Self-Transformation & Build A Better You.

[Corpsey]

Brings to mind an essay on Larkin by MartAmis in which Mamis writes that men of Larkin and Kamis's generation didn't believe in self improvement. That you were dealt a hand and that was what you were stuck with.

Hence:

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.

Very unromantic.

 

[Corpsey]

The unbeatable slow machine sounds like a Burroughs phrase to me (natch cos of soft machine)

Was reading Borges on Dickens last night, he notes that Dickens characters never change, only their circumstances do, and that they are almost ecstatically themselves. Pre-selfconscious, pre self-improving.

 

[Corpsey]

Many artists are egoists

But are many self-conscious in that "maybe I should sort myself out" way?

Perhaps the ego is the key to overcoming this. (If it's something that should be.)

Hence why so many artists are also arseholes.

Eliot says the artist has to sacrifice themselves on the altar of tradition. Losing themselves in an external craft.

 

[luka]

Yeah but Eliot says a lot of stuff that's only ever half true at best

 

[Corpsey]

I put it in the same lineage as Joyce's artist as god paring their fingernails and Flaubert's artist as god, everywhere and nowhere. Self transcendence. Keats negative capability.

 

[poetix]

Larkin's an interesting case here precisely because he's such a studiedly boring one. Life locked down by its initial parameters, its "wrong beginnings", no drama even in its mishaps, "naturally fouled up", and closing upon an ending which should "make him pretty sure / he warranted no better". If there is transcendence it belongs to other lives, beyond the self "too easily bored to love". "As well deny gravity". But in common usage one does not "deny" gravity but "defy" it. Larkin finds no space within himself for defiance, making instead a show of grumpy, then terrified, acquiescence ("life is first boredom, then fear"). A warning to others, or so I always thought: don't end up like this.

 

[poetix]

A case study in what Mark called reflexive impotence.

 

[poetix]

It's odd that he should have been one of a handful of poets who have ever really mattered to me, to the point of memorising whole poems and having an encyclopedia of the best lines in my head.

 

[luka]

I don't really like any poets either. It's odd. I do like Larkin. I don't read it but my dad liked him a lot and would quote him approvingly so it's part of my DNA. Not the sort of thing I'd usually get a along with but its irresistible. It's like Only Fools and Horses. Sitting in a car overlooking a beach in the rain, drinking tea from a thermos. Cheese and pickle sandwiches cut into triangles. Fred West. Readers wives. Coronation chicken. Craner wants to be a European, chic, sexy, glamourous so I can understand why he regards Larkin with horror. Grubby little man with his grubby little fantasies. A library in Hull.

 

[Corpsey]

I love Larkin. There's a discomfort to it, identifying so strongly with such profoundly miserable poetry. But when I came across him it was really one of those "this is ME" moments. Not who I want to be but who I am.

And it wasn't just that, it was the skill with language, the humour, the beautiful evocations of landscape.

Again, that speaks to self transcendence. No poet more clearly loathed themselves than Larkin, but him being able to write poetry so appreciated by so many people is what he managed to do by way of self improvement. He alchemised his humdrum/horrible life.

 

[poetix]

Exactly so - what drew me to Larkin was the idea that you could make such seductively lovely writing out of such a banal and miserable outlook. There was something a bit sadistic about it, even: I thought "this is a way to make other people feel something that they wouldn't ordinarily want to feel, a bit grotty and hopeless, almost tricking them into it", and I liked the idea of being able to do that. A vision of literary power and purchase. As a teenager I had little sense of having any traction over how other people felt or saw things, and sometimes wanted in that way teenagers often do to present some sort of obstacle to their feeling good about things, or themselves. As if satisfied and contented people were somehow distracted from the things I wanted to matter to them, e.g. me. Larkin appealed to something a bit cruel and vengeful in me. The idea of beauty as a weapon, a way of demanding that others pay attention to one's dissatisfactions.

 

[poetix]

I'm fascinated by adolescence, as this profoundly pathological state that we never quite stop inhabiting - all the things one is supposed to grow out of, and hopefully does grow out of to some degree, but never entirely. We insult someone by calling them a perpetual or overgrown adolescent, but who isn't that at some level? Adolescence loiters, outstays its welcome, rears its ugly pustule-ridden head. We grow around it, not away from it.

 

[luka]

I'm fascinated by it too. It's when I became a poet. Something stirred within me. :crylarf::crylarf::crylarf:

 

[luka]

A very magical time of transformations and voluptuous misery.

 

[poetix]

Adolescence can be a time of rapid self-improvement, the development of new capabilities. Teenage boys will attempt the same skateboard trick over and over again, grazing knees and elbows, until they can do it. My son picked up my bass guitar and within a week had decided he wanted to play the bass lines from Megadeth songs. No sense at all that this might be an overly ambitious initial goal. Hours and hours of obsessive practice.

I get the feeling that a lot of self-transformation literature is about Growing Up and Becoming A Man, in ways that imply no longer being adolescent, an embarrassment to yourself, a pariah amongst women and all sensible people. I would be more interested in a programme of self-transformation that offered to return one to an adolescent state of awkwardness, vulnerability, extraness. You'll never get that neural elasticity back, of course, but you could do something useful with that mid-life crisis.

 

[luka]

Do you not think the kpunk self improvement programme could be characterised in that way?[SUB][/SUB] it's a cult of intensity.

 

[luka]

It's the stuff I like best. The spinoza by way of Burroughs programme for self transformation.

 

[luka]

For me being a poet is basically about being an adolescent forever. If I ever grow up I'll write a novel.

 

[poetix]

Totally - fandom as opposed to grey vampirism, the thrill of feeling that Bryan Ferry or the new Terminator film could ignite transcendent passions in you, lift you from your slump, launch you beyond yourself.

 

[poetix]

A wrinkle, though: the Spinoza-via-Burroughs program is "cold rationalism". A contradiction I don't think he ever worked out. He wasn't a cold person, but he sometimes seemed to want to be. An utter ruthlessness would come over him sometimes. You could almost see him marking off the names - "you're dead to me, you're dead to me..."