“To cultivate one’s thoughts – to learn to shape and handle it – is to cultivate one’s style. Looked at from any other point of view, style merely makes for obscurity and acts as a drag.”

Pretty cool huh? And, I think, all-time relevant. How one cultivates the how of how one thinks determines the writer’s style and makes for originality. And you got to love how the boy pulls on a gardener’s metaphor. And I say Cocteau had in mind what makes for originality because further on he says this:

“We are worried when we cannot make comparisons. Our whole system of pleasure is based on comparisons. If we are satisfied with our own work, it is probable that it bears some resemblance to other works with which we are preoccupied. But if we produce something really new, as this novelty is not based on any recollection, it leaves us as it were, with one leg in the air, alone in the world. We are as much disconcerted and disappointed by it as the reader will be.”

Your essay’s got style.

Terreson
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I think your thesis is this and, if it is not, this is what comes through most clearly.

“…democracy as the kind of radical individualism in which freedom of the individual is more tied to individual (unconscious) desire than to individual action…”

It is also true, in my view, that a whole bunch of forces get mustered against the expression of individual desire because they understand the threat. The tool these forces use is categorization, labelling, grouping, whatever you want to call it. The forces are historical, nation-state, ideological, ethnic, clannish, communal, racial, and, you bet, they are tribal. (At the expense of seeming impolite today’s poetry scene is equally as culpable.) The threat involves a stand against the group, which would be intolerable and amount to a taboo.

When you talk about the price put on an African slave brought to America I think about two things. I think about the history of slavery going back to the Egyptians (who were black), to the ancient Greeks (the creators of democracy), to the Romans, and to the Turks (who by then were Islamic in faith). In all cases the notion of owning another person was a matter of property rights: ‘I bought this person, he or she is my property, I have the right to ownership priveliges.’ The history of slavery doesn’t start in 19th C America. It dogs civilization. My second thought would be this. Your notion of the democratic expression of desire keeps radical. It always has and it always will I think.

Terreson
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It being a worknight I got a few notes on your blog. I hope I can come back later and riff more on your themes.

About Par. 1. A historian, one time Marxist and life long conservationist, said a good fifteen years ago that the only freedom left in America is to choose between which brand name products to buy. It took me another fifteen years to come up with a rejoinder. And I told him there is still the freedom to love. But I know he is still partially right. Gays and lesbians can still not state-sanctioned love. Nor can a white woman and a black man in Tangipahoa Parish it would seem. So I get his point and maybe yours too. Our freedom has become defined by what we consume.

Par. 2. “Disconnect between democracy as a matter of individual desire rather than of individual action…” This is exactly what I take from Shelley’s always political poetry. Democracy, in fact, is essentially a matter of the freedom to desire.

One last thought for now. Your essay also brings to mind something de Beauvoir and Sarte brought to the table. They said there was a new character type on the scene. They said he (she) was an American product. They called him the organizational man, the product of corporate culture. I say the type has found its way into the poetry scene, which so hurts the heart.

Terreson
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