AustLit

Forbes’s pagan project is to displace the commodity fetishism of the spirit of capitalism with the fetishism of glamour, of our bodies and the products of those very bodies, so that art becomes a matter of exchange between friends of objects and ideas, rather than another market super-product.[1] How do we reappropriate the power of the fetish?

Forbes is invested in the material operation of the technics of glamour, of the demonstrated ethos of our being in the world. He pits the daemons of poetry against the “spirit of capitalism,” to tip the favour from a financialisation to a poeticisation of life and experience. As the symbolic animal we are bound to abstract and commodify things and their relations, and we are taught or we intuit the scale of prestige: the prancing stallion of Ferrari is not the respectably plebian sign of Toyota. Poetry like dance is an expressive techne of the body in which we become the carriage of ancestral being, and in which we demonstrate the power or manna of the animal that we are. Money is a proxy object for desire: even as an abstract thing it is a promissory note rather than the thing itself. When it comes to the display of the accumulated power of money, money hangs on with its dead sequins and borrowed furs, and we see the projected idea of manna rather than manna backed up with “the pleasures of the senses.” This is not to say high animal prestige is not distributed across classes: we see accomplished animals in the deliriously rich as well as nomadic peoples with only an armload of possessions, but the Spirit of Capitalism, as the go between, has set money before the whole world, and the resulting spree - materially, ethically, aesthetically, erotically - is murder.

Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse

One slip & you’re back, via Whiteley & Ken

Done to what our boosters can’t tell it’s

distinguished from: her number lipsticked

on a crumpled Amex slip, or a forex dealer

with a view, still chatting on his phone,

fucks someone from behind. Pink tinged

clouds decorate a perfect afternoon, white

yachts weave & tack – the images don’t change

beneath a varnish that embalms disgust –

girls reduced to tears just once, blokes in

sports cars fuming, their parasite careers.

Can art be good enough to save all this,

plus the perfume of frangipani blooms

crushed on sandstone piers? Maybe just.

                                                                         (CP 186)

This poem addresses the glamour of cherished “things,” trying through “consideration” to play the ironic chasm between life and its mythologisation, or a possible real and its representation. Sydney Harbour has an ambivalent load: it is a pure commodity for tourism and real estate, and is aesthetically charged as a boutique experience, especially for artists who want to territorialise the mythos of Sydney. The pagan sermon begins with O’Hara’s credo that for an artist “[t]he slightest loss of attention leads to death” (quoted in Berkson, 226). The “Sydneyness” of Sydney is like a siren that would engulf all but the canniest of sailors in an idealizing solution: “One slip and your back.” Whitely and Ken Done are two poles of intensity in the spectrum of Australian kitsch painting, but the greater threat is that the spectacle of these mirages of simplified beauty are what our feelings become once we “slip” to the temptation of becoming poised as a living cliché, and the ineffable aura of the Harbour as Romantic milieu becomes “a varnish that embalms disgust.”

This could be “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Bestiary”: we see prize animals stripped of their prestige, the financier “fuming” in his high performance charger, trapped in traffic circulation and revealed as a “parasite,” the bankrupt erotic exchange of the love letter as a lipstick written number on the back of a credit card slip, and in the “forex dealer/ still chatting on his phone (as he)/ fuck(s) someone from behind.” We have first the poet and then the reader, pinned into position as a voyeur, a perve. No-one escapes the poem as scourge.

The (colonial) aesthete’s desire to read Sydney Harbour as a possession at least as valuable as a Matisse, in an effort to relieve the classical settler anxiety of inferiority, is stymied; the poetical “value” is put on a continuum with other commodities, but again, the moment we stop to admire our penetration of the satire’s subtleties, we have “slipped back” into a reification of the poet, which now belongs on the skewer with everyone and everything else.

Unless it is to be sold, the excess of beauty is trampled, with “frangipani blooms/ crushed on sandstone piers” having their own demimondaine sensual glamour of the sort that might appeal to Baudelaire. The poem then asks itself the ultimate question of the poet’s vocation, “Can art be good enough to save all this?” with the answer being an exquisite heresy: “Maybe just.” 

How do we reappropriate the power of the fetish from the seductive aura of commodity to the operation of glamour in being our “selves” as admirable animals; not as cronies of the “spirit of capitalism” but as incarnations of the daemon?  Like “Sydney Harbour” as a tradeable currency in the Ideal, artists are made commodities to condense the capital value of their works through the cult ring of the name: Matisse, Ken Done, Whitely, Gucci, Balenciaga, Ferrari. The poet here is prone to the things he despises: who does not want to enjoy a “million dollar” view while you “fuck somebody from behind”, perhaps while thinking of your yachts or your new Bugatti. Perhaps not you, but this position our culture tells us is universally desirable. Forbes slyly punctures the last remaining hope of the modernists and the children of the bourgeoisie: is art good enough to save all this? Not art as commodity, but as the superior booty of a pagan sermon?

The poem throws everything into jeopardy: it both gives the rumour of and withholds consolation. It is more precisely a threat saying, perpetually, pay attention, yet the wit of the whole, the ambiguous laughter of the daemon is companionable. The more subtle jeopardy lay in the satisfaction this brings, the temptation to identify with the poem’s superior perspective, which has already been subsumed as a John Forbes moment, not your own. The efficacy of this pagan sermon is to make you take a step away, to practice the poem’s gift of skepticism on the poem itself.

We tend to align prestige with money, power and beauty, those with cultural influence, forgetting other, more inscrutable or occulted types: accomplished human beings, those with “natural” authority not institutionally conferred, those who possess or who are possessed by the daemonic, charismatic storytellers who have gifts of grace in making mythos. Strength, physical grace or awkwardness, great hair, bad hair, startling eyes have mythological as well as phenomenal charge, though these animal features are only sparingly recorded as ghostmarks: like events they only survive if they become storied. [2]

In “Sydney Harbour …” Forbes displays his animal prestige as a hunter of the spirit of capitalism; an assassin of bad taste and bad ideas, and in the ethos of the poem, floated in the voice and in the sting of its images, we get the excoriating attention of the daemon demanding something better or at least something less despicable, while relishing somehow this despicability. The poet does not “appear” in the poem as a phenomenal shape outside of this critical attention: the poem itself takes up this phenomenal shape. The apprehension of  each line is a coupe de grace, demonstrating a certain panache that is at once physical and metaphysical. In “Monkey’s Pride” Forbes writes:
 

                                                   Soon

new technology will detach me

                     & I’ll be employed on a rowing boat

                                mounted in a park,

           the one the avenues lead to

because society has elected me / to decorate

                                                   its falling apart

                                with a useless panache                   (Collected 98)

The vaunted position of the heroic figure in a boat (I think of Ulysses or of Cy Twombly’s floating myth-machines) is here posted as ridiculous poise: the nostalgic decoration for a disintegrating culture. The dextrousness here, stamped as “panache,” is the capacity for withering satire, of himself and his vocation, but also of a society that requires a monument to uselessness, which all “the avenues lead to.” “Panache” belongs to social theatrics in the sense of operating with flamboyance or insouciance, but there is a martial dimension as well, “panache” denoting in the French a plume of feathers decorating a war helmet; so we have the display of the cockerel, armed with the cockspur, the proud and deadly male bird. For the cavalier, the dandy soldier, panache is a whole style of animal glamour, the rhetorical flair of the physical in excess in terms of being and bearing. Forbes’s panache is ambivalent in its operation: it works, it is this poem’s vanity, yet its gestures are unreadable to a population regimented in leisure or corporate wear. The poem’s footwork, or “hopscotching” down the page belies this uselessness, its deadly cuts and thrusts are made to look like playful “divertimento” or entertainments, yet for those paying attention the cuts made through the fabric of “Sydney Harbour Considered as a Matisse” are permanent.

The archive or the poem may seem to be an odd place to look for the display of animal glamour or animal prestige, but Forbes is a notoriously textual creature; we know his moves through his torsional syntax, the music of his rhetorical duende. There is a darker shading to Forbes’s punk posturing, in the calling out as corrupt or inferior what one may at times feel inferior to: luxury penthouse ownership on the harbour, the reputation of Matisse, the glamourous loading of “the Harbour,” a casual knack of being able to “fuck someone from behind” while making more money over the phone: sexual, economic, artistic prestige.[3] Forbes’s is a renegade vocation, the maker of pagan sermons, but one senses spots of dirty blood where at least a semblance of these earthly comforts are craved. There is a double appetite to both wield the scourge and to take one’s place as an enfranchised debauchee.

A strong part of the charm of these poetics is their ambivalence: Forbes is a lover and loather of Sydney; Forbes is a devotee and a skeptic of language. Virtuous and intelligent contradiction is at the complex “heart” of Lyotard’s conception of being pagan. He seizes the pagan as a figure of radicalized political citizenship, one that operates on the margins, within and without the dominant discourses of the polis. He suggests that it is not possible to take control of the master-narrative without becoming it: if an individual or a group get surplus power, the master-narrative will make of these ventriloquists. Marx as terrible prophet and Communism as a nominated utopia is just as catastrophic for the living as other monumental narratives. What is possible, he suggests, is the localised insertion of small, resistant, bandit narratives of living people with proper names that live in operative communities, which reply to and interrupt the flow of official Logos:

In pagan works, it is rhetorical acts themselves that are events. What matters for the pagan is not the exemplary value or universal significance of the speech-acts – it is of little or no importance whether what they say is true, or whether it will become canonical – but the disruptive effects that such acts have the moment they are spoken, their transformative potential and the possibilities for thinking and speaking that they open up.” (9 Intro Lyotard reader)

Lyotard’s “Lessons in paganism” is his critical reply to the disappointments of the revolutionary energies apparent in the spring of nineteen sixty eight,[4] and one his bogeys is the dead rhetoric of the left: it failed to escape its master narrative, which negates the singularity of people and events in favour of the inhuman march of history. His solution is Nietzschean: an affirmation of events in their singularity, of just what happens and just what is as it is put into speech. Events then have no objective criteria: there would be unleashed an anarchy of making mythos, but this proliferation of tongues is to be preferred as that which negotiates with maximum vitality (Katz 99).

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