Intimations of Mortality

Reflections on Retirement Recollected in Agita from Memories of an Early Divorce

A Rhetorical Video Poem

Steven B. Katz

Clemson University

Myers Enlow

University of Memphis

Preface

I.

“Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.' Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 76

This project is a DIY rhetorical video poem on sbk’s “retirement,” made with iPhone, and Adobe Premiere Pro by sbk and Addy Enlow. The project consists of poetry (read and shown), music, and photography, in movie form. Ironically, this project started out life many years ago as several different versions of poems in response to sbk’s early and tragic—almost fatal—divorce, and eventually assembled into this lyrical sequence. In pursuing the present (retirement) from the past (divorce), this lyrical sequence turns William Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality” on its side: “Intimations of Mortality” offers its own reflections on mortality, “recollected” not in “tranquility” (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”), but in “in agita,” analogically as a divorce with the attendant emotions of that trauma. In this sense, the poems themselves, the core of this project, are “chimeras”: the “referents” are half-breeds, hybrids, false dreams, self-deceptions, illusions that at one time existed, and that still exist as referents that one chases in “signs.” But the referents of the poems as “discourse,” like and unlike photographs, are a “superimposition of reality and the past.” The poems are mythic creatures with two heads, or medical organisms with two sets of genes, or entities with two origins, two realities. The poems are half-false, half-true. This rhetorical video poem, which also contains many photographs therefore at its poetic core explores questions of the interaction of memory, emotion, thought, reality, art, and artifice. To quote the old Buddhist koan, ‘everything I say is a lie.’ Including this. The whole project is a lie. This is ‘not me.’ And it was. In lying, the whole project is ‘true.’ The poems are angry and pathetic. I could not be happier.

II.

“Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 98

Each poem in this lyrical sequence is placed in rhetorical metastructures. Drawn from the history of rhetorical theory, these rhetorical metastructures uncannily reveal the rational structure and implications of each poem by abruptly locating them in a much wider rhetorical, historical, and philosophical context. (Or do the rhetorical metastructures “rationally reconstruct” each poem? Or do they rhetorically rationalize each poem?) Unlike the action of photographs that can be “read as the private appearance of its referent,” these rhetorical metastructures participate in “the explosion of the private into the public.” However, the public for these rhetorical metastructures are a highly defined, precise public: the field of rhetoric. The rhetorical metastructures too, then, no matter how apropos or well they fit, can be seen as “chimeras” whose referents and the rhetorical metacontexts they create will be apparent only to that portion of the public ‘in the know’ but remain invisible or meaningless to most unfortunately not versed in rhetorical theory. In addition, although the rhetorical metastructures are quite explanatory and greatly expand and enhance the reach and meaning of each poem, they are chimeras too not only because they are attached a posteriori, but also because they are discipline-specific dreams that will exist for some, and fleet for everyone else. It is the photographs in this co-authored rhetorical video poem (a hybrid authorship, and genre) that “correspond… precisely to the explosion of the private into the public.” In doing so, the photographs escort the poems “into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private.”

III.

“In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads to the corpus I need back to the body I see…. By nature, the Photograph (for convenience’s sake, let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something tautological about it.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 4, 5

You might feel that the photographs themselves and their movement— semantically and visually—obliterate both the existence of and need for the rhetorical metastructures. Additionally, one might believe that the sheer power of the specificity of the photographs even hinder the reading/reception of the poems, even though the shifting of the photographs is timed and aligned with the oral delivery and visual presentation of the poems down to the level of images and lines. This hinderance happens not so much by any photographic reproduction of the poems, but in a kind of ‘co-presence’ of past and present in the image of/and the photographs. The overpowering of the presentation, particularly of written rhetoric and poetry as opposed to the oral and the musical presentation, are part of “the explosion of the private into the public” that photographs entail. The near “universality” of photographs, ‘visual literacy’, is made possible by the “studium” (general “knowledge” or “culture”); whether any punctum—'arresting “detail’,” often highly subjective but utterly revealing (Barthes 26, passim)—coincides with the rhetorical metastructures and perhaps visually punctuates the order and detail of poems, we hope, but cannot say how. For all their power, the photograph is “never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see.” For Barthes, the photograph is a “tireless repletion of contingency” that “has something tautological about it.” More chimeras. We pursue.

IV.

“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence—as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence…. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 115

These private photographs are revelatory. But what do they reveal? They are “extended, loaded evidence.” They beg their own question, the reality of the images they present of something that was and is not, except in the image of the photographs. Photographs that do not arrest passively exist in space, but audaciously extend time. In fact, all of the surrounding space of the original place in the image—in the split second of a shutter click—is cropped, cut out forever. Time is cropped too, but continues and changes into the present of any viewing. The photos then, constitute or reveal “a temporal hallucination,” are temporal chimeras that sbk and Addy have co-created for you here, carved out of sbk’s private life, made public in a sequence of spatially unrelated moments strung together in a strange temporal narrative. This rhetorical video poem as a “temporal hallucination” in its narrative knows no geographic or temporal bounds. The sequence of photographs bounces their referents, and thus the poems, all around the world. As spatial referents and temporal hallucinations, the entire rhetorical video poem project—remixing places, past and present—is a “chimera” that is “false on the level of perception, true on the level of time.” (Even the Photo Credits, after “The End” of the video, continue but also identify and contribute to the hallucination, and have been crafted with care.) But if Kenneth Burke says that photographs select, reflect, and deflect (“Terministic Screens”), temporal narrative too is always a disorienting, a reordering, a multidimensional reinvention, in this case of sbk’s self (cf. Katz, “Missive to Our Selves”; “Rhetoric of Confessional Poetry”). The story the photos tell—iconic, ironic, indexical, humorous, symbolic—“caricature…not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence.”

V.

“For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 79

As you will see in the last section of photographs and music, we must stress here that despite the negative affect of the poems derived from the analogical subject matter of divorce, sbk’s “retirement” was a totally meaningful and joyous celebration of the “conclusion” of his career, thanks to sbk’s wonderful colleagues and students—many now faculty—from every part of his academic life (including sbk’s own dissertation advisor, Michael Halloran). This was especially due to the organizers of the multiple celebrations, Drs. Elizabeth Pitts, Patricia Fancher, Whitney Jordan Adams, Charlotte Lucke, and the English Department at Clemson University.* The photographs as well as original music of this project—particularly the last sections—completely “explode” the “mythos” created by the rhetoric of the poems (see Barthes 87-88; 92-96). It is the power of photographs that confuses “the Real and the Live,” and “surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value. . . by shifting this reality to the past.” Again, this rhetorical video poem is both true and false. But you might ask, why all this convoluted logic, this “chicanery,” this “trickery” of art? Emotions, like quantum particles, are multidimensional, exist in different places and planes of time and space at once (Katz, Epistemic). Multimodal art, with all its intercises and intersections of purposes, approaches, and genres, perhaps gets us closer, captures and contains and (re)constructs, even temporarily, the ‘meaning’ of affective experience. In the aesthetic end, this rhetorical video poem, to borrow Barthes’ words again, is “a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality” (115).

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*Per the advice of his wife Alison, sbk cut from his mind (what is only indirectly but always implicated in photographs [Barthes 14-15]): the death and loss of their last, deeply loved, and very sick cat, Noah, just one hour before the first and largest of the retirement celebrations in Pittsburg, also pictured here in the photos toward the end. But that death, through the “operation” of presence/absence in the ‘living image’ of photographs, appears. In the video, he’s at ‘home’ (where others now actually reside), yet “frozen” in space-time, in this physical form, for as long as human “eternity” lasts. These photographs, and the Photo Credits, visually cite everything in them as referents of realities that exist no more.

Video Poem

(Detailed photo credits begin at *24:26*)

About the Authors

Steven B. Katz is Pearce Professor Emeritus of Professional Communication, and Professor Emeritus of English, at Clemson University. His creative/scholarly interests range from ethics in technical communication to the nexus of rhetoric, poetry, and science. His research foci include poetic and rhetorical analyses of ideologies of new technologies; conventions and ethics of styles in biotech and medical communication with the public; and the materialities and uses of language in different forms of writing, in religion, and in digital media. He has been experimenting in multimedia publications with poetry and sonic rhetoric as means of psychagogic exploration, and poetics as perhaps the only “legitimate” forms of posthuman knowledge. Contents/links to most of his published work can be found on https://stevenbkatz.academia.edu/.

Myers (Addy) Enlow is a PhD student in the Literary and Cultural Studies doctoral program at the University of Memphis. Her research interests are in 20th and 21st century American Literature, feminist and gender theory, and critical race theory.