A poem from TESTIFY by JOSEPH LEASE

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“Enjoy Your Symptom” in Testify by Joseph Lease

(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2011)

Enjoy Your Symptom

Life is a series of injuries and shocks in which it is necessary to dress well, said Jack. I said, Why am I even walking these streets? That is a fart, said Jack. Really your whole stance of precious self-regard, your whole delicacy and force, is a fart at this point. No one cares. You’re just one more sensitive ice cream cone in a world of unemployable spaniels. Then he stood on his chair and immediately five really handsome men and five really handsome women surrounded him. They chanted, “We will be your community. We will be your community.” Really, Jack turned to me and whispered, really the thing you need is, you need a community; but you aren’t going to get one because you’re just another boring individualist. Puppies like you are a dime a dozen. You’re so boring you should be on TV. The ten laughed. I said, “I’ll laugh at your jokes if you laugh at mine. You have no sense of humor, Jack said. You don’t even know how to wear a shirt. You have to know how to sit in a chair and be outside the law. You have never known and you never will know. The next night I came back to the bar but I stayed in the shadows. Well, I’m afraid. Well, don’t go outside. As soon as I go outside I’m in five different streets at once. This is wonderful. I can see five different views at once. I go back inside – nothing has changed. I realize there is only one direction I can go and that is forward. Just as I walk onstage, Jack, smirking like a game-show host, walks onstage holding giant quotation marks made of painted blue cardboard. He is saying, Folks, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

*

“Enjoy Your Symptom”. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out is the title of a book by Slavoj Žižek. It is an elucidation of Lacanian psychoanalysis via examples from popular culture. I’m not sure exactly how much Lacan, or Žižek, we’re supposed to read into this poem.

But it doesn’t hurt to recall that Lacan’s main point is “I can’t cure you, I can just help you see who you are” … i.e. you can do what you want vis-à-vis your “I” except escape it. So you might as well enjoy.

One might also recall that, in this poem, the “I”’s “nemesis” is someone called Jack. But I wouldn’t read too much into that, as I think more than one Jack is potentially implicated, even if only “in a way”. 

“Life is a series of injuries and shocks in which it is necessary to dress well, said Jack.” While it is difficult to see exactly why dressing well is important at this point, I do note that from the very first word Jack is setting himself up as an aphorist. The aphorism, whether or not it makes sense, is didactic. The didact is positioning himself (in this case I Jack is a “he”) as an authority in relation to the author / narrator. Power relations are implicated, tho we don’t yet know to what effect. I think of Lars and W., in Lars Iyer’s Spurious and Dogma (books I recommend everyone read).

“I said, Why am I even walking these streets?” Is this an “existential” statement? Is it a bit of annoyance at Jack? Impossible to tell at this point.

“That is a fart, said Jack. Really your whole stance of precious self-regard, your whole delicacy and force, is a fart at this point. No one cares. You’re just one more sensitive ice cream cone in a world of unemployable spaniels.” This is a direct attack. On what. On the author / narrator, certainly, but why? The “stance of self-regard …” is implicated. This is an attack on the subject position. It is followed by another aphorism, “You’re just one more sensitive ice cream cone in a world of unemployable spaniels.” This makes no literal sense. But it’s clearly an insult. What remains unclear is why the subject position (the “lyric I”?) is distinguished by species from the rest of the unemployables.

I don’t think any discussion of the Lacanian subject (the barred S etc) helps here. The next sentences make it clear (to me at least) that we may well need to focus on another Jack.

“Then he stood on his chair and immediately five really handsome men and five really handsome women surrounded him. They chanted, “We will be your community. We will be your community.” Really, Jack turned to me and whispered, really the thing you need is, you need a community; but you aren’t going to get one because you’re just another boring individualist. Puppies like you are a dime a dozen. You’re so boring you should be on TV.”

This makes me think of Jack Spicer and his coterie rather than Jacques Lacan and his thinking the subject. Spicer desperately needed a “community”, which for the most part meant a bunch of more-or-less disciples. Yes, there were few women in his coterie – I can only think of Joanne Kyger at the moment, and it doesn’t seem worth getting up to gather more certainty on this point, and yes, Duncan was crucial to Spicer, but nevertheless, every history tells me that for the most part it was Jack’s way or the highway … Part of building a coterie is dividing the world into us and them; the author narrator here is forced into the “them” so the others can be a “we”.

Which, if I’m right to think of Spicer here, makes the attack on the individualist two-pronged. One is as described in the above paragraph. The other has to do with Spicer’s notion of poetic composition, in which the poem does not come from the “I”.

It’s interesting to note that in this bit, Jack says, “Puppies like you are a dime a dozen”, thought above he had called the author / narrator an ice cream cone and distinguished him from the spaniels. I’m beginning to wonder if Jack has a coherent position, or whether he’s just in attack mode, and not really thinking.

It will also be useful to remember Jack’s “You’re so boring you should be on TV.”

“The ten laughed. I said, “I’ll laugh at your jokes if you laugh at mine. You have no sense of humor, Jack said. You don’t even know how to wear a shirt. You have to know how to sit in a chair and be outside the law. You have never known and you never will know.” The insults and the ostracism and the coterie building continue. The author / narrator does not respond in kind. He seems to be able to stay independent of Jack, and to see that there’s more than one way to be. I will disagree with myself on that latter point later.

“The next night I came back to the bar but I stayed in the shadows. Well, I’m afraid. Well, don’t go outside.” Knowing that it’s a bar helps me believe in my “Spicer thesis”, though I know full well that it’s not the real Spicer who’s at issue here, it’s the kind of thinking that tries to subjugate the individualist.

We are at that point in history where neither community (in the sense presented here) nor individuality seems viable. Perhaps community that can accept individuality without subsuming it is being presented as a sort of “subliminal” option. I think of Occupy, and its refusal of hierarchy. Not that this is a poem about Occupy.

I do not know who speaks the lines “Well, I’m afraid. Well, don’t go outside.” It could be interior monologue, tho we don’t know why the author / narrator would be afraid of the outside. It could be Jack and the narrator, in which case “don’t go outside” might mean something like “if you join my following (stay “inside”, not “outside”) you’ll no longer have to be afraid. It could be the author / narrator’s “internal Jack”. In any case, this is followed by “As soon as I go outside …”

“As soon as I go outside I’m in five different streets at once. This is wonderful. I can see five different views at once.” The author / narrator experiences the world as open, as full of possibility upon possibility. But.

“I go back inside – nothing has changed. I realize there is only one direction I can go and that is forward.” For some reason, the outdoor revelation cannot be realized by the author / narrator. Enjoy your symptom, indeed!

“Just as I walk onstage, Jack, smirking like a game-show host, walks onstage holding giant quotation marks made of painted blue cardboard. He is saying, Folks, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” This is complex. I begin to wonder if Jack and the author / narrator are two sides of person. I just wonder, I can’t say for sure. When I see “Jack, smirking like a game-show host” I recall the line above, “You’re so boring you should be on TV.” Thus the author / narrator and Jack seem to blend.

Or maybe not, maybe Jack usurps the narrator, takes his (?) place. The power that Jack has been wielding is the power to speak. To speak in place of. Who gets to speak? Once again, I think of theoretically leaderless Occupy. This is not that. In this scenario, there is a definite hierarchy of speakers. Whether or not Jack and the author / narrator are one and the same, they may as well, be since it’sonly Jack who gets to speak.

Also, recall, for what it’s worth, that Žižek’s Enjoy Your Symptom is subtitled Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Onstage, or on TV, we may be out of Spicer and back into Lacan territory.

Jack “walks onstage holding giant quotation marks made of painted blue cardboard. He is saying, Folks, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” What might this mean? Might we have to think something like repetition? I think we should probably be thinking reproduction instead of repetition … might we be “comporting ourselves” towards the past? Might we be caught in some sort of quite vicious circle? We seem to have entirely lost sight of the openness of the five streets.

Writ large, this could well be a poem about the stripping away of the illusion of American democracy. I’ll leave aside a digression on how it was always an illusion. But it’s now become glaringly obvious: We cannot be a democracy when only the Jacks get to speak. And only the Jacks get to speak. And we’ve already heard what they have to say: “All power to me. All power to me.” There is no Real in sight.

*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review.  To wit: NEXT.  And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.