514
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
way of obscenity in any case leads as naturally to silence as to further
excess? Moreover, to the talkative heirs of Socrates, silence is the one
offense that never wears out, the radicalism that can never become
fashionable; which
is
why, after the obscene slogan has been hauled
down, a blank placard is raised in its place.
There are difficulties, to be sure, when one attempts to move
from the politics of silence to an analogous sort of poetry. The opposite
number to the silent picketer would be the silent poet, which
is
a con–
tradiction in terms; yet there are these days non-singers of (perhaps)
great talent who shrug off the temptation to song with the muttered
comment, "Creativity is out." Some, however, make literature of a
kind precisely at the point of maximum tension between the tug toward
silence and the pull toward publication. Music
is
a better language
really for saying what one would prefer not to say at all-and all the
way from certain sorts of sufficiently cool jazz to Rock'n'Roll (with
its minimal lyrics that defy understanding on a first hearing), music
is
the preferred art of the irrationalists.
But some varieties of skinny poetry seem apt, too (as practised,
say, by Robert Creeley after the example of W. C. Williams), since
their lines are three parts silence to one part speech:
My
lady
fair with
soft
arms, what
can I sr:ey to
you- words, words
. . .
And, of course, fiction aspiring to become Pop Art, say,
An Amer–
ican Dream
(with the experiments of Hemingway and Nathanael
West behind it), works approximately as well, since cliches are almost
as inaudible as silence itself. The point
is
not to shout, not to insist,
but to hang cool, to baffle all mothers, cultural and spiritual as well
as actual.
When the Town Council in Venice, California was about to close
down a particularly notorious beatnik cafe, a lady asked to testify
before them, presumably to clinch the case against the offenders.
What she reported, however, was that each day as she walked by the
cafe and looked in its windows, she saw the unsavory types who in–
habited it "just standing there, looking-nonchalant." And, in a way,
