Complexity and Simplicity

I have heard quite often either dismissive or enthusiastic comments imposing simplicity of language as a must-have for any sort of written work. As a consequence of this perspective, anything complex or elaborated tends to be seen as excessive and out of place. This view applies to long or convoluted sentences, paragraphs and less used words and embodies a discrete sort of fundamentalism that strives for a literary canon that requires for every published work to be uncomplicated and concrete (as opposed to abstract). This view is unconsciously consubstantiated in the tendency so many of us have to refer to a novel or a poem starting with the expression “it is about…” as if the about word could bring everyone else to a ground of familiarity and understanding that summed up the essence of that object.

Abstract items, to be removed from a literary work, be it poetry, fiction, essay or drama, are emotions displayed separately from the context that causes them; values claiming some level of universality if explored without the scope of objects and references of any length to anything non-physical such as interior monologues, states of mind and so on. Complexity, in its turn, is identified in texts with long sentences and series of paragraphs with little space for dialogs.
I hear at times people complaining at how some unexpected complexity of writing undermines the understanding and enjoyment of the plot and that, in turn, has made me realise that, in fiction, language is seen as the invisible vehicle for a plot. Sitting with friends and praising Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, as one of those fiction books that is written in such a way that you feel like reading it out loud, even when reading it in the quietness of your home, I got some stares of perplexity, as if the sole role of the language was to remain in a neutral, indifferent state.

Nowadays, the rejection of complexity starts at school, where complexity of language is discarded in favour of ease of learning, with learning being understood as achievement of a pass grade. In this context, complexity becomes the unseen companion of the Political Correctness fantasy of an all-inclusive language that does not challenge, but implicitly smothers and impairs our view of the world. It goes on, then, through life, in our culture of entertainment, of favouring a reading experience almost entirely based on impoverishing plot-centric fiction that leaves out the full blown exposure to the complexity of the others in their states of minds, emotions and alternate perceptions of time and reality; that leaves out as well the enjoyment of a language that can be bigger than life.

What we lose with the forced oversimplification of language is, however, more serious than some literary works and is rapidly extending to the way we express ourselves in our everyday life and how we communicate our thoughts, feelings and emotions; how we analyse our surroundings and the issues we have to solve and how we transmit to ourselves and others approaches to solve them. A fact that should be simple and obvious in a commonsensical way is that we need a complex language to express a complex situation; in some cases, keeping it simple is achieved by leaving information out of the equation or, even worse, gives to what is read an equivocal and blurred sense. Failing to cope with complexity, we have no choice but to rely on pretending to understand so well that we don’t realise that we effectively don’t and expect that someone out there can tell us what to do.

I am not suggesting that everything should be expressed in a complex way, but that complexity should be regarded as an available option seen, if used properly, as a natural use of the full resource spectrum that language provides us with, and the same should be true for simplicity. What is, in fact, implied here is far more serious: We should fear that the automatic rejection of complexity without any further thought is already impairing our ability to fully deal with a complex world and society: ours. By rejecting complexity in favour of an artificial and impaired simplicity we are nurturing and creating a society based on stupidity.

Angel Poetry

There is an ancient gnostic legend that tells how angels fell so much in love for the beauty of earth’s bodily world that they dove into it while looking for their own reflection. They gained in the process a body that imprisoned their immortal nature, becoming, thus, human. What they gain (and lose) in their newfound humanity are feelings and the strange connection between emotions and an individual body.

When we look at how both angels and ancient gods are depicted, they offer us a common lack of feelings, being feelings human by nature. Going a step further, feelings could be seen as a learnt layer that channels emotions, giving a psychology to them. Being a layer sitting between reasoned thought and emotion, they are also the perfect ground for morals.

Emotions, being immediate and potentially impersonal, do not accommodate principles and rules easily - they appear and take, with or without them. Discursive thought, on its turn, is only called to speak after the immediacy of the authorless emotion was allowed to manifest itself.

Some relatively recent views of angels tend to present them as intrinsically good – no good angel would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; no good angel would manifest jealousy of the benefits that god granted to men; no angel could ever fall from the divine grace and fall, a little like Prometheus. Drawing a parallel with the Classic gods, we can see wrath, anger, lust and, at times, a short-lived tolerance towards the acts of humans, but none of the morally nice feelings that seem to guide the life of their human subjects.

If we look at feelings as something that is learnt and imposed upon us as a tool for social conformity, they become a socially accepted response to a given emotional wavelength, repressing emotions or channelling them into compensation strategies regarded as harmless, or, then, frustration. Feelings introduce into the equation words in their standard dictionary sense, creating, thus, a dimension of time (and strategy) for our actions and thoughts.

If emotions are so mutable that they seem to disappear or change while remaining there, feelings try to remain in sameness of state and intensity. Their perpetuation tends, however, to be self-induced, trying to satisfy our craving for identity and permanence. Feelings are history; emotions are the moment. Feelings develop strategy; emotions don’t project into the future (or time). The eternity of the angel is an eternal present of vibrations of the same selfless emotion in its multiple colours and oscillations between what we perceive as the most absolute kindness and the most intolerable cruelty.

Angel poetry becomes the work of the angel in us, an unblinking and uncompromisingly attentive stare at the moment seeking that magic intensity by which the woven fabric of reality is revealed. Poetry of the angel is amoral, carries no concept of right and wrong but looks at the world and sees everything with a newness as it has never been seen, because each moment is irrevocably different, and when truth is stated as a state of sight, there is no point in reasoning about it; we either see or we don’t.

This view of the essential matter that feeds and threatens feelings is direct and wordless and needs forms of verbalisation analogous to the symbolic forms of thinking found in myth and magic to guide its transgression of the everyday use of language. The poetry that attempts to capture the wordless moment of revelation, oscillates between light and darkness, redemption and fall. It is the poetry of the angel. It is the poetry of the damned, condemned to commit their lives into a chase that will never be taken to its term.

Wimbledon

Just to make things clear, I usually don’t watch TV except for DVDs (films and some music) and I take this principle so seriously that I don’t even have my TV connected to an aerial. To make it even more clear, I specifically avoid watching sporting events – I tend to find them particularly unpleasant.

That said, it just happened that I sat in front of a TV showing those excruciating last moments of the men’s final at Wimbledon that lasted for ever. As I sat there, sipping an espresso and chatting, I was progressively drawn into the images. I wasn’t paying as much attention to the game as to the players and to their features and expressions.

Their expressions surfaced, at times, an unmistakable anger that education and training soon would move out of sight and, seeing them, I was transported to other times and places. I wasn’t watching anymore a tennis game in this civilised contemporary Britain, but gladiators fighting to death in a barren arena and adhered to the game as if I could expect to see one of them falling gushing blood and guts from a deadly, vicious blow.

When the retiarius achieved his victory with his net and trident, I could see the defeated Murmillon drop his shield and sword and sink into the ground just as Roddick sank into his chair. The time they took to speak was the time they needed to regain humanity.

Seeing Sounds

As if sight saw a sound. Something watches me as I watch the street and it's evening traffic. A visible sound is then installed, a vibration that is a breath, a background of perception for the perception. It is a vibration of quietness, immutable, that has always been there. Something watches me watching and what is watched ceases being observed, belongs now to a sameness without difference or separation. There would be no perception without this vibration.

The Tomb of Cleopatra

Cleopatra gained such a reputation, that she has almost changed from an undoubtedly real character into a near mythical one, equivalent to Helen of Troy or Circe, the sorceress. The fact is that she held the decaying kingdom of Egypt and managed to seduce and manipulate the powerful Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony. The truth on who manipulated and who seduced and charmed is debatable, as anything in life that concerns human matters, but it is nevertheless believable that Cleopatra was the author of the seduction part.

Learning from the news that archaeologists think that they have found the tombs of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony set my imagination free for some minutes as I heard of the possibilities for rebuilding her face and body from her mummy, DNA samples and forensic techniques. It felt sickly and fascinating at one time, this act of violation of the privacy of death and the question: “Was she really beautiful?” as if it mattered.

For what it really matters, however, I keep feeling sure that the key for the person, the source of the beauty and seduction power of Cleopatra, lies far from the shape of the body or the features of the queen. That will always be the question to remain unanswered, keeping the dead at peace and undisturbed.

The Prodigal Son

We tend to visualise a story when we think of the parable. We see the father, the jealous older brother and the prodigal son who returns from his unfortunate journey across the outer world. We see a story based on the images, a game that is played between two players, forgetting the brother, and we have the morality of the tale, which is not its ethic.

Let’s forget the moral in order to challenge the story. Taking one step further the challenge to our naïve realism of persisting in seeing literal meaning or unequivocal explanations for everything set before our eyes, we should ask ourselves whether the parable really contains a story, if the prodigal son has ever left the house of his father. How could we read it if the parable spoke about the dreams, wishes and fantasies of its own characters?

The father, not loving equally all his sons, looks for a pretext to legitimate his preference. The eldest son suffers from nightmares whereby his father’s choices are revealed to him. The youngest son fears, on his turn, losing his freedom by having to return to the place that he never left.

If we move one step further and reduce all characters to a single one, father and sons within the same person in the image of a disjointed trinity, we will have some unspeakable entity who commands us through a whisper so low that no one else can hear: “go, and bring experience back to me”, and we go, wrapped in the warmest of orders, not even conscious of having abandoned our primeval home. What really matters, then, is to know which instance of ourselves has sent us and which part of our experience is worth to be turned into a story.

Performance and Delivery

After finishing reading some poems at a poetry cafe, a friend told me "Good delivery" and that simple comment remained for some strange reason in the back of my mind while I drove back home.

I guess that what that comment made me realise was a significant difference that exists between what we usually call performance and delivery. Delivery is, of course, a form of performance, but it represents both offering the poem we deliver to someone who is listening and setting the poem free. By delivering a poem, I'm inviting the audience into something that is intimate and, in this sense, invites participation in an inward movement, setting the poem free from my own view of it; by performing, I'm the source of an outward movement, taking as a mission to impress my view of the poem upon the audience and thus not setting it free. I realised, thinking again on my friend's comments, that my concern has almost always been that of delivering poetry the best way I can.

Is it the only right approach? I don't think so. It depends on the interactions between poem and reader. Me? my purpose is to deliver poetry.