Shadows of Futurity: Does Poetry Come From the Future?
Freud observed with some regularity that the unconscious was known by the poets long before its discovery by psychoanalysis. The poet or artist, stricken with the hell of creativity and receptive to subterranean currents, provides the shape of, what…? an enigma wrapped up in a mystery? An irrational force made oblique? The unthinkable truth?
History indicates a veritable clamor of signs in the early 19th century, in a Europe just waking up to its own abyss, of precursors to the unconscious. With the industrial revolution grinding up whole cultures and environments, the sensitive poet-philosopher thought better of modernity and tried, as if for the first time, to think outside of it. Freud cites Schilling, Schopenhauer, and the little-known Ludwig Borne, in particular his 1823 essay The Art Of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days. This essay, having launched Freud’s own writing compulsion at a young age, would become in time the free-associative method of psychoanalysis and may very well be the greatest writing advice of all time; which advice is: write without thinking.
The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was no stranger to this not-thinking. I never cared for or remembered Shelley’s poetry—I was always more of a fan of Mary Shelley—but I’ll admit I’m still morbidly fascinated by his drowning in the Italian sea at age 29. He borrows from the 1798 Coleridge poem the idea of the aeolian harp by which the poet is just an instrument that vibrates from passing wind. Here is Coleridge: “And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?”
Shelley elaborates on this theme of natural inspiration in his essay A Defense of Poetry (1821) written only two years before Ludwig Borne’s how-to essay of similar vein: uh zeitgeist anyone? The second-to-last sentence of Shelley’s poetry essay got stuck in my apparatus from a very young age so that I’m still trying to figure for; it’s like a long 20 year version of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster cocktail from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) that tastes like having your brains smashed in by a lemon wrapped around a gold brick. But so anways here is the sentence:
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.
This turns out to be not a bad definition of what a later age would call structuralism. In short: language (or poetry) is something that one lives inside of. For Shelley language is the shredded remnants of a giant cyclic poem. The shreds of this poem span tens of thousands of years across spacetime; we live inside of the poem, but the poem also lives inside of us. Writing poetry is an attempt to follow the tracery of a structure that passes beyond human thought. But it is a building that, in the last instance, we made, even if it was “built by others”—as the architects so memorably put it. The wind that passes over the aeolian harp is a wind that blows off mass graves. As John Berger says: “The singer may be innocent but never the song.” It’s the ACAB theory of a cursed and ambient destiny. The past isn’t past because we still live inside of it, even in the future.
That’s one aspect of the unconscious—the discourse of the unconscious if you prefer—that Shelley intuited even if he couldn’t think it. He proves he can’t think it because he concludes the essay with the now very famous line: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Really? One wishes the poets were legislators. Can you imagine? But it seems like we are slouching towards a dystopia in which legislators disappear poets.
Getting messages from the future is something else entirely. Those gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present: what’s that about? This is the point about where my brains get displaced by that gold lemon bar. It’s the weird fact that certain writers/artists are ignored in their own time only to be suddenly apprehended later on, in the future. Why does that happen? This has the highly weird effect of feeling as if something in the future were pulling us towards it and the poet is that person who is aware of the gravity; the strange attractor theory of history; being drawn outside of our selves by what McKenna called the transcendental object at the end of time, if we wanted to get really zonked about it.
But I don’t think it’s that epic, more probably just an obscure feature of language: the future perfect: we will have been. Not that poems have to be in this mood but you get the idea. The subject/poet becomes readable only after they are gone. A certain person, tuned to the vibrations of a language that exists in the future, writes as if it were tomorrow. Or something like that. Perhaps in some sense they invent the future. Freud himself writes like this at times, like, for instance, in certain moments of The Three Essays on Sexual Theory (1905). This is a book that, given the repressions of the current United States government, still reads today as if it were written tomorrow.
Because certain poets/writers have readers who, the great majority of which, reside in the future suggests some power that is not subservient to the cursed destinies of repressive structure. Were we to be taxonomical about it, we would say that this is the unconscious in its daemonic aspect. It is the stranger. Today in the U.S. it is most clearly embodied by the migrant getting disappeared by the state.
The Unfinished Span, 2005-06, Rick Amor
