Saved by Miracle: Notes and Criticism 2014

8/10/2019 Saved by Miracle: Notes and Criticism 2014

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Saved by Miracle:

Criticism and Notes 2014Adam Fieled


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Preface

Saved by miracle, a phrase from Keats St. Agnes Eve, sums up for me the pursuit ofincisive art and literary criticism in a year (2014) so beleaguered by cacophonous incoherence

and plummeting perspectives that merely looking at a current newspaper is like putting oneshand in a meat-grinder. With a zeitgeist so insistent on the inane and the nonsensical, mycriticism this year has leaned towards extreme baroque-ization. Ive rebelled by upping mysocio-historical ante on what Ive been calling, for several years now, major high artconsonance. One of my goals for 2015, candidly, is to shoot again for a sensibility moreabout relationships, sexuality and raw edgesa passionate sensibility, rather than thedispassion and attempt at lofty impersonality partly on display here. Oddly, according toEastern horoscopes this should be inverted, 2014 being Horse year, 2015 Goat.Nevertheless, Im pleased to offer this collection to anyone who might share my interest inkeeping a flame lit, which stands almost alone as being a redemptive one for the human racefor all time. Major high art consonance, unlike the vast majority of popular culture artifacts

we are perpetually bombarded with, is solid. I hope this criticism manifests enough solidityto hold water with the art being addressed. If it does, this chunk of my year has not beenwasted.

Adam Fieled 10-23-14


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NOTES ON KEATS

ADAM FIELED
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Keats, and what the phantasmagoric has to offer in coherence/complexity- the

phantasmagoric being a mode of the visionary- and what in it differs from Flaubert's

hyper-sensuality- Keats' phantasmagoric approach in "Nightingale" argues for the

manifest complexity/density of mere subjectivity, and this argument is a critical

commonplace in relation to Romanticism, but lifted into a kind of textual ether by a

dazzling array of polarities, swimming in and out of textual focus. They all vie for

predominance, generating friction which gives off an intense visceral heat,

heightened by melopoeiac mastery, into a sense of the text as a juggernaut orconflagration, an intense, sustained, and burning moment. This is the unique

province of major high art consonant poetry over prose. The momentary nature of

the lyric poem- maximum coherence/maximum complexity as an inspiration, in and

out, and over- has, as its principle, and as Keats noticed himself, intensity as its

signature virtue against prose and other forms of literature. Why the Odes establish

Keats as an almost peerless lyric poet is that when a phantasmagoric edge is added

to cognitive-affective intensity, the lyric poem creates a map of creative cognitive

consciousness which prose, for all its expansive objectivity and perspective

adumbration, cannot.

This is how the odal task Keats sets himself reveals Flaubert, in the aggregate, too-

by representing cognitive processes and responses to processes, we perceive what

animates the subjectivity-in-motion behind all textuality. This perception-

sensibility ascending into understanding and straining upwards towards the solidity

of principles- encompasses, in its verticality, both Romanticism and its antitheses.

The lyric principle is set in opposition to Tolstoy's- the self-represented complexity

of individuals, rather than the complexity of individuals objectively rendered. The
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warmth in lyric poetry against Tolstoy's ice, and sober maturity- is it solely an

adolescent warmth? Keats' phantasmagoric sensibility does suggest a hyper-

developed interior- the sounds and senses Keats identifies with, which he cleaves to

himself and his own consciousness, are many and various. This promiscuity defies

the frugality of age, literary and otherwise. Yet, by demonstrating an apogee of

human consciousness in text, Keats manifests an ideal which Flaubert and Tolstoywere forced to miss- that complex human consciousness can create magnificent

crescendos, the sense of total cognitive and sensual ravishment that Emma Bovary

and Anna Karenina, both readers of mid-level texts and lower, can only pine after.

Phantasmagoric vistas, the romanticism of extreme momentary intensity- in short,

genuine poetry- the principle to achieve these effects is inclusion, movements

towards things (material and cognitive) and embraces of them. Wordsworth enacts

the same textual process, even in his semi-objective Prelude. Flaubert and Tolstoy

are compelled by other imperatives- yet, genuine cognitive ascension towards

profound understanding and solid principles is more fulfilled by the objectivity of

the non-romanticplain glance. Ultimately, the two approaches don't need to negateeach other- the 60-40 advantage I give to objectivity and prose owes to the

inaccessible nature of real intensity in the human world, and the Odes especially are

such rare birdsthat they cannot age completely gracefully over the larger, more

imposing realities of human life as they manifest, and permanently so, and as

consciousness ages towards understanding of sense past sensibility and the allure of

the momentary and its phantasmagoria.


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The ultimate edge Keats holds over Wordsworth- of strangeness, odd proportions,

the uncanny, intriguing semantic juxtapositions- is especially apparent once the

limitations of Wordsworth's system have defined themselves against textual

systems which exceed it. The chiasmus of nature (natural forces) and the mind of

man- how nature, once perceived in the most purified light (as, perhaps, a set of

principles), imposes heightened cognition, understanding into distilled reason- mustfall, once the acknowledgment is made that Wordsworth's system is just another

mode of Romantic (at least semi-adolescent, in its projected narcissism) escapism.

The escapist valve is towards a subjectively held and maintained psycho-affective

transcendence, which the rigorous demands of human society, its labyrinthine,

ineluctable complexities (as is seen in Flaubert and Tolstoy) could easily disperse

into the nothingness of raw sensibility again. The antithesis: an impulse towards

understanding and distilled reason not merely as an escape, but as transcendence-

via-direct engagement, not seeking understanding in the otherness of natural forces,

or pronouncing facile, half-understood blessings on a human continuum falsely

linked to natural forms employed as intoxicants. These forms subsist at a distance

from human systematic reasoning, or attempts at such.

The manner in which Keats intoxicates himself (and the extent to which his

intoxication is a simultaneous movement towards ecstasy and agony, fulfillment and

denial, consummation and abandonment) is more grounded in human reality-

especially, the confrontation between the human mind and physical mortality. The

nature-cocaine Wordsworth imbibes is too much about living forever/eternal life-

despite evident technical mastery and a prosaic style fluid, limpid, and complex

enough to place the Prelude next to Keats' Odes, Wordsworth's simplified thematic

dynamics, and what about human reality is forced by his own systematic fronts to

escape notice, relegates him to a position beneath Keats, whose textual bravery andboldness exceed his. Moreover, there are few angles from which the Odes do not

appear strange- their formal-thematic angularity and balance of finely crafted and

misshapen textual elements render them interesting for reasons past their vaunted

Romantic passion, sincerity, and object-animating vivacity. In other words, to

understand Keats' Odes by the Kantian cognitive model (sensibility-understanding-

reason) is to get caught on each level by a kind of camouflage which hides how the

circuitry is connected, how it coheres to impose an impression of depth, solidity, and
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Keats' "Negative Capability" has become a lit-crit commonplace, so that scholars and

readers forget the richness of its significations. To balance psycho-affective

polarities without "irritably grasping after reason" (or principles, in the Kantian

sense, which specifically suggests deductive reasoning and its sobriety, against the

aesthetic) is one cognitive level Negative Capability accounts for; but the other

question (which the Odes answer) is how polarities might be expressed in text in a

negatively capable fashion. To achieve this end in the most spectacular possible

fashion, Keats has recourse to dialects of sense/sensibility, initiated from a

subjective stance of acknowledgement of the darkness of physical extinction, while

maintaining affective vivacity in relation to his own psycho-affective processes- all

the data being processed finds worthwhile and illustrative objective correlatives inwhat Keats opens textually. Keats' objective correlatives in the Odes- his nightingale,

Grecian Urn, autumn, melancholy, and the rest- have a way of jolting his textual

gambits up from sensibility to understanding and then (importantly, by induction

rather than deduction) distilled/principled reason, not initially grasped for but

floated up to gracefully and artfully.

The time/space coordinates projected by Keats onto his Odal objects create dynamic

tensions which torque and transform depending on any given reader's subjectivity-

the succession of vignettes in "Nightingale," in particular, create a warped sense of

temporal textual succession, in which a succession of disappearances is enacted (the

poet, the nightingale, the song, the state of consciousness and entire sensibilitywhich illuminated the succession as a landscape, a forest scene), so that

conventional space/time coordinates are replaced as the eruption of time zones is

followed by dissolution of the same; and the conceptions which arise from this

enactment, animated by the Odal objective correlatives, have to do with an essential

mutability inhering in the congealed formal matter of Keats' subjectivity, which it is

the unique province of major high art consonant poetry to reveal. This breach in

time/space coordinates is explosive, spectacular, compulsively demonstrative; in
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short, Romantic; and that, the demonstration of psycho-affective mutability

potentialities, is what Romanticism at its best brings to the philosophical table,

against the conceptually grounded stability of the higher echelons of novelistic

prose, their vistas onto human collectives.

The lyric poet, Adorno writes, is self-posited against society; and defines himself inrelation to the entire human continuum of types which he is not; isolated by his (or

her) capacity for mutability (on psycho-affective levels) and cognitive boundary-

dissolution (into, presumably, transcendental realms once conventional frameworks

are eliminated), but also ossified into a kind of stunted adolescence by his (or her)

inability to view things plainly, and discern profound truth from illusion. That's why,

though Keats' textual bravery exceeds Wordsworth's, and his confrontations with

mortality are affecting, his appeal still lies in this inducement of states of

intoxication. If textual truth accords with textual beauty (to follow Grecian Urn

through), Keats must fare relatively poorly next to Flaubert and Tolstoy, whose

concerns and efforts wear more comfortably over long periods of time. Through this

textual strainer, Keats' apogee of intoxication is assimilated and the centralRomantic fallacy pierced through- that the dissolution of boundaries, psychic and

otherwise, is commensurate with a kind of enlightenment, aesthetic or otherwise.

Adam Fieled, 2014


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Notes on MiltonAdam Fieled

There exists for me an amusing connection and chiasmus between Miltons Satan, StygianCouncil and the remainder of his infernal crew and the malignant forces in twentieth centuryAmerica which have propelled us off a precipice into this drastic recession. What lightLucifer carries with him into Chaos and beneath renders him, perhaps, still one third angel;thus, the efficacy of his rhetoric and its subtle variations, stratagem, and twists. What Satanstwentieth century America produced were bimbos in comparison, sans angelic third, alsoproducing rhetoric and strategies but in so crass, reductive, and barbaric a fashion that we inthe twenty-first century could laugh, if not forced to bear the weight of the collectiveforgeries and mutilations. Since we have not lost Paradise but the simulacrum of Paradise,our task is to begin the reconstruction of an Edenic space for ourselves (as artists, asdialecticians) from the ruins of a now-revealed, quite totalized charnel ground; whateverAngelic Third now remains in Americas inhabitants needs to find a manner and means ofdeveloping, extending, and exercising itself; a tall order, and the work of several decades, atleast, beginning with Americas economic modes of production (base).

That both Miltons Heaven and his Hell are overrun with bureaucrats and red-tape protocolsis also a source of wry amusement to me. As is not often pointed out, God develops his ownstrategies in the tasks he delegates in different directions; and his omniscience must be


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balanced by the imperative to exist in the same time/space coordinates that everyone elsedoes. This impossible existence-within-omniscience makes of Miltons God as beleaguered apresence, in some ways, as his Satan. Miltons God is a suffering God, an immaculate artistforced into reckoning the free will and imperfections of his creations. Undercurrents inParadise Lost suggest that God is cognizant almost upon his creation that Man must fall, and

thus Satan partially triumph over him; and God, with the help of his son, scrambles to makeplans accordingly. Procedures with bureaucracy and red tape shield him from the direct,painful glare of his own failure as creator, ruler, and sustainer.

One wonders: what culmination would attend the spectacle of Adam refusing to taste thefruit of the Tree of Knowledge once Eve eats, and falls? Would God take Eve out, andreplace her with a new Eve? Would he create a palimpsest over Woman generally? Perhaps,Eve remaining, God would be forced to configure a plan of action around half-fallen Man; arace then granted partial access to Eden, requiring the half-intervention of Gods Son, andmired in the half-life of the half-disobedient. A story with this resolution (the Choose YourOwn Adventure of Milton, as it were) would make for an interesting half-epic; less sturmund drang, less pathos, more banality and even a hinge to the drollery and insouciance of

Swift and Swiftean satire.

.

On repeated readings of Paradise Lost, an edge emerges, one of internal contradictionbyincluding apostrophes to classical antiquity, and its pagan Gods and heroes, Milton creates aspace for himself in his own text less comfortable and more contradictory than is usuallysupposed by readers and scholars. This space, its darkling hint of distance and alienation,renders suspect aspects of the text, such as Milton's misogyny, more open to interpretationand less "owned" on a first-person narrative level as Milton's own. Milton's misogyny, infact, may not be what it appears to be at allmerely a faithful representation of something

imparted to him, rather than a closely guarded thematic shibboleth of a more ideal state ofhuman affairs (Eden, the Edenic). How Milton is willing to posit himselfboth as anaggregate of textual traditions and representative of an occupied middle space or groundtakes the Biblical myth of Eden and Man's fall and regularly, at intervals, destabilizes it,placed among other myths, other histories, other modes of narrative, textual, and, withintextual, formal-thematic awareness. Once we view Paradise Lost as a destabilizing agent, weare prepared to acknowledge that the parallelism between Milton, behind his text, andMilton's Satan within his text, is very acute, and both Milton and Milton's Satan employdirect and indirect rhetoric to destabilize conventions and the enactment and non-enactmentof "obedience," in both general and specific senses.

The profanity of pagan Gods, both their exploits and the manner in which they areworshipedMilton's quest for an aesthetic ideal, "ideal textuality," necessitates that heinclude apostrophes in their direction. The implicit suggestion is that Milton's aesthetic questis, and must be, commensurate with his quest both to represent, and embody within theconfines of textual creation, spiritual purity. Paradise Lost is thus aligned with both an art-aesthetic history and a strictly spiritual, or spiritualized, oneand Milton prefigures Keatsby the exercise of Negative Capability within this duality. Milton knows, of course, that hiseventual audience will be more artists than spiritualists, and that he will receive his verifiedranking as an artist, rather than as a sageso that the dissolution of his constitutive


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subjectivity into unresolved binaries, hewn together by dedicated force and aesthetic intent,delivers him into a textual consummation whose opacity is, and must be, irretrievable,against the hermeneutic impulse to valorize Milton as a purity-signifier, which he is not. Thesense of bifurcated intentionality is very prevalent in Paradise Lostas is the irony that oneliteral, concrete "paradise lost" by the author is the paradise of fulfilling singular intentions in

a singular (as in not multiple) fashion.

Applying a Deconstructive critical approach to Milton, and ascribing to Paradise Lost acertain opacity, takes from Milton what is almost invariably attributed to himthe textualrectitude of a "true Englishman," whose earnest directness and moral-ethical fortitudebehind earnest textuality does not preclude complexity and nuance. Involving Milton in aFrench sensibility, its perversity around issues of formal-thematic side-winding and generaldestabilization, is in many ways a more interesting theoretical approach to an artist too longleft parochial now that the twenty-first century is underway. The Aughts did not, to myknowledge, include a convincing apostrophe of Milton from the avant-garde elite; a

perceived parochialism, both in Milton and in his entrenched critics, may have been thereason. The Aughts, in a general sense, were Edenic for many of us; we had leave to cherishour Satanic voices (Silliman, Bernstein, and the rest) as foils, forcing us to sharpen ourrhetorical wedges and employ them in the most dramatic possible contexts to highlight ourown aesthetic rectitude within innovation, its perpetual upheavals, and the meta-narratives ofthe time we developed, in the comprehensive manner of Raphael and Michael.

The level flatness of the Teens is richer terrain from which to begin a new approach toMilton. What we had of Paradise has been lostthe avant-garde has no real momentum leftto progress in any coherent direction, many of its leading Aughts lights are missing in action,and to light a textual candle in the direction of possible momentum now is to be left

stranded and derelict. To Frenchify Miltonto point out seams which show in Milton'sstaunch textual rectitudeis an act loomed over by a zeitgeist which takes for granted that adrastic recession will force seams to show, both in present moments and in interactions withthe English-language canon, willly-nilly. Our Satanic mentors (again, Bernstein, Silliman, etc)scoffed as they plummeted from the Heaven of historical awareness and consonance, andnot only subjected canonicity to radical interrogations but adopted rhetorical positionsagainst the canon and canonicity in (as is the case with Milton's Satan) face disfiguringfashion. We listened; and one reason I, personally, did not believe is that (as I intuited) thecanon is the only rock to fall back on when a zeitgeist party ends. I would challenge thenotion that any serious student of literature could fall back on a Bernstein or a Silliman textin 2014; and the Stygian Council of Language and New York School poets will only live

forever beneath the proverbial earth. The Frenchification of Milton is more than a merepastimeit takes the aggregate of our Aughts theoretical influences and places them withinthe rich textual history of seduction, salvation, and damnation. By forcing friction, against azeitgeist stalemated between venues and impulses, it may take us into a realm (again) offerment-within-destabilization, so that we might again fight the Heavenly battles which were,and remain, our due in the avant-garde.

Adam Fieled, 2014


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Odal Cycles: Notes on Keats Odes

Keats Odes encompass cycles and cycles within cycles; they are a literary meta-monument

par excellence.The most overt cyclical energy Ive spotted in the Odes subsists betweenGrecian Urn, Psyche, and Nightingale. That Psyche and Grecian Urn set settingsomething in place to be reifieda cohesive gestalt vision of visions, and a blazon of thevisionary as an emanation from the chiasmus between sense, tactility, and imaginationwhich is parodied, deconstructed and supplanted by subjective necessity against negativecapability in Nightingale, is the basic premise. What is doubled between Grecian Urn andPsyche is profoundthe visionary synecdoche, of young lovers frozen into immobility in aforest, appears to Keats on the Grecian Urn itself, and then magically manifests before hiseyes as Eros and Psyche, embodied physically in three dimensions as Keats strolls throughan actual forest in Psyche; that Psyche, owing to her position in classical lore, constitutes theliteral apotheosis of Daphne and Syrinx in Grecian Urn; that all these processes ofrecognition and assimilation had to evince an (odal) sense of the celebratory; and that what

becomes tactile, as Grecian Urn leads to Psyche, is another recognition, that liminal statesand modes of being, half modes, usually situated between sleep-states and wakefulness, arenecessary to the cultivation of the visionary, and visionary happiness, in such a way that thepoet himself disappears into a liminal trance to channel the rough tactile materials of histrade into sufficiently honed, quiet (or murmurous) forms.

In short, Grecian Urn up to Psyche establish a self-enclosed, self-contained systemasystem both of artistic representation and of self-awareness, poetic and otherwise, aroundrepresentational processes in general. The manner in which Nightingale talks back to the twoOdes constitutes both a (partial) critique and a (partial) denialby beginning Nightingalewith an apostrophe to himself, and his own vulnerability, this version of odal protagonist

adumbrates the limitations of the established odal system and cyclethat the happiness ofself-transcendence and liminal states of consciousness cannot always be achieved; that thetactility of things can be torturous as well as ecstatic; that the entire applied odal method, infact, exaggerates what is inherently (partially) banal in tactility and liminal states ofconsciousness; and that exercising a purple-stained mouth perpetuates its own cycle ofunrealistic expectations and weakly-strung nerves. Just as Psyches casement opens on loveand refreshment, Nightingales opens on perilous seas andforlorn realms; Psyches forest isviewed in broad daylight, Nightingales in confining, embalmed darkness; the heathengoddess becomes an indifferent (immortal) animal; and the totalized purview of thevisionary is revealed as an easeful Death. Even synesthesia, Keats accustomed manner ofderanging and re-configuring the tactile, has its disastersthe shadowy sounds of the

forest reinforce the protagonists isolation, melodious plots of greenery extend past hisreach, sight and hearing do a dance more irritating than not. Because Nightingale closes androunds out the relevant odal trio, the meta-commentary and meta-critique enact an inquirywith, as is typical with Keats, a sense of half-determinate conclusions.

Another kind of subsistent cycle visible in the Odes adumbrates an unconventionalapproach to the odal form itself. The ode, as an established literary genre, is distinguished bya generalized celebratory sense/sensibility; that what an ode assumes as its subject has been


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chosen for a perceived glory or expansiveness inherent in its being-in-the-world,individualized against all else. The manner in which Keats slants this literary genre creates itsown, steady-within-irregularity cyclefrom ode to ode, we see the way Keats underminesthe conventional processes of apostrophe and assignation, sometimes overtly, sometimessubtly. The most unconventional ode, which chafes against its own generic formality with an

intense degree of force and discomfort, seems to be Nightingale. Here, the celebratory isinverted into the elegiac; and while Keats apostrophes and assignations do celebrate (in amanner of speaking) the happy, full-throated freedom of the nightingales passages setagainst his own sickness, isolation, and leaden-eyed despairs, the circle (closed at the poemsconclusion) of all-encompassing subjective interest, awareness, and stalematedpreoccupation girds around him the exclusion of what negatively capable thoughts andmotives he could possibly have. The cycle of unpredictability and disregard for genericconvention moves with a sharp sense of willful, dark-toned imaginative imposition throughthe Odes as a definitive threadthat autumn and melancholy are worthy to be celebrated,as are inanimate objects (works of art/utility tools) and heathen goddesses from antiquecultures. The incredible, well-rounded richness and variable tonal qualities of Keats prosodyare another thread, which established the Odes absolute legitimacy, past their strangeness,

odd, stray angles of thematic approach, and contradictory answer to classical voices.


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History, the Aughts, and the Avant-Garde

What amounts to a twenty-first century version of avant-gardism in English-language poetryemerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century (the Aughts) and has now establisheditself in the Teens as its own gestalt form. The version of avant-gardism which flourished invehicles like The Argotist Online, Great Works, Jacket Magazine, PFS Post, Seven Corners,and moria poetry was involved, as healthy avant-gardism always is, in exploring thecomplications of attempted formal-thematic innovation within the confines of a profoundengagement with the history of the discipline in question. What particularly distinguishedAught avant-gardism, in the creative and critical writing of myself, Steve Halle, Jeffrey Side,and others, was a sense of the imperative to reinstate, against the henchmen-like severity ofthe American Language and New York School poets, the fundamental and ineluctableimportance of narrative, and strong narrative voices, as a backbone of poetic discipline andpractice. We in the avant-garde in the Aughts were united by a collective sense (whichbirthed a kind of creative compact in us) that our immediate avant-garde predecessors haddelivered us, via their experiments and the methodologies which informed them, into a kindof trough or ditch which, as an expanse of creative space, confined forward progress to

narrow, and intermittently inane and incomprehensible, grooves, all represented to haveachieved elite status by sanctimonious self-privileging.

As an Aught avant-grade median space, Ron Sillimans blog, by offering posts displaying astrong and quite phallocentric narrative voice which yet espoused texts whose plummets intoutter anti-narrativity were appalling and appallingly mechanized and inhumane to us, gave usa useful (if often combative) antithesis, and a direct link into the mainstream of our avant-garde predecessors; yet it is our body of completed creative and critical work (and I mean to


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include visual artists like Abby Heller-Burnham in this) which demonstrates the fruits of animplicit compact which dared to create roots more profoundly dug into a longer history thanRon Silliman or his compadres ever dared to be. What was ostensibly off-limits to Sillimanseemed absurd to usthe major Romantics (Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth) withMilton and Shakespeare looming over them; the French Symbolists and later Victorians; and

even, for the most part, Yeats and Eliot. Sillimans historical sense was that of an aestheticchild, a historical innocent; even as his rhetorical adroitness made for compelling reading,and a sense of avant-garde centrality which was difficult, in the Aughts, to ignore. Yet, we allfound ways of ignoring Silliman, the hulking man-childand our own gardens were tendedwith an eye towards the very historical targets he insisted on ignoring. Jeffrey Sides Aughtscriticism, in particular (now featured in his Argotist E-Book Collected), was very germane tothose with historical awareness as applied to avant-garde poetry; his own self-created criticalcompact was strenuous in several directions simultaneously. To be worthy of Sides criticalattention, a text would need to offer some sort of innovative edge, formally or thematically;yet Side prized texts which were able to accomplish this without losing the ambience ofpoetic historys omnipresence, over and beyond any attempt at innovation; all in defense of aclosely watched and guarded, self-consciously English, intellectual scrupulosity on his part.

Indeed, one occurrence marked by avant-gardism in the Aughts was an unusual and fruitfulchiasmus between English and American minds and the methodological approaches theyemployed; partly owing to the respect younger American artists evinced for the history ofEnglish literature, also partly owing to a generalized zeitgeist spirit of quest and aestheticadventure which meant that English poets, critics, and editors were unusually receptive tothe influence of perceived innovations and critical perspectives. It cannot be overstated thatthe rise of the Internet as a valuable resource and tool for the dissemination of novelaesthetic data marked what may grow to be recognized as the preeminent poeticachievements of the Aughts. While conservative, middle-of-the-road venues floundered, notattempting forced entry into the realm of the digital (and preferred digital vehicles like the

blogosphere), both in England and America, the pioneering venues of the Aughts avant-garde took the battles which before the turn of the century could only be fought at odd andcomparatively infrequent intervals and made of them daily rites of passage towards criticaland creative maturity. It is no accident that the venues mentioned in the first paragraph ofthis essay were all web-journals; those reluctant to join the web-poetry fray either did notrecognize or recognized too late that, by solving heretofore irremediable geographicalproblems, the Internet had created a kind of fluidity and reception velocity which turned thepursuit of aesthetic goals towards the possibility of profound crescendos and sustainedmomentum. As futile attempts have been made in the Teens to turn back the clock behindour bold advances, it must also be seen that Internet technologies of maintenance,conservation and preservation have already substantially advanced the sum total of the best

Aughts work done in the higher arts, towards stability, permanence, and easy access withinthe context of both. Understandably and undoubtedly, what we were able to accomplish isfearful and even anathema to improperly and impurely motivated forces around the artsbut their strategic-seeming ignorance, and its disingenuous insistence on totalized noveltyand theoretical banality, cannot withstand numbers and other indications which so drasticallyassert the continued ascendency of the Aughts avant-garde, both on the Net and in print.The Teens salvos against us (both self-acknowledged and willfully ignorant ones) constitutered herrings, put forth as a stop-gap measure towards a resurrection of a time and a contextwhich is permanently gone, and cannot be resurrected.


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The history of the Aughts avant-garde is a dynamic one; some flash-points recurred, othersfizzled fast. All of us took an interest in the term, coined by an unknown, post-avant,designating a mysterious and not agreed-upon form and manner of avant-garde poetry;hundreds of pages, from various sources, were scribed in determined pursuit of what post-

avant was. I argued, in a piece published in the Penned in the Margins print anthologyStress Fractures, that the pursuit of a workable definition was more interesting than thedefinitions produced themselves, for a number of different reasons (remember that StressFractures was UK published and released); because the form and the manner of thediscourse around post-avant was a new one (informed by the reception velocity of onlineinterchanges), because the dialectics produced proved that the Aughts were an era ofthoughtfulness within collective vision-quests, adventures, and imbroglios; and because(most importantly) in the Aughts, even our errors and fallacies led to solid, reasonable,workable conclusions regarding what was and was not appropriate to expect, fromPhiladelphia, Chicago, or London, from serious literature and its adjunct disciplines.

As has been said, the Internet age in the Aughts created a context in which more daily

excitement could be derived from serious literature; even as the major Aughts players I havein mind set a greater store in developing a keen and incisive historical awareness with whichto grace their productions. As we constructed new narrative voices to gird texts like Map ofthe Hydrogen World, Apparition Poems, and even small gems like Brooklyn CopelandsBorrowed House, playing around, sometimes gingerly and sometimes assertively, withvarious forms and manners of narrativity, a sense of honestly, painstakingly earned verticalitygrew around us, lighting up the Aughts years, both then and in retrospect (for me, at least),with a memorable glow. As is invariably the case, many of the names which recurred atregular intervals in the Aughts, poets and critics who fought alongside of us in the proverbialtrenches, will have to be forgottenas will brief crazes like the Issue 1 incident in 2008, andthe regular influxes of new web and print journals which failed to distinguish themselves

over a long period of time. The Argotist Online blurb for my e-book Disturb the Universe(I am counting 10, strategically, as an Aughts year, and a year of culminations) posits,implicitly, the Aughts as an era of transition and turmoiland the transition to a newtechnological and aesthetic century, which sought to create a palimpsest over the rigidlyconfined formalism (against thematic awareness outside critiques of language itself) of thetwentieth centurys avant-garde elite, was a fortuitous one, as new outlets readily appeared toadvance new agendas. Seen from later in the century and centuries to come, it may evenappear to be somewhat charmeda magical confluence of personalities and energies whichdetermined much of what followed it in twenty-first century poetry. As we know, the Aughtsof any given century are often determinative.

To bring these conjectures even closer to homein 2014, the Teens appear to be verymuch up for grabs. I have confidence that the Aughts seeds will ripen and bear fruit in duetimebut that is the work, always, of decades and centuries. In the short term, it will beinteresting to watch how the Teens choose to configure themselves around the Aughts. Hereand there, weve seen the arrival of new, potentially major, venuessuch as the HuffingtonPost and the Boston Review, who have gone out of their way to ignore our innovations andturn the clock back to the comparative thoughtlessness and adolescent clannishness of muchof the late twentieth century. Luckily for the Aughts crowd and our body of work, thesevenues seem to espouse no coherent, cohesive aesthetic agenda. The craze for lists on these


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sites (Buzzfeed and Alternet, also), as though serious literature should be reduced to aPeople Magazine or Rolling Stone-level context, has not (thankfully) coalesced into enoughof a zeitgeist force to render them indicative of what the Teens may bring, or be. ConceptualPoetry, another turn-back-the-clock gambit, is similarly contrived and unconvincing, a failedpalimpsest over genuine theoretical rigor; and the likes of Kenneth Goldsmith, for many of

us, a failed avatar. Every decent century for the higher arts yet has off decadeswhetherthis is true or nor for the Teens, in 14, remains to be seen. This decades machinations aside,the Aughts seeds, their historical interest, are strong and potent and, whether the growth outof our early soil is visible or invisible, the truth remains that what is planted has more or lessguaranteed a fruitful century for those who lament the aesthetic aridity and inhumanity ofthe one which came before, and set the stage for us.

Adam Fieled, 2014

***painting is The Lost Twins by Abby Heller-Burnham, Philadelphia, mid-Aughts***

This essay attempts to formulate the rudiments of a critical rubric around the new, avant-garde English-language poetry of the Aughts of the twenty-first century.


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Notes on Flaubert

dam Fieled


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To take an unlikely route from Kant to Flaubert- one thing "Madame Bovary" shows us is

how a large, possibly dominant segment of the human population never ascend from raw

sensibility into understanding or the principles of pure reason. Emma Bovary is hollow but

for the sensible levels which animate her life- what she wears, eats, who her lovers are and

where/how she lives. In a backhanded way, Flaubert critiques Kant, too- demonstrating the

effectual uselessness of advanced forms of cognition among a race who must, owing to the

biological/genetic and natural circumstances of their birth, remain either unaware of or

indifferent to the fact that advanced cognition is any way possible or desirable as a means of

furthering a collective cause.

Yet, the irony inhering in "Madame Bovary" is manifest- to depict what he wants to depict,Flaubert must align himself with Kant, towards advanced cognitive awareness of what

hollows out/depreciates human consciousness, and how these complexes might be

represented/symbolized most forcefully and dynamically. If there is a principle to be derived

from "Madame Bovary," in the Kantian sense, it is that human interiority is not often

developed past Kant's first cognitive level (sensibility). The human brain, though developed

enough to withstand the rigors of dialectical understanding and distilled reason, is often

employed lazily and without dynamic integrity, towards sensual gratification as the highest

goal and sole ideal; and, when advanced cognition and symbolization ability is applied to

representing this kind of stunted anti-cognitive existence, it can produce what "Madame

Bovary" amounts to- a masterpiece simultaneously of tragedy and satire.

The manner in which Flaubert lingers on sensuality as a mode of symbolism- foods, cloths,

houses- turns positive data into a shadow-realm of the evanescent, the unreal; thus,

appearance/phenomena in Flaubert denies everything other than its own existence;

substances and causes in Flaubert are denied, as is objectivity, in the general sense, except for

the authorial figure himself, who creates this master/masterful textual appearance to appear as

the one cause, the one cognitive ascension, amid his own spectral array. In laymen's terms,
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you can't believe in Madame Bovary (as anything but "appearance"), but you can believe in

Flaubert; Tolstoy's textual tricks are both more nuanced and more extensive, whose chains of

textual appearances lead in divergent directions. Tolstoy's characters are, once the ground of

fiction is granted, substantial; more than mere appearances, or apparitions. What Flaubert

loses in cognitive nuance to Tolstoy he gives back, at least partly, in seductiveness- the

seductiveness of unexamined sensibility, the descent into pure appearances and theirsimplicity.

Tolstoy's aesthetic principle, how he achieves maximum complexity/maximum coherence-

the cognitive complexity of individuals- is one that Flaubert's principle refutes, satirically and

tragically. These two constitute a fundamental representational polarity.


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Why Flaubert and the English Romantics are an interesting chiasmus- representation of

typical human interiority and non-typical, highly developed interiority- on a representational

hierarchy, how Flaubert would be rated against Wordsworth or Keats depends on therespective value judgments of different gestalt critical frameworks- Flaubert's practicality

(and the seductiveness of the sensual and the mundane) versus Wordsworth/Keats' idealism

(the seductiveness of the visionary subjugating mere sensory data).

If, in the aesthetic balance of things, I tilt my scale 60-40 towards Flaubert over the

Romantics, its because reading Flaubert in the cold light of day, having achieved literary

maturity and temperamental sobriety, is a more edifying experience owing to an appreciation

of the complex, multifaceted hollowness of the human race (what in human consciousness is

hollow and what filled) versus the ebullience of consciousness, however tormented in other

respects (especially in Keats), filled to the brim with life, passionate emotion, and portentous,

crystalline meaning.

As to the focus, in Flaubert, on appearances/phenomenon, exteriors in general- part of the

human hollowness represented involves the typical human predicament of internalizing

exteriors as though they were interiors- how appearances fool us into doing so. The

complexity in Emma Bovary involves the subtle recognition that exteriors, like interiors, are

in a constant state of flux- that, on a profound psycho-affective level (and in denial of

Wordsworth's suppositions), there is no such thing as timelessness. Inhering in Romantic

visions and vision-quests are a glamorized sense that the apogee of human consciousness is

internalized and psychically integrated timelessness- but too much (as Shelley suggests) in

these visions cannot be communicated, and the depths of one consciousness can seldompierce through the surface of another.

Though we never see her reading the Romantics, Emma Bovary is certainly Romantic in

spirit. Yet, the spontaneous overflow of the powerful feelings which lead her into adultery,

though her most willful gambit towards exteriorizing her interior life, is also the cause of her

material humiliation and ruination. Her soporific vision of sense-induced timelessness is

briefly realized, but only winds up engendering cognitive confusion and the collapse of the
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exterior social structures around her. The boundary-dissolution of interiors into exteriors and

vice versa, the imposition of harmonious unity between cognition and sensibility into a sense

of overarching, ecstatic unity, with the collateral benefit of confirming and validating the

individual ego- all that Emma Bovary seeks unconsciously, which Wordsworth seeks

consciously- must, more often than not (and the Romantics are good at making exceptions

stick), turn to dust in the cold light of day, and this is the light Flaubert comes closest tomastering.


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Flaubert's hyper-sensual textual world- as to why hyper-sensuality works in this narrative

context- it not only helps us understand the psycho-affective dimensions of Emma Bovary (as

sensuality is the only spirituality she will allow, which was established in her youth)- it

creates an ambiguously sensible (in the Kantian sense) world which it alternately embraces

and disdains- a heightened world- jouncing the cognitively active reader with an awareness

of a possible ascension into understanding from it, and through it- hyper-sensuality is meant

to engender hyper-cognition- Flaubert's game is to play the formal-thematic middle, so that

the hyper-sensual reference itself is both there to be savored and gestures beyond itself

simultaneously.

Why I call hyper-sensuality in Flaubert a game- because it adds a patina of glamorous excess

to his text, the form of the text reinforces and fulfills what is addressed with castigating

condescension thematically- and the delicacy of the gestalt set-up allows the text itself to be a

hyper-sensual object, manifesting its own amorous nature in the form of textual foreplay and

interplay with the reader- in a game of oscillations between formal and thematic awareness-

and the point of maximum coherence/maximum complexity in "Madame Bovary" has to be

this interplay game between sensibility and understanding, form and theme, affect and

cognition, projected into minds rigorous enough to appreciate the sparks and star-showers.

In Tolstoy, there is no game- form and theme intertwine in cohesive unity, and the cognitive

sparks are struck for another reason- the shifting sands apparent in examined interiors,

characters with active interior lives pried open for us to view, in shifting arrangements and

conglomerations- which generates a kind of textual white heat, rather than the rosy/rose-

period fuzziness, the crepuscular softness, which takes Flaubert's text from the prosaic into

the transcendental, or "hyper," in such a curious and individual way. Tolstoy's "prosaic" does

not exist as such- he does not need to create a palimpsest over his own formal technique and
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gambit-structure. Maximum coherence/maximum complexity in Tolstoy is much cleaner and

more even than it is in Flaubert- and, as tastes differ, critics may be more enticed by Tolstoy's

cleanliness or Flaubert's mess. Literary texts animated by form-theme games do tend to be

messes- and textual games have inhering in them the romanticism of the visionary and the

novel, executed, in this case, on a high enough level of mastery to set this particular game in

stone.

The twentieth century trivialized serious literary games into one-dimensional spectacles-

Artaud himself never came to grips with the necessity of complexity and density- or a

vigorously maintained coherence. The game of Proust's winding sentences- or Proust as a

mere showman with a bag of textual tricks- and the trivialization of well-executed literary

games meant that substantial coherence and complexity were insulted widely and

simultaneously.

Adam Fieled, 2014

***attached to the cover of the pdf and to this post by Bonnard***


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Notes on Rubens Prometheus Bound at the

Philadelphia Museum of ArtAdam Fieled


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Rubens Prometheus, which hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, operates from 2014on a number of different levels which would not necessarily have been operative in 2004,1994, etc. The subjective overlay I impose upon the paintingwhat myself and my cohortsinitiated from (as it were) Philadelphia (and Chicago and London) in the Aughtsa

monstrous push behind major high art consonance, against the confounding tides ofcontrived, instrumentally formed and manipulated post-modern mediocrityis difficult totranscend or even elide, standing in different spaces in the PMA European Art room wherethis piece is prominently featured. This surfeit of subjective awareness develops for me intoa kind of pleasing pain, or a redemptive ache.

Most serious onlookers would notereproductions of this are not going to hang inanyones living room, or in a doctors office. Despite its heroic grandeur, this Rubens alsohas a hinge to both ugliness and awkwardness. The composition, though even, and the semi-absurd head over heels posture in which Rubens freezes Prometheus, make a bold statementthat, to enlarge a Keatsian Romantic conception, the beauty in this rendering of Prometheusand his core narrative myth is in the truthful representation of his agony.

From different available vantage points, the wingspan of the bird picking at Prometheusliver makes a statement, a gross and frank one simultaneously, about, not exactly mansinhumanity to man (sort of), but about the putridity of inhuman and inhumane forcesimpinging upon human (or, granting Prometheus mythological status, super-human) lifeunnecessarily, muddying the collective wells, eroding the foundations of what has beenerected purely. The livid, genuine disgust/revulsion of/at that wingspan, is balanced by thecomfort of knowing that Rubens has made that disgust/revulsion ring down the ages in amajor high art consonant contextin other words, has left the complexities in to bethemselves. The inversion of the wingspan is the blood sacrifice of Prometheus himself; asacrifice decided upon from pure, genuine, generous motivations. Yet valor in the human

world must always be contradicted and sometimes supplanted by humanitys lecherous self-interest, and conservation of systems of subjugation and arbitrary reward.

.

That the Rubens in question hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is serendipitousthat the Philadelphia Museum of Art is what it is, is serendipitous too. Why it has to be thatthe PMA is a half-buried treasurethe American press corps has no allegiance to/withmajor high art consonance, or to/with telling the truth about what/where the real centers ofpower are in Americais the same reason that the Philly Free School, at this stage of its

infancy in 14, also must remain a half-buried treasure. Nevertheless, a solid argument couldbe made that (the Met in NYC notwithstanding), even before PFS, the PMA madePhiladelphia, for major high art consonance, securely the capitol of the United States (andthe Rodin Museum, situated in the same neighborhood, enhances this impression). TheUnited States, like the Philadelphia it encompasses, abounds in mysteries and inversions, andis not nearly as cohesively simple-minded as century XX Europe would have us believe. ThePMA, especially after PFS, encapsulates its own mysterythat it subsists as a self-contained, self-sufficient aesthetic ecosystem (the middling shows which pass through itaccounted for) make an implicit argument for depth, complexity, and historical awareness as


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indigenously included in the American package deal. Abby Heller-Burnham, whose LostTwins peer at us from beneath Prometheus on the pdf front page, particularly, grew intoher genius from this soil: first Philadelphias, then Americas.

The gist argument here is that latent in the United States has always been a certain amount

of secret depth, from which could possibly grow the kind and manner of art solidlyconstructed enough to forge a new, historically aware, aesthetically rich America. If, within avolatile cultural context, a site for this development were to be chosen, the most consideredchoice, owing to the PMA and for other structural reasons, would have to be Philadelphiarather than New York, once other contenders were whittled out. By letting Prometheusoccupy an entire wall in the European Art wing, the PMA has unwittingly consolidated andhighlighted the struggle any cache of American artists would have to face, to create andsustain an indigenous vision of major high art consonance from within the continentalUnited States. From corrupt, rotten to the core institutions and government art-fundingorganizations, to a comically banal, vapid press corps; and a society specifically structured(against the ostensible, barely acknowledged in practice American grain) against cohesiveindividualism and the pursuit of material backing for individual endeavors, especially cultural

endeavors meant to encompass/assimilate significant expanses of world cultural history,favoring European history specifically. This vantage point undermines the amorphous,undercooked foundations of American art at any given present moment. Owing to the PMA,it is important to note that there is a Philadelphia conspiracy behind PFS, a subtle currentworking in our favor from the beginning; just as Rubens Prometheus, out of his ownnobility and capacity for self-sacrifice, generates a current which allows us to sympathizewith his plight and inverse crucifixion, and encouraging us to scrutinize to what degree ourmotivations are as pure as his.

The way I configure the Philadelphia conspiracy behind PFS, the school where Abby andMary pursued their art certificatesthe Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)

does not figure into the equation. Conversely, and oddly enough the buildings whichconstitute the PAFA campus in Center City dotheir Old European elegance, solidity, anddignity created a space in the two painters for personal elegance, dignity, and solidity toenter.

..

The fact that Rembrandt has been retrospectively placed over Rubens in many arthierarchiesnot knowing any better, for many years I went along with the heist. I nowreverse my position, knowing that (for me) the narrative and formal richness of Rubens bestpaintings (like Prometheus) supersedes the dull-toned, dingy monotony of Rembrandts

oeuvre. The earth-tones which dominate Prometheusspeckled with bits of spring-likeblue and greenstill do a dance of subtleties around the raw skin-tones of Prometheusbody itself. This harmony of checks and coloration balances lend Prometheus a hinge tocompositional beauty which itself checks and balances the fore-grounded narrative uglinessand awkwardness of the painting. I have employed Prometheus as a synecdoche for PFSand our collective struggles, to manifest major high art consonance from within thecontinental United States, and for all time. The intentional question remains, fallacious ornotwhether Rubens intended Prometheus to function on a biographical level, to standin for himself. Owing to Rubens well filled-out CV, even during his own lifetime, I would


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wager against thisnor does it matter much. The process by which symbolizations, in art,become talismans in myriad time/space coordinates could be construed a (if one were beinguncharitable) arbitrary, or as serendipitousthe reason Id like to construe this particularcongeries as serendipitous is that I feel the arrival of the Rubens in my life as providential, ata recessional moment where every harbinger of resilience and renascence to fecundity must

be grasped with both hands and embraced.

Adam Fieled, 7-9-14

***on the pdf front page: Prometheus Bound by Rubens and The Lost Twins by AbbyHeller-Burnham***


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DEEP NOIR

What "noir" signifies, in popular culture, is an aesthetic condition of extreme stylization.

Look at the elements which configure, say, the average Raymond Chandler novel, and

which do not change from book to book; stylized elements- a hard-bitten detective

(Marlowe) pursuing a treacherous villain, encountering a standard cast of characters.

There's the coy femme fatale, attached somehow to a criminal underworld or with

underworld connections; dirty and double-dealing cops, who may or may not be

trustworthy, and in on certain hits; and innocent bystanders drawn into matrixes of

crime and hustle against their will. What stylization implies, as a kind of mold for

artistic forms to fit into, is homogeneity, and the solidity of homogeneity- we, as

readers, never need to wonder what to expect from Raymond Chandler. To the extent

that more serious artists develop individual and individualized aesthetic concerns and

formal-thematic, consistent topoi, stylization in their work becomes inevitable- this ishow we know Picasso from Manet, Manet from David; or, in literature, Milton from

Byron, and Byron from Browning; etc. If I am interested in "noir," and in poaching "noir"

from American popular culture and granting it another context, it is because the

stylistic elements of myApparition Poems seriesshares, in the kinds of moods,

impressions, and ambience generated, something with noir, and noir stylistic

conventions. All three major Apparition Poems collections cohere around a set of

imperatives, which lean towards the revelation of shadows rather than light, dark tones
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and hues rather than bright ones, and labyrinthine complexities rather than scintillating

clarities. Levels of cognitive awareness, represented in texts which seek to boast some

philosophical import, particularly in regards to ontological awareness in the midst of

extreme (even pornographic) vulgarity, separate the Apparition Poems drastically from

the rote, pop culture consonant facility of Chandler's books.

Indeed, the chiasmus between noir and serious, sustained intellection is, as far as I

know, a novel mode of stylistic inquiry and exploration. My equivalent of Chandler's

shocking plot-twists and peripeteias are linguistic innovations which multiply meanings

and make key words and phrases serve dual, or triple, ends; so that these words and

phrases are set in place, figuratively, to "split the heads" of their audience, towards

recognitions of hidden semantic-thematic depth, and against surface ("surface-y")

orientations and sensibilities. That's why I call my version of noir "deep noir"- the

Apparition Poems are crafted, on some semantic levels, from similar molds- towards

chiaroscuro and the enchantment of multiple meanings. It is also easy to notice that the

Apparition Poems are, in fact, haunted by coy femme fatales, dirty-dealers, and an

interrogating, interrogative protagonist ("I"), who attempts to sift his way through mazes

of psycho-cognitive, and psycho-affective, complications. The poems shudder towards

satori-like head-split semantic inversions; and whether any give satori ends its poem or

not, the ultimate stylistic effect is to startle, unsettle, and re-wire the minds of the

audience who reads them. Chandler, in a pop culture context sans intellectual heft, is far

less unsettling. The Apparition Poems create mysteries and remain centered in them, in

a negatively capable fashion, while Chandler's level of stylization insures easy,

unchallenging comprehension. Still, I like "noir" as a stylistic formulation around the

Apparition Poems nonetheless, because they do create and maintain a "shaded"

ambience, which is recognizably itself from poem to poem and book to book. I have

spoken of the "body heat" passed from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in spite

of the new century's reservations- and, as one level of inheritance which takes the

Apparition Poems to a secure hermeneutic locale, "noir" and "deep noir" both work

surprisingly well.

As to the issue of why, in 2014, a "noir" aesthetic, inclusive of formal-thematic depth,

would be of wide interest once placed into circulation- the reason is fairly simple. On

many levels and in many variegated contexts, few sensibilities other than "noir" could be

generally and widely representative in America, against the facile breeziness of post-

modernity. The Recession has created a climate, both within and without aesthetics, of

entrenched circumstantial darkness and shadowy languor. Untold, unreportedcatastrophes may have wiped out entire sectors of the population- yet the media chirps

away as though nothing has changed. American pop culture is in an advanced state of

erosion and deterioration- there are no new rock stars anymore, and new American

cinema not only isn't selling but is divested, for the populace, of the perceived glamour

which used to enable it to sell. The secret passageways which used to make America

interconnect have largely been severed; even as the Internet has created new labyrinths

and passageways which often amount to a subversive conspiracy against the normative.


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The truly noir facet of the Internet is that it allows the American public to understand

how and why its been duped; and what's left of a thinking American populace is

cognizant of these things. The Apparition Poems were written to hold down a cultural

fort radically on the side of haute culture and high art, scribed by a single author from

within the bounds of the United States. For those watching closely, and who know how

the American literary landscape has largely been configured over long and short periodsof time, this congeries of circumstances is a rebellion and an innovation. That the

Apparition Poems are not only indigenously American (if standing, aesthetically, on the

shoulders of historical Europe) but indigenously Philadelphian is another innovation-

the creation of literary Philadelphia, in the twenty-first century, has to do with the noir

elements already built into Philly as a mythological construct.

Philadelphia, much more so than New York (which offers, to my eyes, nothing

labyrinthine beneath a bold, brusque surface) is perpetually ravaged by contradictions

and conflicting internal imperatives- the Main Line surface/patina is all about the

prestige of old money; South Philly prizes blue-collar, ethnic simplicity, but falsely and

disingenuously (against the complex and baroque machinations of the South Philly

mob); the mob also runs at least partly other suburbs supposed to be middle-class, and

standardized to American suburban norms, which they are not; and the "noir" sense, at

the end of things, is that Philadelphia is a shadow-plagued city, and what you see is

certainly not what you get here. The representatively Philadelphian surface/depth

tensions are what make the city fertile ground for high art, rooted in formidably

intellectual narratives, slanted towards the stylized chiaroscuro of noir symbolization

and signification. Make no mistake- Philly makes a more than reasonable microcosm of

the United States, because Philly has many things to hide. Every thoughtful

Philadelphian has their own Philadelphia narrative. That Philadelphia is often

represented as simple is one of its noir allure-features. Philadelphia, in fact, may be

taken as the secret capitol of America, and much of America's internal darkness is

exteriorized/embodied with precision in our labyrinths here. From a certain angle, for

Philadelphia to produce representative American high art is no stretch at all - higher art

requires higher faithfulness to complex human truth. Because complexities are difficult,

both to perceive and to assimilate, they are, or can be, dark. If my version of noir

borrows stylistically from the likes of Raymond Chandler, the substance of the art is

uniquely set within its own thematic manner/mode of confused, perplexing darkness.

Yet attempts to unearth deep truth, when performed skillfully, are always cathartic, as

pitiful and terrible as the deep ("noir") truth can be, and in this, this art finds its

strength and metier.

Adam Fieled 2014

***photo taken by Matt Stevenson at Main Street West (11thand Webster Street South

Philadelphia) in 2004 ***


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ENLIGHTENED ELITISM, ENLIGHTENED CLASSICISM

Living with the remnants of the twentieth century, and twentieth century culture, still around

us (in the press, art press and otherwise, and even online to an extent), it is easy to see in

what manner my art (and the work of the otherPFSartists) can and will be dismissed. For

reinstating a demarcation between low and high art, against the imposed confines of post-

modern theory, thought, and practice, and radically against the grain of what is acceptable to

the American press corps; and for reinstating, also, a historical sense which deals with art

century by century, rather than living in a radically circumscribed, perpetually "present"

moment; the Philly Free School must needs be attacked by accusations of extreme/extremist

classicism and extreme elitism simultaneously. I would like to opine, however, that what we

have built into our body of work is a highly advanced, thoughtful, scrupulous, and one might

say "enlightened" form of elitism and classicism. Neither I nor my friends had any problem

looking the twentieth century, and twentieth century culture, dead in the face; its just that we

were catholic enough in our tastes not to limit ourselves. Not working at the behest of

spurious, frivolous motives, directed in our tastes by authentic impulses, proclivities, and

sympathies, it was obvious to us that the high/"haute" art in century XX seemed constricted,

narrow, and vulgarized in its essence into tiny forms and expressions. Maintaining a

historical sense, and an ability to make choices owing not to circumstances but to our
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individual temperaments, we migrated back to the nineteenth century over the twentieth and

stayed there, judging century XX to be a cultural regression, while having, by sheer proximity

and "body heat," to allow some twentieth century influence in regardless.

Thus, the language of our symbolizations and significations is polyglot; and if I am forced toanswer accusations of elitism and classicism, simply owing to historical depth and diversity

of influence, I will state that we made our aesthetic choices very carefully, and had the

courage of our convictions to assimilate what moved us the most, from the inside out, rather

than acquiescing to internalize what was presented to us as what was most contemporary,

representative, and praiseworthy. The pejorative connotations of "classicism" and "elitism"

have to do with retrograde, reactionary attitudes, bent into stuffy dismissiveness of anything

new; what PFS has to offer is set at a perpendicular angle to those definitions. We, all of us,

have lived and created under intense, group-centered pressure to conform, if conventional,

substantial rewards (publication, sales) were to be ours; always with the knowledge that the

adjacent post-modern group norm, to stay grounded in a twentieth century ethos at all costs,

against any form of historical sense which would challenge this group norm, was configured

to delineate what was and what was not acceptable, either theoretically or in practice; and

our collective response, from Philadelphia in the Aughts, was to rebel, and to do so publicly,

which we did, with panache. As of the initiation of our practice, enlightened classicism and

enlightened elitism were both (and largely remain) rebellious stances; and the tyranny of the

"present-minded," the vulgar, the thoughtless, the formless, the formulaic, and the

insubstantial (to our eyes/ears) has been both a terrible weight for us to bear and heavy

shackles for us to attempt to cast off. In the realm of the post-modern, what's "new" is never

really new anyway- just as Koons reprises Warhol reprising Duchamp, it is a fraudulent

simulacrum of the "new," which disguises the essential nature of genuine artistic innovation

(that which creates new formal-thematic contexts, nexuses, and matrixes) in order to

advertise its own inversion-heavy (nothing into something) paucity.

The question arises, for myself and others of my ilk, whether our creations are made to

subsist as "foster children of silence and slow time"; in other words, whether or not it will be

a long, slow haul towards establishing ourselves and our art in a major way, and a way which

would be satisfying and gratifying for us. How staunch, as a tightly knit collective, are the

post-modernists in 2014? From the evidence my daily life has presented to me, I have

induced the knowledge that post-modernity, as a capitalistic, profit-counting institution, has

lost ground and momentum in our current Great Recession. My assumptions in this context

must, of necessity, be modest- PFS have demonstrably hada significant amount of space

cleared for us,but we remain largely unknown to the general public, and no visible chiasmus

exists between ourselves, our work, and the American or any other press corps. Yet if raw
https://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnhamhttps://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnhamhttps://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnhamhttps://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnhamhttps://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnhamhttps://archive.org/details/risingInScorpioAdamFieledabbyHeller-burnham


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online numbers are any indication, there is certainly a receptive sector of the American and

European public ready to greet our work with appropriately receptive hearts and minds. This

is why the reference to Keats is both interesting and provocative- what we have written and

painted must, owing to its depth, thoughtfulness, and formal-thematic richness, take on the

sober, austere attire of "foster children of silence and slow time"- but it is intriguing,conversely, to consider that, with our current entropic zeitgeist, in which a populace are

starved for authentic passion and intelligence in what they consume, PFS might attract some

short-term success as well.

In a contradictory sense, it both is and is not immaterial to me whether this short-term

success transpires- to the extent that our work is dealt with seriously, and we are not

trivialized, it could be a positive development; yet all of us have enough education in the

higher arts to understand that what achieves the most profound impact tends to do so

slowly, incrementally, and often imperceptibly, over decades and centuries. This is one

salient reason that post-modernity insults our collective intelligence- by reducing the higher

arts to a mere adjunct and an underling to the popular arts, it so attempts to erase, in a

brutish and militaristic fashion, the entire history of the higher arts beyond its tiny, crabbed

purview, that the entire post-modern endeavor amounts to a sustained assault of anti-art and

anti-culture on entrenched, yet often powerless, adversaries. In a very real sense, all PFS's

elitism and classicism entail is a deep-set appreciation of the entire history of the higher arts,

which we have refused to conceal or elide in an attempt to achieve short-term, ephemeral,

and extremely hypocritical success. Why it is that aesthetic progress has to come at the

expense of a reviled, demeaned, and somehow naive past is something I've never

understood- now, as the new century coalesces, I've been led to the conclusion that auto-

destruction of the history of the higher arts, as both a stated and a surreptitious post-modern

intention/ambition, has had nothing to do with anything but fear and greed, set lecherously

and coercively into motion to homogenize an already blasted Western cultural landscape.

The commonplace, known to art-world insiders, that post-modern artists have more

invested in pop culture imbecility and business ventures than in their own work (which may

or may not sell for enormous sums of money), is shorthand for post-modernity's rejection of

both passion and intellect, and for anything humanistically expressive at all. Confounding

this, our Philadelphia was Edenic for us. Philadelphia is known to be as corrosive and

lecherous as any other American metropolis, in some ways more so; and how Philadelphia is

sold in the media largely inverts, in classic post-modern fashion, both its beauty and its

distinctive ambience. What PFS pursued here was very unique, as we found a way to

progress while conserving, and vice versa; and the "twist in the tale" is that our myth of what

Philadelphia is may be "the keeper" for the entire length of the century to come.


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Adam Fieled 2014

***on the cover of the pdf is Auguste Rodins Thinker on display at the Rodin Museum onBenjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City Philadelphia***


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Documents

Saved by Miracle: Notes and Criticism 2014