James Agee's spiral (and the dust devil): from the apogee of apologia to the apnea of the plunge

Perhaps some of us may remember how James Agee, after having gently coaxed open a portal for the readers’ trust in the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, immediately thereafter dispelled our equipoise in the first sentence by saying, “The house and all that was in it had now descended deep beneath the gradual spiral it had sunk through; it lay formal under the order of entire silence.”  

What other convention, the form of the spiral, could express such a passage from the without of the readers' world to the interior world of this writer's topic of deprivation, of dire straits? And after so gracefully asking our forgiveness for stringing us along, maneuvering us there in the first place, proceeded to bludgeon us with the shear truth of irretrievable stability, disorient us with an other-worldy view of efficiency or the disturbing glee of terrestrial bedlam. The sound that we hear through the supposed silence is the disappearance of the happy moment, the suck of Wall Street wizardry!

From Pandorina's tail, spermatozoan, to the spirochete, dust devils and the masters whip we are all tacking through endless waves of resistance.

The Sign of the Times: Yeats, Pound and Heartfield

A brief thought about the poets W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound and the public temperament leading up to and during the World Wars.  I don’t believe it to be mere reduction to note the shapes of the symbols of their fixations, the gyre and the swastika. For Yeats (and his wife), they stood aside and perplexed by the vortex of the times and attempted by way of spiritualism and the occult to retrieve some notion (specifically in his book, A Vision) of what was happening historically; he looked at the vortex from without it as if he were not engaged himself in history, but once they gazed into the wheel of it it was all bound up in the complexities of assigning faculties to references to phases of the moon.  Pound on the other hand looked straight down into and out of the gullet of Fascism as if he were himself it’s tongue, and thus directly spun the vortex, a sense for which the swastika was a natural symbol.

There is another notable figure now that comes to mind, John Heartfield, whom also viewed the temperament of his times, but from a true artist/semioticians perspective.  His “O Tannenbaum...” a commentary on the violent absolutist form that fascism took (in the swastika), revealed the torquing temperament of the times by the simple bending of a tree’s branches.  The tree in this instance is a symbol of the folkish and natural origins of National Socialism in Europe. Thus the tree is twisted into a symbol of violent abrupt transformation and the breakneck speed of modernism.  

In these three examples it might be said can be seen the different ways that humans deal with the changing conditions of life or perceptions of truth.  We can stand aside and attempt to draw some spiritual or metaphysical sense from it and engage it safely from a distance or through a glass as if we were in a laboratory. On the other hand we could step into it and let it absolutely control us and become one and lost in it as our only solution.  Or, we could recognize our part in the making of it from the start, and from this awareness of choice in the matter, recreate a new and better solution.

Just as I mentioned in a previous blog about Joel Kovel, teachers would become targeted, as they did in NAZI Germany, for any possible anti-Americanism by the fascist right.  It has now become dangerous for teachers to discuss politics in or outside the classrooms. But just as importantly, teachers have a right as all citizens do to choose a political affiliation without fear of reprisal by their employer or the general public. Indoctrination through fear and denial indeed seems more to be the case in America, than through good faith or social justice and the persuasive measures of our educators.  Do you believe in toting the fact-dismissive Nationalist view of history at the cost of contemporary justice?  Think hard about that one!

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/05/23/489097/anonymous-group-of-scott-walker-supporters-attacks-radical-public-school-teachers-who-criticized-education-cuts/

"circumjacent stupidity"

"Circumjacent stupidity" This is how one vorticist (Ezra Pound) described the source of their angst and aggression; and it also provides a visual counterpoint to the idea suggested by the magazine's title "BLAST," of their explosive psychic response to the general critical temperament (between the wars and at the beginning of modernism). The violent, harsh geometrical lines of the vorticists (and the futurists) was in effect the shattering of the picture plane, the sound of its release from the frame; the border line between representative art and life was at once banished forever then into sentimentality and advertisement. And soon enough everything witnessed by a recursive eye was seduced into the realm of artifact, performance, absurdity, deconstuction and finally "post-modernism".  Art had become like a golem walking the streets, disassembling everything we thought we had set in stone, realigning everything according to the idea that all is unstabile and only temporarily "real".  This first fearful temperament, this angst could only have been expressed by the severity and dynamic force of diagonal and reverberating line.  And no wonder it is so easy to clutch so fiercely to fascist emblem, and to nationalism through the waving of a flag.