Introduction: The Margins of Conscious Life
As beings of finitude, humanity is, in its species-essence, a consciousness with margins. Not all can be, or ever be, centered, at the center, front and center, but rather events, things, others, and at once myself in my own manifold yet longitudinal being, come before me and then pass out of focus. What is arrests my attention, commands it, but does not possess it for overlong. I too am a moving target, for others and even for the world in its own anonymous concern. I am a being completed only in mine ownmost death, and whence I am appresented with its more radical otherness I find that it is, in itself, something value-neutral. I am apprehended by it, furtive being who I am, whether or not I have been in life a fugitive or figurehead, sought escape or merely egress, have myself grasped life, seized the day, nay the hour, or have placed myself into a personal corner, from which I then observe the living others and exempt myself from their daily doings. This heavy sleep about which I cannot come to an even terms is yet no horror, once again, in itself. And just as the margins of existence are still part of the human situation, contributing to our shared historical conditions in a manner oft more significant than one might imagine, death too retains its stake in the very life that has given it ironic birth.
But in our time, we have made even death into a living trial; it was not enough to endure dying, to undertake our leave and contemplate our coming absence. Like the darker-souled companion to Masefield’s lady, the ‘presence’ which relieves us of all burdens instead of simply what is burdensome, as she does for the narrator, we, like him, embark on a quest both needless and indeed, heedless. The first because she has already absolved us of care, the second because life and those who live lay now to what we have taken to be marginal; only the lady and her compassionate care occupies our every thought. In turning away from life in order to seek that which relieves life of its very humanity is to neglect the very lesson of concern. Shall he ever find her again? No, for that lesson is taught only once in every life: that the love of another too rests in a passing hearth and the more so, that this is no fickleness. Instead, he shall discover only her shadow, the non-presence that turns a who into a which and thence turns the living into the dead.
It is this second appearance which Beckmann documents. Today, death is a clinician, uncaring of human feeling since itself devoid of it, with the ‘taste of morticians’, as the old song has it, and within the atmosphere of a vulgar Valkyrie. It flies not, but scurries rather underfoot, and undertakes in turn its banal concern in an orderly fashion; that one is numbered in a manner of a factory factorial is very much emblematic of the horror this new death occasions. Once again, dying was not enough for us, we might gainsay, nor even dying alone. As had birth become a clinical experience, so too now death. Beckmann, who could not himself have observed any of the early evils of the coming Holocaust sampled by the T4 extermination program, has nevertheless captured in exact shock a scene which in reality must have occurred some thousands of times. But his ‘Death’, like Masefield’s ‘Vision’, is more about an ethical error than any historical event. The poet’s narrator seems not resigned in continuing his search, in seeking again what he has taken to be the sole space of succor in life, but rather both determined and oddly oblivious. The painter’s victim wears a look of abject terror, not that he is about to die, but rather in what manner. Death today is not even murder, but a moment in a clinical round, saddled up not with sorrow but instead with a salacious sadism. The horror in Beckmann is shared by the viewer, but only the reader is horrified at the decision of Masefield’s character, doubling over the effectiveness of the contrasting imagery. At length, we realize that in Beckmann we have no such contrast; all is centered round the banality which makes the new death utterly evil in both intent and action.
It is this banality which begins to overtake other aspects of life in modernity. It is well known to have found a willing place in bureaucracy, and is part of the ‘rationalization’ of what ideally are merely rational organizations. It is part of the now proverbial Entzauberung that has itself overtaken the world. Much of our daily rounds have become banal, in the main because we do not know, or care to know, the others with whom we interact. Attempts to ‘humanize’ the cashier’s’ lineup or the gas pump are themselves heavily scripted. All of this is so well known, is an absolutely, if not so resolutely, accepted part of living in ‘modern times’, that our very understanding thereof has itself become banal. Perhaps this is a yet more horrifying irony than is presented by either the poet or the painter, for the rest of us, who are not artists and yet as well are sentenced to never knowing the arts of life, live in what for art is itself a margin. Mundane life is hardly conscious of itself. I go about my business and thus busy myself doing so. I have assignments without assignations, I carry a cross across an intersection, discard it only to pick up another; for today’s person in daily life, one cross is like another and in every aspect. There are no intimate burdens on the order of those existential, but rather only those which are taken too personally. This too is a convenience, for in doing so, I absolve others of their human care. At first, I feel this lack as a singular person but then only later do I realize its general absence; in my ardor to be cared for I have excerpted myself from the care of others. It is here, but only here, that extermination can then begin.
In order to reveal the processes and dynamics whereby humaneness is cast adrift if not wholly aside, this collection engages with the margins of living consciousness. Its ‘fields’ contain studies of the banality of sexuality, of literacy, of parenting among others, all spaces of human intimacy and art that should partake only in the noble. Is it only the case that a clinical death has overtaken them, or is there a more nuanced interpretation available? The following also is home to a number of analytic papers whose purpose is to provide a series of ‘frames’ which are not merely epistemic or yet epistemological in scope. Sometimes the language is itself clinical, with a view to getting some distance from not only the object but as well, objecting to the very much partial language which has surrounded it, for to banality we tend to attach a great ululation, also scripted, in order to shield ourselves from the realization that we have forgotten our human concernfulness. Yet these analyses are, I suggest, most effective when they are not themselves bereft of passion, for even if the compassion of the poet’s visitational figure remains the ideal, for humans ensconced within only the expected day-to-day, the procedural proceedings of processed procession, the irruptive semblance of even basic passion may be the most likely path to its higher sibling.
The author is himself both a ‘field’, as an object for the reader, and a ‘frame’, as the director providing a momentary authorial ‘intent’ to same. Given this dual role, an interview is included within part two that is meant to point forward, moving away from impassioned critique and toward compassionate companionship, describing in no great detail the outcome of over two decades of work in the field and a quarter century of such in the library. Their combination has disclosed a small portion of the human experience which, though it too is inclusive of all which seeks to nullify concern and thus make existence into a play of shadows, a ploying cloying umbrous clot that forever sticks in the throat of the poet and to the tip of the painter’s brush, yet has the will and love to overcome its contemporary self. If these studies to follow have in any manner aided in this better self-understanding, their author is forever grateful.
– G.V. Loewe, Winnipeg, Canada. December 31, 2024.