"Untranscended life itself"

March 12, 2007 Brown is one of Australia’s lesser known great poets, if great equates with being revered by her peers; appreciated by a growing number of academics; read by a coterie of fans; producing prolifically in her own minimalist way; being steeped in Australian and international poetics; producing work which is philosophically and technically rich; and being someone who contributes to the wider literary world through her editing, her mentoring of younger poets, her embracing and discerning of literary culture embedded in an always bigger, baggier world. Brown’s works, produced over 30 years, are not widely available. They include volumes such as New and Selected Poems (1990), This World/This Place (1994), Little Droppings (1994), 50-50 (1997), Text Thing (2002), Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems (2003) and 2005’s Let’s Get Lost. The latter is a collaboration between poets and friends Pam Brown, Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan. At last count there were 18 poetry collections, with several of these overlapping in a number of Selected Works.

However, critical attention has not been extensive. Despite being highly regarded within a small group of poets and peers, Brown has typically published in a scattered, small-press way. However, Dear Deliria’s appearance with Salt Publishing should see her work better distributed. While this small-press, small readership approach is something most Australian poets know intimately, Brown has made it into an art form, and one which seems in keeping with her own ironic and at times cynical approach to the world of appearance, celebrity and media hype. Brown’s career is very far away from such scenes, not it seems through self-effacement or a shy-poet-in-the-garret attitude. There is just a residual toughness, a pervasive, questioning cynicism, and a stubborn faithfulness to language’s plasticity which Brown’s poem’s embody, attitudes which seem to come from the deeper registers of this poet’s intellectual and artistic life as it is lead in contemporary Australia.

Reviewers describe Brown as a satirist, as improvisational, wittily paranoid and world-weary, ironic. She is, and does, all these things in her poem ‘Flickering Gaudi’ from the 1994 volume This World. This Place:

                                                             — What
to drink in remembrance of friends, of ideas,
of projects, of eight millimetre films,
of sketchbooks, screenprints, letters all
eliding somehow in the depths of the pile?
The extemporary verve of designs for a life
which never evolve into actual manufacture.
And now, in a kind of inner-suburban
isolation, brilliant — bright — paintings
are attentively wrapped & stacked
at the back of a wardrobe. Mild domesticity
where reasonable evenings become numinous nights
of reading difficult books patiently flat
on your back & raging,
privately, laughing, noting the clues,
improving your vocabulary, never your method.

There is indeed improvisation — of a careful, knowing kind — in the eclectic tumble of things and moods, moments of brief existential measuring: “a kind of inner-suburban/isolation”, “Mild domesticity”, “reasonable evenings”, “on your back & raging”. The wonderful swing of “The extemporary verve of designs for a life” threatens to quite undo the aim of this essay. The poem’s continual riffing on ephemerality — the life never evolving “into actual manufacture”, or realised method — offers a challenge to this reader, both to go with the quizzical, self-deprecating wit of the surface, and to stake a claim about depth in this wonderfully extemporizing poetry.

In the poem ‘Scenes’, from the 2002 volume text thing, Brown is still working concertedly at these meditations on detritus.

that white plastic bag
has been drifting
from the gutter
to the road
for three days,
when the rainwater
carries it off
to the Tasman Sea
I think I’ll miss it.

One of the intriguing things about this scene from ‘Scene’ is its careful noting: of place, colour, time, destination and feeling. Such care is at odds, hauntingly, with the transient nature of the observation. But there is also a poignant realisation in the understatedness of the poem, that the things of the world are intimately connected to emotions, or at least the observer continues to make the connection, albeit tentatively: “I think I’ll miss it.” The scene is reminiscent of the film American Beauty, as the young druggy stands mesmerised by the plastic bag lifting and falling in gusts of wind. Just why that film scene was so moving is hard to explain — did it present an image of transience? A glimpse of nature in a ferociously human world? Of forces outside human power? In both the film and the poetry scenes there is the link to something faintly glimpsed, so ironically distanced and understated.

However admiring I am of the spare, sharp, witty and ironic poetry of Brown, turning on its recurrent tropes of ephemerality, memory, place and postmodern subjectivity, this essay will move beyond admiration. It will read against the grain of Brown’s own urbane secularity, with its emphases on transience, distance, its critique of lack of depth in the modern world, arguing for a reading of Brown’s works within a category of sacredness. This is indeed an uphill argument, one by which I imagine Brown, the poet of “untranscended life/itself”, would be bemused. In this climb I will call on the work of early twentieth century sociologist, novelist and secular theologian Georges Bataille, and his anti-institutional and transgressive concepts of the sacred. Further, the essay will confront ideas about the sacred in Brown’s familiar haunt, the city, so often the icon of godlessness, whether it be in the guise of disenchanted, secular modernity, the technological, commercial, chartered place; or differently, as the place of decadence, Sodom and Gomorrah. Within this context, here is the opening of Brown’s poem ‘Pique’, from her 1997 volume 50-50:

no one
     on the corner
                     here

silent,
     not spiritual,
 the city is empty

antispectacular
      & as
deodorised
        as heaven

no sleeping boys
      no density
no belching
   pissing bodies
no spitting
         in the street

utilitarian –
     make one step
          another step
                  follows

the pace set
      by the tedium
             of the blessed


There’s so much going on in these seemingly laconic and wittily spare little lines, though ‘sacredness’ is not what the poem appears to be focussed upon; quite the opposite, it seems. Brown’s poetry could be described as wry, postmodern, jauntily profane, captured in the little dance of ‘Pique’, with its stepped out little rhythms and sharp observational city-scapes. So where do I hope to get in fretting away at the categories of sacred and profane? In his essay “Savage Metropolis”, critic Andrew McCann argues, through a reading of Australian colonial aesthetics, and of Marcus Clarke in particular, “that modernity brings with it a degree of regret related to its disenchantment”. He argues of Clarke’s view:

In a world where cultural authority resided increasingly with the agents of technological and scientific progress … pre-modern “belief in sacred incarnations, in heavenly interpositions, in personal relations with the awful Spirit of the Universe, is dead” [Clarke’s words] the “creed of the nineteenth century” is unambiguously secular.

Despite this claim to secularity, in McCann’s argument Modernity’s regret about its own disenchantment in Australia informs a larger repressed colonial sense of the uncanny which arose, again and again seeking pleasure in the animistic, in the very things it was meant to be so far beyond. Further, he argues that “the rituals of a ‘dead and forgotten creed’”— and here he’s referring specifically to colonial responses to Indigenous beliefs and practices — are located “inside the Western Imagination”.

If we accept McCann’s argument that colonial writers and readers such as Marcus Clarke are caught in the gap between modern disbelief in the old creeds and superstitions, and nineteenth-century readerly and writerly predilections for the gothic, the barbaric ritual, the eroticised, indigenous sacred, surely the post-colonial, poststructurally-informed writer, such as Pam Brown, is several steps beyond this — aware of these colonial, racial and cultural blindnesses, but self-reflexive too of language as the site most complicit in constructing such blindnesses. After all, Derrida demonstrates the logocentricity of language, the ways in which indicators of sacred beliefs — truth, centre, God — cannot be eradicated, but can be constantly questioned and displaced, revealed in their internal difference. Looking back at modernity’s ambivalent attempts to dispel the sacredness of the word, and looking around at the poststructural word which knows it will betray itself, and at the post-colonial word which tries but cannot open itself up enough to alterity, what can a poet do? Where can she go?

I want to suggest several ways in which Brown’s poetry of the city is a poetry readable within the context of the sacred, a category which gives full play to such directional questions. The first indication of this is when we look at Brown’s uses of irony. Of Bataille’s work on the sacred, critic Jean Michel Heimonet writes that the function of irony “is to ‘torture’ discourse, to empty it of positive content by pressing it up against a blind spot, a symbolic no-man’s-land that simultaneously reveals to the discourse its own finitude and its beyond.”

And this is partly what Brown’s ironic, throw away lines are engaged in doing: a constant confronting of the finitude of discourse which, it is argued, is at the same time a desire for the ‘beyond’ of discourse. The city of ‘Pique’ (Brown, 1977) is empty, silent, unspectacular. Here there is even the asserted absence of abjection: in Brown’s city there is “no belching/ pissing bodies/ no spitting ” — although of course her words are necessarily bodying forth the very thing they seek to negate. She plays here with the limits of her own discourse — its lack of spectacle, density; its repeated rhythms, just like the tedium of the blessed. And goodness knows who these blessed are – the saints of old going about their ritual, circumscribed duties perhaps? Or those who are unreflectively happy, seemingly unlike the narrator of the poem? And all the poet can do is mimic and ironize such tedium and emptiness, her little step down lines making a mockery of the rituals of the blessed, but also of the imitative artist looking for her narrative.

However, in part two of the poem another strategy is tried, as the poem constructs its comically red-neck, blasphemous vignettes. After the poetic hiatus of “the pace set/by the tedium/of the blessed” we have constructed for us — in a seeming reaction to the tedium — an almost impersonal, visceral desire for

demolishing
     half the house
         to make room
for the truck

bashing the bricks
      with
          a blunt tang

aiming
     the air rifle
           anywhere

blasting doves
            from
telegraph poles

shouting and strutting
       down
             BBQ lane

setting fire
     to lakes.

What else can you do in the empty, silent, unspectacular and utilitarian city, but run amok, disrupt the silence, bash, aim, blast, shout and strut? In the vacuum of such a city, how to find a role, how to write, how to live? Well, one last thing you can do is turn the irony back on yourself, the poet:

& here am I,
   nibbling
        my jejune nourishment
with the laxity
          of a cultivated
              & singular minority

languidly
   erasing
         all legend

flick  flick  flick.

Nothing sacred here — all legend (text and belief) casually self-erasing. Or is it?
One effect of the irony is to mock the languidness of poet and audience, the “cultivated/ & singular minority”, that adopts the gesture of power, the eradication of all legend, but at the same time hails its own laxity and jejune cannibalism of the very thing it claims to mock. So the empty streets of the poem are filled with pissing and spitting bodies; narrative excitement is unlocateable, and mocked as the tedium of the blessed, and comically whipped up in the violent acts of nameless larrikins (and poets). Language goes rushing in to fill the void it equally represents. So, the poet or the poem recognises, à la Bataille, that she is confronted by “the finitude of discourse, and its beyond”. But does confronting the finitude necessarily issue in a ‘beyond’? And what on earth might that be? Is it all that out there which refuses to manifest itself when you speak or write — and in this case that which will not manifest is equally narrative, spectacle, and the very void, the emptiness, the silence. Language refuses such silence, but is constantly submitting to it. In fact, I am arguing that this is Brown’s recurrent theme: the impossibility of the sacred, and the impossibility of resting with that impossibility.

In the poem ‘Relic’ we read: “what faith!/flailing & thrashing/beating dry bones/on rust-flaked drums/practising ritual/as if it were possible to swallow/an arrow” (50-50). In ‘Pique’ the gap between the patterned tedium of the silent city and the random violence of bashing bricks, blasting doves, shouting and strutting down BBQ lane sets up an ironic interplay between what will not shine — the city as not spiritual, antispectacular, deodorised, one step placed dutifully or ploddingly after another — and the bizarre violence of language, or poets, seeking to force event or response. As if something was possible. Like Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the characters in Brown’s poetry go about declaring the decay of aura, the loss of sacred possibility or depth in the modern urban world, with its commercialisation and profane surfaces. But for Brown’s city dwellers, as for Benjamin’s flâneur, the city taunts or seduces with its flickering aura, and is simultaneously, I am arguing, the site of “displacement of the religious into new forms of the sacred” (Hegarty). Here is ‘City’, also from 50-50:

City

A yearned-for somewhere
    adverb-physically
as lost as now
       gazing across
           the chunky valley
to a hill
     of quivering lights —

There is no
   destination —
just a place
   no site
not Olympic
          village site
not harbourside
           casino site
    nor section
       of expressway
          just east
of where
        coincidence
          has determined
             your residence
in a city
   you returned to
      to remember
          why you left —

Inventing
    nostalgia
        for elsewhere —
you’ll live there
    in the future —

The final dash — recalling another biting minimalist of the sacred, Emily Dickinson — is wonderful. Is it a linguistic lurch into the future, a beyond, it is postulating? Or another ironizing stroke of the computer key, signifying a no-place, no show? Is it a signifier of the languaged nature of that future? Here, place is emptied of its definitive meaning, emptied of sacredness, it might be argued, for here everything is negated — no destination, no site, not Olympic, not harbourside; and it’s randomly circular, a place to which “you returned to/to remember/why you left”; where ‘coincidence’ rhymes with ‘residence’. But the city is also yearned for, a place that, because it is an invention, can be seen as enabling invention. And there is the flickering postmodern aura of meaning (possibility, substance): the quivering lights, the chunky valley, the shared story of vulnerability — yearning, gazing, memory — told only between the lines, and in relation to the city.

Sacred and profane places. One of the main projects of Georges Bataille, in 1930s and 40s France, as a leading member of the Parisian College of Sociology, was to invent Sacred Sociology (Hegarty). He sought “the profanation of the sacred”. His approach was “to sites that predate modernity but persist within it … that could be characterized as (im)properly modern”. As Bataille scholar Paul Hegarty writes, Bataille revealed:

the transvaluation of sites valorized by Christianity in terms of holiness (the church, arguably the home ... ) or in terms of sin (the brothel, the bar, the woods) such that they are part of an economy of transgression, or of an ever-mobile sacrifice [my italics]. Only after such a shift in value, which is the removal of value (insofar as this fixes a phenomenon) can the move be made to bring back the religious sacred, this time as part of a Bataillean sacred, such that “a brothel is my true church.”

The premise here is that only in the removal of value can the sacred be opened towards. And it is a question of experience rather than fixed space, category, value or definition. As Hegarty describes it, sacred acts or places

cannot permanently exist as sacred, but they can be brought … and this bringing requires time — a time not of progress, or even process, but of waiting, of non-occurrence because unrealizable — unliveable except in hindsight, except perhaps in anticipation of its not being liveable. But this space is far from abstract.

This is not the sacred of the cathedral or mosque, bush or city. Nor is it the sacred of moral codes, nor of the legalism which often attends such codes. It’s the experience of the individual and of a community (readership? peers?): what is yearned for, awaited, dreamed of, leaned towards, recognised as unpurchaseable in a linguistic or geographical or legal or material economy. It’s the coming to realise that there is no destination (as Brown’s metaphor writes it), even as you arrive at your latest port of call. But as Hegarty argues, it’s also far from abstract, this sacred. In Brown’s ‘City’ the sacred and political are imbricated, in the comic refusal of all those alluring national and commercial and class-transcending promises — “no site/not Olympic/village site/not harbourside/ casino site/ nor section/of expressway/ just east.” This sacred undermines fatuities and glittering prizes, just as Bataille’s sacred understood the bringing of sacred experience away from fixed or institutional or codified versions of the religious, including most particularly for Bataille, European fascism.

In the anti-institutional and anti-colonising aspects of Bataille’s sacred there are obviously synchronicities for artists working in contemporary, post-colonial Australia. But of course the context of the necessarily political and spiritual struggles against entrenched hierarchies and dogmas in early twentieth-century Europe is not the same context in which postmodern poets in the West are now working. What was at stake for Bataille and other anti-fascist artists was the need to disarm the mighty push towards political and religious centres, programmes which were yet again establishing themselves. For Brown and her peers, poets such as John Forbes, Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan, there is a different, Australian starting point in relation to the making of meaning; and it seems almost a converse one in relation to any idea of the experience of meaning or sacredness: Brown’s cynicism, satire, attractions and repulsions, seem built around an absent centre, something always already (in the poetry) lost in the tedious non-occurrences of contemporary (Australian) life. At times this absent centre seems to be what needs attacking, eradicating, repulsing. At other times it continues its function of holding out the possibility of meaning. In this latter context, Brown’s poems are perpetually beginning:

setting out,
                 a scarlet flower
         behind an ear,
into the wide
              world into
              banner-adorned cities
   faking
        permanent festivity

(from ‘Anyworld’ in Cordite) or,

leaving nature’s
barbarism (spider
in a glove) behind
me I enter my
paved city —
pocked concrete
& traffic carbon
sky’s all
coppery night’s
coming up

I follow
the man-in-the-dress
along a lane
littered
with litter
where
Carlo and Zanzi
have signed
the sub-station
roll-a-door —
more than a tag —
a declaration —
white strokes
wide brush

(‘In Ultimo’, 1997)

Momentarily adorned as Romantic poet, “a scarlet flower/behind an ear”, the narrators of Brown’s poems have to learn again and again that there is no return, that nature is barbaric, just as the city is, “faking/permanent festivity’, ‘pocked concrete/& traffic carbon”. But her repulsions constantly, momentarily pivot into hope, a leaning towards, observing intimately “my/ paved city”. This is not Blake’s blasted London full of marked and desecrated citizens, nor the Armageddon of Eliot’s Wasteland. Brown’s poetry is less dramatic, more democratic, accepting, following without judgement “the man-in-the-dress”, observing the verve and particularity of Carlo and Zanzi’s ‘declaration’, experiencing in the marks of ‘her’ city what she sees in herself — not the need for redemption arising out of some extraordinary fiat or mighty pronouncement, and possibly foreshadowing no redemption at all, but still a continuing need — in the citizens, in the poet — to declare, to sign, to transgress. Postmodern theologian Mark Taylor writes:

For Bataille, [the sacred is] the soiled, it’s the dirty, it’s the polluted, it’s that which is ordinarily regarded as negative … Because he sees in that kind of hierarchical structure of high and low, extraordinary repression. And he’s trying to release that — to cultivate, indeed solicit, the return of the repressed.

At the end of the poem ‘Anyworld’ Brown declares:

re mem ber Ba,
     Are-e Bam
ancient city of sand
           and mud
        collapsing in an earthquake,
the cultural heritage building
     slipping   subsiding,
                 consigning
any record
     of the archaic ruin
               to dust
*
the memory
           is
             ruined
*
who can accept
             a given world,
who can
     live in it?

('Anyworld’, 2002 in Cordite )

This essay has been reading in Brown’s work an openness towards the littered, un-Romantic, pocked and transvestite city, “my paved city”; to the transgressive, unaffiliated, anti-hierarchcical; to defilements, blankness and littleness. Brown’s poetry places a finger on the pulse of small, everyday defilements, registering the mystery of abjection, of loss, and the unlocatableness of meaning. In ‘Anyworld’ all cities, including the human body, are sand and mud, collapsing. The final question of ‘Anyworld’ — “who can accept/a given world,/who can/live in it” — is almost imponderable. The question strains with irony, the word ‘accept’ pulling in opposite directions: not to accept is to judge, condemn, repudiate, dismiss. But to judge what? In the context of this poem, to accept seems an act of complacency, a simple, total forgetting. But if the world is ‘given’, there is no direct mention here of a giver, divine or otherwise. Unless, in approaching that liminal place between acceptance and rage, living and refusing to live, the experience of the sacred emerges: a waiting, a non-occurrence, a mobility. Of course this poem’s question is potentially moral and political, for one answer is — I will not accept, I will change the given world, as in Brown’s poem ‘At the Wall’s’ and its outrage over ‘sarajevo srebrenica palestine/rwanda kabul’. But a parallel, a certainly not mutually exclusive, response is to acknowledge the sacred dimension of the question, a sacredness experienced in this active play of possibility and impossibility. Mark Taylor writes of Bataille:

at the heart of the experience of the sacred is the conflict between attraction and repulsion. The sacred is never simply one or the other, it is at one and the same time attractive and repulsive. That’s what lends it its power and horror. What happens in a lot of Christianity is that the positive and the negative get split and posited on two different realities — God and the Devil, whatever framework we’re in.

The rigor of Pam Brown’s poetry lies in its very refusal to merely collapse into one or the other reality. There are no Gods or Devils, no unironic negatives and positives. Rather, I have been arguing that in Brown’s poetry there are metaphorically rich experiences of a yearning, one which recognises language as the chief ally and enemy, the poetic site being not one of celebration or repulsion, but of both. The aura glimpsed fleetingly may well be only those flickering lights across the valley, but the poet makes them props in an experience “of waiting, of non-occurrence…unrealizable — unliveable except in hindsight, except perhaps in anticipation of its (possibly) not being liveable” (Hegarty). This is “an ever mobile”, languaged experience of sacredness encountered in the ordinary, faking, littered and flickering city. Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: SUNY, 1988.

Brown, Pam. -Sureblock, Melbourne: P.Woolley, 1972.
----Cocabola's Funny Picture Book (an anthology of prose, poetry & graphics).
Sydney: Tomato Press, 1973.
----Automatic Sad. Sydney: Tomato Press, 1974.
----Cafe Sport. Sydney: Sea Cruise Books, 1979.
----Correspondences. Sydney: Red Press, 1979.
----Country & Eastern. Sydney: Never-Never Books, 1980.
----Small Blue View. Adelaide: E.A.F./Magic Sam, 1982.
----Selected Poems 1971-1982. Sydney: Redress/Wild&Woolley, 1984.
----Keep It Quiet. (a prose collection). Sydney: Sea Cruise Books, 1987.
----New & Selected Poems. Sydney: Wild&Woolley, 1990.
----This World. This Place. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994.
----Little Droppings. Sydney: Never-Never Books, 1994.
----50 – 50. Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 1997.
----My Lightweight Intentions. U.K./Perth: Salt/Folio, 1998.
----Drifting Topoi. Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2000.
----Text thing. Adelaide: Little Esther Books, 2002.
----eleven 747 poems. Ireland: Wild Honey Press, 2002.
----Dear Deliria (New & Selected Poems). UK/USA/Aus: Salt Publishing, 2003.

Brown, Pam, Ken Bolton, and Laurie Duggan. Let's Get Lost. Sydney: Vagabond Press, Stray Dog Editions, 2005.

Clément, Catherine, and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd, New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

Cordite. http://www.cordite.org.au/archives/000488.html. [Accessed Dec.7] 2004.

Hegarty, Paul. “Undelivered: the space/time of the sacred in Bataille and Benjamin.” Economy and Society 32. 1/ (February 2003): 101-18.

Heimonet, Jean Michel. “Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism”. Diacritics 26. 2. Summer (1996): 59-73.

Henry, Brian. Rev. of Dear Deliria: New and Selected Poems. Jacket 23 (Aug. 12, 2003). http://jacketmagazine.com/23/henry-brown.html.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

McCann, Andrew. “The Ethics of Abjection: Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot”. Australian Literary Studies 18.2 (1997): 145-55.

---. “Savage Metropolis: Animism, Aesthetics and the Pleasures of a Vanished Race.” Textual Practice 17.2 (Summer 2003): 317-33.

Taylor, Mark. “Georges Bataille”. ABC Radio National, Encounter: 22/4/2001, Sunday 7.10pm. http:www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories.

Author's note

Dr Lyn McCredden teaches Literary and Cultural Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her scholarly publications include James McAuley (OUP 1992), Bridgings: Readings in Australian Women’s Poetry (OUP 1996, with Rose Lucas) and Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicion (OUP 2001, edited with Frances Devlin-Glass). She is joint editor (with Bill Ashcroft and Frances Devlin-Glass) of the November 2005 edition of the journal Antipodes, entitled Australian Literature and the Sacred.