In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds and Poetry

Near the beginning of his strange, brilliant book Crowds and Power, the Bulgarian writer Elias Canetti claims that our most primal fear is the fear of being touched: the hand in the dark, something reaching out and grabbing hold of us. We only really lose this fear in crowds, says Canetti, since it is in crowds that we allow the boundaries of the self to melt away. We touch and are touched in the scrum and bustle of the crowd, but in the crowd we don’t feel touch as a violation. It doesn’t bother us, because we don’t think of the crowd as other than ourselves: an angry mob, a multitude gathered in protest, a pack of like-minded sports fanatics surging back and forth and chanting in unison: when we’re part of such groups,  we don’t experience the crowd as separate from ourselves: we’re part of an us, and the only threat is from whomever we’ve collectively designated as them. From this Canetti builds a fascinating, and at times terrifying, theory of the crowd.


Poets, of course, have also expressed revulsion from the crowd, but also the seductive bliss of immersion in the collective. Indeed, the two oldest and most revered modes of poetry — the lyric and the epic — respectively express the individualistic ethos of private emotion, and the collective ideals and aspirations of the group. But unless I miss my guess, it’s really at the beginning of the nineteenth century that we see an uptick in the frequency with which poets consciously meditate on the meaning of the multitude. And this poetic examination of the relation of the individual to the crowd has continued up to the present.


Monstrous Ant-Hills: The Crowd in Romanticism


Romanticism is a large and various literary movement, and it certainly has its moments of collectivism, especially in the more peripheral nations of Europe, where nationalist sentiment, even to the point of atavism, was an important part of the reaction to Enlightenment universalism and the spread of standardized, deracinated laws and customs under the banners of Napoleon’s conquering armies. But the dominant relation to the crowd in English Romanticism is certainly revulsion. Here’s Wordsworth describing London in book seven of The Prelude:

Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain;

Of a too busy world! Before me flow,

Thou endless stream of men and moving things!

Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes--

With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe--

On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance

Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;

The comers and the goers face to face,

Face after face; the string of dazzling wares,

Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,

And all the tradesman's honours overhead:

Here, fronts of houses, like a title-page,

With letters huge inscribed from top to toe…

What really strikes Wordsworth about the crowded streets of London is the signage. It’s hard for us to put ourselves in a state of mind where the presence of shop signs is a strange and alienating thing, but that’s were Wordsworth is coming from. For him, the need of shops to spell out in gigantic letters the nature of their services indicates how impersonal a place the crowded city had become. In small villages such as those Wordsworth knew in the Lake District, one knew the individuals with whom one bartered, but in the city every shop needs to shout out its identity to a rushing crowd, lest it remain anonymous. No one really knows where they are or who they’re with, not in the way the characters in, say, Wordsworth’s “Michael” know each other. In “Michael,” each little pile of stones has a story about the generations who lived around it, and all those stories are known to the locals. They know who they are and where they live in a way the inhabitants of the monstrous ant-hill cannot.


Wordsworth is also a bit put-off by the internationalized, multicultural space that London had already become. Here’s a small piece of a long passage on a marketplace:

...another street

Presents a company of dancing dogs,

Or dromedary, with an antic pair

Of monkeys on his back; a minstrel band

Of Savoyards; or, single and alone, 

An English ballad-singer

Camels, monkeys, and Italian musicians from Savoy: the poor ballad-singer, a representative of indigenous culture, hardly stands a chance, surrounded as he is by a noisy array of exotics, including:

…every character of form and face: 

The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south, 

The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote 

America, the Hunter-Indian; 

Moors,Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese, 

And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

But what really throws Wordsworth off balance isn’t anything so banal as the presence of the culturally different. It’s a version of the anonymity and alienation that we saw earlier in the shop signs:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets, 

Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said 

Unto myself, "The face of every one 

That passes by me is a mystery!" 

Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed 

By thoughts of what and whither, when and how; 

Until the shapes before my eyes became 

A second-sight procession, such as glides 

Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; 

And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond 

The reach of common indication, lost 

Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten 

Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare) 

Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, 

Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest 

Wearing a written paper, to explain 

His story, whence he came, and who he was. 

Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round 

As with the might of waters; and apt type 

This label seemed of the utmost we can know, 

Both of ourselves and of the universe; 

And, on the shape of that unmoving man, 

His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed, 

As if admonished from another world.

The old blind beggar has no relation to the people swarming around him. In a village he’d be known to everyone, and they to him, and if it were his home village, he’d be connected to the community by webs of family obligation. His story would be well-known, and he’d have a place. But here, in the crush of bodies pouring through the streets of London, he’s no one at all. His only claim to any connection to others is through advertising his own story, in letters much like those of the shop signs we saw before. He has to assert his humanity and individuality and particularity, and in the passing rush this assertion takes on both a pathos (he’s so small, he’s so vulnerable, he has so little claim on making us care) and a sublimity (he’s so small and vulnerable, yet he endures and is not destroyed, his small light held against the darkness). If you live in America, you’ve passed some homeless man, most likely a veteran in a wheelchair, and seen exactly this sort of life-story scrawled in marker on a piece of cardboard. I don’t know what the sight made you feel, but Wordsworth would see in it “the utmost we can know/Both of ourselves and of the universe” — an emblem of our condition as little orphaned individuals in the largeness of space and time.


Crowds like this are, for Wordsworth, threats: threats to the dignity and rootedness of the individual. And he’s not alone in his aversion to the crowd: Byron introduced us to Childe Harold (the Ziggy Stardust to Byron’s Bowie) by saying:

… soon he knew himself the most unfit
 

Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held 


Little in common; untaught to submit
 

His thoughts to others, though his soul was quelled,
 

In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompelled,
 

He would not yield dominion of his mind 

To spirits against whom his own rebelled;
 

Proud though in desolation; which could find
 

A life within itself, to breathe without mankind.

To be with others in a crowd is to “herd” — to be subhuman, animalistic, erased as an individual. What a psychologist now might describe as the imperfect socialization of a severe narcissist, Byron sees with pride. Harold was “untaught to submit his thoughts to others” — he retains his swaggering individualism and independence, which gives him an isolation that is both a curse (“desolation”) and a mark of specialness.


We find variations on the revulsion from crowds in all the major English Romantic poets, though in Coleridge it is tempered by a kind of nostalgia for a lost sense of community (the Ancient Mariner was only ever unselfconsciously part of a group before he killed the albatross, and at the end of the poem he preaches a gospel of community he cannot embody); and in Shelley it is combined with a yearning for a small community of the likeminded (as we see in “Epipsychidion” and the deeply under-rated “Alastor,” and in the pathos of “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”).


I imagine the exalting of the individual, and the praising of the small community against the crowd, has to do with both the large-scale social conditions of the time, and with the particular circumstances of poets in the Romantic era. The French Revolution and the incipient industrial economy had uprooted old social order. This both unleashed the power of the individual to find his or her own course through the world and bequeathed to those atomized individuals a host of anxieties about anonymity and dislocation. And poets, shut out of the old patronage networks and unaccommodated by the market, felt particularly out of place, alienated from (and therefore critical of) the dominant institutions of their age. They had their individual pride to fall back on, and dreams of happier days in closer communities.


The Poet as the Flâneur in the City


Of course not all poets felt alienated from the crowds of the growing cities of the nineteenth centuries. As the century wore on, cities increasingly became the natural habitat of poets. How did these figures relate to the crush of bodies around them? Baudelaire, in “Les Foules” (“Crowds”) admits to a taste for the multitude, but he begins by noting such a taste isn’t for everyone:

   It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

What makes it possible for Baudelaire to appreciate crowds? It’s something having to do with imagination:

   Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

   The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be both himself and someone else, as he wishes. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

   The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

   What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

For Baudelaire, the experience of the individual going out into the crowd is a matter of the individual more-or-less disappearing, becoming an egoless emptiness into which all passing things flow. It’s much like what Emerson was getting at when he wrote “I become a transparent eyeball—I am nothing; I see all the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me,” though Emerson was thinking about nature and wilderness, not the crush of humanity on the streets of Paris.


Baudelaire concludes by changing things up a bit. So far he’s been following a kind of via negativa, an erasure of self in order to take in and become at one with all he encounters. Here, in the final paragraph of his prose poem, he compares this experience to the experience of Moses-like figures who create a community around themselves:

   It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

In the end, I suppose, there’s not much to choose between the two paths: whether one’s union with the crowd comes from self-erasure, or from the kind of assertive, paternal leadership of the “founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples,” it all ends in the same place: blissful, promiscuous union in the crowd. Here, I think, is what Elias Canetti was getting at when he said that the crowd was the key to losing the fear of being touched: there is only touch, and no self to be touched from the outside.


Walt Whitman, another urban poet, takes a similar approach in “There was a Child Went Forth.” The poem starts out with something like Baudelaire’s self-loss in the encounter with the objects around one:

There was a child went forth every day; 

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became; 

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part ofthe day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.…. 

And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence     he had lately risen, 

And the school-mistress that pass'd on her way to the school, 

And the friendly boys that pass'd--and the quarrelsome boys, 

And the tidy and fresh-cheek'd girls--and the barefoot negro boy and girl, 

And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went.

Soon, though, we see that Whitman isn’t giving us a self-erasure, but a kind of building up of the self: everything the child encounters enters into that child and “becomes part of him.” That is, the child takes in and comprehends the world, digests it, and makes it part of an enduring and expanding self. All the people the child encounters “became part of that child who went forth every day,” and if there’s an encounter with the eternal, it isn’t that the child enters a unity larger than himself. Rather, he gathers the passing faces of the crowd into himself, and it is there that they survive, as he “now goes, and will always go forth every day.” Talk about the egotistical sublime!


What's striking about both Baudelaire and Whitman is the way there's a kind of meeting of the individual and the absolute through the medium of the crowd: the crowd is the way the self opens up to a connection with something like the infinite.  It's a very abstract kind of community that's at stake here: not a matter of getting to know others as particular people, but of finding a mystical union between self and all.  It may be profound, but it's hardly sociable.  I doubt Wordsworth, who dreamed of communities where people knew one another's life-stories, would find it satisfactory.  But it is a way to live in a city and find something other than horror and revulsion at the sight of the multitude.


Modern Ambivalence


Something about twentieth century experience in America seems to have made many of our best poets ambivalent about crowds. My great touchstone for all this is William Carlos Williams’ “At the Ballgame,” which includes these lines:

So in detail they, the crowd, 

are beautiful

for this 

to be warned against 

saluted and defied—

It is alive, venomous 

it smiles grimly 

its words cut— 

The flashy female with her 

mother, gets it— 

The Jew gets it straight— it 

is deadly, terrifying— 

It is the Inquisition, the 

Revolution 

It is beauty itself 

that lives 

day by day in them 

idly— 

This is 

the power of their faces 

It is summer, it is the solstice 

the crowd is 

cheering, the crowd is laughing 

in detail 

permanently, seriously 

without thought

The crowd is beautiful, happy, deeply-rooted in the past of human experience (it’s important, I think, that “it is the solstice,” with all of the freight of pagan festivals that time of year carries). But then again, as Canetti knew, where there’s an exalting us, there’s also a threatened them. The flashy female is likely to find herself objectified — which is a form of not belonging, of being set apart. And the Jewish character has plenty of historical reason to distrust crowds as they thoughtlessly celebrate their oneness and togetherness.


George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous presents another ambivalent meditation on the relation of solitude and multidude. Images of shipwreck and an isolated Crusoe figure haunt the 39-section poem from which the book draws its name. But no matter how deep Oppen’s fears of isolation run, he remains committed to solidarity with others: “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular,” he writes, “We have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous.” Again, we see the desire to come together. But the urge for community is counterpoised to a skepticism about public platitudes: committed to concrete observation, Oppen cannot fathom those who, with such ease and abstraction, “talk/Distantly of ‘The People.’”


The series ends with a quotation of a piece of Walt Whitman’s prose, in which he looks on the capitol building rebuilt after the Civil War:

The capitol grows upon one in time, especially as they have got the great figure on top of it now, and you can see it very well. It is a great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty I suppose. It looks wonderful toward sundown. I love to go and look at it. The sun when it is nearly down shines on the headpiece and it dazzle and glistens like a big star: it looks quite
curious...

The choice of Whitman, the great American Everyman, is significant: his presence signals an interest in a poetry of national community. But the break mid-sentence, together with the lineation, put a great deal of stress on that final word, “curious.” What is Oppen’s take on the idea of community? Is he skeptical? Intrigued? He certainly can’t bring himself to yawp with a full-throated Whitmanesque enthusiasm. The questions are left hanging there in front of us.


Crowds and Countercultures


The countercultural movements of the sixties and seventies put different spins on the theme of solitude and multitude. Gary Snyder, for example, clearly feels the pull of the crowd in one of his most famous poems, “I Went Into the Maverick Bar.” The poem begins like this:

I went into the Maverick Bar 

In Farmington, New Mexico. 

And drank double shots of bourbon 

backed with beer. 

My long hair was tucked up under a cap 

I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay 

by the pool tables, 

A waitress asked uswhere are you from? 

a country-and-western band began to play 

“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” 

And with the next song, 

a couple began to dance. 

They held each other like in High School dances 

in the fifties; 

I recalled when I worked in the woods 

and the bars of Madras, Oregon. 

That short-haired joy and roughness—America—your stupidity. 

I could almost love you again.

Certainly Snyder’s speaker (let’s call him “Snyder,” since he pretty much is Gary Snyder) feels alienated. He is, after all, disguised in the enemy camp: long hair tucked away, earring hidden, while the anthem of the hippie-bashing multitudes plays. But he feels the allure of the warm embrace: dances, horseplay, all that unselfconscious human community. I love the ambivalence at the end of the third stanza. In fact, I’ve always thought the poem would be better if it ended there. But instead we have another stanza, one truer, perhaps, to what Snyder really felt. Or perhaps only truer to what he thought he ought to feel:

We left—onto the freeway shoulders— 

under the tough old stars— 

In the shadow of bluffsI came back to myself, 

To the real work, to 

“What is to be done.”

“What is to be done,” of course, is the title of a famous revolutionary tract by Lenin. If there’s solidarity in this last stanza, it’s not to any actually experienced crowd, like the one in the Maverick bar. Rather, it’s to an abstract idea of a class-based community. Maybe it’s this shift from the warmth of a real crowd to the coldness of allegiance to an abstract multitude that irks me. And believe me, I want to be on Snyder’s side.


If the culture/counterculture animosity could vex Snyder’s relation to crowds, it caused another kind of poet to seek to draw a crowd together. Consider the Black Nationalist aesthetic of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s poem “S.O.S.”:


Here, in a poem clearly written for oral delivery to a racially specific audience, we begin with a strong sense of the phatic function of language, with the poet seeking, apparently desperately, to connect to his community:

Calling black people
 

Calling all black people, man woman child
 

Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in
 

Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling
 

You, calling all black people


The voice is like that of a lost radio operator seeking to connect to home base. But the radio-operator's voice changes, in the final lines, to something else: rather than a voice in the wilderness, trying to find contact, we suddenly get something like a host's voice, or a carnival barker's, welcoming people into whatever desirable location he inhabits:

Calling all black people, come in, black people, come
 

on in.

From "come in" to "come on in" is a big step: the outsider becomes the insider, and the audience, at first sought desperately, is now welcomed warmly. The move is from solitude to the hope of multitude. One senses that Jones/Baraka wants to become one of Baudelaire’s “founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples,” gathering “a vast family created by their genius.”


Otherhood, Understood


One of my favorite contemporary poems to take up the theme of multitude and solitude in Atsuro Riley’s poem “Diorama.” Riley, a half-Japanese southerner, gives us a powerful, non-judgmental sense of a community gathering as a crowd at a small town summer fair. I was fortunate enough to hear Riley read the poem earlier this year, and the man who’d introduced Riley, himself a southerner from Memphis, couldn’t contain himself after the reading, and burst out saying “when I heard your poem, all I could think was those are the sounds, those are the words, I grew up with!” I get it. Riley does a great job of giving what I suppose we could call the audio landscape of a southern crowd of his youth. But then, right there in the middle of the poem, we get a moment where Riley’s main character, a half-Japanese boy, overhears a conversation in which he’s being talked about as an exotic alien:

The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized.
This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. 

I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? 

     You ever seen that kind of black-headed? 

          Blue shine all in it like a crow. 

This other wing (the one I'm back-sneaking, side-slipping, turnstiling into) dips and slopes down to low-lying marsh-mire: whiffs of pluff-mud stink and live gnat-pack poison, carnie-cots and -trailers camped on ooze. They've got (rickety) rides, and tent-shows with stains, and rackety bare-bulbed stalls of Hoop-La Game (RING-A-COKE!) and Rebel Yell and Shoot the Gook Down. Stand here, on this smutch-spot: don't these mirrors show you strange?
Crowds are gathering. Yonder there and down, the yolk-glow of a tent is drawing men on (and in) the way a car-crash does, or a cockfight sure enough, or neon. The ticket-boy's getting mobbed at the fly of the door.No sign in sight, except for the X of the Dixie-flag ironed across his t-shirt.I am bone-broke but falling into line.The men upwind of me are leaking chaw-spit and pennies.That, plus the eye-hunger spreading like a rumor through the swarm.The rib-skinny doorkeeper's hollering: bet now, bout's bout startin!Over his shoulder, a ropy yellow light.Also: circles of white tobacco-smoke, and bleacher-rows of (cooncalling) men who know my daddy.—And there he is, up in front with some tall man, iron-arming two black-chested boys toward the ring.

The remarkable thing about Riley’s poem, for me, is the way the central moment in which we feel the main character’s otherness remains undramatic. I don’t mean to say that it lacks impact — it has plenty of that. What I mean is, it isn’t a dramatic climax, it doesn’t result in anything like the crowd turning on the part-Asian boy. It doesn’t lead to a direct confrontation. In fact, it’s the very ordinariness of it that makes it important: the people who ask “I wonder does her boy talk Chinese?” aren’t mean-spirited or malevolent. But nevertheless we feel the sting of their words. Like the Jewish character in William Carlos Williams’ “At the Ballgame,” we “get it straight” about what it means to be “other.” That Riley can approach this topic, one that clearly gives him much pain, with a kind of distanced, nuanced understanding is remarkable. It’s one of the things that places him among the best poets I know of working on the old theme of solitude and multitude.

Nietzsche and the Hipsters

So there I was, people, in the lobby of one of Our Fine College’s academic buildings, slouching against the wall by the vending machines while waiting for my man Parksie to drag himself down from his office and head off with me to our usual dive for drinks with the mad scientist and whoever else might wash ashore at our table. As usual, Park had left a 45-page printout job until the last minute, so I had time to kill and nothing to read but the student paper. The article that caught my attention was a student journalist’s angry blast at hipsters. The gist of the argument was that hipsters were hypocrites: they craved social interaction as much as anyone, but acted as if they were too cool for it, sitting at the sidelines of events and looking on ironically. The best image in the article was of hipsters sitting on the benches near Chicago’s North Avenue Beach, looking on and commenting snarkily as the square community frolicked, preened, posed, and beach-volleyballed the summer away in a spectacle of glistening bodies, shimmering eros, and casual athleticism.

It’s an interesting theory, and probably has something to it, although I think, in the end, the hipster position on group social interaction is more complicated than the article made out. I think the best way to get at what’s going on with the hipster standoffishness vis-à-vis big partying crowds is to take a look at what Nietzsche had to say about similar issues in The Birth of Tragedy.

Apollo and Dionysus

Nietzsche begins The Birth of Tragedy with his famous distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian ways of experiencing the relationship between the self and the other. “Let us think of them,” says Nietzsche, as the “worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.” For Nietzsche, the world of Apollonian experience is like the world of the dream — although it’s important to note that Nietzsche thinks of dreams in a different way than many of us do. He doesn’t mean immersion in a strange, intense reality — he means quite the opposite. He thinks of the experience of a dream as an experience that we know isn’t real, and that we watch at a distance, knowing it can’t really touch us. “For all the most intense life of this dream reality,” says Nietzsche, “we nevertheless have the shimmering sense of their illusory quality: That, at least, is my experience.” So the Apollonian experience of the world beyond us, is one in which we have a clear sense of boundaries: I stand over here, the other stands over there, separate from me. It is a spectacle I watch, and if I’ve had enough, all I have to do is close my eyes, or turn away. Nietzsche elaborates the point by referring to Schopenhauer’s great book The World as Will and Idea, and invoking the Hindu notion of Maya (very roughly, the world of individual phenomena, which the enlightened see through, in order to grasp the fundamental unity of all things):

…concerning Apollo one could endorse, in an eccentric way, what Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Maya: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis” [principle of individuation]

So there’s Apollonian experience: one feels separate from the world, safe in the little inflatable lifeboat of unsinkable selfhood as it floats above all the otherness — all the things and forces and people — of the stormy world around that little yellow boat.

It is the rupturing of the sense of selfhood and separateness — the sinking of the rubber dinghy — that leads us to Dionysian experience, which Nietzsche defines as “the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature.” That is, we experience the Dionysian when we feel the collapse of the barrier between ourselves and the other. It’s no surprise, then, that Nietzsche calls this an intoxication: it’s a trippy, puddle-of-people at a Manchester rave from the Factory Records era kind of thing he means to get at. Social barriers collapse, the idea of personal space is destroyed, and everyone is not only equal, but united as one (if you’ve ever been in the crowd at a football game when it crosses the invisible line between “a bunch of people in one space” to “a crowd that cries out as one” you’ve been in the presence of Dionysus). Here’s how Nietzsche puts it:

Now the slave a free man; now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power … have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures.

Think about all those face-painted, howling Bears fans: by day they’re mild-mannered desk jockeys, toiling in cubicles as members of the lonely crowd. But at the game, they’re free to act in broader, more ecstatic gestures, and they’re relieved of self-consciousness, since in some significant way they’ve been relieved of selfhood, having been immersed in a crowd. Chanting together, dressing alike in their fan gear, probably drunk, and responding to the same plays with the same emotions: the pleasures of Dionysus are the pleasures of the ecstatic release from selfhood, and the dissolving of the self/other distinction.

If you’re out to retain a sense of self-identity, you’re only going to see the Dionysian crowds with something like horror. As Nietzsche says:

…the servant of Dionysus will be understood only by someone like himself! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him! With an amazement which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all this might not be really so foreign to him, that, in fact, his Apollonian consciousness was, like a veil, merely covering the Dionysian world in front of him.

Apollo Recoils

Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness provides an example of the complex recoiling of the Apollonian man at the sight of a Dionysian crowd. It’s too bad the whole racial aspect of the passage (white Apollo, black Dionysus) makes this kind of dicey as a classroom example of Apollonian reaction to the spectacle of Dionysian experience — but if we can put that aside, and put aside the idea that Apollo is somehow better than Dionysus, which isn’t really present in Nietzsche or Conrad, the passage really does get at the psychology of the phenomenon. Here Conrad’s character Marlow looks at a tribal gathering from the deck of a steamer heading up-river into mysterious territory:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were — No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity — like yours — the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there 
was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you — you so remote from the night of first ages — could comprehend.

Chinua Achebe rips Conrad pretty hard for this passage, and you can read the detailed descriptions of the socio-religious meaning of tribal rituals in his novel Things Fall Apart as a kind of writing-back against Conrad. Achebe’s got a point. But for now I want to concentrate on something else: the way the Apollonian subject, Marlow, floating down the river in his steamship (one wishes the boat were named the Principium Individuationis ), feels very much outside the group that is clearly experiencing, for itself, a kind of Dionysian unity. He’s repelled by the spectacle. To some degree, this is because it is strange, and makes no sense to someone who stands apart from it (just as bare-chested, face-painted, bellowing football fans often seem like flabby, gesticulating asshats to people who aren’t into football). But there’s more: there’s the creeping fear that he, the Apollonian subject, isn’t entirely unlike those Dionysian revelers. There’s a fear that he may in fact be like them, and this is a threat to his sense of identity. He doesn’t want to disappear as an individual, he doesn’t want to give up his selfhood to the mass, but he feels, when he sees and hears the Dionysian spectacle, that it just might be possible. His sense of separate, self-contained subjectivity trembles.

Hipster Apollo

But what, you ask, does this have to do with hipsterism? I suppose it’s this: that image of the bench-sitting, snark-making hipsters at North Avenue Beach is really an image of Apollonians looking on at a kind of semi-Dionysian crowd. Hipsters standing on the edge of parties with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, too cool to dance and howl with the rest of the partiers are, in their way, figures much like Conrad’s Marlow. Their sense of distinction — of being, well, hipper than the masses, is an Apollonian phenomenon, a manifestation of the principium individuationis.

I don’t mean that this is a bad thing. In fact, there is a lot to be said for Apollonianism. Critical thinking, the questioning of widely-held opinions, the cultivation of dissent, and such immunity as we have to propaganda, advertising, and mass hysteria all depend on the cultivation of Apollo. When I teach Nietzche’s Birth of Tragedy in my seminar on literary theory, I always end up saying that the seminar room itself, with its emphasis on critique, analysis, and informed opinion, is a temple of Apollo, just as surely as Soldier Field (that’s where the Bears play, oh football-disdaining Apollonian intellectual) is a temple of Dionysus.

I’m sure social class enters into this somehow. Hipsters, as a rule, are either the products of, or bound for membership in, the professional wing of the American middle and upper-middle class — or, more likely in this age of decreased social mobility, they find that the professional class is both their origin and their destination. It is in these classes — among the lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers, academics, policy analysts, consultants, and the like — that critical thought is most prized. This is not to say that such classes have a monopoly on critical thought, just that they often tend to hold it up as a primary virtue, and consider it an essential part of their identity, and put it ahead of such group-oriented virtues as rootedness, patriotism, and group identity. Hipsters will sometimes simmer with resentment at the implication that their critical, individualist subjectivity is a product of membership in a group — to imply group identity is, after all, an affront to the principium individuationis itself.

Anyway: there’s nothing wrong with professional-classness, or at least nothing more wrong with it than with any other kind of class identity. And it is worth noting that those nations with the most developed professional classes are the least likely to fall into authoritarianism, though that can, and has, happened to bourgeois states in times of severe crisis — you know the examples. Generally, though, I’m glad the professional classes are there, and not just because I have a lawyer and a doctor and an accountant. I’m glad they’re around because they provide a pretty deep reservoir of critical thinking.

The Distrust of Crowds

Perhaps the best way to illustrate the virtues of Apollo is to haul out an old William Carlos Williams poem, “The Crowd at the Ballgame.”  It shows us one of the most benevolent crowds imaginable. I’m with George Carlin on the difference between baseball and football fans — baseball is much less conducive to the more violent outbreaks of Dionysus than is football.  But even here, there’s a menace inherent in the Dionysian unity of the home-team fans, one visible only to those whose particular identities keep them from being entirely absorbed into that unity.

Here’s how the poem starts:

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

all the exciting detail

of the chase

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty

the eternal—

So far, so good: the crowd is clearly Dionysian, in a gentle way (when they are “moved uniformly” they lose that standing-apartness that is the essence of Apollonian experience).  But watch out!  As the poem continues, the danger inherent in Dionysus becomes clearer:

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

for this

to be warned against

saluted and defied—

It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly

its words cut—

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—

This is

the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought

Okay! There it is!  The unity of the crowd is several things.  For one, it is “without thought.” That’s the intoxicated state of unity for you — indeed, to be free of selfhood, self-consciousness, and the need to think is one of the goals, and in some instances one of the virtues, of the Dionysian crowd.  I mean, who among us hasn’t left some sporting event or concert (I mean a rock concert, not the Apollonian silence and paralysis of the classical concert) refreshed and renewed, having hit the “reset” button on our individual subjectivity by losing it, for a moment, in a crowd?  But thoughtlessness is also dangerous, and this crowd, like all crowds, is about unity, not analysis.

Of course the thing about unity is that it isn’t really unity.  Unless the entire population were to enter into some universal rapturous state together, the unity has a border to it, and leaves some people out.  It’s significant that Williams gives this insight to three characters in the poem: the Jew, the “flashy female,” and that woman’s mother.  The reason the Jewish character would understand that crowds are not inclusive seems clear enough: the historical experience of Jewish people would render the character sensitive to the fact that crowds aren’t inclusive, and that those excluded by crowds are vulnerable.  But what about the “flashy female” and her mother?  I suppose their insight into the limits of a crowd come from objectification.  That is, a crowd is a kind of collective subjectivity, a single identity for multiple bodies (that’s why it can “mov[e] uniformly,” like one organism).  But if you are a “flashy female,” you’ve been objectified — seen as a body to be possessed, or acted upon — probably be whole groups of guys at once.  Imagine here some 1950s-era scene where the hot chick sashays past a lineup of Rebel Without a Cause tough guys, who leer and wolf-whistle collectively.  You’ve felt yourself not as part of the Dionysian collective subject, but as an object they might pursue.  You’re sensitive to what it’s like not to be in the group, but to be on the outside, and a bit vulnerable.  The mother of the “flashy female” knows all this too, and is protective of her daughter, probably feeling the daughter’s vulnerability more than the daughter herself does.

So, to haul all of this back to our neglected hipsters: I think there’s much to be said for the habit of alienation such people cultivate.  The world needs those who dissent from the pleasure of crowds.

The Distrust of the Outsider

Just as the Apollonian distrusts the crowd, the crowd distrusts the Apollonian, self-possessed outsider, with his refusal to join in the fun.  This crowd-friendly, outsider-distrusting mentality was, I think, behind the anti-hipster sentiment of the article I read in the student newspaper as I waited impatiently for my colleague to get his shit together.  But where does such sentiment come from?  Elias Canetti knows.  Consider a passage from his strange, rambling book Crowds and Power, which is composed of a giant set of riffs on the nature of Apollo and Dionysus.  Here, he tells us that crowds, in their Dionysian smashing-down of boundaries, can become destructive, and turn on those who have not joined (or cannot join):

Windows and doors belong to houses; they are the most vulnerable parts of their exterior and, once smashed, the house has lost all individuality; anyone may enter it and nothing and no-one is protected anymore.  In these houses live the supposed enemies of the crowd, those people who try to keep away from it.  What separated them has now been destroyed and nothing stands between them and the crowd.  They can come out and join it; or they can be fetched.

Yikes.  And there’s more!  The crowd can be particularly cruel to those whom it considers members, or whom it thinks ought to be members — if those people dissent, and refuse or renounce membership:

An attack from outside can only strengthen the crowd; those who have been physically scattered are more strongly gathered back together again.  An attack from within, on the other hand, is really dangerous….  Everyone belonging to a crowd carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone.  As long as he does all this on the quiet the crowd does not make too much fuss about it, the crowd allows him to proceed.  But, as soon as he makes a noise about it, it starts to hate him and fear him.

So: if a crowd thinks you ought to be a member, joining in the collective Dionysian loss-of-self, but you refuse, choosing to follow your individual desires and cultivate difference, you’re a threat.  It’s not that you could attack physically the crowd and win — the crowd is secure in numbers.  It’s that you propose that disunity is possible, and that membership in the crowd is somehow undesirable.  You threaten the idea of unity, and what’s more, you make one of the main pleasures of the crowd — unselfconsciousness — impossible.  If we all lose our inhibitions and borders, we can all behave in ways we generally feel too inhibited to behave.  We can go apeshit in an eroticized, boozed-out Mardi Gras blur, lifting our shirts and throwing up on the sidewalk, making out with passers-by and otherwise cutting loose from our individual inhibitions.  Or, at a football game, we can shout and leap around and feel camaraderie with people we don’t know as individuals, because we’re not at the stadium as individuals — we’re all there as fans together, wearing team colors and cheering for the same touchdowns.  But add someone who dissents, and looks on without joining, and you’ve added someone who, intentionally or not, judges the crowd.  And it takes a hell of a thick skin to remain unselfconscious while being judged (I owe this observation to my wife Valerie, who has to put up with me muttering about Crowds and Power when she’s trying to eat breakfast).

Which brings us back to the hipsters at North Avenue Beach.  If the cavorting beach crowd notices them, it surely notices them with some disdain.  Who wants to be gaped and snarked at?  Or consider those dancing and boozing at some party.  Why wouldn’t they be hostile to the snickering hipsters in the corner, whose very attire signals ironic distance from the crowd?

Contradictions of the Apollonian Hipster

Of course the very fact that there is recognizable hipster clothing, and known hipster neighborhoods, gathering points, and the like indicates a contradiction at the heart of hipsterism: in standing apart together, hipsters are both rejecting and seeking group identity.  They want to form that contradictory entity, a group of individuals, a Dionysian fusion of self-sufficient Apollos.  I imagine we’ve all seen the symptoms of this attempt to square the circle.  I can think of a few of examples off the top of my head.

—  I remember walking down the street near Myopic Books in a particularly hipster-saturated part of Chicago, on my way to give a poetry reading with the redoubtable Don Share.  As I passed a giant American Apparel store, two hipster-looking types (wearing what for all the world looked like American Apparel hoodies) looked into the store’s windows, snickered, and one, in full arch irony, said “oh, let’s go shopping at American Apparel.”  “Yeah, right” snickered the other, in reply.  These were people who belonged to a demographic that populated the area, a demographic that had supported a large American Apparel store.  But they’d be damned if they’d be considered part of that demographic.  I’m pretty sure they had moved to a hipster zone to be with the likeminded, but they wouldn’t want to lose their individuality and merely, you know, be with the likeminded.

— I remember chatting with an über-hip experimental poet with a pretty high-amp academic position.  She told me how much she hated the fact that the neighborhood where she had just moved was gentrifying.  I was (and probably still am) enough of a clod to point out that she was part of that gentrification.  I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me.  Why would she?  As a hipster, or demi-hipster, she wanted to live in an appropriately hip, edgy neighborhood — to point out that by doing so she was becoming a part of the gentrifying group she disdained was to assault the hip individualism she was cultivating.  I should point out that I have total disdain for the rich bastards who surround me in my glossy commuter town, but there are plenty of perspectives from which I, myself, appear as a rich bastard, so I’m no better than anyone else, really.  Hell, I’m fully prepared to admit I’m worse, since I’m the one who was a dick about someone else’s contradictions.

— One really need look no further than the Facebook group “Hipsters who hate other hipsters for being hipsters," a group with close to 40,000 members, to illustrate the contradictions of hipster consciousness.  I mean, the group embodies a wonderful self-reflexive knowledge of the clash between the Dionysian desire to be in a group with other hipsters, and at the same time to distance oneself from any kind of group identity (as a good Apollonian will do).

Can Hipsters Dance?

So, where does this leave us? As I stood there waiting for Parksie, student newspaper in hand, I was pretty sure that I knew: there was a fairly simple dichotomy between Apollonian hipsters and the Dionysian crowd, with a gulf of animosity between them, and a bit of irony about the phenomenon of hipsters dressing and acting like a group, but resenting each other for it. Hipsters stood at the edge of the party, snickering at the crowd, and wary of their own peers for being hipsters. The crowd danced the night away, happily unselfconscious until they noticed the hipsters standing by the wall, refusing to shake it to the music.

Later, though, after I’d laid my thesis down for Parksie, and we were driving home with the windows down and the new Grinderman album thumping away on his crappy car's savage speakers, he drew my attention to a new development, one that may shake the foundations of my argument. One of his students, a hipsterized DJ for the college radio station, had just tapped out an essay called “Hipsters Can Dance.” Next time we head out to the bar, I’ll ask Parksie to bring me a copy.