“The Secular Prophet”

A review of Ken Babstock, On Malice, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014.

 

Over the last few years, a great evil has been descending over our world . . .

– Stephen Harper (qtd. in Chase and Leblanc)

 

The Canadian Prime Minister made his observation on January 30, 2015 during a speech introducing the country’s new anti-terrorism legislation, officially known as Bill C-51. Under the pretense of increased security for all Canadians, Bill C-51 grants Orwellian powers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) qua Secret Police. For example, it establishes a lower threshold for warrants and arrests. The purview of the proposed law includes those individuals connected to terrorist acts that “may be carried out” (Payton). In addition, it gives the government power to request secret investigative hearings related to terrorism, thus creating information blackouts. Like last year’s Bill C-13 (the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act), Bill C-51 subjects online and phone communications to increased scrutiny. It grants CSIS the authority not only to monitor, but also to “disrupt” and “counter-message” online terrorist activities (Payton).
 
Moreover, just as Bill C-13 tapped into cultural sentimentalism about protecting the innocence of children, Bill C-51 taps into moral panic and paranoia in the wake of recent violence in Paris and, closer to home, Ottawa. In each case, legislation opens up potential rootkits and backdoors (e.g., environmental activists risk being dubbed “terrorists”). Not surprisingly, the legislation has been opposed by Daniel Therrien, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner; Thomas Mulcair and Elizabeth May, respective leaders of the New Democratic Party and Green Party; and even Edward Snowden: “I would say we should always be extraordinarily cautious when we see governments trying to set up a new secret police within their own countries” (qtd. in Miller, “Edward Snowden speaks”).
 
Canadian poet Ken Babstock’s On Malice is a timely entry into this emotionally-charged public discourse on the limits and conditions of privacy in Canada and, more generally, post-9/11 North America. The book arrives with a sense of occasion. On Malice also looks into the pre-history of contemporary “surveillance and capture” models, which originate in the years immediately after WWII (Agre 743-44). Babstock is one of many twenty-first century poets, artists, and thinkers presently committed to investigating surveillance and capture—as aesthetic, ethical, and political practices—in relation to technological imperatives, governmental policy, and historical exigencies, including the “War on Terror” and Jihadism. For example, in August 2014, Andrew Ridker edited Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics, which includes work by Rae Armantrout, Joshua Clover, CAConrad, Nikki Giovanni, Jorie Graham, Cathy Park Hong, Paul Muldoon, Eileen Myles, and Matthew Zapruder. Similarly, in December 2014, Deep Lab—a cyber-feminist, interdisciplinary think-tank organized by Addie Wagenknecht—congregated for a week at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to explore the central role women must play in shaping the cultural conversation about big data in a post-Snowden world:
 

Maybe for women, we’re more aware of protecting ourselves online because it’s always been a social problem…. Think of contacting friends before you leave a party late at night so people can make sure you got home safe—men maybe don’t think about that and women always do. And it’s those same roles on the web. How do you protect yourself from a hack or doxing? The power shifts to the person with more knowledge. (Wagenknecht qtd. in Pearson)

 

Excellent studies such as Stephen Miller’s The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance and, more recently, Timothy Melley’s The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State and William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, demonstrate how writers, artists, and thinkers have long negotiated the disciplinary force of surveillance. With my tongue firmly in cheek, I might even propose that John Stuart Mill, in his “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” is the earliest advocate of poetry as (self)surveillance. “Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard,” Mill writes, situating poetry within an economy of secrets (95). The Muse is less like a mythological goddess and more like surveillance specialist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation: “I don’t know anything about human nature . . . that’s not part of what I do.”
 
Babstock’s On Malice is a long poem divided into four sections, distinguishing it from the lyric practice that defined Babstock’s early career. The title’s prepositional phrase calls to mind the speculative essay tradition, from Montaigne and Bacon to Hazlitt and Emerson. Three of the four sections rely on delimited sets of vocabulary derived from source texts: Walter Benjamin’s Archive, William Hazlitt’s “Why Distant Objects Please,” and John Donne’s Biathanatos. Only “Deep Packet Din”—the devastating third section, which expresses the inner experience of a comatose patient who is not permitted to die (“No limit to the streaming of form from the machine” [77])—is composed without recourse to found materials. Babstock’s sources are purposely selected. He doesn’t reduce the diction sets to asignifying materiality. Instead, he conducts colloquies with Benjamin, Hazlitt, and Donne, discussing language acquisition, aesthetic idealism, and biopower, respectively—all of which Babstock frames according to the book’s overall conceit of surveillance and capture and the running theme of privacy rights, for which he conceives multiple cultural metaphors (a father watches over his child, the body monitors for pathogens, etc.).
 
“SIGINT” is the book’s first, longest, and most elaborately conceived section: a sequence of thirty-nine unrhymed, thirteen-line sonnets arranged in isometric tercets (thirteen times three equals thirty-nine). The title is an abbreviated form of “Signal Intelligence,” the National Security Administration’s information-gathering mandate. But it doubles as a rhyme for, and mutt form of, “sonnet.” “SIGINT” also evokes singing and dreams (from the Italian sogno)—thus, the title is a literary nod to the Dream Songs of John Berryman.
 
The vocabulary from lines one through six is derived from “Walter Benjamin’s record of his son’s language acquisition between the ages of two and six,” explains Babstock (93); from lines seven through twelve, Babstock’s voice takes over, riffing on Benjamin’s source text. In lieu of a closing couplet, the poet provides “italicized ‘incident reports’” of “imagine[d] collisions between light aircraft and common swifts in what would have been Soviet airspace” (93). The technē of the former (light aircraft) and nature of the latter (common swifts) function as the antecedent and consequent rhyme words of a traditional closing couplet. The incident reports are dated between September 1, 1970 and May 1991. The start date signifies a collision between the anniversary of Operation White (the German invasion of Poland) and the year of Babstock’s birth. The incident reports are not only italicized, but also presented in a lightweight font. Adding to the degree of difficulty, Babstock organizes the incident reports in abecedarian form: points of departure or contact are alphabetized from A (Alma-Ata, Aldan, Blagovashensk, etc.) to Z (Zielona-Gora). Finally, the sonnets
 

“occur” inside the abandoned NSA surveillance station on the summit of Teufelsberg (‘Devil’s Mountain’) in Berlin, Germany. Teufelsberg is the result of the Allies’ decision to pile massive quantities of the postwar rubble of Berlin on top of a Nazi military-technical college, designed by Albert Speer and left unfinished after the war. As part of ECHELON, the NSA listening station was constructed in 1963, intercepting all telecommunications and satellite signals from the east. (93)

 

The sequence’s elaborate conceptual rubric risks mystifying its autobiographical element. The poet considers his relationship with his young son, Sam, to whom On Malice is dedicated. His mixed feelings about fatherhood—equal parts bliss and regret, pleasure and distress—are mediated through Benjamin. A transhistorical rhyme is imagined between fathers (Babstock and Benjamin) and sons (Sam and Stefan): B and S. On the one hand, Babstock recognizes the inevitable surveillance function of fatherhood. That is, he is compelled to protect and discipline his son. On the other hand, the poet is cautious not to restrict the boundaries of Sam’s imagination, experience, and language.
 
Babstock draws on Benjamin’s source text—“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies” (The Holy Bible: King James Version, Ps. 8.2)—in order to celebrate the private language of children as a poetic resource. Consider the following excerpts:
 

A pretzel? No. An apple? Better. A brick?! (49)

 

Outside stand two sheep.

‘Ought’ guards the sheep.

‘Perhaps’ shakes the little tree….

When he hunts, he thumps a dog.

When he hunts, he thumps a dog.

When he thumps, he hunts a dog.

It is raining here in the room.

What gets learned from all this listening? (48)

 

The fairground screamed. The mountains

and valley were gone. The fire was gone

too. The hanging ‘because’

was gone too. The men were away

and my heart already dead

and the fairground monkey dead in my mouth. (34)

 

What the big people are taking

from the baked moon and the forest

disturbed my sleep quite a bit. Quite a bit. No?

I can buy you, you ape! (46)

 

Someone made hello in the can.

You can marry every third woe in sleep. (47)

 

Here is language that evades or confuses authority and its instruments of measurement. What does it mean to “marry every third woe in sleep”? Why and how does “‘perhaps’”—an adverb transformed into a noun—shake the tree? Does he mean “‘perhaps’” disturbs the “tree” diagram of a sentence? It is language that possesses no indexical relation to the world. Babstock taps into this child-like freedom, which doubles as a protection against the security state’s eyes and ears. The syntax, diction, and imagery give the State the (momentary) slip, and nothing is learned or instrumentalized.
 
The sequence’s larger abecedarian structure is parodic. The alphabet serves the needs of intelligence gathering agencies, working against the mess and mass of information. Transcripts, audio reels, and personnel folders are labeled and filed from A to Z. The alphabet formalizes an irrational desire to contain and control the world. Likewise, the alphabet is integral to the education and indoctrination of children. Children internalize the sequence of letters. The imagination is streamlined. Alphabet books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the alphabet to introduce key images and ideas related to national identity, family structure, and moral character. It’s no accident, then, that the final words of “SIGINT” are “Now I am good” (50). It is a moment of great pathos: the malice of surveillance internalized by the child.
 
In section two, “Perfect Blue Distant Objects,” Babstock turns his attention from language to aesthetics. Specifically, he engages with William Hazlitt’s 1822 essay, “Why Distant Objects Please.” Hazlitt proposes that distant objects in space and time compel the viewing subject to “clothe [objects] with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy.” When objects extend beyond the “reach of sense and knowledge,” they are “imperfectly discerned,” causing the viewing subject to compensate, producing idealized forms. These forms are dangerous because they correspond, as Babstock warns, with “nothing derived from reality” (71). The world is bowdlerized. Memory is subject to the same logic. Time’s passage has the capacity to dull and diminish unpleasant memories: “Time takes out the sting of pain . . . and all that remains of our original impressions is what we would wish them to have been” (Hazlitt). So distance in space and time engenders an imagined reality with amnesiac and soporific benefits. Hazlitt invests this anti-materialist stance with a morality: it is “a dream of good,” he says, which implicitly renders difference bad.
 
In response, Babstock strikes a decidedly materialist stance with “Perfect Blue Distant Objects.” He argues for recognizing and preserving the particularity of deformity—just as he wants to recognize and preserve the private language of children in “SIGINT.” To do so, Babstock subjects Hazlitt’s essay to a counter-surveillance misreading that purposefully deforms Hazlitt’s prose. Hazlitt’s text takes on new, unexpected meanings. The ship “port” becomes Babstock’s computer “port” (55). The “clouds” of Hazlitt’s youth rhyme with present-day “cloud” computing: “Experience / enhances deception / in the cloud” (55). The pastoral piping of the pre-industrial shepherd is now the “undersea piping” of Internet cables that, literally, connect the world (63). Babstock releases a series of nightmarish scenarios prophetically embedded in Hazlitt’s original essay: in an especially visceral passage, he describes fields of crops that yield “row upon row of implants / and discoloured cabbage” (58-9). The punning implants and discolouration point to the cultural hubris that informs everything from cosmetic surgery to Monsanto as two sides of the “beauty myth” coin in the twenty-first century.
 
To provide a better sense of Babstock’s method, consider first the following passage from Hazlitt:
 

Oh! yes. I unlock the casket of memory, and draw back the warders of the brain; and there this scene of my infant wandering still lives unfaded, or with fresher dyes. A new sense comes upon me, as in a dream; a richer perfume, brighter colours start out; my eyes dazzle, my heart heaves with its new load of bliss, and I am a child again.

 

Here is Babstock’s rendering:
 

Yes, I am drawn to war, the unlocked memory

on my back in a casket.

The infant brain is still, confronted with a blue

sky. Scenes of wandering

dyes, faded from sense, a new me

upon which fresher,

richer colours put out my eyes, a bright

dream of starting out

loaded, loaded and heaving my new bliss

into a child. (57)

 

The poet speaks through Hazlitt in order to speak about the war on terror and its effects (“on my back in a casket”). The new militarized context invests “dyes” with the “dies” overtones; similarly, “loaded” is now a loaded term, suggesting munitions. “Put out my eyes,” says the speaker, but the “dream” of a blank slate is just that—a dream. When the eyes return in section four of On Malice, they have multiplied like a hydra: “Five Eyes.”
 
Babstock’s critique is informed by Hazlitt’s sense of social interaction. Physical proximity produces intimacy and sympathy, according to Hazlitt. Proximity allows individuals to exist as “concrete existences” rather than “arbitrary denominations”: “we gain by being brought nearer and more home to us” (Hazlitt). Proximity to flaws and quirks is humanizing. Surveillance and capture, on the other hand, are dehumanizing practices performed at a remove. The particular body is subject to generalization, and the individual subject is reduced to data: as Babstock writes, “the only true / general with models / abstracted from naked ones and zeros” (71). Put simply, for Babstock distance is the precondition for constructing a “general” enemy that serves malicious political ends. It encourages binary thinking (“ones and zeros”) and, by extension, a “shrinking commons” (64).
 
Section three, “Deep Packet Din,” is On Malice’s most powerful expression of the physical toll of surveillance and capture. Deep Packet Inspection scans and filters data transmitted between networks. It looks for viruses, spam, or other foreign agents. It is structurally homologous to Cold War-era checkpoints (e.g., “Checkpoint Charlie”), present-day geopolitical border control (e.g., the GOP’s proposed “Secure Our Borders First Act”), and especially the body’s immune system, which protects against pathogens. Babstock uses the body as a metaphor for his philosophical inquiry, investigating its susceptibility to attack despite the immune system’s surveillance function.
 
“If ever I accepted a return to your world—” (73): so begins the poem, with the comatose prophet, from his hospital bed, leaving the sentence incomplete for the poem’s remainder. The speaker strikes a mock-vatic stance, adopting the voice of a “secular prophet” (73), but he’s as sick as his epoch. The “secular prophet” lacks the moral high ground of a Jeremiah or the oracular riddling of a Sibyl. He is a prophet cum profit: “You all owe rent” (73). The poem isn’t so much a loud cry of condemnation as a muted “gargle” from “a sea vent” (73). Semantic gaffes (“Your Tomahawks, tokamaks, Takoma Parks, / Junichiro Tanizaki, and watercolour // Matoakas” [75]), malapropisms (“On Skye one ewe’s” [76]), paronomasia (Civilization and Its Discontents slips into “Sybilization and its bisque of trance” [76]), and pareidolia (the self as “grease pool in a Moabit pizza box / made of pulped satellite printout” [75]) abound.
 
The central motif is illness: “think on your secular prophet / blubbing through his infection’s duration” (emphasis mine; 73). Infection and toxins invade the poem’s body. The sick prophet warns of “super bacteria” in some unnamed body of water (73); “crosscuts of the brain” reveal inflammation (74); “damp sutures” risk exposing an unidentified wound (76); and “T. gondii” (77)—the parasite for which cats serve as hosts—results in organ-related failures, neurological disease, and mental illness when transferred to human owners. In a darkly comic image that imbricates colonialism, capitalism, and deadly disease, the speaker describes the “black plague silkscreened on a throw,” which can be readily purchased at your local department store: “True life is housewares. One floor below” (76). Drugs such Effexor and Oxycodone also populate the poem, equal parts palliatives and pollutives. Ultimately, the subject’s inner experience exists in epiphenomenal relation to environmental disaster (e.g., “methane loops” [77]). The e-waste of the Third World returns, with malice, to poison the First World that produced it. The result: “sub-terra lullabies of plate-shift / and ordained extinction” (73).
 
The “secular prophet” doesn’t possess a voice so much as a skittish consciousness:
 

I vacuum up the streaming chirps

and store all in a manger. Straw, and the ticks.

I’m banished structure, and the smell when

the lid is lifted. Predicate of presence.

Imagine dimensionless white gallery space

for the hell of it. ‘Gandolfini died. He was

a good man.’ ‘– ?’ ‘You Serbian?’ ‘No, from Nfld.

You?’ ‘Ghana. Tell us a joke, Newfie.’ ‘Asamoah Gyan.’

Silverfish are neither silver nor fish,

little Robert Mitchums in their elysiums of piss. (74)

 

Yeats’s “rough beast” that “slouches towards Bethlehem” (187) is replaced with a digitized Christ “in a manger” infected with “ticks” (74). The bathos devolves into bathroom humor (“[I’m] the smell when / the lid is lifted” and the “elysiums of piss” [74]). The scatological is coincident with the eschatological. The passage ends with an Inside Sports-type joke to which under-achieving Ghanian soccer star Asamoah Gyan serves as the punchline. The Newfoundlander wins the battle of wits, while deconstructing imbricated ideals of nationalism and “good” men that persist into the twenty-first century. Galdolfini is neither good nor bad but, simply, an absence (“–”), and identity cannot be so easily reduced to one’s place of origin, whether in jest or as a point of pride. The humorous encounter harkens back to Hazlitt’s theory of proximity—in this case, conversation—as essential to learning to see and hear the difference between “silverfish,” “silver,” and “fish.”
 
The final movement in Babstock’s quartet is “Five Eyes,” which proposes a relationship between surveillance and capture and biopower (i.e., “the right to make live and let die” [Foucault 240]). The source material for “Five Eyes” is John Donne’s 1608 essay Biathanatos, the first defense of suicide in the English literary tradition. Donne defends suicide as the creative act of “a private man” determined to be “Emperor of himselfe”: “And he whose conscience, well-tempered and dispassioned, assures him that the reason of self-preservation ceases in him, may also presume that the law ceases, too, and may do that then which otherwise were against the law” (61). If, in “SIGINT,” Babstock turns to the private language of children, believing it has the power to rescue the imagination from the disciplinary force of education, in “Five Eyes” he turns to suicide as a private act of conscience, believing it has the power to rescue man from the intelligence-gathering alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. “Five Eyes” also directly responds to “Deep Pack Din,” asking: Does the “secular prophet” have the right to die?
 
Due to the predetermined source material, “Five Eyes” is theological and eschatological in tone. Repeated terms like “sin” (79), “damnation” (90), “virtue” (80), “good” (80), “law” (87), “purgation” (86), and “heaven” (86) render it distinct from On Malice’s first three sections. The rhetoric reaches for the collar beams and rafters: “I give incitatory words to my masters / who require them / under law” (87). At the same time, “Five Eyes” occasionally tips into science fiction, hinting at an apocalyptic near-future.  In fact, each section of On Malice assumes a touch of genre: espionage fiction (“Deep Packet Din”), pastoral (“Perfect Blue Distant Objects”), and bildungsroman (“SIGINT”). In “Five Eyes,” the references to “Section 7” (“Avoid the diseases of Section 7” [88]) and “Section 9” (“It blotted out Section 9 with a bowed head, and / wished the actual nation / lay down its lives” [90]) would fit right in with the conspiratorial sci-fi of television dramas The X Files or Supernatural. In this apocalyptic near-future, biopolitical imperatives are explicitly connected to the pharmaceutical industrial complex:
 

Nothing preserves nor aggravates forms

of life more than

to proceed from

a safer box of drugs,

through immolation, to the particular sense

of torturing natural

action with a secret

Law of Witnesses. (79)

 

People are kept alive as “data” to be mined:
 

Misery is not secret. Misery is the state’s

data. Damage done upon

life is justice stealing data

as recompense for her

elected

privilege. (85)

 

In terms of everyday life (“our own eyes / hating life” [90]) in the “enforced Utopia” (81), we act without agency: “the wetting / rains direct you to do it / with no reason for doing it” (90). The objective is an indeterminate pronoun never to be discovered. The citizen gives up making inquiries, and we call this virtue. Babstock scathingly observes, “Virtues are but degrees of / an act that provide against / liberty” (80).
 
But Babstock, at least, imagines liberty in suicide. Why? Because suicide is a “self-authorizing” act of imagination, the will of the State be damned. He paradoxically accesses “self-authoriz[ed]” privacy and, by extension, freedom by way of other “shadow” texts:
 

Is the text moral whose shadow

confesses, whose

invitations to its own

death are a fire?

Loving ourselves as

we do, hanging in

opinion, loving

directions, the force of accepted order. I intend

to answer to fact by dying. (91)

 

Babstock’s fascination with the textual condition of suicide—a poetics of self-annihilation—takes on greater significance if literature’s “economy of prestige” (to borrow James F. English’s formulation) is considered as a particularly insidious type of cultural surveillance. On Malice is Babstock’s first book after winning The Griffin Poetry Prize for Methodist Hatchet in 2012. (He had been previously nominated for Airstream Land Yacht.) He’s the most laurelled Canadian poet of his generation, an embodiment of “the force of accepted order.”  On Malice is Babstock’s heroic attempt to preserve aesthetic and political autonomy against the opinion of the Canadian literary marketplace, especially its awards culture. It is his timely return to the “shadow[s].”
 

I guess that makes Ken Babstock Canadian poetry’s Lamont Cranston, master of disguise, with “the power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him” (qtd. in Terrace 212). Even Prime Minister Harper’s best, most sinister legislative efforts have their ontological limits.