The Sublime

I had one of those moments today, when I can say that the was to some extent, an elavation of my soul - to borrow the phrase from Edgar Allan Poe. During a seminar on James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, we were looking at Schuyler's poem 'An East Window on Elizabeth Street.' The concept behind Schuyler's poetry, is that it should be treated as a painting or photo. He will write about something that he can see and the poem itself is the frame around the scene. The poem were were studying for instance is Schuyler putting into words, Elizabeth Street from an eastern window. It was in the lines that are:
"But why should a metal ladder climb, straight
and sky-aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood
up into nothing."

If we picture the scene, Schuyler is looking around as he's writing the poem and his eyes are drawn to a fire-escape thats ladder goes up five rungs higher than the stairway hood. In this moment Schuyler, unexpectingly experiences the sublime - an elavation of the soul - from surveying the ordinaryness of his scene, and not being attentive to anything in particular, and just happens upon the ladder; the idea is that one will not find the sublime if it is being sought after, rather it is found when you aren't being attentive to finding the sublime. This got me thinking and really struck a chord with me. It made me think of all the moments in which some form of culture - in the broadest sense, I don't try to pretend that it's only high culture that has this effect on me - really touches the soul. For instance listening to a piece of music, where you get a cold shiver because you find it that special; or when a poem really moves the emotion that it seeks to, etc. Essentially what I'm trying to get at is when something really connects with your mind and subsequently infuses a rush or emotion - whatever that emotion is. Last night for instance, whilst reading for the seminar Schuyler's poems, I felt a connection with 'The Payne Whitney Poems,' where a certain section called 'February 13 1975' really 'spoke to me' - for lack of a better term. I think what I like in Schuyler's poetry is that vunerablilty and fragility that is present, as a result of his mental state. A line from 'An East Window on Elizabeth Street' really touched in the seminar once I'd -we'd - unpacked its meaning: "I never thought I'd make it." The line itself is so ambiguous that it's magnificient; one can guess that Schuyler made me referring to his own anxieties about a poet - considering he didn't publish whilst his friend Frank O'Hara was alive, because he was too intimdated by O'Hara's work, or the fact he had several major nervous breakdowns.

I'm digressing slightly - massively. The main point of this was my meditation upon this idea that one can only find the sublime when they have no expectations and aren't being attentive to the search for sublimity. Having only really started to really enjoy poetry within the past year or so, it is in music that I've experienced this many times. The most vivid one that I can think of at the moment occurs in Eternal Lord - 'Get to F**k' 1 minute 20 seconds in to the song. The song slows down with palm muting and a slow beat from the drums, and suddenly the vocalist screams - I've no idea what he actually says, and lyrics websites don't tell me either, but the contrast of the breakdown and his scream gave me goosebumps the first 100 times I'd heard the song. What's sad is that now the song no longer has the effect on me because I know it's there and have experienced it many times before. This reminds me of Poe, where he says that the artist is constantly trying to reach the 'Supernal Beauty' after experiencing a taster of it: art is essentially an attempt to elavate their soul to this supernal beauty. I honestly felt that at this point in 'Get to F**k' that I reached some form of supernal beauty; what makes it slightly ironic is that I found this 'supernal beauty' in a band that have been labelled - in my opinion, incorrectly - as Death Metal!
A few other songs that have had a similar effect on me:

• Blink 182 - 'First Date' interlude
• Taking Back Sunday - 'Timberwolves at New Jersey' - the first song that I ever appreciated the 'growl' type singing - although I realise that it's barely even that
• Four Year Strong - Maniac (R.O.D) - The guitaring at the outro
• Four Year Strong - Bada Bing! Wit A Pipe! - Many things with this song. When he sings "Roll with the punches..." at the beginning, followed by the introduction of the synth and then some of the most meaningful - in my subjective opinion - lyrics: "Sing it back to me, this is your life story." The mixture of these at the start of this song has given me many a goosebump
• Fall Out Boy - 'Dead On Arrival' when I realised how special this band were, and subsequently have become since the realise of 'From Under the Cork Tree.'
• Fall Out Boy - "Tell That Mick He Just Made My List Of Things To Do Today" With lyrics that at a certain spot in time, I could really relate to
• The Academy Is... - 'About A Girl' for helping me through one of the hardest times in my life :-)
• Gym Class Heroes - 'Faces In The Hall' for being one of the only songs that can evoke such a strong emotion by the end of the song
• Pendulum - 'Mutiny' I remember driving from Canterbury to Swindon, during a previously bad part of my life, and driving down the M25, around Caterham, with this song on really loud and loving all the different part, techniques, genres all fused into one song, and feeling immeadiatly uplifted.

These are just a few instances of songs that have unexpectingly had a profound effect on my being. I'm quite sure there are other songs that have had the same effect on me, and possibly even more, but I can't remember them. One thing that the Schuyler extract at the beginning of this post has inspired me to do, is to just be open to all culture, because there will be some form of art - again, in the broadest sense - that will unexpectingly move my soul.

Lastly, the sentiment that came from the poem made me consider certain things in my life, and has made me think in a way that I didn't before: something that Schuyler, and the postmodernists would have been happy with.

I now really don't know whether to write an essay on James Schuyler or on John Ashbery for my New York module; the other module will definatly feature a Wallace Stevens essay, who I'm sure you can tell (I don't know who you are, though I will still refer to you as you) I love - once again unexpectingly stumbling across his work amidst some very average work on a previous module.

James Schuyler - 'The Payne Whitney Poems'
PASTIME
I pick up a loaded pen and twiddle it.
After the blizzard
cold days of shrinking snow,
At visiting hour the cars
beloew my window form up
in a traffic jam. A fast-
moving man is in charge,
herding the big machines
like cattle. Weirdly, it all
keeps moving somehow. I read
a dumb detective story. I
clip my nails: hard
as iron or glass. The clippers
keep sliding off them. Today
I'm shaky. A shave, a bath.
Chat. The morning paper.
Sitting. Staring. Thinking blankly.
TV. A desert kind of life.

P.S

treat this as a post-script to my previous post. Just an after thought: Wii Fit is not a form of exercise. This could be one of those bullet-points on a facebook group that's named: 'You Know You're Really Fat When..'

• Wii Fit is my main form of exercise

I hate Nintendo now with a passion; it's bred a feeling that if you're good at Brain Training, then you're a fucking genius; that if you play on it's Wii Fit, then you'll lose that 10 stone that you desperately need to; that you're a musician if you play Wii Music; that you're good at Bowling/Golf/Boxing etc. if you play Wii Sports. Reality check: read a book, go for a jog, buy a fucking recorder, join some form of sport club.
This rant was brought to you by Facebook's status updates.
FUCK NINTENDO for it's horrible PR for the Wii

Next Week

Blogging involves also talking about your actual life doesn't it?! Hmm, next week is going to be amazing. Sunday (it's the start of the week in Argos, and therefore the start of the week in the 'real world') involves work (boo), followed by the arrival of James and Grant. Not sure what to do in the evening as everything shuts down; I'm thinking possibly going out for some food to somewhere: I know that people from Swindon are sheltered from the Nando's experience, and maybe I'll enlighten them in the same way I was enlightened a few weeks ago.
Monday sees us 3 travel to London to go see Alkaline Trio at Koko in Camden Town; I've been lucky enough to see most of my favourite bands live, but never had the oppurtunity to go see Alkaline Trio, so I am so excited, it's ridiculous. Not sure what to do during the day, possibly just head up to London early and do my usual: Canary Wharf for a Starbucks - I wonder if they have a Costa though?! Hm.
Tuesday could possibly be the end of my week! It starts with me dragging James and Grant to a lovely Modernism lecture - I have been told Grant isn't too keen on this, but the lecture is on the king of the world - not Martin Elbrow, but Wallace Stevens. Lunch will then follow the lecture in one of the campus bars, followed by my lecture on some New York postmodern literature thing (I haven't actually checked who it is yet). The evening is the part that my abrubtly end my life: Millwall vs Swindon Town. Eep. One thing is for sure, I'm not wearing my Swindon shirt.

Wednesday will be either spent in A&E, or with my doing a presentation on the King of the World: Wallace Stevens. Venue in the evening too with the Swindonians, plus a medley of the Canterbury lot (basically whoever I can get out).
Thursday and Friday, and Saturday don't matter, because Sunday-Wednesday is going to be immense; I don't think I've been this excited in such a long time.

Currently Listening To: Alkaline Trio - 'Good Mourning'
Currently Reading: John Ashbery's poetry
Currently Watching: 24 Season 6
Currently Playing: Football Manager Live and Geometry Wars 2

That's the culture part done. Football Manager Live, culture, lol. Gonna end again with a poem; I think it's only fitting to put a John Ashbery one because I absolutely love his poetry and have spent all evening reading it:
John Ashbery - 'These Lacustrine Cities'
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only an example.

They emerged until a tower
Controlled the sky, and with artiface dipped back
Into the past for swans and tapering branches,
Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.

[...]

The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see

You have a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all of your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

Excerpts

Every now and again I'll post either a full poem, or part of a poem - or thinking about it, maybe lyrics from a song - that I like, or mean something to me, or that I think are profound etc... This is an excerpt, rather than a whole poem:

Wallace Stevens - 'The Man With The Blue Guitar'

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Social Networking

Social Networking is an amazing thing isn't it. For me, social networking started when I was about, say 14, when I first signed up to MSN Messenger, and remember loving filling out my profile on MSN spaces, which with hindsight is probably the worst 'profile' I've ever created. I then dabbled with Bebo and MySpace before finally settling on Facebook.

Things such as Facebook are really bizarre though if you think about it: it sort of breeds a million-and-one false pretences in one's mind. Let's take my profile for instance; I have - according to Facebook - 333 friends. The word 'friend' is one such pretence that can be empowering to a certain degree. I'd probably say that out of those 333 people, I'd probably say that no more than 50 of those are 'real' friends; from those 50, probably only half of those I keep in regular contact with.
The phenomenon named 'Facebook-stalking' can harm someone's self-esteem in a similar way to watching porn can create some form of inferiority complex. I've just clicked on a random profile, and this said person has 476 'friends'. Looking at their wall, they have had 4 wall posts in the last month: if you want me to do the maths, that's an average of around a post a week. From this arises the question 'do they have a life?' Or is it that they don't really have any friends? In contrast I've had 102 wall posts in the same period - yes, it took ages to count, and no I'm not bragging. Simple logic would dictate that I have more friends than person 'x', although it's this thinking that I take issue with. I know person 'x' to a certain extent and know that this person probably has a lot more of a social life than myself; it's more likely that this person rather socialises with people through different mediums - Bebo, mobile phone or face-to-face - than through Facebook.

This is just an example of the problem with social networking. I can create an inferiority complex with my social situation through just browsing through someone's profile, doing a bit of Facebook stalking. Indeed Facebook - although Myspace was more guilty of this - does also breed a level of self-importance in its users. The thing that I used to take issue with most with MySpace was making the profile private, and only viewable to your friends. I can understand if the person in question was some form of celebrity, even within their own field; when the person is just a horrible scenester who thinks that by putting their profile as private, they are expressing some form of superiority over the rest of MySpace users that we can see the inherent flaws in social networking. This was my main reason for changing from MySpace to Facebook.
I think that social networking - and giving users a space to express themselves - in general though breeds this same self-importance. I'm guilty of this self-importance myself; I think that people care about what I write on my profile; they are probably indifferent, or completely unaware of what's on my profile though. This blog itself is an expression of my self-importance; I think that what I have to say is important and people actually care what I say. What in fact will happen is that someone will see the link in the website section of my Facebook status, see this blog, and think pompous-prick. This blog however is for me, and me alone. I'm hoping that not many people read this, and I can use it as a space for me to write about things that I'm interested in.
So, yeah, if anyone does read this blog, please don't read it as me trying to reach out to the world and preach all my shit. Future entries will hopefully be more entertaining than this bullshit that I've written. I may put excerpts of things that I'm reading, find funny etc.. Or link off to websites or videos. Whatever. I'm going to stop writing now and hope no-one finds this, if they do, I'm sorry that I've wasted 5 minutes of your life.

Hello World

just a shitty little entry to see how all this works