{"id":12624,"date":"2014-12-10T03:47:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T07:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=12624"},"modified":"2014-12-10T03:47:59","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T07:47:59","slug":"review-of-robert-kellys-collected-essays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/review-of-robert-kellys-collected-essays\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Robert Kelly’s Collected Essays"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Urban_conflicts_by_AngiNelson\"<\/a>Ian Dreiblatt just posted a longish blog post on drunken boat<\/a> that starts with a review of A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly<\/em><\/a>. I am reproducing the opening section below; you can read the whole piece here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Stone Stair New York, Part 1 by DB Guest Blogger Ian Dreiblatt<\/h3>\n

contra mundum press<\/a> has just published a voice full of cities<\/em>, a heaping anthology of Robert Kelly\u2019s essays, selected by Pierre Joris and Peter Cockelbergh.\u00a0 the book is a winding labyrinth of wonder; trails of intelligence, attention, desire, and pleasure that curl inward and nest among each other.\u00a0 The overdue assembling of them into a book affords an opportunity to feel how richly and intricately these thoughts coexist, how the roof of one serves as floor of another, shared walls enlacing to produce a tremendous contemplative cortex, dotted with sancta in which old gods \u2013 the oldest gods \u2013 still darkly sleep.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been particularly rereading one piece from 1971 called IDENTITY\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PREFERENCE\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 TEMPLE-COMPLEX.\u00a0 it\u2019s a short essay that begins by inquiring into \u2018certain vectors of desire\u2019 \u2013 where does that feeling originate in us, and what are the suns it grows toward?\u00a0 what does it mean to be both made of the past and endlessly multiple in a world of \u2018felicities, miseries & confusions?\u2019\u00a0 remembering Robert Duncan\u2019s notion of The Poet as a single voice spoken thru many mouths in a given age, he wonders whether there might not likewise be a voice \u2013 a\u00a0prounikos<\/span><\/span><\/span> he calls it, a \u2018carrier\u2019 \u2013 some polyvocalic, integral whole of Desire that speaks as the illusorily discrete desires inside each of us.<\/p>\n

& as soon as this question is posed, the essay shifts radically and introduces a second section with the observation that scholars of ancient mesoamerica do not refer to mayan population centers like uxmal and palenque as \u2018cities\u2019 \u2013 rather, they call them \u2018temple-complexes\u2019, emphasizing the way in which it was not distinctly economic, military, or agricultural concerns that animated these places, but cultic ones, rituals of tithe, sacrifice, purification, time-keeping, formalized contemplation.\u00a0 So, altho the word will prove very problematic \u2013 which we\u2019ll get to \u2013 we might casually name as religion<\/em>the primary force that gave these places coherence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0& then there\u2019s an amazing passage where he turns his attentions to new york city, and describes it, too, as a temple-complex, one where \u2018a bewildering hierarchy of temple-functionaries arrives each day\u2026 ready to devote (in the technical sense, sphagia<\/em>) one-third of their biological time to the national cult.\u2019\u00a0 As to the object of this cult, the question of \u2018what god is worshiped on this most complex of all human altars,\u2019 the answer is Preference, the continual act of choosing to think some things better than others and to design a self as the sum total of all these choices.\u00a0 this will be familiar to anyone who\u2019s lived under late capitalism.\u00a0 (Reminiscent of it, I think, is the thesis of Bourdieu\u2019s landmark la distinction<\/em><\/a>, which was published eight years later.)\u00a0 & then, affirmingly, the essay considers some fertile heresies that thrive amid but against the grain of this religion, among \u2018those deeply committed to some one or few actual substances,\u2019 like drugs, sex, and poetry, any immersion into \u2018the worship of the thing, as meaningful existent.\u2019<\/p>\n

I love how picturing new york this way, as a temple organized around a sanctified inanity (the \u2018divinized freedom to Prefer,\u2019 RK calls it), helps ease my sense of predicament, connects the holy crisis of navigating urban life in america today with the holy crisis of living in any human settlement at any point in history.\u00a0 You wake up with eyes in front of you & just go from there.\u00a0 You move thru a tube underground or past a giant limestone plinth that the limestone king\u2019s sitting on.\u00a0 Whatever world you landed in.\u00a0 To have come about at all is, famously, an intrinsically weird situation.<\/p>\n

ctd here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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