3 Disney Songs Considered
Edmund Hardy
"Where are the people?"
"I just don't see how a world which makes such wonderful things... could be bad." Ariel's chamber of sea-swallowed treasure is a material index with no access to the world it is the index of. This chamber is the teenager's bedroom, full of significant objects which stand in for a world of experience. Growing up will mean leaving this room, voyaging out or up - "I want to be where the people are". The voyaging out towards the people supposes that among others - among all of the others - is where reality lies. Or something easily substitutable for reality, or which 'points' to it, or which 'represents' it, to use William James' taxonomy from his essay 'The Essence of Humanism'. The song and its crystallised longing is directly parodied in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as "Up there!", sung by Satan in hell.
Ariel's desire is for a different way of framing, which is what the idea of the people points to. "I want to know what the people know, ask them my questions and get some answers..." Perhaps we can hear a mournful ethnographer singing along. "Wish I could be part of that world".
"Resurrection is a sense of direction"
Finding resurrection in all the old forms, this song's location is in the transition between the two zones of spirit and life, the two codes which continually translate and redeem each other, organising the realities of a world which stream back and forth in time. Spirit extends into matter in the form of a cathedral, a site where the translations into and back from life can occur, or can be at their most dynamic. But a dualism can also freeze over, fall into abeyance - the force of the world's interests and instrumentalities ("I ask for glory to shine on my name") diminishes the spirit, such that only a glorious shell remains. It takes a Disney heroine to bring life back to life, in relation to spirit - someone who says "I ask for nothing". The goat who appears in the cathedral at the close of the song shows us that the translation between the great codes has been resumed, "content" given back to the old forms, a life free among the stones. This is a form of resurrection which HD's Trilogy also asserts: "This is the flowering of the rod,/this is the flowering of the burnt-out wood". The Goat of the Absolute is both life and spirit, it gambols across the zones.
"On the side of speech"
The reluctance to speak a form of words - a form which may strike their sayer as too bossy, too ready-made for the intricacies of states felt to be interior and fragile, a straight repetition of past failure and thus constrictive of the self's desire to remake and be open to experience - this reluctance is also a withdrawal from the fabulating drive of language, backed here by the classical archive: Hercules with his hand out to grab onto, doo-wop's neoclassical chorus. What would a mythless love be, or a politics without story? What a strange speech-act, to place yourself in a fable ("This scene won't play"), even if the words sound to their bearer as if they're spoken by someone else. But this very hesitancy to speak, in the case of this song, is a guarantee of the statement's eventual, renewed veracity.
"Where are the people?"
"I just don't see how a world which makes such wonderful things... could be bad." Ariel's chamber of sea-swallowed treasure is a material index with no access to the world it is the index of. This chamber is the teenager's bedroom, full of significant objects which stand in for a world of experience. Growing up will mean leaving this room, voyaging out or up - "I want to be where the people are". The voyaging out towards the people supposes that among others - among all of the others - is where reality lies. Or something easily substitutable for reality, or which 'points' to it, or which 'represents' it, to use William James' taxonomy from his essay 'The Essence of Humanism'. The song and its crystallised longing is directly parodied in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as "Up there!", sung by Satan in hell.
Ariel's desire is for a different way of framing, which is what the idea of the people points to. "I want to know what the people know, ask them my questions and get some answers..." Perhaps we can hear a mournful ethnographer singing along. "Wish I could be part of that world".
"Resurrection is a sense of direction"
Finding resurrection in all the old forms, this song's location is in the transition between the two zones of spirit and life, the two codes which continually translate and redeem each other, organising the realities of a world which stream back and forth in time. Spirit extends into matter in the form of a cathedral, a site where the translations into and back from life can occur, or can be at their most dynamic. But a dualism can also freeze over, fall into abeyance - the force of the world's interests and instrumentalities ("I ask for glory to shine on my name") diminishes the spirit, such that only a glorious shell remains. It takes a Disney heroine to bring life back to life, in relation to spirit - someone who says "I ask for nothing". The goat who appears in the cathedral at the close of the song shows us that the translation between the great codes has been resumed, "content" given back to the old forms, a life free among the stones. This is a form of resurrection which HD's Trilogy also asserts: "This is the flowering of the rod,/this is the flowering of the burnt-out wood". The Goat of the Absolute is both life and spirit, it gambols across the zones.
"On the side of speech"
The reluctance to speak a form of words - a form which may strike their sayer as too bossy, too ready-made for the intricacies of states felt to be interior and fragile, a straight repetition of past failure and thus constrictive of the self's desire to remake and be open to experience - this reluctance is also a withdrawal from the fabulating drive of language, backed here by the classical archive: Hercules with his hand out to grab onto, doo-wop's neoclassical chorus. What would a mythless love be, or a politics without story? What a strange speech-act, to place yourself in a fable ("This scene won't play"), even if the words sound to their bearer as if they're spoken by someone else. But this very hesitancy to speak, in the case of this song, is a guarantee of the statement's eventual, renewed veracity.
Thanks to everyone who came to: Intercapillary Places Launch
The first ever "Intercapillary" live event is nearly here - "I Know Something About Love"
For the latest updates follow Intercapillary Twitter
"I Know Something About Love" Facebook event page
Thursday March 17th, 2011
6.30 for 7.00 pm at Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW
A walk around the 'Jardin d'amour' maze installation by Yinka Shonibare MBE
Elizabeth Eger - A talk on 'Jardin d'amour'
Reitha Pattison - Reading from 'Some Fables'
£3 / £1.50
Important: As the capacity for the event is limited, please book in advance by emailing Charlotte Jones at events@parasol-unit.org or calling on 020 7490 7373 ext 20. Please be aware that if you haven't booked in advance and turn up on the night, this is fine but please be aware that if capacity is reached then you may not be allowed in.
Join us amid the Jardin d'amour, a large verdant maze installation which visitors can walk around, and which in the centre features three arrangements of headless aristocrats, though dressed in batik-style fabric - Elizabeth Eger will essay the labyrinth work to hand and its 18th century implications, then Reitha Pattison will read from "Some Fables".
We will be gathering in the gallery foyer from 6.30 to 7, allowing time to wander around and get lost in the installed Jardin d'amour maze. Then we will retire upstairs to the events room for Elizabeth Eger's talk on the Jardin followed by Reitha Pattison's poetry reading.
Hope to see you there amid the maze, beside the decapitated rococo lovers. There will be chairs to sit on, & 'Interior Ears' for all attendees...
Hope to see you there amid the maze, beside the decapitated rococo lovers. There will be chairs to sit on, & 'Interior Ears' for all attendees...
About the Speakers
Elizabeth Eger is Senior Lecturer at King's College, London. Elizabeth teaches on the interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-century Studies at King's. Her research interests include women’s writing, poetry, visual culture and the conceptual history of ‘luxury’. Her published work includes Bluestockings: women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (2010), Luxury in the eighteenth-century: debates desires and delectable goods (co-edited with Maxine Berg, 2003), and critical editions of works by various Bluestocking writers and Maria Edgeworth. She curated the Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-century Bluestockings exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 and was co-editor of its accompanying catalogue. She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth Montagu, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Reitha Pattison was born in London in 1977. Her first book of poetry, Word is Born, written with Michael Kindellan, was published by Arehouse Press in 2006; her new book, Some Fables, was published by Grasp Press earlier this year.
'Intercapillary Places: Poetry at Parasol Unit' is organised by Edmund Hardy and Felicity Roberts
For the latest updates follow Intercapillary Twitter
"I Know Something About Love" Facebook event page
Never to have compromised with transcendence: Tony Trehy’s 50 Heads
Philip Davenport
In this regeneration, the idea of the poem as mnemonic is reversed. The versifying is shot through with scientific and mathematical terminology that disrupts sentences into a series of thoughts that never quite survive the moment of expression – the language kills them. The effect is the closest written simulacrum to the process of forgetting that I’ve ever encountered. I read these poems, but cannot hold them. They make the impossibility of remembering their core. Rather than the ringing of rhyme and cadence, these are closer to the recollection of trauma, melting as they come close. And they are themselves wreathed in amnesia.
For this is a manifesto championing the need to think, without sentiment, without sloppiness, without apology, without striving to be popular. Only then will transcendence arise. The alternative is compromise and with it the inevitability of living in Porlock with a head full of crap:
Maleness and the pathos of un/feeling underscore the work. Trehy is a remarkably consistent voice for the male dilemma, a delicate human mired in technical manuals. They are poems that tell of immense distress and distance. They are fearful and contrite and trapped, they depict emotional crisis with the thesaurus of science and maths and corporate blandness. This conundrum is, to mismatch images, at the heart of the heads. Emotionality expressed without the usual signifiers. The brisk one-word titles of the poems indicate the disquiet underneath: CBT, Compromise, Doubt, Hesitation, Underachievement… In this communique, friendship becomes Reciprocity. A meditation on fragility prompted by a fall in the snow (see Tony’s hilariously daft preamble to this poem at The Other Room website) is Lassitude. Trehy writes inside his self-imposed dilemma brilliantly – using the very deficiency in expression as his tools for saying.
But this isn’t merely the trope of male inarticulacy that’s dissecting itself, it’s by implication all the boardrooms and governmental think tanks that rule our lives. Which gives the book its rage. Turning their jargon on itself so that it becomes feral, Trehy is welcome in a time of official lapdog poets. New work as jagged as this, un-dumbed, uncompromising, is a scarcity – a rare, raw vision.
Trehy has built his new century Xanadu, with its own sweet nip of madness, its treasures and favoured. Akhenaten’s daughters are here, lolling in a sports car amongst a drift of autumn colours. Rosebud is burning in the cellar. And of course the demons are present too, and the correct terror.
50 Heads by Tony Trehy published by Apple Pie Editions ISBN 978-0953967-5-5
‘Regeneration of small, empty ghost-towns with no raisonThe corporate press release, the executive summary, the committee minutes: Tony Trehy’s 50 Heads is written in the code of closed meetings and comes with its own inner bureaucracy. The first poem in the book is titled Content and the collection ends with Apology. Between these two bits of business, the rest are delivered in a disrupted alphabetic order, like pieces of agenda. Trehy has ingested corporate speak in a great body-wrenching toot – and with his exhale he gives us a Xanadu of bright blue glass towers and besuited people whose own bodies are their only contact with nature. These are the ‘discrete breathers’ (in physics, a non-linear wave form, here a rather beautiful appropriation to represent the human) who inhabit the blocks. Using their vocab, he both mocks and remakes the very idea of the poetic:
d’etre. Failure to predict. Not having had the experience;
to organise oneself in front, to chair the panel…’
('Lottery')
‘with engineering software, public sector financialThe modernist block on the cover of the book is echoed by the solid rectangle of each page of verse. Trehy’s unit of composition is the box of text and he adheres as closely to this as a sonneteer. The line breaks are immaculate, each bringing surprise, or its own turn. A brutalist box is often used as a form by others, but rarely with such precision. Verses begin with a 0 and end with 1, between which the variants are infinite.
incompetence, flattened out epiphenomenal justifications –
sighs, epiphanous sighs; for the irreflexive how the
autumn sunlight patterns dust over wood grain
intersected with baritone shadows: 1’
('Shaman')
In this regeneration, the idea of the poem as mnemonic is reversed. The versifying is shot through with scientific and mathematical terminology that disrupts sentences into a series of thoughts that never quite survive the moment of expression – the language kills them. The effect is the closest written simulacrum to the process of forgetting that I’ve ever encountered. I read these poems, but cannot hold them. They make the impossibility of remembering their core. Rather than the ringing of rhyme and cadence, these are closer to the recollection of trauma, melting as they come close. And they are themselves wreathed in amnesia.
‘Children haunt with the smell of butcher, cost and50 Heads is very much a book of the head; touching is forbidden. Here, repulsion is posited as a valid, non-neurotic response to the physical proximity of the world, especially other humans. Episodes are re-told in careful, almost weary, detail, without hysteria. The position is not an authorial pose for the sake of irony or shock. It is a clear proposal: closeness is a danger that might force a compromise in thought and that above all must not occur.
elections deplete memory of us, heroes, our movements
recorded and forgotten, from one traffic light junction to
the next top of the range sports car accelerates’
('Epigones')
For this is a manifesto championing the need to think, without sentiment, without sloppiness, without apology, without striving to be popular. Only then will transcendence arise. The alternative is compromise and with it the inevitability of living in Porlock with a head full of crap:
‘drowned out formants immobilised in narrow happy-People here stream and ebb like lost particles, or formulae in an overworked mind. They eddy around one another, they merge and they break apart as waves. There are the breathers, the epigones, telomeres, formants… terms reminiscent of the Alphas and Epsilons of our best-loved dystopia. However the writer is here inside the snare with everybody else, just as heartbroken.
clappy tunes. La la la for the rest complete transfusions’
('Quiescence')
Maleness and the pathos of un/feeling underscore the work. Trehy is a remarkably consistent voice for the male dilemma, a delicate human mired in technical manuals. They are poems that tell of immense distress and distance. They are fearful and contrite and trapped, they depict emotional crisis with the thesaurus of science and maths and corporate blandness. This conundrum is, to mismatch images, at the heart of the heads. Emotionality expressed without the usual signifiers. The brisk one-word titles of the poems indicate the disquiet underneath: CBT, Compromise, Doubt, Hesitation, Underachievement… In this communique, friendship becomes Reciprocity. A meditation on fragility prompted by a fall in the snow (see Tony’s hilariously daft preamble to this poem at The Other Room website) is Lassitude. Trehy writes inside his self-imposed dilemma brilliantly – using the very deficiency in expression as his tools for saying.
But this isn’t merely the trope of male inarticulacy that’s dissecting itself, it’s by implication all the boardrooms and governmental think tanks that rule our lives. Which gives the book its rage. Turning their jargon on itself so that it becomes feral, Trehy is welcome in a time of official lapdog poets. New work as jagged as this, un-dumbed, uncompromising, is a scarcity – a rare, raw vision.
Trehy has built his new century Xanadu, with its own sweet nip of madness, its treasures and favoured. Akhenaten’s daughters are here, lolling in a sports car amongst a drift of autumn colours. Rosebud is burning in the cellar. And of course the demons are present too, and the correct terror.
‘system of fear to curl up with eschatology, a smell like
tobacco, tired leather and urine and loss: you can’t
remember the end all the time.’
('Vinculum')
50 Heads by Tony Trehy published by Apple Pie Editions ISBN 978-0953967-5-5