ABOVE:
La Maison Forestiere, by Simon Patterson 2011
Projection, manuscript & text by Wilfred Owen
For Friedrich Hölderlin in one of his most brilliant late fragments, an epitome of radical Romantic yearning and ingenuity, a goal of democracy is so simple: to sit together (beieinander), quietly celebrating the classic host-guest relationship. No art: no monument. Yet the pathway there instinctively erects the assumption of poetry and monument:
I want to build
and raise new
the temples of Theseus and the stadiums
and where Perikles lived
But there’s no money, too much spent
today. I had a guest
over and we sat together
--trans. Richard Sieburth
To celebrate, or is it recreate? democracy, the artist instinctively turns to the monumental symbols of ancient Greece, a fantasy that mimesis will usher in the revolution. The attentiveness of the artist to exigencies spoils the plot: a modern democratic artist has no funding for construction on such a massive scale. Not stated in the poem but surely implied, a monument in stone requires the intense, exhausting work of unsung labourers. For Hölderlin, a monument-to-democracy recapitulates the capitalism that undermines a community not based upon inequalities. The collapse of the mimetic, architectural plan, for art as building-up, is indicated poetically by the crumbling of monumental form into a fragment—broken, full of lacunae, which, however, becomes an opening for noticing, incorporating, using the materials at hand, for human beings living out the democratic dream, one to one, next to one another.
Fred Moten’s Hölderlin update:
jaki’s blues next. just calling, just lining out while they sell that flour. here come
presence out of nowhere. the
social hum of movement is the essence of it, “because that is Black Power, that
is one of the elements, a sitting
down together to reason, to ‘ground’ as the Brothers say, we have to ‘ground
together,’” in a gully, in a dungle,
in the jungle, on an oil drum, till some furniture moving everywhere. the ballad
of the underground is our
orchard hill, our clyde woods, our way of shearing, the sound of residue in
spacing, like a bare living room in
the morning air. when he ready to get up and do his thing, when he wants to get
into it, man, it’s paramilitary
theory. the good foot is a blues march. the screamers are lost in thought, to
prepare the song they pare, like a
next machine, man. marshall allen is so close you can hear his people drumming,
“we are nowhere, here, we are
Elsewhere, moving, doing it, you know, down” slow, sounding, diving, the shape
we in.
Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)
Comments
Post a Comment