Fan Wu interviews Ben Meyerson on /Seguiriyas/
Ben's debut poetry collection out now from Black Ocean
Fan: I wanted to start off with a fairly simple, open question. I love this moment from “Scenario: Entry”:
“A colossal illumination
will helm
this new body into which I
dawn
parsed in implicate glow
drawn
like water from the well
slow then
streaming from form to form—”I'm transfixed by this sublimate “new body,” here pulled in two directions by the enjambment of “dawn.” A body becomes the formless stream it always was, a passage playing off in-betweens rather than resting in any given form. I wanted to hear your thoughts on the relation between (fleshy, felt) body and (poetic, [quasi-]metaphysical) form.
Ben: You've provided a lovely reading of that passage – thank you! There are, as you say, flows whose shape and directional multiplicity are always constituting and reconstituting the body, but I do not believe that they are incorporeal at any point. In other words, I am not convinced that there is a "metaphysical form" toward which the body is oriented or by which the body emerges into itself. Rather, following the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, I am of the opinion that there are different articulations of corporeality: the somatic, on the one hand, and the psychic, on the other. The flow between those two articulations of the individual is a key dynamic if we want to think about the production (and destruction) of subjectivity. The somatic flow pertains to physical processes that subtend the individual and so connect it to the wider milieu of life, while the psychic flow is a process that pushes the somatic flow toward a more strictly separated phase of individuation – this difference causes tension between them, but it is a tension that allows for the togetherness of individuals, connected as they are by the somatic substrate that they all feel and share between them, and separate as they are by virtue of their confinement within distinct psyches. Perhaps, if there is a poetic flow, it occurs when we allow the psychic articulation of subjectivity to give way to the somatic for a moment, and in doing so enact a controlled mode of self-annihilation: as we attune ourselves to the somatic flow that runs through us and connects us to the eruptions, interruptions, circulations, mixtures and separations of the larger world around us, we find that the temporary dissolution of psychic individuality takes on a form in and of itself, one whose pulse is in time with a larger pulse. This is what we could call the 'poetic form' of the body, and it is truly of the body: internal to the instant of its welling-up, irreplicable as each flutter of a leaf that dangles just above running water, not metaphysical but wholly and stubbornly material. To sit within such a telluric attunement is to feel our own becoming, which is constant, catalyzed over and over again by each and every instance of change. The stanza that you quoted is my attempt to describe the pulse of the body's constant becoming ("streaming from form to form") as it is felt from the standpoint of the somatic flow that connects the individual to the material substrate of being ("a colossal illumination will helm this new body into which I dawn") and renders it legible to the broader milieu in which it is situated ("parsed in implicate glow"). Every body is water from the well, and the well is every body.
Fan: I appreciate your principled refusal of the “metaphysical,” and that it's a matter of corporeality – of the staunchly material – whether that’s in the valence of the somatic or the psychic or in their oscillation. For me, this position instantiates an “ethics of immanence” that structures our relations, that is definitively anti-identitarian; that attends to locality of where we happen to be and its socio-geographic histories; that is ready to give up individuation when the larger body calls for merge & dissolve. Poetics is ever connected to ethos, and yours suggests a new way to make life, and to make elsewise of a life than what we've been already habituated into.
It feels like this oscillatory corporeality is given form in how flamenco – itself so passionately embodied, at the axis of music and dance – appears across these poems. You write about it a bit in the intro of your book, where you mention your forging of recombinant histories across Gitano (i.e. Romani) and Jewish populations, but I'm curious to hear more: what is flamenco doing with you as one of the intertexual motifs woven throughout the poems?
Ben: Your formulation of immanence is really fascinating insofar as it chimes strongly with what I have in mind – an ethics that finds its footing in the local and makes life there, an "oscillatory corporeality" (I love this phrase!) – and then diverges somewhat. Before I answer your question, I want to explore this divergence, because I think it's important. If locality (the way you describe it reminds me a bit of how Adriana Cavarero frames her concept of the “absolute local”), as you say, calls for a given subject's dissolution into the larger body, then such a situation presents a problem for groups such as the Jews and the Roma, who have insisted in various ways on reserving the right to remain at least partially exterior to the European Christian communal inside either by maintaining a certain belief system in the face of Christian supersessionist dogma or by holding onto cultural practices that diverge from those accepted within the Christian interior. In the face of a larger body – a state, a religious community, etc. – the option for exteriority needs to remain, and some part of the immanent subject must be capable of resisting dissolution into the collective. Otherwise, the call of the local also becomes a call for cultural erasure.
This is a problem that I've been confronting in my engagement with Spinoza, who is a major influence on my thinking throughout Seguiriyas, and who is often regarded as one of the foundational figures of process-based philosophy in the modern West. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza describes the subject's relationship with the state as follows: “it’s evident that the Right of a state, or of the supreme powers, is nothing more than the Right of nature, determined not by the power of each person, but by the power of a multitude, led as if by one mind.” On its face, this pronouncement runs entirely counter to my insistence that the option for exteriority from the collective must be preserved at all costs. Spinoza, however, leaves us a sliver of space in which we might read him against himself. I can’t help noticing that the “as if” (“veluti,” in Latin) is doing a lot of work to tie the state’s “Right of nature” over the multitude to the mind’s sway over its respective sphere of influence – and we must assume that the mind’s corresponding sphere of influence would be the body. Even as he seems to foreclose the individual subject's option for exteriority to state power, the “veluti” challenges us to explore the role of the mind within the explicatory analogy that he has laid out for us. If we take the simile as it is given and accept that all members of the multitude do indeed imbue the state with a collectivized mind whose rationality circumscribes their activities, then we must treat the multitude as a body attached to the mind of the state. The multitude is composed of many minds, and each of them is attached to a separate body; a state formation that acts as the many-minded multitude’s collectivized mind must therefore pertain to a collectivized body composed of that same multitude’s many bodies.
With that out of the way, we can turn to Spinoza's Ethics and use his portrait of the mind-body relation in that book against him here in order to grant the subject more autonomy relative to its apparent dissolution into the state. In the Ethics, Spinoza holds that the mind must always possess a concept of the body in its totality, but the body, despite being conceived by the mind, can remain independent of cognition in its parts (one does not need to cognize the pancreas to cognize the body, and in cognizing the body, one does not necessarily cognize the pancreas in isolation). The body, meanwhile, can react affectively to the mind and, in doing so, change it: the containment, augmentation or alteration of the body’s power causes the mind to produce an idea of the body’s state, and then the mind’s idea of that state, in conjunction with external stimuli, impacts the body on an affective level, which in turn prompts the mind to alter its idea of the body in response to the shift in affect, and so on and so forth.
In a political context, then, even if the subjects’ minds are given over to whatever state might be governing them, the subjects’ bodies are in a situation whereby they are being controlled by the state and simultaneously impacting it with their inevitable response to its control. Thus, while the minds of subjects are fundamentally interior to the state's ‘natural Right’ of governance, their bodies constitute a threshold between interiority and exteriority relative to that same state. They are always being brought inside the state insofar as they are being conceived by the state’s mind, and yet they are always moving outside the state in their reaction to the ways in which the state conceives of them. In many cases, the state’s conception (and here I mean organization, regulation, etc.) of the bodies under its purview will be violent, and, when a body is caught at the threshold between interiority and exteriority (as so many often are), its reaction will be equally violent. This violence will always be directed straight back at the mind, at the state, and toward the somatic impact of their decisions. Moreover, as Spinoza belabors in the Ethics, the mind cannot ever be decoupled from the body. This means that the individual subject’s mind, in conceiving of its own body, must on the one hand conceive of the state at least partially by way of its body's interiority or exteriority to it and on the other hand impose its conception of the state onto whatever awareness it might possess of that bodily interiority or exteriority.
In all of this, we find another manifestation of the tension between the psychic and the somatic that I was discussing earlier. We also discover a perfect exemplar of what you've just described: an "oscillatory corporeality" that must construct a somatic and psychic relation between each subject and the collective regardless of whether they are insider, outsider or a mixture of both, even as it simultaneously structures the relation between the psychic and the somatic. I suppose what's happening here is that I am trying my best to make sure that this framework of material immanence preserves the reality of the violence that collectivity can impose while simultaneously understanding the collective to be a vehicle that might in some circumstances be used to counter violence and encourage solidarity or even reconciliation.
That was a very long digression – my apologies. Now I need to answer your actual question! I'll give you a very simple response and then elaborate on it: one of flamenco's primary roles in my book is to demonstrate how the body can physically fail in its attempt to contain all of Andalusia’s interlocking histories of cultural mixture and dispersion – between Roma, Muslims, Christians and Jews – along with the particular social reality of privation and discrimination that the Iberian Roma continue to face to this very day. As I mention in my Author’s Note before the reader can even get to the poems, flamenco occupies a really interesting position whereby it bears witness to all these different histories of transit and dislocation predating its emergence – specifically, the forcible conversion and expulsion of Spain’s Jewish and Muslim populations as well as the many ordinances leveled against the Roma at the behest of the Christian crown – and then binds them up into a practice that gathers meaning internal to Romani communal life and inscribes the Iberian Roma's own history of transit, displacement and oppression in more recent centuries.
I can say all of that to you right now and you will understand it, but how can one show it while preserving the inarticulate but deeply felt lacunae that riddle such historical memory? I try to do that in the poetry, of course, but flamenco's answer is much more direct: put it all in the body and let it come out through the mouth. What I hear in the voice of the flamenco cantaor is the body filling itself with history until it reaches beyond the threshold of its failure and forces the voice to break, and then continuing on toward the next breakage. It is the failure of the throat that ensures the transmission of all these disembodied histories, I believe, because the breakage demonstrates the degree to which they remain present – their overabundance – and ushers the rest of the community into the ragged flow of somatic memory by virtue of their listening. I use the flamenco voice as a steady motif throughout the collection because it can act as that which carries histories into bodies and between bodies, models transit across time and space, and functions as a sonic envelope in which subjects can navigate togetherness and apartness. In this way, it models a method by which diasporic memory can be transmitted. I then repurpose and expand that model such that it carries Ashkenazi Jewish history, too, hearing it as a voice that frays in its overabundance, and experiencing it within a sensorium that does the same, alongside the histories that flamenco itself has encoded. In doing so, my goal in Seguiriyas has been to bring forth a kind of historicized solidarity, or a companionship in memory, while also acknowledging its pitfalls – a “wandering hum,” as I call it in one poem, which might turn inward and listen only to the sound that it is making by itself or venture outward and find another song elapsing in unison with its own.
In any case, you're right that there's an oscillation in the flamenco voice – it’s moving back and forth between its capacity as an embodied, purely somatic cry predating speech and its capacity as a communicative medium that comes after language has intervened. That oscillation maps onto the oscillation between the somatic and the psychic, and it also produces a temporal loop between anteriority and posteriority; it is this loop, which recursively circulates between its poles, that allows the voice to contain, carry and transmit historical memory. In “Pellizco,” which is a poem that is directly about the flamenco voice, I rely on three separate metaphors to express that very idea, some of which purposefully reprise variations on the motifs that I introduce early on in Seguiriyas in poems such as “Scenario: Entry,” to which you so generously drew our attention in your first question:
“duct between there
and here
A pool that wells up;
the well that contains the pool”
And:
“Water
unsure of its own age, pulled
to a blunted thrum, a hollow stretched flat,
a serrated edge along which
everything goes
and everything returns”Fan: I'm struck by what you've said about collectivity, its capacity to be both a vehicle of violence and of resistance. As I write, student protests are erupting across campuses who unite their voices to "reach beyond the threshold of failure," to transpose a phrase you used for the flamenco cantaor's aesthethics. In this case, it's the threshold of the failure of Western Imperialism -- and its instantiation in university administrations -- that activist collectives are trying to push past in a hope to reach a new horizon of social life and civil belonging that's not premised on greedy genocidality. Is your poetics interested in the function of gathering and organizing collectivity, perhaps in subtle ways not recognizable under the harsh light of explicit capital-P Politics?
Ben: These are difficult delineations that you’re making. To what degree does Western Imperialism possess unity across its various expressions and mimeses? How can we know where “capital-P Politics” ends and another mechanism of collectivity begins? I think these are related questions. As an ideology, Zionism sought the aesthetics of a break with European-ness or Western-ness even as it embraced the colonial logic birthed by the Christian supersessionism whose forceful application had plagued European Jewry for hundreds of years. Under those auspices, Zionism is not so much a direct extension of Western Imperialism as it is a mimesis of it. This allows for more absolute modes of disavowal – for instance, Zionists can make arguments that appeal to the notion of Jewish indigeneity such that the colonial ethos undergirding the movement remains unspoken. But then we see very similar rhetorics of disavowal on college campuses when administrations respond to the encampments by issuing statements about student safety and tolerance rife with HR-speak even as they call in armed police forces to batter student and faculty protestors. On the one hand, then, we ought to acknowledge the differences between a mimesis of Western Imperialism and a direct reproduction of it, but on the other hand, it all becomes something of a hall of mirrors, reflecting the same harsh light every which way, such that nothing remains untouched. A collective based on care is just as capital-P Political as a collective based on violence, and depending on where one is standing, there might not be any difference between the two. The harsh light of Politics recognizes all of it, finds ways to translate it and integrate it. What’s more, it is under that same light that we go about writing poetry, so why should my poetics be capable of imagining an ‘otherwise’? And if there isn’t an otherwise, then what kind of collectivity can poetry strive for?
This might feel like defeatism, but that is not what I am getting at here. I sometimes think of George Oppen, who stopped writing for many years due to his sense that poetry would always be unable to right the world’s wrongs or make ‘useful’ community. In moments of despondency, I find myself leaning toward that same conclusion, but then I remember that poetry can take stock of what is before it and fashion proximities that would otherwise be unlikely to exist. These proximities must be dense in order to remain durable: a simple mutuality of interest or passing resemblance will never be sufficient. Just as a good metaphor requires – and often fashions for itself – a deep interrelation between tenor and vehicle, so too do these encounters call for corresponding entanglements with the frictions of history, for the voicing of spatiotemporal junctures at which one group’s memory might be tugged toward another’s. In Seguiriyas, I do try to address what this might look like in my attempts to produce multi-referential poems whose content unites Jewish, Muslim and Romani histories in Spain. These are interrelations that can only exist in dialogue with the legacy of Capital-P Politics, insofar as their capacity for solidarity resides in their engagement with histories that both inform and are informed by the evolving political realities that each group has had to navigate.
Of course, there are many modes of sociality that subsist in excess of what has been imposed by the current order, but their forms are always going to be circumscribed by that imposition. Indeed, such a situation – being circumscribed by vertical power and attempting even so to forge horizontal social relations and kinship bonds – is precisely what has shaped things like the flamenco voice; what’s more, as I explore in Seguiriyas, it is also what allows for a chime of recognition across situations, a solidarity whose terms are given by and claimed despite the movement of history. However, the collectivity produced under those auspices is always invaded in some way. Take flamenco as an example: in the mid-20th century, Francisco Franco’s fascist government was all too happy to use it as a key element of its nationalistic propaganda campaign. Such complex and compromised entanglements need to be acknowledged by any given collective if it desires to make good decisions about itself – I know that much.
As we speak, I am still in the process of thinking things through, trying to build poems that can find their way toward a properly realized formulation of a sociality that can be resilient in the face of that which seeks to tear it apart while also reckoning with its own inevitable flavor of violence in a productive manner (all iterations of collectivity have to figure out where to put the violence that allows for their existence, and some go about it more destructively than others). It seems to me that a good collective must take pains to address distorted constructions of its own past, confront problems relating to memory, kinship and attachment, and social reproduction. It must preserve the option for exteriority even as it cultivates a welcoming interior and harbors no illusions about what would be inimical to its existence. For me, the first step toward understanding what that would be like is to pick apart the constitutive logic of collectivity as it is understood in the Western Imperial and supersessionist tradition, so that is the juncture at which I’ve begun – we’ll see what the writing yields. Doing that kind of excavational work is certainly not a substitute for direct action, though; rather, I hope it might serve as some kind of esoteric supplement, for those who want one.
Ben Meyerson’s Seguiryas is available from Black Ocean Press: https://www.blackocean.org/catalog1/seguiriyas
You can learn more about Ben on his website: https://benmeyersonmedia.com/
This interview will be printed in Common Measure Vol. 2. You can buy Vol. 1 at https://commonmeasure.press/
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