from the archive: to trust brutality.
on anger and the dislocation of language, drawing on JG Ballard, Amelia Gray, Sylvia Plath, Caroline Bergvall, James Kelman, and Hyemi Lee.
I finished my last post thus: Perhaps we are our very own rough and candid performances, with sincerity murky sometimes and our vulnerabilities too openly given occasionally— a circus and a riot in our own bodies. I want to dwell on and more closely investigate some of these final ideas I reached out to. I’ve been looking at my own anger a lot lately, especially its relation to our bodies. The grey area in-between is rough, clumsy, but strangely intimate.
When the world speaks too carelessly, my impulse is to fall into blanks. I am speechless in the sense that I choose speechlessness in moments where the situation has lost track of its own record. The story has unravelled into spatter. All has returned to nonsense. I start to swear to fill the gaps. I start to raise my voice to give volume to silence. And then I’m suddenly, in that very moment, exhausted. It’s as if I must somehow relearn a known language.
I’m sure I’m not the only one.
What turbulent waves churn under water?
Perhaps part of my reaction is claustrophobia speaking. Perhaps it’s the extremities of my independence speaking. And perhaps its the perpetuity of being stared at too closely or the harassment on the bus speaking. I have a feeling anger and brutality are somehow entwined. What if it’s the fear of intimacy and vulnerability speaking?
There’s a real vulnerability in trust. To trust the rawness of true vulnerability and trust, that is. I struggle with trust but for some reason I struggle less with vulnerability. I think it comes from the fact that I have more confidence in myself than in others. I willingly speak my mind and let people in, but often I am let down by others. Whilst researching for my Masters dissertation, I came across the idea that ‘the absence of distrust need not mean high trust’ (Cho, 2006). Though a marketing publication, Cho raises points which most definitely speak to the everyday. It holds a somewhat freeing sentiment, casting aside the assumption that lack of one must mean the whole of another. It feels true that trust and distrust do not cancel each other out or must definitely erase one if the other is present. The lines are blurred and I like the comfort of that.
Extremities. Rawness. Anger. Brutality. Vulnerability. These are, somehow, words I keep using in shared space. Perhaps their distance from each other is not so wide…
But perhaps I must outline first what I mean when I say ‘brutality’.
In my mind, brutality and violence are not interchangeable terms. Their seeming synonymity comes from socio-political influence. Perhaps I have it all wrong. But I can’t look past the ways in which brutality is used to cover up violence sometimes. Violence is destructive but in order for violence to be pallatable, we seem to give it the name of brutality. How does brutality soften things?
In my mind, brutality has inherent links with emotionality. It is a force, a gesture, has a destabilising humanity that gives off the impression of merely bruising, not overtly harming. It numbs us. We are fiends for spectacle and ‘brutality’ allows us to distance ourselves from the frontlines. These examples discredit the other ways in which ‘brutality’ might be understood. Perhaps instead, there are layers, branches of varying meanings to brutality.
In my mind, there is never an absence of brutality. Everyone is capable of it. When enacted, pushed outwards in a certain way, has the ability to hurt and harm. Our muscles, when resting, do not lash out. Only when we give them that emotion and that power do our bodies put barbarity into brutality. It is the potentiality of a kind of potent and forward expression that, in some cases crosses into violence. I am, however, not pretending brutality is in any way pure-hearted or divinely wholesome. To be ‘brutish’ is to be coarse and a brute is a devilish creature. These terms we know and they affect our understanding of brutality. A careful subversion of certain facets of the word reveals undercurrents of strange emotionality in unexpected ways. There’s something about this kind of brutality that takes the shape of a kind of stumbling fortitude. One which manifests simultaneously in those misunderstood concrete buildings and between the sheets. What if to be a brute meant to be entirely vulnerable to another person, to possess a blunt kind of honesty? Perhaps trust is somehow dependent on the presence of and acknowledgement of shared brutality; that inherent roughness which, in order to fully recognise someone else, one must recognise their potentialities, too. That takes guts. This kind of brutality speaks the language of brutal gestures which actually hold us together. This all feels to be a lesson in confrontation and unexpected sensitivity in seemingly unforgiving spaces. Our built environment and socio-political climate are not so kind to those of us who live within. By these interpretations, it is difficult to separate one form of brutality from another. I’m not too sure myself what I’m trying to achieve in disassembling. A poor attempt at defamiliarisation in order to reframe, perhaps.
What preconceptions of vocabulary are we trying to unlearn?
Anger alone is an emotion which, when given attention and granted permission to act, manifests in uncertain ways, some obviously harmful. It’s something I’ve had to read up on personally because I did not know what to do with my boiling kettle. I started to resent my own anger, throwing it outwards against myself and others, because I was uncomfortable with its resilience. It starts to bite at you, in the same way it gnaws at others. It was this total discomfort with my own flesh. I couldn’t sleep, out of fear perhaps that anger would still take me in my dreams. I felt the fragmentation of my own body by the mere forces of uncontrolled temper and I saw the pettiness of it. I felt so ridiculously stupid that a grown ass woman couldn’t keep her emotions under some level of control. I was scared that my anger was sign of something else – was it unresolved mourning (not that mourning must be resolved), was it depression (not that a diagnosis would necessarily give me healing), was it the generational familial trauma finally taking a hold of me (take me please I’m tired). But perhaps I was afraid of what my own inconsistencies, uncontrollabilities might reveal about my deepest vulnerabilities. I didn’t trust myself to know. It was an incoherent headspace, an alternate reversion to utterance, soundless and somehow boundless. The absolute brutality that is the mind. I am trying to relearn what sets me off.
And so I’ve turned to literature, naturally. There are endless numbers of writers who have thought about what I’ve been thinking about. I am merely gathering a few on a page and thinking over what they have said. For me, it is always useful to reconsider known lines, bring them into different contexts, see how they turn on the page.
When I think of anger, I think of Amelia Gray’s Threats and Sylvia Plath, amongst others. The empowerment and agency of anger as a temper is comforting. Somehow it puts the shame of anger aside. Agency shows us how we can channel it appropriately, precisely, carefully.
“Your face is sealed with glue I have boiled in a vat. … Trust me when I say this: I exist to ruin you.”
And I
Am the arrow,The dew that flies
Suicidal,
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
There’s a violence in Gray’s words but it does not necessarily harm. It is confrontational and penetrative in the kind of way that pries us open to show us fragilities. Plath is perhaps subtler, but she wields temper skilfully, and deceptively softly, in the way one tears paper slowly but faultlessly against a scored line. She has us ‘naked’. Plath’s “arrow” (Ariel) reminds me of the precision we can give emotionality. We can direct it, let it go without flinging it outwards wildly. It is somehow, “dew”. There is restraint in the pull, but its the resilience of this which ultimately melds us, almost softens us in the end. Even if the arrow aims itself back at our own selves, perhaps it is somehow for the best. ‘Ariel’ ends with the “cauldron of morning”; even the hottest of tempers meets a cool air. In ‘The Applicant’, Plath is audacious in her control. It’s a voice that entices whilst aiming perfect provocations. Like Gray, Plath holds temper on a line, never boiling over, never mellowing for the sake of acceptance or approval. That’s powerful, “sweetie”.
When I think of relearning language, I think of Caroline Bergvall’s Drift. There’s movement from coherence, into incoherence, back into a regeneration of ideas. Here’s an extract:
The way this poem moves feels like a ‘pushing forward’ of language; as if someone/something is inching utterance forward, past itself, beyond what it knows. Undoing itself and almost being satisfied with being undone. That’s surely reminiscent of giving fully to vulnerability. There’s a real trust in letters. The way the repetitions of ‘t’ form stutters and turn into visual icons at the same time. Imagine this being read out loud – “totally at sea lost myway” indeed. Ugh, it makes me feel some type of way, “Ache come off”. It is uncomfortable to read and yet the poem manifests in its own discomfort, never letting it go. Even at its most incoherent, it is in control. That repetition is consistent and persistent. And through its persistence, it maneovours into lines renewed by new meaning, composition. In my opinion, its coherence is more uncertain of itself than its incoherence. I guess you are only ever lost if you believe yourself to be.
I’m here reminded of Kelman’s narrative voice in How Late It Was, How Late. The way a blind man’s perception of words is suddenly all voice, no visual:
Ye just get the head clear. If ye’re allowed to. That stupit voice was still droning away, it was like a race commentary, a distorted one, slowed right down…
Sometimes ye’re too wound up, ye’re too fucking…ye just jump in. It was stupit; stupit getting involved. That’s what happens but ye get angry for nay reason; yer heart starts pounding away and ye’re wanting to bang the bastard, fucking idiot man yapping on about fuck knows what…
Talk about anger. Famously, the book was so angry it was dispelled by critics for being the mere ‘rambling thoughts of a Glaswegian drunk” (Simon Jenkins, 1994). Jenkins also accused Kelman of being “totally obsessed with the word [Fuck]” whilst Rabbi Julia Neuberger described it as “frankly…crap”. More interestingly, James Wood (2014) notes the “fighting power” of Kelman’s language and Sam Jordison (2011) speaks of the “confusing, claustrophobic” narrative voice. Controversy strangles the book: was it undeserving of the Man Booker? Was it just chaotic for the sake of it? Is it vulgar, its anger roughly and unjustifiably thrown about? And yet it thrives beyond it, in my opinion. There’s no denying this is a close-knit work. Without turning this post into a Kelman review, the power of his work emerges first from its ways with utterance, not necessarily its plot. Its ‘obsession’ with vulgar language is an homage to utterance and filler language, that rough evocation of rawness. Somehow coherence is inadequate in capturing lived experience and emotion – not unlike Bergvall’s poem. The anger propels Kelman’s work forward and it is mesmerising. It’s claustrophobic and hyperreal and surreal all at once because Kelman strips away all visual elements of life, bringing forward what is felt innermost and outermost. Ultimately, its success is its rawness. It is guttural.
On the subject of guttural utterance, I’m reminded of JG Ballard’s ‘Singing Statues’ from Vermilion Sands (1971). Famously known for his “dislocated” imagery (Adrian Tait) and “radical indeterminacy” (Andrej Gasiorek), Ballard is very good at never providing readers with closure and often makes his readers very uncomfortable. Quite frankly, he is brutal with the way he writes about our surroundings and our experiences. ‘Singing Statues’ imagines the sales of a sonic sculpture and the way it is perceived by onlookers. Themes of fluctuation and penetration are at the pulse of this short story. There’s a passage which describes the final pushing of buttons and rewiring of abstract circuiting inside the sculpture. Emanating from the sculpture is a pulsating stream of sounds:
…the electronic overtones disguising my voice and amplifying the tremors of emotion as I screwed up my courage…
Stepping up to the statue, Lunora listened to it motionlessly, eyes wide with astonishment, apparently assuming that it was reflecting, like a mirror, its subjective impressions of herself. Rapidly running out of breath, my speeding pulse lifting the tempo, I repeated the refrain over and over again, varying the bass lift to simulate a climax.
Suddenly I saw Nevers’s black patent shoes through the hatch. Pretending to slip his hand into the control panel, he rapped sharply on the statue. I switched off. ‘Don’t please!’ Lunora cried as the sounds fell away.
The liminal space between psychosis and the pragmatic. Beyond the loaded sexual innuendos and the technological dreamscape typical of Ballardian imagery, I think of this stream of ‘overtones’ and ‘tremors’ in the context of utterances. The way we edge towards a sort of exclamation at the end of a ‘climax’ of abstract reverberations: Don’t please!’. In language, the ‘climax’ is somehow clear articulation, ‘sense’ put on sensation, almost. The way language ‘switch[es] off’ part of the manic in the narrative voice, who ‘controls’ the sculpture, brings us back to ‘reality’. Bergvall challenges us to find control within incoherence – so can we see Lunora’s exclamation her attempt to stop incoherence? What brutal confrontation is she denying when she relies on ‘coherence’ for safety? Returning to the first few lines quoted, the overlapping of sounds is matched by an apex of emotional gesture: “I screwed up my courage”. A mere ‘simulation’ of ‘climax’ – does that make the emotional response dishonest? Whatever conclusions we draw from this, it’s ultimately open-ended. By simple experience, we know that we are driven towards emotional response by both matters real and unreal. Often, we don’t know why we cry. Emotion is utterance, exclamation is guttural.
Intimacy takes brutal shapes.
To be crushed by someone in the sense that your inhale is their exhale. Your entire body seized up by another and it’s just the two of you going, going, gone. The offbeats of hearts going off sporadically against each other in a strange tournament. In such moments, do you become more real, hyperreal the way a pair of new glasses sits over your eyes, or do you enter the surreal, unreal? Amidst everything, you trust that though they fall into you and that you clasp on with every inch of hill and valley, you are still one. That though you have merged, you still retain your own shape. That you won’t disappear into them. That at some point, they will let go of you. That this embrace is just an embrace and not a strong hold (stronghold?). That you won’t be churned out into crumpled fragments by the promise of those muscles. They will slacken and they will not hurt you.
Brutality is laced with intimacy.
We’ve talked about them before. We rise to an unfamiliar surface.
That was us turning over the ocean cultivated long inside
our bodies and offering it to each other.
from ‘Diver’, Unexpected Vanilla, Hyemi Lee translated from Korean by So J. Lee (Tilted Axis Press).