Sexual selection and the Arts: Revision versus Editing

"Elizabeth Grosz: At the most elementary level, of course, the built environment is our attempt to create a small territory within chaos where chaos doesn’t impinge as much as elsewhere. In a way, this is the most primordial impulse of all civilization; to build a shelter which enables you to get some space to do something potentially luxurious. So chaos is maybe too strong a word, although it’s not entirely too strong a word. The point is, nature is full of these teeming impulses that we don’t really control, and at best what we can do is carve out a location, a territory, and in the process of carving out a territory, which is the primordial impulse of architecture, we also carve out something like a body for ourselves. So this dual operation of territory and body is produced simultaneously."

I woke up, read some Elizabeth Grosz, as one does, for pleasure, then ate some cashews. Drove to Boulder listening to the radio and trying to avoid mating red-winged blackbirds on the back road. Also robins. At Naropa, I established myself at the oval table in the Writing and Poetics office, where, in due course, I had a 70 minute conversation with a clown. Yes, as part of my day job, I mentor a clown. Abbey Pleviak is an INDT student, specializing in definitions of red noses. "A red nose differentiates the clown from others. It lets others know that there's about to be a departure from conventional behavior." I am paraphrasing. I liked it. Then, out of the blue, a door suddenly flung open, and Abbey said that in a recent workshop with "Barnaby", she learned that clowns should always go through open doors. So, we crawled through the door, and peeked into the Summer Writing Program office. We saw Lisa Birman sitting at her computer. Lisa Birman is an Australian, Prague-soaked poet who has recently started writing a gorgeous lyric epic, that I got a glimpse of, but not today. Today all I saw was that she was wearing a pink jumper. Dark pink. Then, me and the clown lay on the steps pretending to be sleeping, but no-one walking down Araphoe noticed us, so we got up and went back in.

After that relaxing morning activity, I had a meeting with the Chair, Junior Burke, a fantastic screenplay-writing singer-songwriter novelist entity, and Amy Catanzano, our Administrative Director, who writes and teaches at the flickering-pulsing intersection of avant-garde physics and contemporary poetics. I sat down, at the same oval table, and we bowed in. I can't remember what they were wearing, but I did notice that on the filing cabinet behind Junior's right shoulder were haphazardly arranged words from one of those magnetic poetry kits. All the words were Hebrew mixed with Yiddish mixed with English. I saw that my composition, from over six months ago, when I was car-pooling with a rabbi, an adjunct faculty member who was teaching Jewish Mysticism on Monday nights when I was teaching an undergraduate seminar on narrative, was still up. It said: Falling-crazy-in-with-wild-eyed-Shalom. Made note to self: Must do something about that. Continued to have interesting chat about writing as a kind of future, when abruptly realized it was time to go.

Class. I like class the very best of all. On the board, I scrubbed off the Tibetan sentences and the words "palace" and "deity," then set to work with my own sub-headings. I wrote: "Mixed Present: Towards a Successful Question." Then, in groups, some beneath the blossom trees outside, some on the picnic bench next to the Japanese tea-house, and some in our little cottage, Upaya North, the MFA class of Spring 2008 made chaotic, arcing, private maps. The maps were questions, translating from our Small Conference on Failure back to writing. Then, in an act of natural/artificial selection, each group presented the most intensive question. Then, which was possibly a mistake as it required drawing on reserves of intense thought and attention, and I for one was operating on five hours of sleep, we presented our challenges to these questions. I forgot to write down the questions, but it's only Tuesday night of the same day so I am going to pull myself together and try to remember:

1. Where were you most absorbed, and what would you risk for that absorption?
2. What is the messy context?
3. Where in the structure, or in a character: is a home?
4. What new activity emerges in this piece?
5. Is there a core to this piece? Is it intact? Is it shredded?
6. Describe the form that makes the activity, the relationship, possible? [Something about a glass floor.]

Then everyone went back out into the sunlight and tulips, or stayed in the quiet dark, and ran the program of the question on the line. On the work of their peers. Peer revision. What is a peer? During this time, I:

1. Eavesdropped.
2. Went to get a cup of tea.
3. Thought about Montreal.
4. Made notes in my notebook about the question as a kind of boundary.
5. Erased the questions and wrote instructions. I wrote: "What will you do next?" Which is technically a question.

Then I drove straight to my son's school, about an hour north of Boulder, to pick up my son. In a complete change of circumstances, I kicked off my shoes and sat on the grass, and watched the children gallop in the park, like feral wallabees.

PS The decision to "select" shifts the species. Is species stable? No. Is the poem stable? No. It's not stable. It's not even remotely stable. Why should we select in way that shifts context, if we have, up to now, proliferated in a context? These ideas are from the work of Elizabeth Grosz -- her new book on chaos and art and Deleuze is out in a couple of weeks time. I will obviously be eating a snack and lying in the back yard, pronto, as soon as it arrives. This is a link from a lecture she gave in Australia, to a conference for interior designers, on art and architecture:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm

Wait. I just read it again. I may have got it totally wrong.

"Elizabeth Grosz: Darwin talks about two fundamental processes that regulate all of life; one is natural selection and the other is sexual selection. Natural selection is about survival, and sexual selection, for him, is largely about reproduction or about sexual seduction. And what I think is the origin of art, basically, is that impulse to seduction. So I take it that all forms of art are a kind of excessive affection of the body, or an intensification of the body of the kind which is also generated in sexuality. So it’s something really fundamentally sexual about art, about all of the arts, even though they’re very sublimated. What art is about is about the constriction of the materials, so the materials then become aestheticised or pleasurable. The pleasure of those materials has to do with the intensification of the body. So this impulse to art is to not make oneself seductive but to make oneself intense, and in the process to circulate some of that eros that would otherwise go into sexuality."

Hmm. Must keep thinking and writing.