The missing pen is mightier than the symbolic sword

I mentioned yesterday that this blog is a deranged song of praise to an inspirational university professor. Today I feel more inclined to suggest that it is symbolic of a poetic dry patch which is perhaps best summed up by the fact that yesterday I submitted three poems to an online poetry community for discussion which were composed 3-6 months ago.  This blog is, as much as anything else, a search for those things which compel me to write... I will use that dangerous word, that poetic mantra: those things that 'inspire' me. 

And yet, when I cock my head to one side, squint my eyes, raise a slightly bushy eyebrow and stare this dry patch in the face I realise suddenly, in what one might refer to as a flash of the aforementioned 'inspiration', that this dry patch is not a case of not knowing what to write about - Indeed only last week I took some notes in my journal that, in my prolific period 3-6 months ago, would have excited me - nor is it a case of attempting to write and falling short of anything acceptable or, for want of a better word, 'chic', or, as W.N.Herbert eloquently phrases it, looking in the mirror after a writing session and, with a great deal of Italian hand gestures, asking myself "Why you no write proper no more, huh?". 

It is simply a case of not trying hard enough, vis-a-vis that these 'writing sessions' do not happen. In a bizarre splitting of the self which hauntingly resembles the last entry of Anne Frank's diary, I chastise me: 

'I should sit down and write.' 

'Yes, I should.'

And yet, despite all of that, I am fairly sure that I don't even have a biro in my flat, which is a great shame considering that 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. 

Which, in turn, is a phrase that I was thinking about in the shower earlier this evening. The shower is one of those places along with 'bed' and 'outside' in which my thoughts tend to flourish. It was only last night that I got out of bed around 3am to make a note that I intend to suggest in my paper on 'Detective Fiction, Historiography and The Culture of Imperialism' that a possible reading of Conan Doyle's 'The Sign of Four' is that it signifies a shift towards a cerebral/intellectual/cultural rather than physical/concrete puncturing of Britishness by its colonial other...

Returning to my thoughts on that mantra 'the pen is mightier than the sword': It strikes me that we no longer use swords in war. Military technology has, in a convenient though unnecessary parallel with my chronological shift from a physical to an intellectual puncturing of Britishness in 'The Sign of Four', developed with time. Rather than swords, we now use bombs, occasionally of the nuclear variety. 

And yet, in a remarkably concrete example of Saussure's principal that language is a plastic medium that moulds to fit thought, this doesn't make the statement invalid. Rather the 'sword' that it mentions shifts, again like the puncturing of Britishness in 'The Sign of Four', to a symbolic/cerebral sword which stands in place of 'conflict on-the-whole', rather than a physical/concrete sword with a shiny handle. 

As I made this fairly banal observation an essay that I read (in the passive rather than active sense - the words tended to flow over and around rather than into me) around 18 months ago suddenly resurfaced and registered, made sense. I refer to Jean Baudrillard's rather melodramatically titled 'The Evil Demon of Images and The Precession of Simulacra'. I thought I would share.

Baudrillard argues that there has been another chronological shift, I apologise that I keep bringing them up, from the concrete to the cerebral. Or rather that the 'real' has gradually disappeared from society:

"For us the medium, the image medium, has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary , upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its own logic. ... The fatality lies in the endless enwrapping of images which leaves images no other destiny than images. ... Images become more real than the real."

To translate as best I can: There was a time when we as a race/society were in touch with reality, but with time, in a sort of helter-skelter effect, we have gradually spiraled away from reality, through Aristotle's 'Mimesis' (Imitation), creating image after image until we are left with nothing to imitate but images. 

At a conceptual level I always felt that I knew what Baudrillard was getting at, but for lack of a concrete example (perhaps this lack of a concrete example in itself seems to illustrate his point) I failed to cross that often unfathomable abyss between 'knowledge' and 'understanding'. (One need only look at the Holocaust to see this abyss in action: I know that it happened. I do not understand, nor incidentally do I wish to understand, how it happened.)

However, as mentioned above, the phrase 'the pen is mightier than the sword' finally provided me with the concrete example that I have evidently been subconsciously seeking for the last 18 months: There was a time when 'the pen is mightier than the sword' applied literally to that physical/concrete sword discussed above, but now we have shifted away from concrete reality (away from the sword with the shiny handle) towards a world of semiotics - signs, symbols, images - where swords are not swords but images that stand in place of something else, in this case of what I described earlier as 'conflict on-the-whole'.

Nevertheless I genuinely feel that 'the pen is mightier than the sword' remains true despite having become something of a 'faded coin' since it was written in 1839 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. In fact, I recently watched a Russian film called 'The 9th Company' by Fyodor Bondarchuk which briefly presented the idea that conflict on-the-whole (i.e. 'the sword') was art in itself: A form of beauty because it had no excesses, no superfluous lines, everything in it was necessary. This destruction of the time-honoured dichotomy between conflict (the sword) and art (the pen) troubled me. It strikes me that what one can achieve ideologically through art will always be firmer than what one can impose ideologically through conflict. As I wrote in my 2006 book 'Close Up Theatre': "Allow them to come to their own conclusions. Their belief will be stronger".

I hope to prove myself right, if only I could find a biro.

 

On a careless comparison.

I find myself embarking a project to maintain a blog that has come into being as a deranged song of praise to an inspiring university tutor whose blog I stumbled across, read, enjoyed, and now attempt to imitate. 

Presently it strikes me as well intentioned, although rather ambitious: I tend to have rather fleeting obsessions which echo and resurface at occasional and obscure periods in my life, often coinciding with exam/revision/essay writing periods and providing a convenient and quasi-intelligent distraction from what I perhaps should be doing. 

That 'what I perhaps should be doing' presently takes the form of researching and writing two papers: One on 'Representations of the Holocaust' and the other on 'Detective Fiction, Historiography and The Culture of Imperialism'.

The very notion of reading Detective Fiction against Historiography and both in turn against the Nineteenth Century British Imperial Mission sets my thoughts turning about the nature of comparison - It can be a surprisingly risky business:

I recently came across a website which was conducting an anti-abortion campaign by likening/comparing abortion to the holocaust, likening hospitals which offer abortions to concentration camps. I emailed the webmaster my thoughts. 

It is remarkable how much easier confrontation becomes when it is conducted through textual mediums. One immediately thinks Sex and the City: 'Dumped by a post-it note!'

We have been diverted...

I have a number of reservations at the comparison drawn by this website which do not stem from a decision to condemn/condone abortion (I am currently in a state of flux as to my opinion towards the topic - particularly after having just seen a scan of my nephew/niece who is due to arrive in October and already feeling a degree of pride and attachment to him/her/it despite the fact that he/she/it is still merely an embryo) but rather stem from as thorough a comprehension of the nature of the Holocaust as one can perhaps hope to achieve. 

I am troubled by the comparison between an unborn child and a victim of the Holocaust - Primo Levi argues in his excellent, excellent book 'The Drowned and The Saved' that the Holocaust is not as simple as a division between Good and Evil, Jew and Nazi, White and Black, but rather that there exists 'A Grey Zone' between these two opposites - For Levi the most demonic crime of Naziism was that it 'made it's victims like itself' it 'deprived them the sanctuary of innocence' - for instance the Sonderkommandos: Jews who were forced to cremate other Jews, victims yes but also, in a strange way, perpetrators. 

The figure of the child victim in Holocaust representation is very interesting - It certainly emphasizes a sense of innocence against evil, one need not look far beyond the title of one of the most famous representations of the Holocaust (Anne Frank - The Diary of a YOUNG GIRL) to realise the power of setting the figure of the innocent child against naziism. The excellent and poignant poem 'Marie' by Charlotte Delbo has the same effect:

Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters were all gassed on arrival.

Her parents were too old, the children too young. 

She says: "She was beautiful, my little sister.

You can't imagine how beautiful she was.

They mustn't have looked at her.

If they had, they would never have killed her. 

They couldn't have."

It is certainly beautiful and effective, but I can't help wondering in light of Levi's comments if the figure of the child victim is 'too easy', if by emphasising the innocence of the victim we are somehow being reductive in our understanding of the Holocaust, simplifying it, failing to recognize the ambiguous, muddled, 'Grey Zone' that it continuously throws up. One need only go on to read the remainder of Delbo's book (Auschwitz and After) to get a real sense of the displacement and confusion of her Holocaust experience. 

By suggesting that abortion is a contemporary form of Holocaust experience the aforementioned website seems to do just this, it likens the holocaust victim to the 'tabula rasa', the blank slate, the unborn child and in doing so demonstrates a reductive understanding of the complexity and uniqueness of the Holocaust. 

In turn of course, the question of whether it is justified to liken a parent who makes the difficult decision to abort a child to Hitler is surely not a question at all.

It is interesting, to return briefly to notion of 'confrontation through textual mediums', that I have received no response to the email I sent to the webmaster. Perhaps the artist in me finds a degree of satisfaction in reading his silence as a guilty one.