Emvergeoning

A few months ago I wondered whether we’d lost the art of writing a good manifesto. Recently a friend sent me Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” which demonstrates that a good manifesto can still pop up now and again. It is interesting to think about in terms of Herzog’s own documentary work, which always seems to be an examination of the construction of reality, rather than an attempt to hold reality captive. Here is the text in full:

Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
“LESSONS OF DARKNESS”

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

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I went to see Edward Hirsch’s lecture at Trinity the other day, and found him to be a thought-provoking and entertaining speaker. The main thrust of his talk was encapsulated in a single image: the message in a bottle adrift at sea. Hirsch sees the poem as this message, launched into the turbulence of the world with the hope that one day, on a distant shore, someone might be able to give this message life through the reciprocal act: the act of reading. The thought that the reader is required to give life to the poem is a nice thought, and is a good complement to the book series he is editing for Trinity University Press (Writers On Writing). The readers in the audience (presumably a large number of those attending the lecture) got to feel that they do in fact have an essential role to play in the process of writing. I do think it’s important for readers to understand that they are directly involved in a creative process — the act of reading is not purely receptive, but involves interpretation, feeling, and growth. Especially in light of post-structuralist thought, the act of reading can be seen as the creation of an entirely new work.

However, despite the fact that I find his ideas compelling, and do not at all dispute his understanding of the relationship between the reader and the work, I must take issue with his implication that writing is primarily about reaching another person. This is an aspect of it, to be sure. But in my experience of writing (and this does of course extend to other forms of art), there is always an “other” that is part of the process before the reader, and is ultimately more essential than the reader. This other is deeply mysterious to me, but could be called the unconscious or God. Either of these titles will bring a lot of baggage with them, so perhaps it is best to leave it unnamed; let’s just say it is a relationship that can be experienced in the absence of other people. I do not think the experience of the creative act is ultimately dependent on another person (or even the idea of another person), nor do I think that the work remains inert and lifeless between the time of creation and the time of reception. In my experience, there is a give and take, a sense of conflict and resolution, that happens during the act of creation; and even after this, the work continues to live and breath in some hidden corner of the mind.

What the reader brings to the table is not the resolution of some hoped-for communication on the part of the author, but a transformation of the work into something new. With this transformation comes a confirmation that the work has been alive all along, that the poem has an identity independent from its author.

I’m not able to argue this point as forcefully or eloquently as the lecturer I’m responding to, using examples from the writings of Borges and Buber and Dickinson, but this has been my experience of the creative process.

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I’m a little slow on the uptake here, but Fluxus poet, performer, and artist Emmett Williams passed away on February 14. He was an important innovator in the areas of concrete poetry, visual poetry, text-sound, permutational poetry, text art, etc. He collaborated with people like Claes Oldenburg, Robert Filliou, Deiter Roth, La Monte Young, and others. Interesting that he died on Valentine’s day, considering two of his more important works are A Valentine for Noël and Sweethearts, an erotic concrete poem cycle which is a “full-scale, permutational masterwork of the concrete movement” (according to the editors of Poems for the Millennium). Most of his books are out of print and fairly rare, but as usual, UBUWEB comes to the rescue.

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