To be into poetry at all, to read it with pleasure, requires a higher than usual tolerance for what I’ve sometimes seen called ‘woo’. As in new-agey or supernatural type beliefs. I assume Woo Woo, the original version, has something to do with ghosts. And I’ve certainly met a nontrivial number of poets who believed in ghosts. Not just ghosts. Astrology, of course, but also aromatherapy, homeopathy, crystal healing, acupuncture, therapy, theosophy. Every other poet you meet is training to join some crank profession. I spent my 20s training to be an academic literary critic, for example.
I have often, therefore, found myself pondering the relationship between the best words in the best order and the virtues of selenite, or the dilution of poisons, or Deleuzeianism. What connects these practices to poetry and why do I feel uncomfortable about it?
In general I don’t think a poet’s beliefs matter as such. You don’t have to believe in Dante’s Catholicism, Milton’s Protestantism, or Blake’s whole deal to appreciate their work. Yeats believed in all sorts of weird bullshit.It shouldn’t matter that poetry is full of woo, and definitely not any more than it matters that several great poets, including Yeats, were fascists. And yet.
My discomfort is of course a matter of temperament. But behind that I think there’s a real question about what it is poetry does. Because you can easily see the resemblances between poetry and alchemy, for example. Both are approaches to their medium (language, matter) that arguably once had uses—poetry as memorable speech is a good device for recording information before you have writing, alchemists really did make many chemical discoveries—but which are now, in a sense, the residue of their non-useful elements. In their very residualness, they signal some kind of rejection of their more rational successors. But I don’t think that alchemy is a valuable practice to continue, and I want to think that poetry is.
Some of my discomforts about belief, truth, poetry, and woo woo began to demand crystallisation recently, when I read a sort of hybrid essay/poem piece on the always decent digital magazine The Hythe. It was by Will Alexander, an American neosurrealist poet, who’s having a bit of a moment. His first book picked up by a British publisher, Refractive Africa, came out a year or so ago. I’ll discuss it later, (Pitchfork-style rating 6.4) but the essay was instructive for me on the difficulties of disavowing the connection between poetry and the mystical, or the just plain woo.
It features lots of statements along the following lines:
So the integer within simplistic Occidental modernity emits form as accuracy. For the most part majority takes mathematical grammar to range no higher arithmetical portion so only a quantitative reasoning can transpire.
I take it to be saying that the truth of mathematics is more profound than counting, and yet that a lot of people, swayed by a kind of positivistic ideology, take this basic aspect of maths as a description of all reality: only think things that count count. These people also tend to be in charge of the death machine that is the global economy. Or Occidental modernity, if you prefer.
It’s an attack on a narrow definition of reason. I think many people would go along with it. Indeed, to read poetry sympathetically you might need to believe things akin to this (or like Don Paterson, whom I discussed elsewhere, construct a scientific justification for the practice of poetry). Maybe we can get at why we have to accept the truth of this by thinking about what effect this type of sentence has on a reader.
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Different kinds of people might read Alexander’s sentence in different ways. One (1), who thinks of words as a tool to deliver a clearly understood meaning, might balk at the whole thing. What is the point of this kind of obscurantist blather? Emit is normally used to mean something like radiate outwards, so what does it mean for occidental modernity to emit form? Form, especially the kind of form that is based on the integer, is not a kind of pollution. Alexander is talking nonsense. This person probably doersn’t have much time for poetry, or even for the claim made here restated in more conventional terms, as I have tried to do above. Any convention of poetry, after all, gets in the way of prose’s lucidity.
Another reader, more likely to be sympathetic to Alexander (2), who knows that poetry is not just about propositions in sentences, might say, No, listen to the sounds. ‘Modernity emits’ is also thinking with the sounds of words, this is part of their truth, that the Ts cluster together. That’s the point of poetry. Language and poetic form is not just a question of “accuracy”, meaning, or whatever, but a kind of penumbra of other qualities. Association, the shape your mouth makes, etymologies long forgotten. These matter, even if they don’t count. Words have a truth of their own, and Alexander, as a poet, is attuned to them, beyond their propositional meaning. And indeed, when you really think about it, to emit, to send out is to impose on abroad, as 'Occidental modernity’ has always done, as it has done with its pollution. The sentence might seem at first to be an unclear or awkward construction, but it is the best word for the work that needs to be done.
A third kind, (3) the person who thinks of words not as vessels for meaning, nor as things in themselves, but as actions taken by people, and who therefore mostly hears social position, or personal intentions, signals about people, rather than meanings, might think that the latinate diction has a kind of idiosyncratic charm, or might deplore the sentence as lacking the polish of someone who has been taught when to wear their learning lightly.
The three kinds of meaning, let’s call them propositional, material, and social, push in different directions.
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If they didn’t just gaze blankly back at you, most people, if you were to ask them the question, ‘in which of these three dimensions might you find ‘truth?’, would say the propositional. My translation of Alexander’s sentence and his sentence both make a proposition, and they both might be made true by the same fact or complex of facts in the world. Some philosophers call these truth conditions or say that the sentence has truth values. But such a way of understanding meaning detaches the words both from their material nature as words, and their social situatedness.
Someone sympathetic to Alexander’s project, or someone engaged seriously with certain kinds of Continental philosophy, say, might claim that the idea of a truth condition or propositional content is, itself, the kind of ‘quantitative reasoning’ that Alexander is criticising here. This is how Alexander attaches his project to a broader, anti colonial, Black radical critique that is really at the heart of his work. The colonialist makes a fetish of a very limited sense of mathematical truth. So therefore when the numbers justify horrific treatment of others, that’s ok.
And I think the general dissatisfaction some people feel when only certain kinds of truths are taken as true hovers behind what makes you find poetry beautiful or meaningful. Poetry, after all, is a beautiful thing made out of the same material as we do our more useful thinking in. It thus violates our normal communicative and intellectual decorum. It makes us see something lacking in our ordinary attempts to convey truth. As in: the beauty of the words, of their arrangement should be understood as a kind of truth itself, not just a kind of valuable but pointless mental activity, like exercise, but reflecting something about the world we inhabit together.
A world in which only the ‘true’ is real, and not the beautiful, is actually an empty abstraction, not a physical world at all. For one thing it denies the existence of our own subjective experience of the beautiful. This is sort of the undergirding feeling, it seems to me, behind, a lot of poetry. I won’t get too deep into the weeds of this. Maybe you could boil it down to: There are more things in heaven and earth than in your philosophy.
But what kind of things do we actually allow entry to heaven and earth? Personally, I struggled with the bio of Alexander’s essay:
Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics.
Alexander is not simply saying that there are other ways of thinking than the strictly quantifiable. He is also saying stuff about the psychic powers of people that built the pyramids. I’m pretty sure he thinks there are still valid truths to be found in alchemy. If we accept the limitations of what we might call truth-only cognition, does that mean we are bound to accept the Egyptian worldview as understood by “R A Schwaller de Lubicz,” one of many still-popular early 20th century cranks, who argued that behind the writing of the Egyptians was a special realm uniting the material with the spiritual, not abstract ideas, but the knowledge of the heart? In one way, we might be. The critique of positivism and the embrace of theosophical mysticism seem to be logically consistent with one another.
Alexander is always saying out-there sounding things in Refractive Africa:
via transparence as would a dazed electrical gryphon I vertiginously explore invisible solar forts on Mimas & Saturn*
or psychic echo missions across galactic volcanic vicinity.
Saturn, I take partly to be an allusion to Sun Ra, who claimed to be an alien from Saturn or to have visions of Saturn, and whose pan-galactic Africanism underpins Alexander’s book. He’s a surrealist poet. You’re meant to expect the unexpected. But the method seems more coherent than the madness that merely shocks you to your senses.
It is this coherence that troubles me. What are we to do with the claim that there are invisible solar forts on Saturn and its moon? It’s the kind of thing people talk about in weird forums when they claim that the hexagon on Saturn is a space station. What makes the gryphon electrical? Can Gryphons fly into space Why would the gryphon be exploring in a manner that suffers or induces vertigo? Here, and in his bio’s claims, Alexander is saying stuff about the world, and its containing electrical gryphons on Saturn that seems to push harder on this idea of the nature of truth than I am willing to do. Poetry in his work is not a supplement to positivistic truth, but aims to usurp its place.
It’s a laudable ambition, I guess. I’m glad that all the fields of exploration are open for Will Alexander, and I wish him luck with his expanding inner range; but how seriously can you take claims about the psychic power inside the pyramids? To take it as a metaphor for resisting the cramped western mental picture might get us somewhere, but I don’t think that’s in the right spirit. The specifics clearly matter and are meant to carry some truth value. That implicit truth claim troubles me. If someone wants to point out the intellectual limits of occidental modernity, I find it harder to go along with them if they’re covered, metaphorically speaking, in ectoplasm.
But how is one to differentiate between the knowledge of theosophy and the claim for a kind of non-propositional truth in poetry? It seems important to me to differentiate between the claim that non propositional truth is real and valuable and the claim that you can cure cancer with positive thinking.
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Alexander’s work is a model of commitment to his intellectual ideal. Right down to the level of the word, it militates on behalf of what he calls ‘non-limit’ in his bio.
Refractive Africa is a collection of three longish poems that, as the book’s title implies, uses an idea of Africa to send language out in all directions, casting a strange light on history, politics, identity— the usual concerns of writers nowadays. But its refraction is really in the service of a less usual one: making the case for the awesome world-bending power of the imagination.
It’s a poetry of high argument:
As Akashic sangoma
I peer into the Congo
as transpersonal witness
as incisively faceted tiger
squirming
having the powers of a shark
via forces that sculpt the lenticular as lightning
perhaps a telepathic wakefulness
perhaps magisterial conjuration
creating migrational litmus in my blood
thereby knowing the dangerous template that is the Congo
This is about all the situatedness we get in the central poem, ‘The Congo’, with the justification that because of some power of ‘transpersonal witness’, the poet, who is not Congolese, can see and present the truth of the Congo as ‘a dangerous template’, both a historical example and model of the worst horrors of colonialism, and an idea of Africanness that might, as idea, resist this colonialism, be dangerous to western interests. Lenticular means something like pertaining to lenses, so we could think of the poem as making a claim for itself as moving beyond perspective and into power that branches out all around. As lightning does.
The argument, at the risk of reducing it into the mechanistic terms it would reject, is about the limits of the colonial imagination, and the potential of the anticolonial one. As in the other piece, the historic inability of the ‘occidental’ mind to think anything other than mechanically is contrasted to the rich imaginative resources Alexander finds in Africa. Materialism turns the Congo into ivory and cobalt, and kills the Congolese to get it.
I think the crucial gauntlet Alexander throws down to the reader, the most exemplary aspect of his actual case for the imagination and against colonial reason, is his rejection of the premiums placed by many writers on compression, and on what we might call domain relevance (or purity, more old-fashionedly). Never use a big word when a short one will do is a kind of dogma in writing, one I have personally internalized. As, to a lesser extent, is the idea that the language should in some way be restrained by the ideal of ordinary speech, or of the kind of audience it addresses, or be appropriate to its topic. Otherwise you risk the reader not understanding your tone, and even laughing at you. If someone said to you “What beverage would you like to imbibe?” You would find it hard to take them seriously. And Alexander’s poem is full of phrases like that.
There’s a beauty possible in it, certainly. I was struck by many lines that are kind of New Age-Miltonic. Phrases like ‘siring a nightmare of particulars / negatively alive with carnivorous anti-resonance’, show off Alexander’s gifts for ornate or baroque sonority. But it’s also dedicated to this ideal of ‘non-limit’, a belief that language matters, not merely as a register of the historical or social experience of people, but as a conduit to a truth about the universe more profound than the imperial-western-quantificatory.
You might put it this way: that he is trying to open up language, to pry words out of habitual use and let them ring out, pure of the connotations of the kind of person who would say them. A word without limit is transpersonal, not exemplary of a person and mode of life. So Alexander is not just hostile to the philistine utilitarian Reader I called (1), but also to the more convention-minded reader (3).
A sympathetic framing might suggest that Alexander shows up most kinds of dictional restraint as snobbery. All words are useful in your assault on the ‘reign by murder & assault’, that is the history of Western rule in the Congo. The abstraction favoured by reader (1) has a murderous history in the Congo, and Alexander wants to go through that and out into a realm of a different kind of freedom. To do that, he also has to get past reader 3, who sort of remains inside this history, with their cramped and narrow, almost positivistic conception of the function of words.
To me, Alexander’s book is at its best when it is rubbing up against limits, rather than floating freely in the kind of mystical ether of non-limit. It’s why I think the kind of reading practice of reader (3) remains important. Even though Alexander is sort of disavowing them, he needs them for his work to work. My instinct here, which I’ll try to frame as a thought is that reader (3) is sort of essential to distinguishing between the truth that is not quantifiable and more straightforward bullshit.
To get to why, we might have to leave poetry behind and think about other practices that fall under the banner of Woo Woo. How do we read them, not as containing truth out there in the world, but as things done by people?
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The most famous attempt to delineate the scientific from the non-scientific is probably Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability. Which is to say that a claim can in principle be tested against empirical observation. The example Wikipedia gives is of a black swan proving that the claim all swans are white is false. This makes all swans are white a falsifiable claim. It is not because you see the black swan, but because you could. Pseudosciences or nonscientific beliefs, are those that cannot be tested in principle, or which flatly fail the test, refuse to acknowledge this legitimacy. This makes it a kind of test of propositional content, something to appease reader (1)
But on this ground, what would distinguish the truth of poetry from the truth of, say, homeopathy? Homeopathy’s beneficial effects may or may not show up in empirical testing, but the principle of homeopathy, of a likeness between cure and poison centred on their effects on the vitality of the subject, is sort of beyond this principle. The lovely thing about homeopathy, as I understand its theory, is that it suggests that subjective experience is at the centre of the universe. As medicine, it fails our current testable standards, but as a a description of the world, we might think it beautiful. Is the truth of homeopathy poetic? Or is it bullshit? The difference is a little fuzzy.
Neither discourse, poetry or homeopathy, is ever falsifiable, unless you think poetry is actually meant to contain important true moral or scientific statements. There’s a whole history of ways to get around this severe test of truth in poetry. For example , the critic I.A. Richards claims that poetry contains pseudostatements. These are valuable because they create complex (but measurable) psychological states. But most people would not want to judge a poem by its ability to trigger maximal firing in some “complex emotional state” region of the brain. They want there to be a realm that the poem grants us access to that is in some sense truth like.
I think this is where the social or interpersonal aspects of truth come back. If we think not about the truth of the world, but the truthfulness of how we organise our lives, maybe we can get somewhere. Why do people like homeopathy? Because it works for them, maybe. But also because it is kinder to them. It speaks to a deeper truth about what we feel to be the case in the universe. The person matters. Complementary medicine offers a vision of a life that is not reducible to numbers, human averages.
And yet, if we stay with it as a social practice we see that it does this and then pockets your money, knowing that this belief cannot be questioned by something as reductive and impersonal as randomised controlled trials.
Homeopathy has two plausible ends we can attribute to its practitioners. One is to heal, the other is to make money. In a way, which of these motivations any given person has matters less than the fact that their way of describing how the world is is subordinated to a practical end. If you have an end in mind, are you really getting at the truth? Well, yes. But we already have a form of thinking dedicated to ends: science. If it has limits, these limits have to do with the limits of ends themselves, I think. And so a theory like homeopathy, which stays within the limit ascribed by ends, seems to me not to deserve the leniency that we accord to poetry. Rather than falsifiability/ non falsifiability, you need to think about what kind of stance towards the world the practitioner takes.
Homeopathy, as a stance, occupies the same ground as science, as what is sometimes called instrumental reason. It is an attempt to manipulate the world. Magic, I think, is not the opposite of science, it’s just a not very effective science. A curse and a missile have the same aim, but only one has a good targeting system.
But if this is true of homeopathy, perhaps it’s also true that there’s something of this in the poem, especially in the poem that gets close to magic. In the case of Will Alexander, his poem claims to be a vision, a proof of the powers of the imagination. But precisely in its comfort with the claims of power, of “transpersonal witness”, it seems to me to come closest to falsifying itself, to make claims about the world not in the language of poetry, but in the language of bad science.
This is where the social practices of meaning worried over by reader (3) come back in. Alexander’s massively expanded vocabulary really might bamboozle the reader, disguise the poem by suggesting it is truly grounded in a holistic understanding of quantum physics and the like. I’m not saying Alexander’s poem is bullshit; but to hold out the possibility that words can touch something called ‘non-limit’, seems to me to fall prey to the bullshit of the world. To try for this is to orient your poetry towards a kind of transformation that is impossible. Poetry cannot and should not become magic.
Of course, the book at its best doesn’t do that. It deduces the idea of non limit from limit. It works within its limits because language is a limit, whatever Alexander’s gurus and influences think on that matter. Refractive Africa is a fascinating book, and if I found it frustrating at times, I don’t want this to detract too much from its success in the realms where success is possible.
Where it fails, however, it seems to be symptomatic of a sad fact about the imaginative life of the species. Which is that everywhere around us the idea of an unlimited imaginative realm returns us to something else. It is packaged and sold back to us in the language that has produced the limited corporation. On TikTok, people will tell you how to shift into another dimension, or that you can commune with elves. I imagine some poets will soon believe this too. More power to them, but the algorithm underneath ticks on undisturbed by this content, which, whatever it claims, operates according to its logic. There’s no contradiction between the supernatural and the machine.
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Like many people, I imagine, I got into poetry to find something outside of the narrowness of truth-only thinking. My parents were scientists. The determinism that would be the final point of any given argument about how the world is seemed to cut off something important about life. For me, and probably for others too, you could reasonably argue that poetry operates as a vessel for spilt religion. And yet, whenever I found myself, for example, confronted with a poet who seemed to believe things that were clearly nonsense, I would recoil, partly in fear that the whole enterprise was tainted with the irrational. I needed poetry to be true, and not just feel right. Whenever I was judging a poet for believing something I thought stupid, I was imagining a poetry that was truer to the felt reality than science, and yet also outside of the messiness of people and their experiences. Perhaps I was still trying to make poetry like science, even if I could elaborate my conception of it as thinking beyond the limits of scientific truth. It was rational, and poets appeared not to be. But maybe poetry lives inside the hollowness, the bullshit of our personal lives and our irrational beliefs, or nowhere at all.
Maybe the truest poetry has to reckon with its falseness. The fact that it is bullshit. The truth it bring us to is not in the world in some physical sense, but in our doings as people. We live in a world where words register the impress of a social order more than they register the impress of subjectivity, or of whatever spirit realm their speakers are trying to access. The logic of modernity, or truth-only-cognition, if you think this is connected to capitalism, racial capitalism, etc, cannot be expunged from the language. But we need this to get to what it’s like to be a person, what the truth of our experience is. The social dimension of words, their register, has to be registered, poems have to take place between people, not in transpersonal interdimensional space. If Alexander overreaches, by trying to get outside of that, we feel his presence, his reality in his failure. It’s a companionable way to be wrong. The only way out is through.