tangled in the bedclothes of my mind, I mean the pleats of matter

I just knew it! Sometimes, even if you can't understand something, you can sense its innate truth: it is then the job of your understanding to catch up with your inner sense in acknowledging this truth. I just had one of those experiences, reading an essay called Notes toward the postmodern Baroque, by Joshua Corey, in Issue 6 of the online quarterly Action Yes.

Corey writes:

"In a time when even the acknowledged legislators appear helpless to do anything other than ride the tiger of accumulation, what are the unacknowledged ones to do? The blue pill of ideological critique offered up by the Language poets seems to have lost some of its kick, while the “I do this, I do that” of the New York School has come to seem merely descriptive of how most of us behave in the residual shopping mall of culture."

(This seems a bit unfair to poor Frank and, by extension, the rest of the NY school - after all, even the Puerto Ricans lounging in the doorways know that their own experience is not only cheap, but free. Real experience is even logo-free. Nobody can take this away from us.)

Corey continues:"My heart is no longer in my pocket with my copy of Pierre Reverdy—it has been broken up and distributed along innumerable lines of socio-economic flight—a part of the larger reality that must, in Paul Celan’s words, be searched for and won. The baroque comes to my aid..."

(Yes! I'm hearing the William Tell overture, here, played on bassoons.)

"...by foregrounding the tenuousness of the connection between ideology and materialism, cultural politics and the means of production, the spirit and the letter."

(I did that on purpose.)

"To quote Deleuze once again, 'In the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all other folds'."

(I think this sums it up pretty nicely. No wonder I can't get a date. Just wait till I ascend over all the other fools, I mean folds.)