Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

This is a piece I wrote for Hilson Hilson: The Poetry of Jeff Hilson (Crater, 2020), edited by Richard Parker. It is mostly about a poem in Jeff's book Stretchers (Reality Street, 2006), and also a bit about Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House, 2017).

 

Stretchers #19: I Can I Did Candid

“As a poet, I knew to be gentle.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’
“Show the ferret to the egg.” - Aldous Harding, ‘The Barrel’

I.

 
Imagine we’re off swimming in the river or, even better, down by the creek.

 
Now imagine today everybody wants to be a good egg, with infinite wanting. So if you shout, “Last one in’s a good egg!” exactly zero of us get in. We sort of start Zeno’s paradoxing into our Speedos etc. One wants the others to enter the water earlier than oneself so that, heh heh heh, one can be that egg.

 
So in this way “Last one in’s a good egg!” could be a good example of perverse incentive design. Or it might just be deceptive incentive design: it strongly seems to be trying to do something, and that very seeming is what makes it do something else.

 
But then, at the other extreme, imagine the more familiar scenario, a day of broad consensus that being a rotten egg is as bad as it gets. On such a day, a single yell of “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” and in we all splash, not so much as stopping to take off our socks and shoes. So that’s good, transparent incentive design, even if the results are again quite homogenous across the group. More about our socks and shoes in a moment. What we see in both examples is the power of naming, or more specifically the power of labelling within a hierarchy, to steer action and shape subjectivity. As the poet Timothy Thornton writes:

eggs haribo
eggs boxset
eggs poirot
eggs amagansett

eggs powerful
eggs underfunded
eggs sporcle
eggs countermanded 

(Facebook post, 15 April 2020)

It’s probably this power of naming that tempts poets to cultivate wriggly, creaturely poems that seem to perhaps articulate forms of social organisation different to those the poets have experienced and, in some sense, different to those they can imagine. What if instead of (say) laws or economies or bureaucracies, we had sonnets or stretchers?

The thing is, between these idealised extremes of infinite appetite and infinite aversion, there stretches a vast possibility space of diverse leaderboards (and leaderlessboards) where diverse armoured and storied embryos vye to define us, shape us, steer us, and bring us together while also keeping us apart. “Third one in’s an eggs toxteth,” etc. “Penultimate one in’s an eggs liar’s paradox,” etc. I think most of these floating ascriptions have a quality that first two earlier examples don’t have. These ones filter and sort. In a very basic model, they filter according to a pre-existing distribution of desire and aversion, merely revealed in our response to the yell. We discover in what proportions each of us wishes to be or to not be which egg. In a more nuanced model, albeit with the energy of neoclassical economics, these ascriptions filter first on that basis, and then on the basis of revised desire and aversion reflecting the various skinny-dippers’ updated theories about one another’s mental states and intentions, and then again, and then again, and so on, probably accommodating ‘strategic’ action, and probably converging on various Splash equilibria. I’m not sure yet, but I think you could probably rig a Turing machine out of skinny-dippers moving to and fro hesitantly, craftily, hungrily, imploringly at the edge of the limpid plunge-pool in strategic search of their preferred egg statuses, implying that with enough time and energy you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life by shouting just the right set of egg opportunities, say, “4th one in is a rotten egg, 3rd one in is a good egg, 6.022×1023th one in is an egg amagansett!” etc. to just the right gang, just the right that one summer that seemed to last forever. Eggs nihilo: something comes from nothing when it is egged on. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch though.

Jaden: “I don't got the time to put you on the stretcher (stretcher) I am here and I'm still flexing (flexing).”

Another way of labelling the same topic is the governance of the commons. The diversification and spread of digital social architectures in the 2000s and 2010s has probably both enriched but also colonised the social imaginary of the governance of the commons -- the recipes Marx scorned to write because, as he perpetually pointed out, he didn’t yet even know about microwave ovens or for example activated charcoal -- or at least it has colonised the more abstract, ethereal regions of that imaginary. In the simplest version, you just add “social” or “networked” or “crowd” to some older aspiration. Let’s simply crowdseize the means of production, etc. Crowdone in’s a crowdegg. Uber, Twitter, and all the virtual valorisation machines of the internet are still very much capital, capital more human than ever in its capacity to absorb and co-ordinate human and more-than-human investments of affect and cognition, in its capacity to twist a buncha-jewels-inna-bucket like it’s a kaleidoscope of crystalline personality godhead, or in other words, its capacity to make Wogan economies out of Wonga economies. The evolving interest in virality and permutability of several of Jeff Hilson’s Latanoprost Variations (Boiler House 2017) is inflected by the voice of specifically digital algorithmic curation and suggestion. So the recommendation “You might like” becomes “You might liken” or “You might not liken,” spreading across the page like the proliferation and crumbling of fungi and algae / cyanobacteria symbiotic composite organisms, like likens. Similarly, ‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ is a witchy eco-poem, a little redolent of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations,’ and an extended meditation on Google’s “did you mean to search for.” That said, I don’t really think it is Google’s “did you mean to search for”: it’s a broader exploration of the concept of being asked if you meant to want what you did not quite manage to want. Part of what is exciting about these poems is that they often manage to not be about the internet at all.

… & on the twenty sixth day I was up with the lark to root out the scottish dock I didnt find it instead I found a red star thistle I rubbed myself with which withered me to a stalk & on the twenty seventh day ...

‘A False Botanic -- Forensic Poem for February’ 

I was searching for an egg and “I didnt find it.” There isn’t actually an egg in Stretchers poem number nineteen, ‘... smile your in candid trench,’ but there is an eggs conspicuously missing. The line in ‘... smile your in candid trench’ is “the last one in is a thistle.” One of the ways that Stretchers often feels sort of curiously generous and inclusive is that even when it leaves things out, it keeps them in. The ‘correct’ versions of the idioms, proverbs, collocations, scraps of nursery rhyme etc. faintly accompany their morphed and mutated versions. These unspoken words can be sinister presences too. The egg is missing, and so is the shell: “I’ve some blonde / bombs” implies the word “bombshell” and puts into interplay the objectification of femme bodies with the objectification of the enemy, the target to be neutralised. And the poem begins “smile your in candid trench”: it begins, in other words, not only with a warzone, but with a hidden “camera.” The candid trench could well be the stretcher itself. And of course a camera and a stanza share the etymological metaphor of being a room, perhaps a room stretched to capacity.

This failure-to-appear also appears in later writing. The Incredible String Band are a British psychedelic folk band formed by Clive Palmer, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron in Edinburgh in 1966. In Latanoprost Variations, what is missing from the title of ‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’ is ‘String Band.’ It is obviously a poem about how music can, like a room, bring people together. Music brings people together, for example, in the sort of somatic or subter-songfulness of language and of all semantic interaction; in dancing; in a kind of affective commoning where we mosh and/or emosh together in tandem; in dismissive, gatekeeping interactions like “Oh, you say love your daughter? Name her first four albums”; and in Spotify’s recommendations and the broader patterns of digital persuasion architecture and surveillance capitalism in which they participate. It is a poem, in other words, like a lot of Jeff Hilson’s poems, interested in how societies (or assemblages or networks or bands of individuals or dividuals) are put together or how they might be put together. If we read it as a utopian poem, then the “incredible strings” become the amazing and currently slightly implausible linkages that bind together utopian society. String Theory helps these implied ligatures to feel vaguely angelic and ectoplasmic. But these incredible strings are not there, they are only implied, they do not make us a band, we did not form a band. “I didnt find it.”

Instead, there is the word ‘Canterbury’: maybe recalling the Knight, Squire, Franklin, Summoner, Pardoner, Manciple, Canon et al. of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, while the invisibility of ‘String Band’ also allows an implied ‘Shrinking Man’ to scuttle in or ‘Hulk’ to smash in, along with the superhero genre generally, and its often flamboyant celebration of well-divided labour: cf. e.g. Marvel’s Eggs-Men, this one scrambles brainwaves, this one fries you alive, etc. In this poem the gesture toward an estranged or detourned or evolved or utopian together-yet-apartness is (I think) quite a broad gestural sweep. Think of buying a song as a 1 and not buying a song as a 0. Given enough time and energy, and an immortal listener, I think you could run an entire universe filled with conscious life on a Spotify playlist equipped with just the right recommendations algorithm.

if you liken the incredible string band try hatfield and the north you listened to aphex twins heres an album you might not liken you listened to supertramp and kate bush you might not liken this song you listened to swell maps this week liken to try the wilde flowers?

(‘The Incredible Canterbury Poem’)

Egging your MP is like detonating a small material symbol of a bomb. It activates associations of assassination. It also activates associations of what Chantal Mouffe, back in the days of high third way neoliberalism, quite reasonably theorised as agonistic democracy, politics as a real fight with real stakes but with the violence magicked away. But whether you’re shouting “Fuck you, here, the egg” or “Seventh one in is an eggs candid” or “Third one in is an eggs floaters,” or whether you are shouting, “The first tranche of pool-divers are gold eggs, the second are silver eggs, and the third are bronze eggs,” the cultural form of the hierarchy will never be a neutral frame, but always an active agent. In other words, earlier on I had to clarify that in our made-up scenario, everybody actually wanted to be a good egg. That’s because if you just shouted, “Last one in’s a good egg!” where norms of individualist striving prevail, the meaning of “last one” would overwhelm the meaning of “good egg,” and everyone would assume eggs good were the new eggs anathema. Nice eggs finish last. 

And on the other hand, if you just shouted “Last one in’s a rotten egg!” where norms of solidarity prevail, the meaning of “last one” would probably overwhelm the meaning of “rotten egg,” with everyone assuming eggs rotten were the new eggs non-contributory assistance. And again, it’s in the middle territory stretching between these two idealisations where the precise force of the hierarchy (or leaderboard, procession, parade, queue, race, or something else) is various and probably unpredictable. It is somewhere in that vast stretch where you get the weird forms of commons governance suitable to the leavings of advanced industrial colonial capitalism, the weird forms of equity that are not just inert negations of hierarchy, which are not just “horizontal organization” that are really the same old vertical hierarchies lying on stretchers. Where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and stuff like that.

II.  

When you say someone is a ‘terrible liar,’ it can be a sort of autoantonym, meaning two distinct somewhat opposite things. The worst liars are often the best liars. There is an essay at the back of Stretchers (Reality Street 2006), “Why I Wrote Stretchers,” that talks about that title Stretchers. The preoccupation with virality and the fractal is here too. “Each stretcher tells a story and each story contains many other stories.” But do they really tell stories? Or is this a lie? Are some of them just nonsense? A stretcher is where you lie when you are hurt. It’s that old paradox: how far can you trust a liar sharing their lying practice?

Maybe what is less well acknowledged is how leaky and spready that Liar’s Paradox is. Everything that is said about lying is a bit suspect, because whoever is saying it is thinking about lying. And is there a kind of listening, adjacent to misinterpretation, that can also generate lies? If so then everything that is said about lying is doubly suspect, because whoever is listening is thinking about lying. Stretching and lying strongly imply yoga. Also, utopia: the thing the genre (if that’s what it is) has been stuck on since More’s Utopia is the enclave form. Who’s the last one in before the gate slams? Who is outside? The ones who walk away, the ones who were not born in time, the ones who would tear it to shreds, etc.? The sleeper woken, the time traveller? What makes any utopia better than a billionaire’s gated climate fastness? Is utopia constitutively stretched, always managing to include more than it reasonably should? The title of Stretchers comes from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

A bit of a stretch. Entertaining ideas just over the edge of feasibility. Allowing things to work that shouldn’t or don’t really. Epistemologically, there may be an “OK just this once” aspect to anything that is a bit of a stretch: let it slide, but don’t update your deeper convictions on the basis of what just slid by. Don’t learn from it. When you stretch a piece of fabric, sometimes you control its translucency. If there are words or imagery printed on it, they may mingle with the imagery of the world below. Stretching an image can also reveal an infrastructure of threads, a sort of secret lattice or honeycomb shape bound together with the shape of the ink.

There is an experiment you can do where you hold your fingers in front of your face, and then keeping your gaze fixed forward, gradually draw your fingers apart. Eventually you’ll come to a point where your fingers are in the ‘shadows’ and you’re not sure if you can see them or not. Or, you can see them, but what you can see isn’t the sort of phenomenon that stereotypically characterises the constituents of vision. Or they are neither “in” or “out” of the enclave of your visual field. Bataille writes in The Story of the Egg, “She played gaily with words, speaking about breaking eggs, and then breaking eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.” In Dublin in 2008, a woman named Ann Dooley was blinded in one eye by an egg thrown by eighteen-year-old David Morgan. Before I got glasses, in order to bring distant objects into focus, I used to curl up my forefinger and look through the pinprick ‘lens,’ or more often just manually distort my eyeballs with my fingers. It was fine, we’ve all been brainwashed by Big Optometry. And when an eyeball is stretched wrong, the visual field degrades. There is an essay at the back of Latanoprost Variations, “On ‘Latanoprost Variations.’” Latanoprost is topical eye drop used to treat open-angle glaucoma. Glaucoma is becoming besieged by ‘shadows.’ They bunch around the periphery of your visual field and march inward. Latanoprost relieves pressure. “Latanoprost” was printed on a pen found by the poet under a bed. Something astonishing I’ve noticed is that darkness is literally not black. When I shut my eyes in the sun, of course I see a sort of taupe orange. But even in the middle of the night, I don’t think what fills my visual field can be described as blackness. It’s a flock of colour or colour-like qualia, and there is black, I think, but there is also at least as much silver and grey. We live in a world where darkness is literally not black.

Does ‘... smile your in candid trench’ tell a story that contains many other stories? It might be a time travel story. I am writing in 2020. A day ago Matt Hancock tweeted: “Thanks to the nation’s resolve, horseracing is back from Monday. Wonderful news for our wonderful sport.” A bit of a stretch. There are also questions of elasticity: that is, whether these poems unpinned from the page would snap back into another shape. If something has been stretched, energy was involved in deformation, and that energy may be stored in a specific pattern suitable to a specific agency. Winding a clock is just one familiar example. Anything can be interpreted in this way.

Sometimes stretching the truth can be boasting. Is poetry a kind of boasting? British people supposedly don’t like boasting. Walt Whitman contained multitudes: did ye aye? Then again, where’s the counterexample? Which people really say: “We love boasting, come round to ours and boast? Big boasters us.” The USA? Cape Verde, Egypt, Ghana, Iran, Mozambique? I kind of don’t think any do. If Stretchers are boasts, they are mostly very gentle and self-effacing boasts. More like the kind of naturally occurring boast when someone is very tired or drunk or high or just forgetful and they keep repeating themselves, and the repetition is actually a kind of odd (almost extra-linguistic) cognitive sharing, a kind of telepathy, insofar as it gives you a special kind of peek deep into their skull, behind many of the usually intervening layers of potential guile. Or like a toddler who runs into a room and shouts something strange. Or like when someone keeps repeating themselves. If a boast is a way of valuing yourself too highly, what is its ethical status within a system where value is systematically misascribed?

If it tells a story, it might be a time travel story, partly because I am writing about it after almost twenty years. Partly because it raises the possibility of disordered or reordered time with hysteron proteron, the rhetorical trope where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, as in “I put on my shoes and socks” or “I took off my socks and shoes.” How can the time traveler who visited utopia in a temporally disordered fashion avoid accusations of boastfulness upon their return? How can utopia be communicated through the particularity of any less-than-universal subjectivity? The rich man is the eye of the needle, and entry into heaven is as tricky as threading the needle through itself. And / or if everyone has to see for themselves, is the utopian economy heavily reliant on tourism? How’s the beach ecosystem? And / or, is it a poem about the kinds of things that can only ever be true retrospectively, that can never be true at the time? The poem is queer-gently gender-jiggling: “your it ling-boy who / fingered his walnut for sunny / delight.” In the game of tag, when you’re “it” you chase everybody. They fle from me that sometyme did, they fle from me that sometyme will me seke. When you are “it,” everyone who is “them,” who are they, he, she, etc., flee from you. Maybe you are the last one in before there is a first one in. Maybe you are the expletive subject, the “it” of “it’s raining.” If reality absolutely consistently fled shrieking from a vacuum, would it be indistinguishable from its flowing shrieking into that vacuum to fill it? Last one in is named, last one in is “it,” last one in doesn’t really exist. When a game of tag ends, and you were the last it, you feel weird about that.

The confessions of ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might unfold in a kind of peri-urban locus amoenus where eggs shy leap forward and lazily windmill arms and legs over Edenic plunge-pool-cum-thirst traps, clothing tugged funny, or else folded behind them on the rocks like gossamer idling on the wanton summer air and watched over by eggs brave. And / or ‘... smile your in candid trench’ might be a kind of pubescent sexual boast. This is one of the stretchers that first appeared in a chapbook in the early Naughties, the era of teen sex comedy box office dominance: There’s Something About Mary came out in 1998, and the second Stretchers chapbook itself fills the gap between American Pie 2 (2001) and American Wedding (2003). The American Pie franchise (continuing in 2020 with Girls Rules) springs from a virginity-losing pact of the hetero penetrative phallocentric kind: it’s a movie about “the last one in.” They are also movies about reasonable expectations of privacy being constantly confounded, about bodies brought shamefully into the light in ways that are somehow worse than anything the inspected figure could have possibly predicted, and yet not so bad. About becoming it, and it being fine.

The poem seems to end with a kind of biiig gesture toward polysemy, really a bit of a breakdown of meaning through multiplication of meaning. It is a candle burning at one fuse. Vowel variants are letters or pairs of letters that can make the same sound, and we’re told elsewhere that all mis-spellings in these poems are intentional. So here there’s a possibility here that every word is actually pronounced like a different word. Maybe “peel” is pronounced “pale,” and so on:

… vowel
& variants all frail peel them
like each other with our pen-
tricks move along or you
will lose it with that zee …

“[S]o shoot me” -- that’s what you say when you’ve done something bad, but not as bad as your interlocutor is making out. And/or to downplay something really bad you’ve done. The play on a photo shoot is elaborated throughout the poem: on the one hand, violence as epistemologically generative, producing knowledge and/or things to be known, and on the other hand, observation and image-making as violent processes. The trench of “smile your in candid trench,” especially so close to “some blonde / bombs” and “every good girl deserve,” could be read as public space transformed into a theatre of war by misogynist gaze, expectation, and imperative (“smile”). In camera: what a strange way to say in private. Later, “hop hop has lost his lean his / wife could eat no floaters” is a reference to an old rhyme about a gendered division of labour (and / or dietary requirements: “Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean, / But, together both, they licked the platter clean”), altered to remove his name as well as hers, and perhaps to include suggestions of ‘hopping to it,’ of the collapse of individualist “lean-in” feminism, and of an inability to flash the shit-eating grins, or to let daily microaggressions be water off a duck’s back, left behind in the workplace when you go home for the night (“splashing off / sallys night feathers”). “Sally” is one of those names that feels plucked from folklore. It suggests a little attack, of course: so “sallys” is again one of those femme military puns. But it’s also again about mutualistic swarming behaviours -- ways of being together -- and about the division of roles within collectives, insofar as mixed-species flocks often divide into sallying species and gleaning species.

Rivers, roads, trenches, are said to stretch, which is strange because they don’t. Could it be a kind of weird metonymy, insofar as what stretches is the person who goes from one end to the other? Stretches their legs, maybe, but stretches their self, definitely, the elastic distortion of the self at the origin to the self at the end. The poem’s interest in things being out of order could be understood as a provocation about lived experience, about how the legitimacy of any voice of lived experience, whether it is the self speaking to the self or the self speaking to others, is stretched and transformed by temporal distances from the experiences of which it speaks. XYZ. The “zee” is, within British English, the less likely, the less canonical, the surprise ending.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” you might shout, and then it’s you. One thing about “last one in is a” as a model of surveillance is that you’re not confident that anybody will actually be watching who the last one in is. Everybody will be in mid-air with arms and legs windmilling. “[L]ast one in is a” has the aura of the last evaluation before the revaluation of values, or the apocalypse. Not the Final Judgment, more like the opposite: the judgment that is made when it is too late for it to trigger any process. The very last time somebody pays for something with money. A moment later, through the membrane, they receive their purchase as a gift. The need to “move along” or you will “lose it with that zee” raises the idea of staying put too long, and getting cross, giving up on that surprise ending.

Is there such a thing as the ‘baseline avant-garde’? That statistically inevitable presence in whatever you are doing or experiencing of traces of things that will by sheer chance be more widespread and/or significant in the future. Maybe poets cling to that sheer surface or hammer things into it. What if these poems, lurking in the heart of a Liar’s Paradox, haven’t been stretched at all? What if they’ve been hammered dense? Just like “your” could be the final state that “you’re” approaches, after only half the hammer blows. The blurring of the possessive “your” with the contracted pronoun and copula “you’re” suggests reification, becoming blurred with the things that you own, or alienation, being unable to be identical with the things that you are. The hammering-dense can be seen in the tendency for the end of one phrase to flow into the start of the next: “that time at that time,” which untangles to “that time at” (a stroll down memory lane) and “at that time” (some historical context). Nostalgia has an affinity with fascism -- golden ages, decline and degeneration, purifying fire -- but when society grows more fascist than it was, there’s got to be such a thing as antifa nostalgia too. Which is like saying they don’t make they don’t make nostalgia like they used to like they used to.

Is there such a thing as a ‘degenerative avant-garde,’ associated with the collapse of possibility and the closing down of potential? As political possibilities fall, as the eye, or whatever it is, stretches, as the ‘shadows’ march in from the edges, different sets of objects begin to welter and flicker and give up secrets. I’m not necessarily saying this is happening now, any of it. And I’m not really talking about immiseration. I don’t think I’m talking about disaster communism either, or building things back better for all. I’m talking about something probably a bit more trivial, about quite good things becoming estranged through their wrecks and ruins, and for a moment conveying visions of even better things. By seeing x decay into not-x, we might discover the why and zee. Of course, on one level, e.g. Johnson might make May ‘look good in comparison,’ May might make us ‘miss David Cameron,’ algorithmically governed fake news ecosystems might tempt us to ‘long’ for earlier more analogue phases of media ideology, the next phase of deepfake stretchers might tempt us to ‘long’ for the epistemological larks of 2020, etc. I don’t think that’s what I mean either. But perhaps that process is mixed in ambiguously with the other one, the one where objects crumpling and distorting reveal their never-before-seen facets. And maybe these two processes are not really distinguishable after all.

The series BoJack Horseman is built around the never directly acknowledged pun, “Why the long face?” BoJack Horseman, on the home stretch of BoJack Horseman, is contacted by an old acquaintance. “You’re tall. I need you to reach something for me.”

OK, now you’re just reaching.