Outline Suggesting a Useful Introduction to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

1. Rochester is a materialist: his understanding is premised on proofs and elements that are tangible to him – he resists metaphysical presumption (unlike his poetic forebears, who I have recently discussed at length in this blog)--Rochester arrives in the Fruitful Restauration of Charles II.

2. This lack of metaphysical presumption even surfaces as a contempt for metaphysical conceits. He distrusts abstractions (and therefore discredits the capacity REASON has to apprehend)

Cf. “A Satyre against Reason and Mankind,” 37-42: wit is a whore, fatal to admiring fools; 62-81: the creative flights of fancy, beyond Material sense, makes a mite think he’s the image of the infinite—“And tis this very Reason I despise;”

3. Having dismissed metaphysic, his business is articulating pleasure of life. His intellectual understanding is conscientiously focused on material with the intent to elicit GREATER PLEASURE from his activities –intellectual or otherwise ('Satyre')

Cf. “A Satyre…” 92ff: “And we have modern Colystred Coxcombs, who/ Retire to think, ‘cause they have nought to do:/ But Thoughts are given for Actions government,/ Where Action ceases, Thought’s impertinent./ Our sphere of Action is Lifes happiness, And he who thinks beyond, thinks like an Asse; 104-05: Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy, Renewing appetites yours would destroy. My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat, Hunger calls out, my Reason bids me eat…

4. HE IS NOT, HOWEVER, outside his time: He asserts responsibility and role of the citizenry to organize government and the material purpose of a sovereign’s rule—that is to protect the citizenry and promote greater appreciation of life (as Rochester understands it—drink and fuck) among his citizenry ('Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery')

Cf. “To the Reader” Rochester is no anarchist: 17: To be lawless is true vassalage; 71: Lawless liberty is the Lowest slavery; “To the Reader:” 38: The certain way to reigne is to protect; “Sodom” 1ff: Bolloxinian: Thus in the Zenith of the lust I reigne:/ I eat to swive and Swive to eat againe./ Let other Monarchs who with their Scepters beare to keepe their subjects less in love [than] feare/ Bee slaves to Crownes, my nation shall be free… FURTHERMORE the central premise of the drama is that Bolloxinian is expected to fuck and his wife and all his mistresses and boys (read subjects)

5. SO THE RULER IS STILL A FOUNTAINHEAD from which the LIFEFORCE of the nation courses--the first and the last cock to cum in any political structure

Cf. as in Sodom, when the Prince ceases to trickle down power (semen and sex) the structure disintegrates and Cuntigratia is compelled to find others to fuck her Act II, Scene 2, 14-15 Lady Officinia: That day of marriage you may JUSTLY rue/ Since he will neither Swive nor suffer you

6. The complication is that, if Rochester is promoting an Enlightened Despot, he does not seem to bother suggesting that this despot necessarily must promote didacticism or knowledge—-promotion of pleasure and protection of welfare alone are the virtues he assigns as the DESPOT’S duties (this becomes problematic when Bolloxinian, his prince, can’t fuck everybody)

Cf. 'Sodom:' Scene B2: 100: Where Pintle cannot gain new breath/ the resureccons wors than Death

7. Rochester seems a good case for examining the reality of a frame inspired by Hobbes taken to its most extreme conclusion: if ruler does not care to advance his people except to licentiousness of body and living—should a body politic still be obliged to follow? Cuntigratia does not. Charles the II could not either and basically gave up on trying

8. Would Rochester say that such is necessarily a BAD thing? Compared to intolerance or violence? Can we presume that Rochester did not understand or perceive his disassociation with the PURITAN flavor of his time (of course not)—-he instead chose a more perpetual tendencies, i.e. the body, sexuality and lawful liberty in love (in doing so associated such with the court of Charles II, as anodyne to the convulsions of the Commonwealth)

Cf. Evident by his invective against the savagery of man: Satyre… 129ff: You see how far Man’s wisdome extends… Birds feed on birds, Beasts on each other prey, But savage Man alone does man betray: Prest by necessity they kill for food, Man undoes Man to do himself no good; Sodom: The Phallic sovereign: Act 4, Scene 5, 31: Damn silly dildoes—had I but the blisse/ of once enjoyeing sucha a prick as this,/ I would his will eternally obey, / and every minute Cunt should tribute pay; 41: A God to rule and keep our sex in awe!; Vide 'Artimizia to Chloe;' The destruction of Sodom by Sexually Transmitted Disease only occurred when the Prince swayed from the organization of sexuality—there is no invective against liberal sex as such, only against the Prince not having fucked the necessary amount of cunts to keep his kingdom functioning (Fuckadilla’s Epilogue)

End note: Rochester is verse already on its way down to, or out to, or toward, pure song in the English language. Rather than an architectizing rhetorician, Rochester was something like the outgrowth of a return to boggier lands.

Marvell's Republicanism

Marvell’s historical moment is marked by conflict between social content and the larger, political form encasing that content. The transformation of a culture from an emergent within is, as Raymond Williams says, the effective penetration by alternatives to the dominant social order. The emergent culture “depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form” to account for the evident transformations in the content or the character of society.

(An illustrative example of this would be the transition from the Ptolemaic model of the universe to the Copernican. Hans Blumenberg: “To describe the innovation initiated by Copernicus as the simple interchange of the position of the earth and sun is to make a molehill out of a promontory in the development of human thought. If Copernicus' proposal had had no consequences outside astronomy, it would have been neither so long delayed nor so strenuously resisted.” The difficultly in establishing the argument for a transition out of the Ptolemaic model of the universe was rooted in the lack of a larger paradigm in human thought that could validate the new facts presented by Copernicus and allow his model for the universe to transplant the old in a more immediate manner. Content preceded form but form had to eventually reevaluate and restructure itself to account for the transformations in the content of a society’s development. The genesis of the Copernican world, tr. Robert Wallace (Cambridge 1987), 1,772.)

The conflicted orders in Marvell’s political moment are the immemorial monarchy and the emergent Republicanism of the puritan revolution. Beside the distinct structures of power that such a transformation bridges, the emergence of Republicanism also produced a different sense of time, history and contingency. J.G.A. Pocock posits that Republican theory necessitates and, in its implementation, imports a certain kind of historicism:

The republic… was at once universal, in the sense that it existed to realize for its citizens all the values which men were capable of realizing in this life, and particular, in the sense that it was finite and located I space and time. It had had a beginning and would consequently have an end; and this rendered crucial both the problem of showing how it had come into being and might maintain its existence, and that of reconciling its end of realizing universal values with the instability and circumstantial disorder of its temporal life.

Unlike monarchical time, in which law and sense of self-legitimation presuppose immemorial custom, republican time has no prescriptive foundation upon which to legitimate its presence. It must make its own myths to promulgate an argument for its necessity. The central action Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” seems to be the ratiocination of the role of historical agents in different kinds of time. The notionally perlocutionary poem weighs one timescale against another:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.

Although the British Raj had not yet been instituted in India, the East India Tea Company had had a Royal Charter since 1600 and, as shown by ‘The Great Case of Monopolies” in 1683-85, there was already legal contention to the fact that the monarchy had given monopolistic sanction to the Company in Marvell’s time. The mention of the lady’s presence in India must then be read as associated with commercial empire. The timescale of empire as evoked the poem, were it a possibility for these lovers, would be one in which passive courting would be possible.

As the poem goes on to assert that such patience is not possible, with “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,” that timescale is repudiated in favor of one in which individual agency is so aggressive that it makes even the sun run. In the line previous to this last, however, the poet admits that they cannot make their sun stand still. Having admitted that the lovers have no capacity to control the sun’s immobility, it cannot stand to reason that they should have a capacity to control the sun’s mobility.

Marvell’s investment in a republican sense of time—-or one in which individual agency amounts to historical events—-is undercut by the autonomy of events (the sun’s autonomy), while simultaneously underscoring the urgent need for the kind of individual agency required in republican theory (making the sun run). Pocock might argue that this is essentially a dialectic failure inherent to republican theory of the time, in so far as he understands the English revolutionary moment to have been:

[S]ubjected to strain by the republican decision to pursue universal values in a transitory form…

The crux of the issue seems to be that Marvell is attempting to position himself in a double time—-at once needing to assert the political stasis and reflexivity of naturalized institution (a reliant sun), while allowing—and indeed arguing for-—the revolutionary emergence of republican historicity. That is, the poet here expresses a sense of responsibility to the contingency of events albeit in a vestigial frame of timeless, naturalized custom.

In a previous post I've suggested that the Metaphysical moment was a sort of political reaction--or even a physical response to the political terms as exhibited in the corpus of some 17c poets. In thinking about Marvell against Crashaw and Herbert, something beneath the surface seems similarly disembodied.

On the Allegorical: Even Dwarfs Started Small

From Grammar to Rhetoric, there is no exegetic escalation without expansion. Grammar, as a rigid structure of definition, is closed or more enclosing than Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an exhibition of the permeability between terms.

If we take these two as bifurcating epistemes in the history of language at any given time, we are doing great disservice to the nature of language and the stake of humanity in the annals of history. One comes to know of oneself by mirrors. Rhetoric is nothing without the face of Grammar upon which to reflect.

As a thought in this reflection, allegory is best understood. Our hermeneutics are already always established. Our learning and skill with signs are not factors which we must consider before we inquire. Emulation and linkage occur, more or less, rather than are enacted. We indeed are often passively active. Allegory, then, occurs.

Unlike metaphor, which is an expressed relation between things, allegory is a resemblance of relationships. More about happenings, it seems often to just happen. When it happens, however, there are distinct registers which it can assume.

Closed allegory, or rigid allegory, or allegory which is less thoughtful in the mirror and more exactingly observant, occurs when the figures in an allegorical comparison are meant to be deciphered back into their original status. It is codification intended for decodification with the legend articulated in the composition. Certain medieval morality tales come to mind as the most obvious examples ('Pearl' and the 'Romance of the Rose,' though the best example is definitely the 400 AD 'Psychomachia' by Prudentius, in which Hope, Chastity and Humility battle Pride, Wrath and Avarice for the human soul).

Open allegory, or allegory which is more unsettled in its cognitive process in the mirror, occurs when Rhetoric is allowed to think about itself as Grammar and about itself as Rhetoric thinking about itself as Rhetoric and Grammar. These allegorical constructs have no defined decoding scale. They are not exacting. Inexact resemblances of action occur as early as 'Piers Ploughman' in English, but the happening goes back as far as humans began noticing their gestures mirrored in others, though somewhat inexactly. 'Piers' is a psychomachia that disturbs and renders breachable the boundaries between allegorical resemblers.

The more open that allegory becomes the more sympathetic that it feels. Emotive allegory is the most human allegory, the nearest to allegory in its purest sense. Shadenfreude is a deeply disturbing occurrence of allegory in the mind: Glee in a negative upshot which could well be our own, and in that case not so gleeful. The relationship is determined as an emotive corollary that simultaneously associates us with and separates us from a similar other. Being a distinctly German term, it is perhaps the Germans that best understand this. Herzog's 1970 'Even Dwarfs Started Small' allegorizes revolt and liberation in a disturbingly comical literalization of allegorical relationship.

The movie is cast entirely with dwarfs, who overrun the prison-complex in which they are kept. The mirror of seeing ourselves in a lesser other is literalized and, unlike allegory in which we decipher A for X, B for Y, and C for Z, the correlative between the viewer and the miniature figure for the viewer is an emotive glee.

The midgets run amok in the compound--killing a pig, stealing a truck, tormenting two blind children, crucifying a monkey--all while laughing maniacally. The viewer inevitably laughs with them or at them (the distinction is difficult to determine), and in so doing we are living out the emotive status of revolt. They laugh at the suffering of others and we laugh at them, laughing in effect at ourselves, albeit in miniature.



The struggle for liberation, the peril of extremism and zealotry, the violence and decimation of oppression and revolt on the human psyche are lived out in them and us. But they are not discretely allegorical: No moment or character stands in for another. The speculations of Rhetoric are far from the face of Grammar. It is here imagining itself as someone else, or rather speculating on the permeability of human action.

No other film has made these thoughts as lucid to me. Its means are, undeniably, demented and over-literalizing. Often we need a swift boot to the head to wake us from a deep sleep.

The Grotesque Mr. Richard Crashaw

To preclude an overly tedious account of mid 17c political trends in England, I'll presume that the reader trusts me enough to accept that it was a compressed period of violent transitions. After three civil wars (1642-46, 1648-49 and 1649-51), Charles I had been beheaded, the Rump Parliament fractured and failed, and Cromwell named Lord Protector of the Commonwealth (1653-58). Even before the wars, there was great suspicion of Charles' closeness to Catholic agents and powers, which, before Charles, had been vigorously suppressed in England by James I (1603-25).

To these convulsions, Crashaw arrived (b.1613, d.49); a period of intense politicization of the corpus of English man and woman. Within a very short period, individuals had experienced intense transformations in their legal and political status. I suspect that this instability resulted in the denaturalizations of language common to poets of this time. The Metaphysicals, as they're known, had to impart that peculiar, unbodily affect because physicality had become a legal liability.

With Herbert, for example, the activities of the mind as exhibited in his poetry are reckoned as an emanation--or struggle for emanation--of God within. But Herbert, poet, must still be effecting the poetry, so that the sense of material fixity in Herbert is continuously being undermined. Herbert's evacuation of his own agency removes the assertions of his poetry from a liable, physical person but simultaneously insists that the material of the poem should stand as a representation of the poet's, Herbert's, struggle to create.

With Crashaw, who expatriated to France during the civil wars to pursue the Catholic inclinations he had long been fostering, the metaphysicality is tended to with a distinct sensuality. Rather than evacuate, Crashaw saturates his lines with often conflicted physicalization and imagery. Describing the Christ's foot receiving Mary Magdalene's kisses:

This foot hath got a Mouth and lippes,
To pay the sweet summe of thy kisses:
To pay thy Teares, an Eye that weeps
In stead of Teares such Gems as this is.

Are they mouths? Or are they eyes? The wounds of the Christ? Is it possible to reconcile the presence of all possibilities without considering the passage grotesque? In this regard, Crashaw's poetry is fundamentally without a true body. Objects, organs and extremities liquify from sensible to insensible to strangely sensible.

Where then is the body? It is sometimes forgotten that the Christian religion began as a deeply Earthy movement. Compared to Islam, which has traditionally shunned representation of man or the world and is more aligned with a certain algebraic understanding of beauty and spirituality, Christianity, especially the Catholic version, is extremely sensuous, anthropomorphic and organic. An excellent example of this could be glimpsed in a study of Toledo in the 13th century, when the great Arabic preservation of Greek texts was being translated into Latin, while the tendencies of the Baroque are beginning to surface in the construction of some Catholic cathedrals (ie. Arabic Muslims had kept account of ideas while Christians were erecting massive, voluptuous temples of Christ--Toledo at the time was famed for its religious tolerance and had large communities of Jews, Muslims and Christians living peacefully together).

Crashaw's body does not exist--it could not exist, for reasons detailed earlier. But his idiom required he understand its non-existence in material terms. He was trying to speak of unearthliness with a strict language of the Earth. For this reason, his grotesque is more appealing than Gongora's, which often feels more conflicting than conflicted:

Pasos de un peregrino son, errante,
Cuantos me dictó versos dulce Musa
En soledad confusa,
Perdidos unos, otros inspirados...

Era del año la estación florida
En que el mentido robador de Europa
-Media luna las armas de su frente,
Y el Sol todos los rayos de su pelo-,
Luciente honor del cielo,
En campos de zafiro pace estrellas,
Cuando el que ministrar podía la copa
A Júpiter mejor que el garzón de Ida,
-Náufrago y desdeñado, sobre ausente-,
Lagrimosas de amor dulces querellas
Da al mar; que condolido,
Fue a las ondas, fue al viento
El mísero gemido,
Segundo de Arïón dulce instrumento...

Crashaw's denaturalizations--with their wounds that eyes and are mouths--seem to me more blindly natural.

Words and the Presidents that Use 'em

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/17/washington/20090117_ADDRESSES.html

Bill Henry Harrison's excessive use of 'power' perhaps underscored an overweening? After his two-hour inaugural speech (delivered without overcoat or hat--to exhibit the sturdy stock of an old soldier still in him) he caught cold which turned to pneumonia and pleurisy. Died after a sickly thirty days in office.

Shattered the hopes of the Whigs and Clay's American System. Was at least the first sitting president to be photographed.


It's also said that Harrison sang himself into the presidency, as his campaign was the first to use an endemically catchy tune to fuel large crowds with song (and drink). The euphonious concatenation of polemic against Van Buren and saturated support of Harrison (nicknamed Tippecanoe) and Tyler is titled 'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.'

What's the cause of this commotion, motion, motion,
Our country's going through?
It is the ball a-rolling on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler too.
For Tippecanoe and Tyler too.
And with them we'll beat little Van, Van, Van,
Van is a used up man.
And with them we'll beat little Van...

'Tippecanoe and Tyler Too' reverberates with the patting of a military drum. The power of its mellifluity perhaps caught too greatly in the heart of its notional progenitor? Alternate title for this post could've been 'Presidents and the Words that Use 'em.'

Guns and Verse

Trope of the gun rhyming in the first person gained a great amount of currency in the 90s. The most famous example is 'I Gave You Power' by Nas, 1996:



Before this, Organized Konfusion had done a less effective trope of the rhymer as a bullet in 1994's 'Stray Bullet:'



Tupac's 1996 'Me and My Girlfriend' is often erroneously assumed to be about him and a bandit lover of his. But it seems that the numbering in the song only makes sense if he's talking about a gun, 'picked you up when you was nine,' 'bought you some shells when you turned twenty two,' and 'forty five but she still alive.' He would've had to have known her for 36 years by his own account, though he only lived 25. Additionally the sexuality between him and his girlfriend becomes much more interesting and evocatively bizarre if she is understood as his gun:



But the trope wasn't created in the 90's. George Herbert's 'Artillery,' c.1630:

As I one evening sat before my cell,
Methought a star did shoot into my lap.
I rose and shook my clothes, as knowing well
That from small fires comes oft no small mishap;
When suddenly I heard one say,
Do as thou usest, disobey,
Expel good motions from thy breast,
Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.

I, who had heard of music in the spheres,
But not of speech in stars, began to muse;
But turning to my God, whose ministers
The stars and all things are: If I refuse,
Dread Lord, said I, so oft my good,
Then I refuse not ev’n with blood
To wash away my stubborn thought;
For I will do or suffer what I ought.

But I have also stars and shooters too,
Born where thy servants both artilleries use.
My tears and prayers night and day do woo
And work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse.
Not but I am (I must say still)
Much more obliged to do thy will
Than thou to grant mine; but because
Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws.

Then we are shooters both, and thou dost deign
To enter combat with us, and contest
With thine own clay. But I would parley fain:
Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast.
Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine:
I must be so, if I am mine.
There is no articling with thee:
I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.

Canibus has a response to LL Cool J in which he samples Nas' 'I Gave You Power' but it isn't as effective and it's my opinion that Canibus tends to go on longer than necessary to convey his point. It doesn't hold the trope tightly enough and is too boring to include here.

There are at least two troubadour examples of a similar trope, but the general sense of weaponry in verbal sparring is found throughout in that tradition. If those trobars are recognized for creating romantic love as we know it today, their additional contribution to the beautification of violence and instruments of violence should not go without recognition. Love and war are perhaps like blood, which, though blue inside us and red when released, is essentially one fluid. Bertrans de Born, c.1200:

A Perigord pres del muralh

At Perigord near to the wall,
Aye, within a mace throw of it,
I will come armed upon Baiart, and if I find there
That fat-bellied Poitevin,
He shal see how my steel cuts.

For upon that field I will make a bran-mash of his brains,
mixed with the maille of his armor.

Elsewhere, an Easter song from Bertrans quickly degenerates into a war chant. As early as the 'clamor' of birds, Bertrans' true inclinations are itching to be scratched:

Well pleaseth me the sweet time of Easter
That maketh the leaf and the flower come out
And it pleaseth me when I hear the clamor
of the birds, their song through the wood;
And it pleaseth me when I see through the meadows
The tentts and pavilions set up, and great joy have I
When I see o'er the campagna knights armed and horses arrayed

And it pleaseth me when the scouts set in flight
the folk with their goods
And it pleaseth me when I see coming together after them
a host of armed men
And it pleaseth me to the heart when I see strong castles besieged
And barriers broken and riven,
and I see the host on the shore all about shut in with ditches
And closed in with lisses of strong piles
etc., etc.

In another song, Bertrans argues for war, insisting 'there's too much peace about.' The compulsion to war has no cause save the unbearable stasis of peace. Bertrans' songs derive their energy from violence and war. His love songs are boring until, like his Easter song, they degenerate to war chants.

There are parameters in the warrior troubador's method that easily and not so superficially align with the efforts of newer rhymsters. I include here, to conclude, some of the most energetic:

Raekwon, Ghostface, U God, Masta Killah, and Cappadonna's 1996 'Winter Warz.' Cappadonna 'a-cometh' and, in my opinion, taketh the spoils of the raid:

Adventures of Philip Marlowe

Farewell, My Lovely, the 1975 film adaptation of Chandler's novel, has a 57 year old Robert Mitchum playing the role of 37 year old Philip Marlowe, private eye. Set in 1941, it seems that Mitchum--whose signature in noir as the shamus with class perpetually transacts in Marlowesque characters--is playing a role made and set for him a score of years earlier.

We see Mitchum trying to play his younger self. His movements were always clunky but in this movie they seem clunky and unoriginal--as if in trying to emulate his own awkwardness, he becomes less naturally awkward but doubly awkward because he keeps trying--an old man trying desperate to live the fire and days of a more stupid youth.

To add to the sum weirdness of the movie, there is a brief cameo by Sylvester Stallone, in which his character shoots and kills a violent, obese, dutch madame. Stallone too will later star in a film which will put him in a role designed to have him play a younger him: the recently released Rocky VI. Except that Rocky VI isn't set in 1976. It's just an older Rocky boxing again.

Philip Marlowe, in Mitchum's older, less agile hands, is haunted by the ephemerality of his name. There is no Marlowe in Mitchum's portrayal. It is Mitchum playing Mitchum, while the ghost of Marlowe moves between them. The ideational Marlowe, the tropological entity on the surface of the performance, is dead but evidently appearing in the convulsions of Robert Mitchum.

For some reason--whether the scenes, the portrayals, the premise; I don't know--the movie disturbed me. Marlowe, who becomes something like a ghost, is troublesomely haunting. Also--color movies set in times when color film didn't exist (but when black and white did) disturb me deeply.

For more Marlowe: The Adventures of Philip Marlowe was a CBS radio show running 1947-51. Ninety of the half-hour long, Old Time Radio episodes are available here for downloading:

http://www.freeotrshows.com/otr/a/Adventures_Of_Philip_Marlowe.html