daughter whom he loves dearly. She vaguely shows some of the same mental instability as her parents, but has a calmer disposition. She becomes the focus of the journal entries until they abruptly end– Abe having run out of room to write. Some personal revelations are also revealed in the end. His daughter, Rumy, is one of the main characters of the book I am working on now.

I am asking fifteen dollars, plus the cost of a journal, which can be pretty much as cheap or expensive as you want it— however I would need an advance check for expensive journals. Cheap journals I can cover myself and you could pay me when you receive the journal and decide whether or not it is worth fifteen dollars. If not, I will just accept to be refunded for the actual journal itself and nothing else.

I’m estimating it will be about fourteen chapters long and closer to thirty or forty thousand words instead of sixty. Pretty short.

I’m unplugging everything this weekend, and won’t be able to post or respond to comments (not that I ever do anyway).

See you on Monday

George Packer on Christopher Hitchens:

The new essay about his voluntary waterboarding in the woods of North Carolina has the usual degree of exhibitionism, but it also shows why Hitchens’s weaknesses are almost inextricable from his strengths. As in the piece about the soldier, he describes his sensations and emotions with admirable exactness; he strikes a balance between self-presentation and self-effacement (always apologizing for mentioning his own feelings); he moves easily between the particular moment and the larger concern.

Apology is by no means self-effacement. It may perhaps be a substitute for effacement when one has committed an offense that cannot be undone, but what is its function when it appears in writing alongside with the offense, published simultaneously with it? In such a case, the offense could have been erased if it ought to have been, and the apology is in fact nothing but a further self-presentation.

Yet Packer’s complaint against Hitchens is that he does not make himself present enough, not to the reader but to himself. He could make so much more of his essays, Packer believes, if he would make each of them “an argument with himself,” rather than only the hint of one, tacitly broached but never actively followed up:

This is the beginning of an argument with himself—not craven self-denunciation, but a genuine effort to draw out and clarify the hard trade-offs and ideological confusions that the past years have forced on all thinking people. But instead of having this argument, Hitchens places it in the mouths of others: the waterboarders on one side, a specialist in interrogation named Malcolm Nance on the other. In other words, he gets out of the way just when one would want him to interrogate himself.

In other words, Hitchens’s kind of self-presentation has nothing to do with “the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell, in which ideas are the flower of direct experience and everything depends on the strong presence of the ‘I’” with which Packer tries to ally Hitchens in his defense. The conclusion to be drawn from Packer’s analysis, then, is forced back to its beginning. For what is a man who makes himself super-abundantly present while eschewing self-reflection but an exhibitionist who “will do anything to be noticed?”

By which of course I mean that Chesterton gets nothing, or at least gets something of what it would be to get nothing, “nothing to have at heart,” perhaps indeed the poverty at “the heart of the whole.”

From his St. Francis of Assisi

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made.

This insight, which seems to have been at least partly borrowed from T. S. Eliot (cf. the “falls the shadow” passage The Hollow Men), begins to make sense of an earlier passage of Chesterton’s book which seemed wildly out of place when I first read it: Chesterton spends most of a chapter on a tirade against the journalistic tendency of the modern mind, which only concerns itself with “events” without regard to the history out of which they have come. It is a very interesting tirade and congenial to many of my own sentiments on the subject, but why is it taking up such a large portion of a fairly small book which is supposed to be about St. Francis? Perhaps the justification for this deviation is simply that it embodies the mystical temperament of St. Francis himself, by insisting that the “origin [of things] is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them,” as Chesterton says elsewhere in the same book.

I mention this shadow-crossed feature of St. Francis’ mysticism, because it seemed to me to conform a certain inkling I have been nursing for nearly a year, and which is now growing into a hunch: that in some way the spiritualist movement which saw in St. Francis the end of history was not entirely mistaken. In a way that may become clear in time, his insight into the origin of things in nothing is a view only accessible from the end of all things.

Update: After time runs out, there still remains: the extension. In this case, the deadline of the challenge outlined below has been extended to 10:00 PM central time on Friday, August 29.

Now that you have discovered the life-changing power of reading Grub Street Grackle and obsessively checking the Gracklog for new posts despite long months of disappointment, what are you going to do with the fire we have kindled in your heart? Hide it under a bushel? No! Dear friends, do not be lukewarm gracklers. Share the love. Bring the message to the masses.

Since I know that the average elite grackle reader is probably no more inclined to prompt action than I am, I have decided to offer some incentive: whoever tells the most people about Grub Street Grackle between now and 10:00 PM next Friday (the 4th of July) will receive the highly desirable earthly reward of their choice from the following list:

• a complete set of Volume I of Grub Street Grackle
• a complete set of Volume II
• two sets of four greeting cards featuring art by Grackle contributors Charity Hunt and J. Anselm Prever

Just comment here next Friday night and tell us how many people you told. Only people you tell directly count (in person, over the phone, by mail, personal e-mail, or singing telegram). Blog posts, mass e-mails, and anything like them are out.

Upon request tracts are available with detailed instructions on accepting the Grackle into your heart.