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8 R e p o r t s /  C a p i l d e o they arrived, the bridegroom would not let them in. He told them solemnly, ‘I do not know you’. There was much discussion of how being off guard is not the same as being wilfully underprepared; of the rights and wrongs of sharing in different situations, and what things we cannot share, but must seek and do for ourselves. Naturally, it was the fire that caught my imagination. It reminded me of helping with preparations for a Vedic Hindu wedding. We needed many days, and were wildly excited when the groom’s party arrived, as is traditional, at the bride’s house for the final ceremony, which includes the couple walking around a fire, tied to each other by the wrist, facing the sun and becoming inhabited by the divine masculine and feminine. How far was the New Testament groom’s party travelling, perhaps in the dark or through wilderness? Without enough lamplight, perhaps they would lose their way. Even if they were bringing their own lamps, would they feel welcomed if they were not met with lamps? How else would illumination be mutual? For when you hurry out carrying a lamp, looking for the bright face of the bridegroom, your own face and path will be lit up. Perhaps having enough oil means having lived in a way that recognisably places you on the side of love. Perhaps it means making sure others don’t get lost while you and your friends are disputing resources. When I think of fire, I also think of tears. Sitting masked and distanced on a Cambridge riverbank, two non-white women friends and I asked the usual catchup questions. How is your family? Have you seen any nice cats? Has anyone cried at you lately? If you do not know what I mean, perhaps you have been insufficiently cried at. Here are two examples of weaponised tears, one from literature and one from life. In Henry VIII Act II Scene IV, Katherine of Aragon is on trial. She warns Wolsey: ‘My drops of tears / I’ll turn to sparks of fire’. He counsels patience. She calls this out as tone-policing. ‘You are mine enemy’, she declares, denying that he can be her judge. However, Katherine’s sense of her rights derives from her sense that she is royalty, not that people seeking justice commonly deserve to speak and be heard. The second example occurred at dinner after an event where I was an invited speaker. The organiser, a friend, caught my eye. She passed on a question from a translator guest: where had I learnt English? I spoke it very well. I looked at the questioner and gently challenged the grounds of the question. She stood up at table, like a golden lily, weeping with indignation while saying she was perfectly right to ask. She kept standing, insisting, and weeping. Her words hurt me. Her performance as vulnerable flesh made me wrong in my very body, like stone, for keeping my cool and wanting my dinner. Those crystalline tears blistered me. Being in company who could laugh at those tears would have performed a third-eye function: evaporating them. Otherwise, the tears stick and burn like pitch. The phrase ‘white-women tears’ sounds tasteless and divisive. Yet how many readers share this experience of not infrequently being cried at? What interests me is the rupture in a dialogue that changes, in a professional or public context, from an equal exchange of words to the forced, shared witness of personal discomfort elevated to spectacular pain; and which bodies are turned by grief into a thing for a pedestal, not a thing to be tidied away. Paradoxically, in these cases, the apparently suffering body is the one that spoke hurtful words. The person at whom hurtful words were launched now is required, for the sake of amiability, to find comforting words to staunch the tears that have been launched. Crying is a form of setting what makes you uncomfortable on fire. It obliterates. It shows an individual sense of entitlement, a willingness to burn the house of conversation down. My good internet connection found me and my faulty eyesight at a Zoom meeting listening to a speaker on the gaze. According to her, we are accustomed to looking out and to looking at. Now our houses are our shadow-play caves as we try to be present via the internet; and being masked if we do meet is a new deprivation. Almost everyone who had chosen to share their video showed rapt and amiable faces. This was in the eleventh month of the pandemic; for me, the eighth month of hearing paid professionals discourse on the office-house as a retreat, and enclosure as a rupture with the normal. Yet I was conscious that at least one listener not sharing their video was housebound by disability, not lockdown. Suddenly I had a swooping vision of many years’ and two hemispheres’ worth of incarcerated people: migrants trapped on small islands in Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Pacific; detention centres in the neighbourhood of business-and-holiday British airports; crippled poor relations languishing in small rooms in the Caribbean and Latin America, where the state assumes ‘the family’ looks after its own. I ‘saw’ East Asian urbanites donning medical masks against pollution and winter flu. Sweaty bandanas were pulled up over dusty, filmic American desert faces. In memory, the roadside tea vendor in old Calcutta who communicated by flashing his eyes over the geometric scarf sheltering nose and mouth from the cold wind flashed his eyes at me again, urging me to speak. My heart forcefully told me: visibility is a privilege. The expectation of being seen and known has hardened into scales that do not fall from ‘our’ eyes. Why not catch fire? Why not rush to find ‘our’ identity with the hidden ones instead… with the long-time masked? I put an ultra-condensed version of this in the Zoom chat box. The answer? What I had said was ‘brilliant … we in the west need to learn … We in the west have a lot to learn’. How did ‘west’ vs ‘east’ even enter the discussion? Katherine of Aragon’s tears transmute into flame so far as her queenly quality is perceived. My foreign quality whited out the re-visioning I proposed. The adjective ‘brilliant’, detached from any engagement, translates as ‘extra; optional, esoteric, distant and sometime-perhapsnever-to-come’. To be seen was to be mis-known, placed as oppositional, as being of the ‘east’. I stayed quiet. From experience of similar situations, I was afraid one of the good faces would cry or otherwise perform discomfort as pain. Tears are not mine to shed; my spirit returned a NO OIL TO SPARE error. Will Harris, in Rendang (Granta, 2020), shows himself to be a poet of love and vision, who knows the world is
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on fire. His astonishing poem ‘Break’ opens with the speaker’s attempt to revive a dead tree by feeding it with coffee grounds. This gesture of emptying out as part of a cycle of nourishment, a work of faith more than hope, leads into a reflection on what it might mean to be ‘fine’ while being ‘on a break’ from one’s beloved. The stanza seems to carry out the digestion, or diffusion, of the steam and bitterness of yesterday’s coffee, along with unreported conversations. Primarily it records an openness to processes of transformation. The second stanza cites the Book of Job, Sharon Olds, and jazz ‘breaks’. This compound music of breakage accompanies the speaker saying ‘I’m aware of / something in me broken. That doesn’t mean unhappy’. The third and final stanza explores the break as in-betweenness: You slip into the break and look around, see past and future, love and sickness rearranged. Reordered. You feel yourself both whole and breached. As me you. As you do. Pronouns disturb each other’s territory in this syntax, so that being and doing, self and other, are in an unwonted state of intimacy and change. The poem concludes with trans-human tenderness, wondering about the consciousness of dying dogs, and whether it’s ‘like daylight breaking through an open door’. Not seeking likeness, Harris neither enforces nor condemns integration. By embracing absence, he embraces presence and loss. Without figuring internal adjustment as imposed, or external change as disastrous, his tearless yet vulnerable poetics of patience moves from heat to light, coming around to dawn. Analog Sea and the Pixelated Madness Horatio Morpurgo 9 R e p o r t s /  M o r p u r g o ‘Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it’, wrote Max Frisch in 1957. In an essay published only after his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks reflected on the ubiquitous use of smartphones in his New York neighbourhood. He foresaw ‘a neurological catastrophe’ as the reflexes of a generation with ‘no immunity to the seductions of digital life’ are conditioned in this way. Two Norwegian reports, recently cited by Will Self, studied the effect of social media use on the ability to ‘lose oneself’ in long-form prose narrative. They suggested that Homo virtualis is already with us: ‘I can see’, wrote Self, ‘no future for words printed on paper… if our civilisation continues on this digital trajectory’. The Analog Sea Review, founded in 2018 by the poet Jonathan Simons, is part of an ‘offline publishing house and institute’. It offers ‘life-sustaining counter-measures to the pixelated madness’. The above quotations all come from work that has appeared in its pages. It is published in English but in Freiburg. The Central European atmosphere of its content extends also to its elegant hardback design. ‘When you express yourself, use the things around you’, wrote Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet. ‘If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself; tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.’ Analog Sea faces the worst about the likely prospect of ‘downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and the world’. It turns to poets and artists, living and dead, to novelists, physicists, psychoanalysts, film-makers and philosophers, not only for their views on the pixelated madness, but for hints on how our relationship to primary experience could be restored. Novelty of course has always been the internet’s chief promise and selling point. Are we too quick to take that novelty on trust? There are longer stories to tell in which the internet is neither as new nor as exciting as its marketing people would relentlessly have us believe. It represents an acceleration of that tendency described by Guy Debord, half a century ago, which he called ‘the spectacle’. Part of Analog Sea’s 2019 edition was devoted to Debord’s current relevance. The spectacle is the reign of personalities, ‘news’, commodified art, a reign of appearances under which no ‘central question’ can any longer be posed. It is the power of all this to hold us spellbound. It controls our lives by reconstituting us as passive spectators, so long as we remain ignorant of it. Dextrously, it determines how we relate both to the life going on around us and within us. It is the ‘ruling order’s defence’: it serves capitalist structures by acting as the veil which conceals them even as it distracts us. If ‘the entertaining celebrity is a capitalist robot’, as the philosopher Donald Kuspit has more recently argued, then what is the country which elects such a robot to highest office? Debord’s answer was neither scream nor shrug. It was the ‘dérive’: literally, ‘drifting’, a reinvention of the way we engage with our surroundings so as to subvert this omnipresent ‘ideology of trade’. In developing his idea, Debord drew on the Surrealists, the Romantics and the Baroque, as well as from the Age of Chivalry and its traditions of the long journey of adventure and discovery. He affirmed, in other words, a rich vocabulary of pre-spectacular dissent on which we might still be drawing. There’s a reason we are encouraged at every turn to play down the past while we cry up the Novelty. ‘Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies’, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography (1977), ‘it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.’ The

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on fire. His astonishing poem ‘Break’ opens with the speaker’s attempt to revive a dead tree by feeding it with coffee grounds. This gesture of emptying out as part of a cycle of nourishment, a work of faith more than hope, leads into a reflection on what it might mean to be ‘fine’ while being ‘on a break’ from one’s beloved. The stanza seems to carry out the digestion, or diffusion, of the steam and bitterness of yesterday’s coffee, along with unreported conversations. Primarily it records an openness to processes of transformation. The second stanza cites the Book of Job, Sharon Olds, and jazz ‘breaks’. This compound music of breakage accompanies the speaker saying ‘I’m aware of / something in me broken. That doesn’t mean unhappy’. The third and final stanza explores the break as in-betweenness:

You slip into the break and look around, see past and future,

love and sickness rearranged. Reordered. You feel yourself both whole and breached. As me you. As you do.

Pronouns disturb each other’s territory in this syntax, so that being and doing, self and other, are in an unwonted state of intimacy and change. The poem concludes with trans-human tenderness, wondering about the consciousness of dying dogs, and whether it’s ‘like daylight breaking through an open door’. Not seeking likeness, Harris neither enforces nor condemns integration. By embracing absence, he embraces presence and loss. Without figuring internal adjustment as imposed, or external change as disastrous, his tearless yet vulnerable poetics of patience moves from heat to light, coming around to dawn.

Analog Sea and the Pixelated Madness

Horatio Morpurgo

9

R e p o r t s / 

M o r p u r g o

‘Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it’, wrote Max Frisch in 1957. In an essay published only after his death in 2015, Oliver Sacks reflected on the ubiquitous use of smartphones in his New York neighbourhood. He foresaw ‘a neurological catastrophe’ as the reflexes of a generation with ‘no immunity to the seductions of digital life’ are conditioned in this way. Two Norwegian reports, recently cited by Will Self, studied the effect of social media use on the ability to ‘lose oneself’ in long-form prose narrative. They suggested that Homo virtualis is already with us: ‘I can see’, wrote Self, ‘no future for words printed on paper… if our civilisation continues on this digital trajectory’.

The Analog Sea Review, founded in 2018 by the poet Jonathan Simons, is part of an ‘offline publishing house and institute’. It offers ‘life-sustaining counter-measures to the pixelated madness’. The above quotations all come from work that has appeared in its pages. It is published in English but in Freiburg. The Central European atmosphere of its content extends also to its elegant hardback design. ‘When you express yourself, use the things around you’, wrote Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet. ‘If your everyday life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself; tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.’

Analog Sea faces the worst about the likely prospect of ‘downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and the world’. It turns to poets and artists, living and dead, to novelists, physicists, psychoanalysts, film-makers and philosophers, not only for their views on the pixelated madness, but for hints on how our relationship to primary experience could be restored.

Novelty of course has always been the internet’s chief promise and selling point. Are we too quick to take that novelty on trust? There are longer stories to tell in which the internet is neither as new nor as exciting as its marketing people would relentlessly have us believe. It represents an acceleration of that tendency described by Guy Debord, half a century ago, which he called ‘the spectacle’. Part of Analog Sea’s 2019 edition was devoted to Debord’s current relevance.

The spectacle is the reign of personalities, ‘news’, commodified art, a reign of appearances under which no ‘central question’ can any longer be posed. It is the power of all this to hold us spellbound. It controls our lives by reconstituting us as passive spectators, so long as we remain ignorant of it. Dextrously, it determines how we relate both to the life going on around us and within us. It is the ‘ruling order’s defence’: it serves capitalist structures by acting as the veil which conceals them even as it distracts us.

If ‘the entertaining celebrity is a capitalist robot’, as the philosopher Donald Kuspit has more recently argued, then what is the country which elects such a robot to highest office? Debord’s answer was neither scream nor shrug. It was the ‘dérive’: literally, ‘drifting’, a reinvention of the way we engage with our surroundings so as to subvert this omnipresent ‘ideology of trade’.

In developing his idea, Debord drew on the Surrealists, the Romantics and the Baroque, as well as from the Age of Chivalry and its traditions of the long journey of adventure and discovery. He affirmed, in other words, a rich vocabulary of pre-spectacular dissent on which we might still be drawing. There’s a reason we are encouraged at every turn to play down the past while we cry up the Novelty.

‘Industrial societies turn their citizens into image junkies’, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography (1977), ‘it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.’ The

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