Thoughts on the language of John Ashbery
|
|
Thoughts on the language of John Ashbery |
by Tom Jameson
The timeplace: early 1950’s America; New York area specifically. The atmosphere: smoky, grimy, reactionary, isolationist: B-movie hell with its WW2 legacy.
Think McCarthy, film noir, Kinsey. Think, you just graduated from college, everything before you: comfortable background, expectations high, good education, talented, contacts secured, the exploding art world beckoning. And you’re gay. But you’re not gay, you’re ‘homosexual’, for which, read ‘psycho-sexual pervert’, some kind of shameful disease. Kiss of death to your ambitions, of course.
But you have friends, lovers; you do not have some weird mental thing. There is a normalcy denied by contemporary mores. And you have the gift of the gab, you know, with care, you can wing it. The challenge is invigorating. The secret a kind of acquired indeterminacy: not to allow yourself to be pinned down; and the fun of the slight twist, the unseen subverting of the rigidity of the straight.
Things are not in your favour, however: from the other side of the world reality slams home. The Korean War. They’re recruiting, and now you are eligible. You despise the war, its politics, its consequences, and its impact on your world. The only way out is the social and career-suicide of declaring yourself publicly a ‘psycho-sexual pervert’. This is reality; it’s no longer a game. You do it. Everything stops for you, the hi’s on the phone, the invites with gilded edges. Go abroad, young man. So you skip out, to Paris and the ‘over there’ European art world.
Coming to terms with all this: squirming on the needle of your time, like a bug under a microscope… Not just finding a way out, but wondering: into what? Sham of your life, sham of post war society, sham of the polarized and narrow constructs of a cold-war world. Does any of it stand up to scrutiny? You are on the outside looking in, and what you see is… laughable really.
To negotiate your way through requires a careful weighing of connotation, denotation, of word and phrase, of the expectations set up, and the onrush of language.
To experiment: ‘Litany’ from “As We Know” (1981) has two mutually dependent columns to be read together, whilst retaining each’s distinct character. Designs on your consciousness: can you dissociate, can you become two (three) points of awareness at the same time, can you ease open your ‘you’ sufficiently to allow the other voices equal status?
Is it possible to democratize language to such an extent that all experience, all tones of voice, all voices, have equal status: homosexual, heterosexual, ‘other’?
John Shoptaw’s excellent “On the Outside Looking Out”, (Harvard U P 1994) makes an attempt to codify Ashbery’s language techniques:
“ … lyric markers formed from sonic, visual, associational misrepresentation
eg “it all came/ gushing” (crashing) “down on me…”
“the pen’s screech” (scratch)
‘…dropped, added or substituted letters
eg “signs of mental” (metal) “fatigue”
“screwed into palace” (place)
“Time stepped” (stopped)
“long piers” (periods) “of silence”
etc.
Once rumbled like this, Ashbery twists and twists again: indeterminacy as a way of life.
His writing of the 1970s perhaps has something of the quality of Ericksonian writing. Milton Erickson was the foremost exponent of hypno-therapy techniques. Grinder and Bandler developed Neuro Linguistic Programming from his bases. It is possible to present information within a seemingly nonsensical verbal exchange.
As we have seen with ‘Litany’ Ashbery has had designs upon our awareness, as many avant-garde: John Cage’s ‘silences’ were constructs for inveigling supposed Zen-like states (Emersonian ‘quietism’?) into what is thought different in Western consciousness.
We’ve had all the ‘subliminal suggestion’, the pseudo-psychological advertising techniques, and none of them are really much cop. The mind is too complex.
This is really Ashbery’s main subject: the mind’s experiencing of itself. The best description of his technique so far is that he writes thought, all thought, any thought, bizarre thought, mundane thought: our thought.
It may not amount to much in the long run, but then, do we? This is everybody’s gamble: the ultimate democracy.
Milton Erickson’s great hypno-therapy proficiency found the participant/client could provide from their own life-experience the solution to their particular problem. There need be no hierarchies; and no professionals and subjects. The appeals to Ashbery’s democratic sensibilities are obvious.
A reading by Ashbery amazed me: there were phrases, or more correctly, variations on phrases that had not been readable before; he gave them tones of voice so they instantly made sense. American (New York?) phrasing and emphases can articulate American (ditto) mind-states, not seemingly accessible on the page, and to the non-speaker. All this is grist to the usability of language.
Ashbery’s greatest virtues are his all-consuming sense of wonder, humour, and personal charm.