I went looking for the madness.
I don’t know if I found it.
Did you?
The backdrop of Ivan Blatny’s life (as discussed in class and in the introduction of The Drug of Art ) prompted the search. It felt like a murder mystery, looking for clues, trying to find its seeds. I wondered what it would have been like to read the poems without knowing he spent time in an asylum, but guess that would be impossible to do. I also wondered if my preference for Bixley Remedial School came down to the timeline. I want to spend this whole post talking about insanity. I’ll try to resist. Quite honestly, I’m not too sure it exists, because so much of what is called sane/insane is just a representation of our acceptance of a power/belief structure.
Institutions:
Blatny was a clearly prolific writer, but there is a 32-year gap between the poems presented in The Art of Drug. There could be many reasons for this gap; an editorial decision; Blatny didn’t write during this time; or anything he wrote has been erased by an institution. It doesn’t much matter if it was the Czech or English institution, both labeled him dead.
It seems that his run-in with the communist structure and subsequent interactions with a mental health structure, affected the survival, creation and reception of his work. His interactions with a political regime literally shaped the tone and character of his poetry, and also shapes the way the reader interacts with the work.
So, for an author whose life and art was so politicized, I was actually surprised to find little overt political content in the poems. In the earlier poems, I get a sense of social upheaval and war, but the war felt like the background noise for the speaker: as the radio broadcast the farm report,/the newspaper carried news of war,/of war to come, and yet everything and everyone was fast asleep (57). What is outside is like a condition of being, it is like sleep, and it is something that needs to be navigated. This passage comes from The Game, which is a long poem that is a mix between pages of prose block and the more traditional poetic page. The prose section of the poem is the Passerby dreaming of trials, rules, a doctor, a Resistance and of poetry.
Boundaries and Other Containment:
The Game is a poem that typifies recurring images/ideas of boundaries and containment that I saw throughout the collection. I felt that the speakers in Blatny’s poems are solidly contained. The containment is sensory, physical, relational and structural. But the speaker perceptions cannot be contained, and the poems represent a blurring of boundaries and distinctions between realties. (By “reality” we mean, the reality of his dream.) (59).
The dream within The Game, shows the Passerby on trial, and the people who represent the structures seem confused about the rules and labels they have aligned themselves to: The inspectors sought to establish who was a member of the Resistance and who was not. Still, he had no idea which signs meant yes, and which meant no (59). The inspector tells the Passerby he and his mother that they were going to chop off a leg from each of them (59), for whatever crime, and they would replace his leg with some type of mechanical apparatus. Towards the end of the poem the speaker tells us: he gritted his teeth and brought his leg down sharply on the lower block./He made up his mind to play it out to the end…/as the Passerby sat down at the table/and heard/the buzzing of several milky ways..(67).
Here we see confusion between the boundaries of wake/sleep, participation/observation and identities. Is the buzzing the sound of the saw in his dream, or is the sound of wasps as he wakes? When the speaker is hearing the buzzing the prose block has ended, giving the reader the impression that the dream is over and this is reality; a reality that the speaker will: play out to the end. As a dreamer, the speaker is both participant and observer; he is the inspector, the doctor and the victim/patient. And although the speaker is going to play out this game, there is no real sense what the game is. Is the game, the game of politics, of conformity, of poetry, etc.: the game is never spoken of: everything must be played out within the games framework, and within this framework the doctor had every right to be insulted…(63).
Wow, I just realized I got lost in The Game, which is ironic, because it was the one poem I did want to talk about. I found the prose section so dense; I couldn’t force myself through, and skipped it on the first read. But it really illustrates how Blatny works away the edges of the real.
While I see The Game mostly playing with structural boundaries and norms, I see other poems playing with the boundaries of the sensory. This Night paints a sensory world, in which the speaker’s senses exist beyond their prescribed powers. Light and time can be heard and what is seen of time can be touched. ...Eight-thirty struck/In the lampshade I heard…/I turned out the light And outside it was gently blowing…/I reached for the handle, what can be seen in an instant/All days All nights Right at this moment/Gurgling from the water mains (13). His word choice, line breaks and repetition in this poem and others are techniques Blatny uses to subvert the distinctions between internal and external existence.
But are these the signs of a mind that has the seeds of mental illness showing, or are they simply an expression of experience, an aesthetic? And what about his experience or aesthetic couldn’t be contained within the “normal” functioning of a society?
Flatness:
And I guess I’m going to use that question as a rough transition to his later works, which are the works directly attributed to his so-called confinement. There are many things that struck me about the poems written in England. The length is much different, tending to be very short, efficient use of the page. He also shifts back and forth between different languages. I could very well be mistaken on this one, but I think he flips between German, English and Czech. I really enjoyed the language shifts. It was like an erasure of parts of the poem, like closing the door to certain members of his audience.
But beyond the switching of languages, the quality that most struck me in his later poems was the evenness of tone. It was like every word, every image all carried the same weight. The poems became flat—not blurred, just flat. An untitled poem on page 120 is one of my favorite examples of this evenness:
Never Light the job
Nottingham is the North of England
potato blight killed there all the bulbs
I have no rules
I’m still undecided about everything
I’m still in
There is a church in America
and when you get married
the priest gets more voices
to get to bed in the evening
it is not my birth-day
to expect the triumph of God in the morning
The potato blight, the church in America, being undecided about everything and not expecting the triumph of God in the morning, are all joined together in the same manner of importance and tone. Nothing seems to be beyond the internal logic of the speaker’s voice. I’m not sure I can describe it any better than this but I’m wondering if any of you experienced this same sensation?
I could go on and on about what I think of this flatness, but it would probably devolve into how Blatny’s poems illustrate a Sociological Theory I love, so I will spare you all that, and leave you with some possible questions to discuss, or go whichever directions interests you. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Possible Questions:
Ø Am I wrong about the political images and themes in The Drug of Art? Were you struck by political messages within the poems? Is art always potentially political and subversive?
Ø How did the issues of boundaries strike you? What are some ways that you see Blatny establish and take away boundaries?
Ø What did you make of his use of language? How does it relate to the notion of containment?
Haha, Trish, I too went looking for the madness. This is the problem with knowing too much of a writer's life story before reading his work for the first time. I actually saw some kind of unsettling mental edge creeping up in those later poems, particularly in Bixley Remedial School. It's not mental illness, necessarily. But there's something going on there, some kind of break from what we see in the earlier poems. The "flatness" you speak of, Trish, reads to me like a kind of sucking away of writerly power. I don't know how to describe it, necessarily. The sense of place has been messed with, the language has become disorganized (literally, as the different languages fade in and out), and the words themselves are very plain.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways, I saw this as a kind of political action. I don't know if it was thought out by Blatny, though, or if this is what happens when you take a poet away from the place that made him. The early poems in this book have a terrific and even touching sense of place - of his hometown of Brno, of Czechoslavakia. Then, exiled and living in an institution that takes him out of the external world, his poems suddenly lose that sort of place-setting (Old Addresses has a strong sense of place, but these poems could be older. Bixley, though, has almost no sense of place at all, except maybe the place of the mind). This disconnect between earlier and later poems becomes a kind of political statement, I think. This is what exile does, these poems say. This is what happens when the land we know and love becomes a bizarro version of itself. Maybe I'm biased because I like the place poems better than those Bixley poems, but to me, it's tragic what's happening in the narrative of this poet's life as it comes out in his poetry. It's still good poetry, sure. But there's some kind of loss of human faith there that kind of breaks my heart.
So I guess in a way that means this book is all about boundaries and containment. The boundaries of the mind, of place, of what happens to poetry taken out of the context of itself. It's about how we create our own containments and about the different kinds of self-containment - getting stuck in our hometowns (Blatny's Brno, my Woodlawn, etc) or getting stuck inside our own minds (the Bixley poems). I don't know. It was hard for me to read this poems and not feel too much in them.
Great thoughts, Trish--thank you. Like you and Beth, I too went looking for "the madness" and found myself thinking about madness and poetry as I read the book. I remembered reading an essay by Foucault long ago that spoke of the history of mental asylums and how historically they weren't really places for "treatment" at all, but rather places to contain those elements of society that didn't fit in to "normative" social paradigms. Regardless of whether or not he was 'clinically' ill (which seems really doubtful to me despite the dramatic change in his later work) it's fitting to me that Blatny took refuge in an asylum as the only place to get away from the insane social forces in his native land invested in doing away with him because he was at odds with the prevailing political climate. Artists like Blanty (and I think, all 'authentic' artists) always exist beyond the borders or containers that are placed upon them, especially by monolithic societies.
ReplyDeleteEven though I didn't sense too many overt political messages within his poems, I think Blanty's poetry--early and late--dramatizes and speaks to and from life on the edge of the 'real,' so to speak. The early work, as rooted as it is in place and as often as it speaks of the poet's native land, seems so often to move beyond or outside of place, too. The poem "Places" seems almost posthumous, written from beyond the grave, and death seems an ever-present force in this poem and so many others. I keep returning to thinking about Blanty's long poem "Terrestris" and how the figure of Terrestris seems similar to Lorca's duende--both are dark, mysterious forces that nothing can control and that exist on the edge of life and death, sanity and insanity, beauty and terror, etc. Terrestris may be deadly, but her power and love seem transformative too. In conjuring her, Blanty seems to conjure a sort of primal energy prior to--and uncontrollable by--human beings. It seems like Terrestris might have been Blanty's muse like the duende was Lorca's muse, and it makes sense to me that neither poet could be tolerated by the monolithic societies they found themselves caged in. Blanty's work--like Lorca's--seems aimed at channeling these 'forces beyond' normative or 'real' life.
I think Blatny's later work stands as another kind of "speaking from beyond." The 'breakdowns' in these later poems--of language and word play, of image, of thematic "coherence"--seem to speak against any hierarchical powers that would impose order, meaning, or even a dominant language on the world. Blatny's art resists absolutely:
Anarchy
There is a village without a bell
there is the world without leadership
Choc-ice is in czech called Eskymo...(117)
It's not that there *could* be a village without a bell or a world without leadership, but that there *is*--somewhere outside the regnant orders that impose themselves on the world and on human beings. Blatny's later work seems to want to envision that world and realize it; it mixes languages, images, etc. so as to dethrone anything and everything that might try to dominate life. And it's life, in the end, that Blanty seems to have faith in:
The will to life is remorselessly exploding all eternity
there is no death...("Fate" 115).
(Maybe what I'm reading as a will to deconstruct all hierarchies of power leads to the "flatness" that you sensed in Blatny's later work, Trish.)
The Drug of Art
ReplyDeleteInteresting post Trish and great thoughts Thade and Beth. Needless to say, while there are indeed mental illnesses, I agree with you Trish that the concept of “madness” is rather a social function that serves certain needs. It also reminds me of the following excerpt/ poem and which I attempt to translate here and which I will try to connect to Blatny—because it seems to me that it is almost written for him:
“that individual that is missing a screw or two
that disturbs or scandalizes his family or society
is usually classified as insane accused of mental illness
and persecuted as sick
this act of psychiatry fulfills important needs
that individual gazing upon the blue thighs of a flying woman
upon the singing little trees the foul earth
is locked up slammed with electricity insulin doctors
this act of psychiatry fulfills important needs
the need to sing or fly?
the need of that individual missing a screw or two
that disturbs or scandalizes his family or society and is
classified as insane accused of mental illness and persecuted
as sick?
other needs?
needs of the individual not missing a screw or two
not disturbing or scandalizing his family or society
not classified as insane accused of mental illness
nor persecuted as sick?
no flying thighs of blue woman?
nor singing little trees nor foul earth?”
[My bold—emphasize or whatever]
*
Blatny writes in Autumn III from old addresses and well into his “madness:”
ReplyDeleteAll my lovely years, where have they whirled,
those lovely hallways that led to sweet woman,
the murmurs, ankles, the magic of the world?
Oh why did I stay alone, alone, alone?
The orchard shook and fell like a dead goddess.
The undertakers usher out the bier.
The castle stands, oh nonetheless,
and shreds fly far and near.
The villages drowse in the autumn plains
while actors take their greasepaint off the train
The curtain rises. The band begins to play.
Nádhera the director paces backstage,
Cervícek sings as in a bygone age,
and starts depart again, the same old way.
*
now to connect both poems to Blatny and some of the questions raised, particularly on the search for the “madness and the plotitical.” and also on trish’s concern about art always potentially being subversive/ political…
In the final analysis whether Blatny was “crazy” or not does not truly matter. Perhaps it was a case of one suffering from a mental illness that coupled with the stress of exile produced some truly amazing poetry but again it doesn’t matter. For one I cannot even imagine what it must have been like to write in those asylums and perhaps without any books, any tutelary authors that always accompany one in our writing. I often wonder if a work of art must be explicitly political to be classified as “political writing”? I don’t think so, that is a very limiting way to look at art. All art is political whether its author intended for it to be or not. I could be wrong about that but let’s consider for a second the following: Literature spans the whole of the written messages that make up a determined culture, despite whatever political value these might merit. A novel, a popular folk song, a screenplay, a collection of poems, however mediocre or brilliant, alienating or liberating—all these are political literature—good or bad, as any other book that is explicitly writing to “resist through language.” Furthermore the decision that an author might take in his or her subject matter/aesthetics, in his decision to keep silent that too is just as much a political act as it is “speaking out,” as “resisting through language.” We make political decisions everyday, in what we write, in what we eat, in what we dress, whether we know it or not, we live in a politicized world.
now Blatny does not have to make his poetry an explicit indictment against the stifling aesthetics of communist oppression—in fact it is his disownment form Czech letters that irnocally validate him as one resisting this madness. Also Blatny is not keeping silent by not making this indictment, the very act of writing because itself an act of scandalization, a perturbation of society. it is even more disturbing to both societies of his time in the sense that Blatny refuses to be categorized into any of the two categories available during the Cold War. true art will always refuse to be put to the service of propaganda, it will only sing for absolute truth. In this sense Blatny always remained a true artist, “scandalizing and disturbing his family and society.”
trish, i had the seem feeling about the political in his work. i came into it almost expecting (because isn't that what we're supposed to expect out of poetry written in non-english in a certain timeperiod? that there will be politics in it? i don't know, i do, and i feel like others do also) some overt political stuff. and there is, to be sure, but you nailed it, i think. it feels more like a setting than the central concern of his poems.
ReplyDeletealso, about the madness: to me it comes through in how fractured those final poems feel. fractured not only in the sense of plot/image/structure, but in the language itself. he slips from english to czech to german to french, seemingly indiscriminately, which i found extremely fascinating (and a little annoying: if the czech is translated, why wasn't some of the german? but that's not his fault).
you get a sense of his place, too, in an asylum, particularly in the poem 'menu' on page 108 (which is my favorite). his focus is mainly on cigarettes and macaroni and cheese, the mundane nature of institutionalized life: food/minor pleasures. the first line is ambiguous and weird (does he mean a woman to have sex with or does he mean a nurse in the institution? if the latter, why would that mean he is having a happy day? what happens in this room? we get a hint of it in the poem 'misspelled' on page 122: "and go with a lady to the Room / like a unicorn in the mirror / all naked in the mirrors / so that I could see the blood trickling." i have no clue what this means, and again points toward how fractured and uncertain these poems are. then again, maybe i'm just looking for fractured, i don't know). the last line, too, is phenomenal: "the drug called happinesse" is awesome, and links with 'the drug of art' in many ways. how is art a drug, how is happinesse a drug? i'm not sure how much depth he goes into in these final poems, but i get the sense that without this drug, this thing which produces pleasurable feelings (art, happinesse), institutionalized life would be somehow less bearable? art as the opiate of the inmate, maybe, except here it's less about control and more about survival.
anyway, the use of multiple languages seems to signify a sort of jumping around. usually when the language shifts it changes tone or thought, sometimes mid-stanza. the shifts are really interesting to me. also, i just noticed, we only get parts of bixley remedial school, only selected poems, which makes giving a complete reading of these poems pretty impossible. i agree with lauro: in the end, it doesn't matter whether blatny is crazy or not. what matters are the poems, and i liked these poems.
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ReplyDeleteGreat post, Trish. I, too, noticed the series of containments in Blatny’s The Drug of Art, and was particularly struck by the visual containment in the excerpt of the BRNO ELEGIES, as they were set in rhyme and meter. I kept thinking this translates too clean, somehow— but, since I don’t know enough Czech to counter this intuition (or to see how the different translators worked with/against each other, though these were things I did consider), I referred only to the right side of the page to make my remarks.
ReplyDeleteI’m not fond of the structured rhyme, but I found that Blatny created a sort of stage by which these poems sang. (These are elegies, after all; of Blatny’s homeland, the place which he could not return to after exile; though the fact these poems were written before his exile create a poignant binary that made me wonder if he had an inkling he would one day be declared dead on the radio.)
You sometimes turned to strangers. They now sleep
In other lands. The mill grinds with no intake.
The rubbled bed and rockface, sheer and steep
Fade in the darkness of the rippled lake. (3)
Blatny sings of exile before he even became such. He writes almost of a post-apocalyptic mental state: one that has forgotten its original purpose and setting.
I see most of his poems rooted in interiority, by which this “madness” is discovered in religious search, natural contemplation or the Passerby in “The Game” (I saw the Passerby as a veil for the speaker, or one that could easily be substituted for another person; I saw the fluidity of persons and personal fixtures that changed as the text did, but one that could not escape the social and textual constructs that bound them). I didn't find the madness I was looking or hoping for, but I did find madness.
Just like the Passerby
Just like the Passerby
Only the other way round. (69)
thanks for the reat post, trish. And also, thanks for your thoughtful comment, Megan.
ReplyDeleteI had a hard time reading this poems, and was realizing that my taste for poem has been weirdly constrained in a way that I cannot digest the dense poems as well as I would. Your approach of reading structure as a stage makes a lot of sense. The dead, apparition, youth (that wilted away ages ago), thousands and millions of overwhelming beings populate these stage, and the structure becomes a device that shows impossibility of containment, his memory, the details of the land he cannot return.