Morning Corrects Itself – Jonny Keyworth

Morning Corrects Itself - 01/05/2020

Duetto Larry Poons (2007)

These pieces were written during the lockdowns of 2020 and originally published via TinyLetter.

It's hard at this time to stop the eye from straying from the pool of Chrome tabs, unanswered emails, Zoom joining urls and Teams notifications, to the window and the world beyond. The burnishing sun that brought in this strange period has slowly slipped into something more morose, more in-keeping with the mood inside.

The early days of brightness, whilst eerie, felt full of possibility - I'll write that novel, I'll master making stock, it's a time to reflect; it was easy to fall into some sort of new routine, it was new and tantalisingly unfamiliar. But now, bigger questions linger in the corners in the room, we think a little more about how and where we might live in the months to come, how sociability may look, how we may come together once again. [Nb. this is not a call for the empty politics of 'publish an exit plan' of the new Labour leadership.]

It's made me think about our conception of mass, collective politics. The Right has it easy - its conception of society as a structure of individuals that come into contact for purely economic purposes, does not see long-term isolated households as a threat to its hegemony - its theoretical framework can contain that sort of distance. The social in socialism, however, suddenly becomes a challenge, and no number of Zoom gatherings will replicate that and will not sustain organising long-term.

The concept of collective joy is one that took on some saliency during the heady heights of the Corbyn years, a tenet of Mark Fisher's Acid Communism and its spawn, Acid Corbynism. It's the idea that radical politics takes its fuel from collective moments of joy - music festivals, football matches, on whatever scale. The question of the future leads us to consider how we can create these moments of collective joy when we are so loosely distributed and apart. It has to amount to more than symbolic clapping. As the use of the word Acid suggests - it is about the liberation of human consciousness.

The brilliant poet Ada Limón recently wrote a poem in the New Yorker, which ends:

I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,

enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high

water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,

I am asking you to touch me.

For me, this captures our longing for collective joy on whatever scale - 'enough of the kneeling and the rising and the looking inward' she says earlier on in the poem, and that sense of exasperation even with 'the air and its ease' is so painfully longing. This guttural feeling is the greatest challenge to joy.

Enforcer Larry Poons (1962)

From thinking about the future of left organising and crying whilst reading Ada Limón (read all her poetry) - I very fortuitously flicked over to the documentary, The Price of Everything about the concept of value in the art world. I learnt very little beyond the reiteration that Jeff Koons is merely 'lobby art' and de Kooning paintings sell for shit loads of money because of market dynamics.

But I was taken with the story of Larry Poons - and his transition from geometrical pieces in the sixties (such as Enforcer), to his more recent complex style (such as Duetto), and his journey from hot young thing as part of the The Responsive Eye exhibition, a survey of post-war American art at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1965, to outcast and forgotten. And now perhaps, his market value will continue to see a new dawn with his new identity as a 'rediscovered artist'.

The title of the documentary comes from Oscar Wilde's well-known line 'The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing' and Poons straddles that binary, seemingly thrown out of the art world to attain his value. I like how Poons said in an interview that 'paintings are mistakes' and he quotes Leonardo da Vinci's line 'Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.' Poons goes on to say that we add more mistakes to that mistake and:

All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end. Where did Cézanne begin a painting? Where did Titian start? You can’t tell. You just don’t see it.

Larry Poons in his studio

I've been thinking a lot about John Ashbery's prose poem 'The System' and it's opening lines:

The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the country is.

'The System' is a long meandering poem (the copy I have stretches to 37 pages) and is deeply reflective and internal, but the ebb and flow of the meditative feel of the poem makes us think about how we experience historical time - what does it feel like to live in history: 'who am I after all [...] to have merited so much attention on the part of the universe?' Much like Poons' conception of art, history is never finished. It does not begin nor end with us.

I find it unbearable to read the poem in one sitting, it's too close to the rhythms of our own thought patterns - it is like being trapped inside the mind of Eliot's Prufrock for 37 pages. But then, when you want to give up, Ashbery has these moments of striking juxtaposition that cut through the denseness:

It is possible to know just enough, and this is all we were supposed to know, toward which we have been straining all our lives. We are to read this in outward things: the spoons and greasy tables in this room, the wooden shelves, the flyspecked ceiling merged into gloom - good and happy things, nevertheless, that tell us little of themselves and more about ourselves than we had ever imagined it was possible to know. They have become the fabric of life.

I love the juxtaposition of the things that define our everyday experience and how Ashbery contrasts how these things are simultaneously integral to our sense of being and identity, but also meaningless and disposable. These things are incredibly clear to us at this current moment - the lack of change of scenery only reiterates their shape.

These mundane things stitched into 'the fabric of life' become, as he says in today's poem Crazy Weather, a 'poetry of mud'. I've always liked the idea of a poetry of mud - of the messy terrain underfoot, the things that could be so easy to ignore as we participate in the forward march of history. Ashbery asks us to consider that these 'rare, Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots'.

Perhaps this is the way that the Left can find fuel for our journey towards moments of collective joy - paying attention to things that may seem uninteresting but are putting out shoots, potential for growth and nourishment, openings for collective joy. The mistakes and defeats that the Left has suffered are not end-points, they are merely waymarkers on the journey of fighting for a better world.

Now, enough from me, here's Crazy Weather.

Crazy Weather John Ashbery

It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:

Falling forward one minute, lying down the next

Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.

People have been making a garment out of it,

Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning

At some anonymous crossroads the sky calls

To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray

Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.

You are wearing a text. The lines

Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need