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Vortex Out of German London ________

Robert Bond
Focus on the genuine hidden in the interstices between dogmatized beliefs of the world, thus establishing a tradition of lost causes; giving names to the hitherto unnamed. Siegfried Kracauer1 The Action occurs in the Restaurant Gambetta, in German London, in October, 1914. [] A very large brass vase in the middle, and a Russian wood-painting of a Virgin and Child on narrow wall between the two windows, gives the German cultured touch. The peculiar situation of this Restaurant makes it indispensable to a few people. Wyndham Lewis, The Ideal Giant (1917) (CPP 123) What is worse, they [these learned monsters] do not know how to pass over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they work which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to rhetoricians and politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker. Charles Olson2 Extraterritorial I was like laid off the docks. Mark E. Smith on why he launched The Fall in 19763 In his review of Fredric Jamesons Fables of Aggression (1979), Alan Munton suggests that Jamesons rule-making rather than rule-breaking contemporary academic methodologies cannot supply us with an understanding of the transgressive and pleasurable qualities of Wyndham Lewiss work. The oppositional spirit or spirit of joyful rebellion within Lewiss writings and thinking can be conveyed by a method which situates him alongside illegitimate groupings, however: Munton points to the illegitimate tradition in nineteenth-century European writing singular social theorists such as Fourier, Stirner,

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and Nietzsche.4 In the course of this exploration, I want to argue that we warm to Lewiss specifically Vorticist transgression and illegitimacy, as well as to what Walter Allen called the generally profoundly unEnglish quality of Lewiss ideas, when we see that he is floating free: Lewiss rebelliousness is enabled by an extraterritoriality which was a centrally defining quality of the Vorticism within which his consciousness matured.5 Such extraterritoriality found expression in his social role as an unattached intellectual; it also became manifest in the super-national character of Lewiss activities. This essay sets out one specific manifestation of the migr extraterritoriality which I would suggest fascinatingly characterizes contemporary neo-Vorticist activity as well as the Vorticist-period radical culture in London: the involvement in Anglo-German cultural phenomena. My enquiry develops into a documentation which is by no means complete of the points of affinity between the visionary sensibilities of a range of extraterritorial cultural phenomena across the twentieth century: Vorticism, the Lukcs circle, and Expressionism around the First World War, along with the London neo-Vorticism developed by Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling during the mid-1970s and after. A major subtextual concern of my work is that the floating social position, as well as the visionary perspective and strategies, adopted by these extraterritorial avant-gardes may turn out to be of considerable relevance to our neo-liberal intellectual life increasingly riven by reliance on the short-term academic contract and random redundancy. This sociological interest of mine has biographical motivations motivations which, for the moment at least, my writing cannot help wearing on its sleeve. In many ways this somewhat fraught and fragmentary research constitutes a plain description of how it feels to have an intended academic career terminated by the irrationally competitive market system. What happens to scholarly energy, to academic intent, when ones department unexpectedly informs one that one can no longer practise that energy, develop ones intellectual impulses? I began to need to understand spiritual violences: the strange fruit of this societys almost unbearable frustration. I had sensed that at the core of every aggression expressive of todays often selfish social behaviour there might lie a more positive, natural form of violence: energies which I could begin to historicize within locatable genealogies of spiritual passion. If we can discern these hidden energies more clearly, perhaps we can begin to redeem the violence to which our intellectual life is now reduced. To transfigure academic egotism into mental vitalities. Philip Head has connected Karl Mannheims idea of the Freischwebender the free-floater or unattached intellectual to T. S.

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Eliots description of Lewiss political status as a detached observer; though Head does note too that Mannheims canonical sociological conception of a relatively classless stratum [of intellectuals] which is not too firmly situated in the social order, is not quite identical to Lewiss ideal of a creative ministry possessing no concerted and lawless power, coming indifferently from all classes.6 But Lewiss vaunting, in Rude Assignment (1950), of unofficial, or private, or outside criticism versus intellectual work in the propaganda service of the State, which is seen as merely fascism (RA 81) is a clear expression of his role as a freefloating, disaffiliated commentator. Like Iain Sinclair, unofficial social critic in outside publications from The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971) onwards, Lewis arguably joins Deleuzes Spinoza in that line of private thinkers who overturn values and construct their philosophy with hammer blows: unlike the public professors (who, according to Leibnizs approving words, do not disturb the established sentiments, the order of Morality and the Police).7 Head endorses Michael Lwys suggestion that Mannheims concept of a grouping of unattached intellectuals drew on his own experience of the group around Georg Lukcs, with whom he had been associated in the so-called Free School for Cultural Studies in Budapest in 1917.8 In her important, yet rarely cited, study of the Lukcs circle, Mary Gluck quotes from the diary of one of the groups most prominent Freischwebender, Bla Balzs, in 1916: I am the descendant of a spiritual type which has never appeared in history as a separate race of people, of whom only theosophy gives occasional glimpses, and which has sent only isolated, individual messengers like myself into the world, who even in their isolation and orphaned state recognize their own kind.9 Though such otherworldly spirito-intellectual messengers may feel able to recognize few of their own kind in the contemporary academic system, Mannheims formulation of the concept of the marginal, unattached intellectual, which was more or less complete by 1918, as Gluck notes, once represented what amounted to a generational manifesto within central Europe.10 A case could be made that under existing university conditions the nurture of a singular soul or intellect, the fulfilment of a genuine spirit, has been replaced by the Adornoderived condemnation of idiosyncrasy as bourgeois ideology, ineffectual

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rebellion; a condemnation paradoxically twinned with a self-publicizing cultivation of truly ersatz, anti-capitalist rebellion itself determined largely by the hustle for tenure. Cultural Marxism as New Labour in polysyllables. The maintenance of hierarchy in the university as elsewhere: todays mass production of thought is overseen by those who will best promote a false democracy, our complacent populism where the people remain the victims. But in history, the Lukcs circle emblematized a wider phenomenon of self-nurturing, intellectual freefloaters; a phenomenon which persisted within Weimar Germany. As Martin Jay has written, such Frankfurt School-aligned figures as Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer were all unaffiliated and experimental leftists who could have merited Benjamins description of Kracauers consistent outsiderness.11 A 1931 essay of Kracauers, Revolt of the Middle Classes, adds a Marxist inflection to Deleuzes general characterization of the philosopher as free-floating Luftmensch, as frequenting various milieus [] in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveller or boarding house lodger.12 Kracauers essay, in observing that it is the dispossessed middle classes that are rebelling, hints how the shadowy homelessness of the unattached intellectual prefigures a much more widespread state of bourgeois dispossession within contemporary capitalist society. In economic terms, the middle classes today are to a great extent proletarianized; in conceptual terms, they are homeless. During the current crisis, this proletarianization has exacerbated their resentment of capitalism.13 Just as the paranoias of the Freischwebender are re-enacted in your local Waitrose, Kracauers para-academic concept of extraterritoriality has now become a mainstay of the global academic discourse of German Studies such as Weimar film studies and critical theory. Jays article The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer, which was included in his collection Permanent Exiles (1985), records how Kracauer filed a series of letters written in the 1960s under the heading of extraterritoriality. Kracauers marginality as an unattached intellectual found expression both in his stammer which, Jay wrote, would preclude, among other things, a teaching career at any time in his life and in his appearance. Jay notes that to Kracauers protg Adorno, who actually used the word extraterritorial when describing Kracauers face, he looked as if he were from the Far East.14 The critic Hans Mayer dubbed him a Japanese painted by an Expressionist, while Asja Lacis added an African allusion.15 Kracauers aliens visage hence alerted others to the way in which the extraterritorial unattached intellectual is characteristically migr. In his own History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969), he remarked how the migr (such as himself in

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America) lives in the near-vacuum of extraterritoriality.16 Because he saw that Germany itself in 1960 had become no country but a place lying somewhere in a vacuum, Kracauer was happy to have escaped the unreality of a space frightening in its prosperity, politeness, sham depth, and complete formlessness.17 Extraterritorial Kracauer and Vorticist Lewis are connected specifically by the way in which an migr extraterritoriality of the unattached intellectual, or artist, characterized London radical modernism. In an essay for The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in Britain 1900-1945 (1982), Charles Spencer noted how Slade-trained Jewish modernists such as David Bomberg ensured that foreignness, so to speak, had been injected into the British art scene not only by the French and Italian avant-garde [Cubo-Futurism], but from within by these Jewish practitioners.18 Pointing out that Bombergs reputation in particular is now probably higher than that of any British artist of his generation and as high as any in the present century, Spencer went on to approve Andrew Forges remarks that not a single one of the generalisations that are usually made about British painting can be applied to Bombergs work. It is not graphic, not illustrational, nor anecdotal, nor is it gentle or refined.19 His was of course not a British art but instead an immigrant London art: cutting his task down to expression, Bomberg was less strictly Vorticist than Expressionist, as he conveyed through In the Hold (1913-14) what Richard Cork called the agitation and strain of the physical process of migration. Citing Mark Gertlers memory of disembarkation All is chaos, selfish and straining. I am being pushed and hustled Cork has suggested that the grids explosive effect on the figures in Bombergs painting may, therefore, be seen as a metaphor for the broken lives of the immigrants he knew so well. In the Hold was displayed in the Jewish Section, organized by Bomberg, of the Twentieth Century Art exhibition held in May 1914 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.20 As Muriel Emanuel has observed, it was all the more remarkable that within a refined and conservative Britain, where foreigners and their alien ideas were regarded with equal scepticism it was precisely in the successful marriage of their cultural backgrounds, and their responsiveness to the major avant-garde artistic developments on the European continent, that Bombergs generation made its impact on British art.21 What Spencer calls the highly individual and disturbing nature of Bombergs own art can be traced to its combination of an

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alien Jewishness and an alien modernism.22 It is indeed precisely the alien quality that is, the tensed and disturbing quality of migr extraterritoriality which Spencer suggests bonded Vorticism with Jewish London modernism. Highlighting the fact that Gaudier-Brzeska shared Jacob Epsteins 1913 exhibition and became close friends with a number of Jewish artists, Spencer notes that what is significant is that as an alien, by birth and in the daring nature of his work, he allied himself to these Jewish colleagues.23 Similarly, while Bombergs aesthetic alignment with the Vorticist Lewis was of course tense, since it was more a confluence of alien disturbances than an alliance, Walter Michels remark that Bomberg consistently rejected (M 72) Vorticism does seem extreme. Bomberg refused Lewiss invitations to contribute illustrations to both issues of BLAST, and further refused to join the Rebel Art Centre in Spring 1914; but he also united with the Vorticists in their dissociation from Marinettis and Nevinsons Futurist polemics, and Bomberg did appear in the special non-members section of the 1915 Vorticist Exhibition.24 Crucially, during Lewiss visit to Bombergs Whitechapel home in the winter of 1912, Bomberg had recognized in the conversation, a Slade man honouring the same pledge to which I was staking my life namely a Partizan.25 The London Expressionist and the Vorticist were both partisans of extraterritorial disturbance. I am particularly interested in one specific manifestation of the mode of migr extraterritoriality which characterized the Vorticist-period radical culture in London: the involvement in Anglo-German supernational artistic endeavours. Writing of the structure of ideas about super-nationalism and universalism that Lewis had formulated with Nietzsches help in 1915, Paul Edwards cites Ezra Pounds 1918 remark that Lewis is a collection of races. As Edwards also notes, Lewiss thinking about super-nationalism in relation to his (Vorticist) self-image influenced his work on Tarr around the time of the war.26 Unworried by the likely unpopularity of its stance at that time, that novels 1915 preface hoped for future Anglo-German cultural manifestations, as a concretization of an already-beneficent alien influence: Germanys large leaden brain booms away in the centre of Europe. Her brain-waves and titanic orchestrations have broken round us for too long not to have had their effect. As we never think ourselves, except a stray Irishman or American, we should long ago have been swamped had it not been for the sea. [] Germany has its mission and its beauty. But I do not believe it will ever be able to benefit, itself, by its power and passion. The English may a little more: I hope Russia will. (T1 13-14)

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Lewiss suggestion here that English culture may continue to be influenced by the power and passion of German culture, hints that he conceived of Vorticism and Expressionism, say, as twin artistic movements in some way forming a unified aesthetic project. Looking back on this experimental time so as to assert its essential supernationalism, he indeed wrote that the conjoined vorticist, cubist, and expressionist movements had presupposed a new human ethos, which undoubtedly must have superseded, in some measure, modes of feeling of a merely national order (WLA 306). The art-movements revolutionary affinities meant that in some measure, for Lewis, the international war could not happen. But it was also the war which, in objectively terminating the movements prematurely, affined them. One central resemblance between Vorticism and Expressionism was their incomplete, speculative nature as cultural phenomena: the movements after all only aimed at a renewal of our artistic sensibility, and to provide it with a novel alphabet of shapes and colours with which to express itself. Lewiss crucial retrospective description of Vorticism as a program, rather than an accomplished fact (WLA 339), sees it to be as much of a provocative spectre, a semi-formed cultural undercurrent, as Ernst Blochs Expressionism. Expressionist architectural innovation in the form of Bruno Tauts Glass House, and the surrounding Werkbund Exposition in Cologne had been shut down prematurely already in August 1914 on account of the First World War.27 Yet as late as 1938 Bloch commented that the inheritance of Expressionism is not yet at an end, because it has not yet been started on at all.28 Sinclairs visionary tract Slade & the Tyrannicides (in his Suicide Bridge (1979), the text dedicated to Lewis) seems to launch a comparable conception of neo-Vorticism, as a hyper-articulate aesthetic potential locked within a clot of inarticulacy and frustrated delivery: They [Hand & Hyle] are enclosed in personal sandstorms, furious vortex: questions, accusations are latent, unspoken. The tragedy cannot get into gear. The Miracle Play remains a potential, without text. The craftsmen are absent. The audience is distanced, complacent; egoic attention, half-hearing, repulsed by syntactic crudities. It does not touch them.

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But the speed: from car to Slade is frenzy, garbled rush of Orphic Mysteries, messenger who cannot get the speech performed in the allowed interval.29 Brian Catling himself stammers, as Kracauer did; and arguably the impeded avant-gardes of Vorticism and Expressionism alike can be placed in what Kracauer termed a tradition of lost causes. It is also worth underlining the fact that, as such abortive aesthetic programmes, Vorticism and Expressionism and in particular what Timothy O. Benson has called the urban phase of early Expressionism, centred in Berlin just prior to World War I were affined too by a shared supernational quality.30 It seems that such extraterritoriality was precisely a product of a distinctive power and passion which marked a certain mode of cultural production across Europe around 1912. Head has noted, crucially, how the implicit criticism of the orthodox critic, in wartime, that Vorticism was un-English was curiously paralleled by German orthodoxy that found Expressionism un-German. Head argues that the critics believed that the avant-gardes concentrated on self-expression rather than the representation of the cultural values of their national societies; we could add that it was the peculiarly passionate and severe quality of their expression Ludwig Meidners apocalypticism, for example, and what Head calls Vorticisms pictorial intensity and implicit violence to which the orthodox especially objected.31 The clairvoyant expression of the frustrated can be troubling, and today Sinclairs writing a writing crazy, dangerous, prophetic, in Angela Carters apt words continues to raise the hackles of those who would delete passion from culture.32 In a sense it was precisely because the force of Vorticist and Expressionist imagery powerfully registered social tension and prophesized the coming war (and while the newspaper critics looked the other way), that The Times could go on, in 1915, to accuse the Vorticists of an aesthetic violence worthy of the Junker, should the Junker happily take to painting, instead of disturbing the peace of Europe.33 As Lewis would write in Rude Assignment, [s]everity [in visual art], like Satire, will only in the end be tolerated in the foreigner (RA 132). In his 1978 essay Servant to the Stars, Sinclair identified this extraterritorial passion, solar disturbance, as the defining feature of the neo-Vorticism of Catlings Pleiades in Nine (1976). The same alienated foreign quality: solar men. The sun roaring beneath the formal English surface: Saxon or photon.34 As Head sees, Expressionism and Vorticism shared what Eksteins calls a motif of violence in theme, in form, in colour

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which was more intense than that to be found in either cubism or futurism.35 This is just one of the affinities between Vorticism and Expressionism recorded in Heads brilliantly and extensively documented article Vorticist Antecedents; yet, arguably, it is precisely this affinity which most explains why, as Edwards has put it, visual Vorticisms connections with Cubism and Futurism have been acknowledged more fully than its no less important connections with Expressionism.36 As if seeking to develop Sinclairs solar imagery into a full-blown imagery of informal sunspot or sunstream passion, Head contends that Vorticisms relationship to Expressionism is best visualised as a flow of two streams fed, in part, and unevenly, from a common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source, rather than as a flow from one stream to the other. Head points to the image of the vortex, when adopted as a motif of transcendental experience (or P/passion), as a common source: this concept of the vortex was used in Edwardian England by the Theosophical Society (which directly influenced Kandinsky and Mondrian), and also within artistic Munich around 1900, where the vortex Head states was readily visualized in the years preceding the emergence of the new art as a point of experience at which the long-dominant traditions of naturalist art [] could be supplanted by a creative vision which combined the ecstatic with the geometric.37 The suggestion is that Expressionism and Vorticism sprang out as two trajectories from the ur-modernist project of capturing transcendental passion within aesthetic form. Neil H. Donahue has noted how within Hugo von Hofmannsthals originary document of German literary modernism, The Chandos Letter (1902), the vortex-image represents the concentration of his disordered vision into sudden visions of a higher order. The figure of the vortex is the only image to be repeated in the letter, Donahue observes, adding that the figure of the vortex controls the formal organization of the letter in its different stages and represents its increasing density as a self-reflexive construction.38 In his introduction to the 1963 Penguin anthology of Twentieth-Century German Verse, Patrick Bridgwater similarly summarized the work of early Expressionist poet August Stramm, in terms of its dynamic, [] highly concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision: [Stramms poems] are dynamic, staccato, abstract, highly concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision. By means of

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neologisms (verbs formed from adjectives and nouns, etc.), an absence of punctuation, more or less arbitrary line-breaks, Stramm seeks successfully to convey the immediate dynamism of the moment of sensation. [] Together with Arno Holzs impressionistic central axis poetry, Stramms work is closest to the work of non-German poets: Italian Futurism (Ungaretti and the early Montale) and Anglo-American Vorticism.39 The preoccupation with art as a geometrical, abstract capturing of visionary dynamics arguably constituted the basis for what Bridgwater calls the closeness between Expressionist poetry and Vorticism, at least in their theoretical substructure.40 Heads findings consistently underline how this preoccupation was sourced in the proto-Expressionist aesthetics of Munich around 1900. Recording that Hermann Obrists unpublished papers include art criticism from 1895 titled Ecstatic Vortex, and that Peg Weiss described this compilation as offering an astonishing anticipation of Vorticist poetry, Head refers to Obrists idea that (in Wilhelm Webers words) the spiral is one of the basic forms that visualize dynamic force.41 Lewiss susceptibility to this somewhat subterranean notion and its central significance as a fundamental common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source for Vorticism is suggested by the six months he spent in Munich in 1906, when he studied art at the Akademie Heymann, as well as by his remarks in the editorial for the second volume of BLAST (1915) that unofficial Germany has done more for the movement that this paper was founded to propagate, and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science and Art, than any other country. It would be the absurdest ingratitude on the part of artists to forget this (B2 5).42 It may well have been an idea of the visionary vortex that Lewis had in mind when he defended, in this mid-war editorial, the historical link between un-German, unofficial cognition from Germany and unEnglish, equally spectral, Vorticist cognition from London. Elsewhere in BLAST, it was Enemy of the Stars (1914) which represented in Edwardss words English Modernisms most concerted attempt to come to terms with the Expressionist heritage of German culture: moreover it [Enemy of the Stars] is, at least for Lewis, at the heart of the Vorticist project.43 Edwards also traces the spectral obscurity of Enemy of the Stars within contemporary English studies to its (un-)German, Expressionist heritage. If Enemy of the Stars is not a well-known modernist literary text, that is at least partly because its affiliations are with Expressionism, and its intellectual lineage, correspondingly, is through Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Max Stirner.44 The relation of

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Blast to Expressionist visual art is signalled most obviously by the fact that the major Berlin Expressionist journal Der Sturm was, as Richard Humphreys wrote, clearly an influence on the title and contents of the London magazine.45 Der Sturm had a travelling show in London in February 1914; Lewis contributed a Note [on Some German Woodcuts at the Twenty-One Gallery] to BLAST in 1914 (see B1 136).46 Still in 1921, in his foreword to the Tyros and Portraits exhibition catalogue, Lewis was comparing the experiments of the 1914 Vorticists to Kandinskys expressionism (CWB 354). Kandinsky had made regular contributions to the Allied Artists Association Salons in London throughout the period from 1909 to 1914; the first volume of BLAST included Inner Necessity (B1 119-25), the Vorticist Edward Wadsworths substantial review of Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual in Art (ber das Geistige in der Kunst; 1912).47 Inner Necessity, in citing Kandinskys emphasis on the inevitability of expression in the visual arts the inevitable desire to express the objective is the force which is here termed Inner Necessity (B1 120; trans. Wadsworth) resonated with the proto-Expressionist poetic theory of Arno Holz. As Bridgwater notes, Arno Holzs Revolution der Lyrik (1899) recommended the use of inevitable inner rhythms, along with the assembly of images or lines on an invisible central axis; Holzs advocacy of a compulsive, if spectral, centralizing focus suggests a parallel with the theory behind the Vorticist movement of 1914, and points to the later experiments of August Stramm.48 This sort of alliance between the driven objectives of visual art and writing was exemplary of Expressionist production, which stressed what Sigrid Bauschinger has called a complementary interaction between a work of visual art and poetry: for example, the September 1912 issue of Der Sturm featured both Franz Marcs woodcut Vershnung and Else LaskerSchlers poem Der Vershnungstag (Reconciliation; also Yom Kippur). The aim to represent a cohesive aesthetic vision by employing a diversity of artistic media and methods, Bauschinger points out, was an idea at the heart of Expressionism typified by Herwarth Waldens gathering of Der Sturm itself.49 Rosemarie Haag Bletter has documented that in 1914, while he was designing the Glass House, Taut published an essay in Der Sturm proposing an ideal building in which all the arts would be unified perhaps as if inevitably, on an invisible axis since, as Bletter points out, Tauts essay reveals his awareness of the work of Kandinsky and other Expressionist artists and sculptors.50

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If the Expressionist multi-media method is suggestive of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, Vorticism in its duality of visual and literary impulses harks back to Blake. Andrew Causey argues that Lewiss designs, like Blakes, reflect ideas arising out of his writing because Lewis, like Blake, made his visual project the representation of ideas or the representation of faculties such as reason and the imagination. Among painters Lewis was intellectually in a class of his own, a philosopher-artist like William Blake, rationalizing issues through writing and painting.51 Vorticism expressed Lewiss role as writer-artist. As he later wrote of his new philosophy called Vorticism, it had offered an inflammatory doctrine [which] affected equally the images which issued from its visual inspiration, and likewise the rather less evident literary sources of its ebullience (CHC 378). In his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound agreed that with Vorticism we wished a designation that would be equally applicable to a certain basis for all the arts.52 Stressing that a meta-art historical perspective on Vorticism is the most appropriate one to adopt when we understand Vorticism to have constituted a program for all the arts Reed Way Dasenbrock argues that it was not the isolated and abortive movement it might seem to be to an art historian, for its impact and influence was primarily on Modernist literature, not on the visual arts. Dasenbrock points out, referring specifically to Yeats, that the dynamic formism Vorticism advocated and represented became a formal pattern underlying central works of modernist literature.53 I am interested specifically in the neomodernist, neo-Vorticist preoccupation with the formalization of visionary dynamics. Indeed it is, as I have argued elsewhere, precisely within the London neo-Vorticist oeuvre of the mid-1970s that the dynamic formist ambition was most evidently and powerfully recurrent.54 Writing of Catlings conceptual apparatus, Allen Fisher has remarked on how it links directly to aspects of Expressionism, to ideas of revealing the unseen and clasping an inner life into outer presence.55 We could speculate that Brian Kim Stefans was thinking of the influence of Expressionism on Sinclair, when he wrote that Veronica ForrestThomson, amongst contemporary poets, was one of the few, along with J. H. Prynne and perhaps Iain Sinclair, who appeared to engage with the most difficult traditions of modernism.56 (One thing shared by Forrest-Thomsons and Sinclairs poetries of the mid-late 1970s is a concern with the constitutive violence of the Cambridge intellectual environment, and with the repression of spiritual energies perhaps the negative of the Expressionist project of revealing the unseen.) Probably the most well-known indication of the Expressionist influence on

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Sinclairs work was the use of Meidners Apocalyptic Landscape (1913) as a dust-wrapper illustration for the millennial anti-epic Downriver (1991): that fictions Dr Adam Tenbrcke (a Wapping-based collector of Expressionist art) might be interested to learn that, coincidentally, this Apocalyptic Landscape was the only colour illustration in the first Meidner monograph, Lothar Briegers Meidner (1919).57 Sinclairs first novel, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (1987), had already featured on its dust jacket Time and the Raven by John Bellany an artist later labelled by Sinclair the distinguished expressionist.58 The Time and the Raven dust jacket was reproduced in the catalogue The Shamanism of Intent (1991), a publication of Sinclairs from the same year as Downriver which also features his essay The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto.59 This essay saw the attempted renewal of Expressionist (and also Neo-Romantic) apocalypticism to be a defining strategy of contemporary art in need of enlivenment. We somnambulated through a house of mirrors, soliciting only those images capable of doubling as a distortion of the familiar Born Again Expressionism (without trauma), or a second life for trembling Romantics, twilight garglers, playboys of ruin. It is arguably just because such neo-Expressionism expresses present-day spiritual disturbance (psychic tremble), that it represents a not entirely depleted art for Sinclair, and can converge with what he goes on to call the visionary revival deregulated shamanism, such as manifested in the work of Gavin Jones.60 Importantly, in another essay published in 1991, A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent, Sinclair presents Catlings neo-Vorticist text The Stumbling Block: Its Index (1990) as an aspect of the visionary revival a dictation from the furies which is as disturbed, convulsed, as Meidners apocalyptic, Expressionist visual art.61 This dictation from the furies could be blocked, seamlessly, alongside Wyndham Lewiss Enemy of the Stars: it re-defined the notion of prose-poetry as a rolling sequence of frantic, but disciplined, convulsions of language.62 Sinclairs conception of Catlings Spitalfields neo-Vorticism seems to refer, extraterritorially, to an Expressionist convulsive passion roaring (or gargling) beneath the formal English surface of prose poetry. These spiritual convulsions recall the sequence of pushes towards that silence in which THE THING can be made the involuntary regulation of breath in terms of which Sinclair described Catlings stammering action in the Lud Heat (1975) essay A Theory of Hay Fevers. Here the convulsive pushes end in a moment of discipline

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of invocatory silence rather as, in A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent, Catlings neo-Vorticist energies are held to achieve an Expressionist balance of visual and literary impulses. Catlings work has achieved this balance, the ability to swerve between furnace-forged speech and articulate objects, and to map a field of consciousness eager to sustain them both. Sinclair here compares Catling to writer-artist Lewis. He returned to the comparison in Lights Out for the Territory (1997), when describing Catlings neo-Vorticist poetry books of the mid-1970s, such as Vorticegarden (1974), as subliminal triumphs, unreviewed by literary clubmen, ignored by the art establishment. Catlings gifts, like those of Wyndham Lewis, made him a leper at both sets of tables.63 Exilic Magic: A Genealogy How all his words followed an unknown needle! He was driven to the unborn from tyranny, persecution, Driven from Prague, Vienna, At last to Paris, the place of Heines exile. -Vernon Watkins, The Shooting of Werfel64 it was an art & is now a function -Anna Mendelssohn65 Lewis in The Dithyrambic Spectator (1925) suggested a connection between obscure artistic singularity and the supernatural, when he wrote of how, in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of whose potentialities we can form no conception, the art of Egypt is as rare and irreplaceable a thing as would be some communication dropped upon our earth from another planet (WLA 240). I would suggest that this quality of being magically irreplaceable of being from another planet, leper-like, perhaps because tuned into a different, more transcendental register or aesthetic tone is deeply characteristic of such neo-Vorticist work as Servant to the Stars, just as of such original Vorticist productions as Enemy of the Stars. Arguably, combined ideas of hidden intellectual excellence and of contact with another world are particularly relevant to the present moment, when, following a religious turn in the humanities, it is not simply a matter of believing or not, as iek has argued but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, of the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension. In The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), iek sees present-day academics spirituality

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to partake of leperdom: what we are getting today is a kind of suspended belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret.66 Neo-Vorticism, with its hermetic spiritual violence and violent textual hermeticism, seems peculiarly illustrative of an art that expresses the contemporary experience of the spiritual as a private obscene secret, at a time when spiritual passion is twinned by the media imagination with migrant terrorist threat. In The Verbals (2003), Sinclair suggested that he viewed the artists he assembled for the 1991 exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, The Shamanism of Intent, as private, singular: it wasnt an aesthetic or political movement, he argued. The Shamanism of Intent, as a blanket area that I was trying to pitch, signified instead the notion of some kind of possession or magic, outside the usual parameters. Sinclairs relation of these extraterritorial creators, such as Catling, to magical practice recalls the Lukcs circle and the way in which, for Balzs in 1916, identification with isolated, individual messengers generated the adoption of a magical stance and sensibility: recognition of his exilic status brought him to align himself with theosophy.67 Gluck refers to Balzss childhood sense, which she describes as being already essentially magical, that behind the appearance of everyday reality there lurked a different secret sphere of life in which all objects and people are totally different from those here, and are connected to each other in totally different ways.68 In Lud Heat Sinclair similarly propounded occult connectivity, with a quote from J. G. Frazer: things which have once been in physical contact continue to act on each other at a distance after contact has been broken69. Glucks account of the Lukcs group stresses that the longing for connection was what underpinned its members magical interests as when she quotes from Anna Lesznais diaries of the late 1920s. What are the phenomena existing in society and the individual psyche, which have retained strong magical tendencies? These are art, certain facets of religion, erotic love, a whole series of spiritual experiences such as presentiment, telepathy, dj vu, suggestibility. The group was fascinated by magical experiences since such experiences, as Gluck writes, seemed to give a premonition of a radically new form of existence in which direct communion and identity between subject and object would be possible.70 Gluck stressed that members of the Sunday Circle felt, both individually and collectively, almost completely isolated in their own

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country, and their sense of radical homelessness forms a constant refrain in their letters, essays, and novels. With such an exemplarily extraterritorial grouping of radically disaffected or dislocated individuals, as Gluck notes, it is hardly surprising that they could not translate their discontents into the conventional language of radical politics; she goes on to quote Lesznai: in reality, our group had a closer resemblance to a religious gathering than to a political club: the gettogethers had a ritualistic, quasireligious tone.71 (This description will strike a chord with anyone who has seen the photograph, in The Verbals, of the Fieldgate Street launch party-ritual for Downriver.)72 Citing Lukcss remark that his circles attempt at inner liberation from the spiritual crisis of official Hungary took the form of extolling European modernism, Gluck emphasizes that for the group cultural radicalism seemed not only more congenial but more fundamental than the political radicalism of socialists and other oppositional groups. Rather as Sinclair has turned to the Burroughsian magico-aesthetic practice of deconditioning of reflexes, for Lukcs the modernists stood for an inner revolution whose intention was to transform the internal life and the consciousness of individuals, not merely their external power relationships in the social and political world.73 But of course precisely the internal exiles claim for inner revolution what Balzs called his lifelong longing for inner independence and freedom can be seen to affine them to a radical social project.74 To adopt some of David Frisbys words in relation to the German context, though Kracauers (extraterritorial) position may rely on a quasi-religious existentialism and so offer a plain existential critique of the existing social order, it nonetheless remains based on the necessity of the fulfilment of a human essence in the personality a fundamental Marxist necessity.75 Free-floating thinkers have often noticed the reduction of fulfilling professional life to hyper-competitive bureaucratic life, such as in our university system now where the free creation of original knowledges has become almost entirely supplanted by the administration of pre-existing knowledges and the battle for status. Sharp practice becomes an end in itself so that little of reality is actually practised. In 1986, Burroughs reminded an interviewer that within society at one time each person did have something to do, but less and less as time goes on. You now have one role and a million applicants, and not a very good role at that.76 Kracauer too during the time of Vorticism and Expressionism had sensed that, as Frisby puts it, the feelings and values of the individual can no longer be integrated into the social functions that are available. Kracauers first known publication, On the Experience of the War (1915), had taken up with

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Georg Simmels wartime emphasis on the separation of an objective material culture from an unrealized subjective culture of the individual (Frisby). Above all else, the most important need of the soul, the religious, lay broken; there were no living, universally binding beliefs, that expressed our essence. Kracauer saw the curtailment of human existence within social forms: for him it was precisely the professional social roles of the teacher, the artist and the politician, what Sinclair would call their parameters, which were incapable of liberating essential inner needs. What attracts me is the suggestion, hinted at by Kracauer, that a spiritual project of the articulation of inner needs the fulfilment of individuals through the definition of living, universally binding beliefs, or a pursuit of an absolute, could be twinned with a recoil from wage economy and professional status characteristic of the extraterritorial Freischwebender. That figures social alienation her exilic character again seems peculiarly tuned to the notion of some kind of possession or magic, outside the usual parameters.77 Bridgwater wrote of Erich Fried the translator of Dylan Thomas who moved to London in 1938, and whom Bridgwater called the chief representative of the second generation of German-speaking poets to have lived in England that the fact of living in exile has clearly influenced Frieds attitude to his language: not being the language of everyday communication, it has gained in magic and mystery. (Celans poetry, judged Bridgwater, represented a magic that is over-aware of its own seriousness.)78 Commenting on Bombergs extraterritorial semi-Vorticist period around 1912, Peter Fuller senses that Bomberg shifted into his profoundly unModern abstraction in the hope of intensifying his eschatological, even biblical, motifs: the exilic sensibilitys pursuit of an absolute again becomes visible.79 By 1920, in his essay Schicksalswende der Kunst (Arts Turn of Fate), Kracauer was arguing that Expressionism was effectively defunct. This was the case, he claimed, because it no longer offered a vitalistspiritualist mode of resistance to mundane capitalist life. Before the war, by contrast Kracauer suggested Expressionism had struggled towards that which the great social revolutions of the present set as their task in the realms of real life: the destruction of the powers of existence that have hitherto been valid. Kracauer defined the pre-war Expressionist project as the expression of the inner needs of the human being transformed into a primal self [Ur-ich]. Kracauer wrote of this Urich as a soul [in] search of a God, undergoing Stumbling Block-like

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ecstatic convulsions: in the face of the objective culture of rationalized, mechanized society. Painter and poet endeavour to strip existing reality of its power and to reveal it for what it actually is: a deceptive, shadowlike essence, a chaos without soul, without meaning. The artists elemental spirituality may be accused of being equally shadowlike, spectral, but for Kracauer the earlier Expressionist could cast the burning torch into the buildings of our existence and inflame the ghosts into revolution. With Expressionism we saw the extraterritorial ghosts broach the barricades; while the citizen remains condemned to a Godestranged reality, as if encased in a brazen solid wall, it had once been Expressionisms historical merit to have forced a breach in this wall, to have reduced it to ruins.80 Looking back on Vorticism in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Lewis similarly ascribed insurrectionary capacities to the spirituality of an extraterritorial avant-garde. Lewis commented on how, to Asquith, Vorticist pictures looked like plastic cyphers or properties of the magician. And here was its high-priest! [] This learned P.M. was reminded of illuminism, doubtless (BB 51). Lewiss retrospective account projects Vorticism as a threatening leper colony or an invisible revolutionary community which may be spiritualist or may be political: I might [to Asquith] almost have been the member of a powerful secret society (BB 53). There was in fact, Lewis added, a tidy bit of political contraband tucked away in our technical militancy (BB 253). Kracauer offered what Frisby called a more specific analysis of Expressionism in his 1921 article Max Beckmann.81 Sinclair too turned to Beckmann, when, in The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto, he sought to stress the collision of the spiritual and the political, of subjective and objective cultures, within our contemporary art economy. For the great Max Beckmann there were two worlds, the spiritual life and political reality; worlds that his paintings, paradoxically, insisted upon fusing. The heavenly and the mundane interpenetrate any of the present worlds that we can retain for a moment before our eyes. Yet Sinclair here was concerned to develop a critique of a mundane, or fake, performance transcendentalism which undermines an implicit purity of the transcendental. Contemporary artspirituality is seen by Sinclair to be not an absolutism oppositional to capitalism, but instead deeply complicit with it; a new twist in the career. In the contemporary art world apparently occult acts are revealed as survivalist reflexes. Shamanism has developed its own realpolitik. [] This art of secrets, remote or hidden beneath the ground, is also an art of expediency.82 Interestingly, Beckmanns own Creative Credo (written in 1918 and published in 1920) itself attacked the notion of a

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pure or more precisely an abstract transcendental. Complete withdrawal in order to achieve that famous purity people talk about as well as the loss of self in God, right now all that is too bloodless and also loveless for me. An engaged vitalism seemed to be moving Beckmann away from an adolescent, abstract transcendentalism that false, sentimental, and swooning mysticism and towards a mature transcendental objectivity: I hope we will achieve a transcendental objectivity out of a deep love for nature and mankind. I have argued elsewhere that a comparable enriched abstraction is precisely the goal of the Vorticist and neo-Vorticist visionary mode.83 It had indeed been their state of disengagement alienation which had originally drawn exilic modernists to mysticism. Writing of the German Expressionists around 1910 in her article Jewish Renaissance Jewish Modernism, Inka Bertz noted how social isolation and the artists alienation from the public now became a dominant theme for example, in the journal Das neue Pathos. Artists sought to overcome their anomie through mysticism, theosophy, and a religion of art.84 Simultaneously in Hungary, as Gluck records, Mannheims growing interest in the philosophic problems of mysticism coincided with Lukcs discovery in 1911 of Bubers work on Chassidic mysticism.85 Yet Gluck stresses that for the Lukcs group antirational phenomena such as mysticism, erotic love, and the world of fairy tales were merely oblique symbols of metaphysical possibilities in some faroff future, rather than genuine options and solutions for the present.86 Lajos Fleps comment that quite simply, we are the seekers of a higher, spiritual world outlook, and we are not to be confused with any sects, points forward to Sinclairs disavowal of movement status for the group involved with The Shamanism of Intent.87 As spirituals but not spiritualists or sectaries, the continental extraterritorial modernists were of course also affined to Vorticist Lewis in particular, to Lewiss critique of Kandinskys abstraction. Lewiss ambivalent view of supernatural interests has been summarized usefully by Richard Humphreys, who notes that although [Lewis] was usually scornful of most varieties of spiritualism he had a persistent attraction to metaphysical and theological interpretations of reality. Lewis indeed lectured at the occultist Quest Society in 1914, and Humphreys even writes of a central role of occultist thought in his work of the Vorticist period. Lewis was not a believer in table-tapping or levitation, but rather saw the artists close engagement with the material world as a

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complex relationship with psychic and metaphysical realities. Without this visionary impulse he believed art would be inert naturalism or mere significant form.88 But Kandinskys abstraction too could be attacked; what Giovanni Cianci has termed Kandinskys lyrico-mysticism led Lewis to view the Expressionist as being, at the best, wandering and slack (B2 40).89 Lewiss objection to spiritualist diffusionism returned in Men Without Art (1934): The massive sculpture of the Pharaohs is preferable to the mist of the automatic or spirit-picture. Then, the dreamy and disordered naturalism of so much European art is akin to the floating, ill-organized, vapours of the plastic of the spiritist (MWA 99). It should be emphasized that this extremist reaction against the illorganized and unsolid derived from the originary Vorticist, visionary demand for heightened definition. Lewis suspected that the quest for magical definition could be impeded by movements of Expressionist subjectivism. In Heads words, Lewis had seen Kandinsky as probably the most logical of the artists directing their attention to abstract experiment, but he also found too much of the vagueness, of the effect of a drunken tracery, that spirit drawings have. Kandinsky, docile to the intuitive fluctuations of his soul, receded into a cloud-world, out of the material and solid universe.90 Sinclair, in his essay Nicholas Hawksmoor, his Churches, from the neo-Vorticist period of Lud Heat, famously describes the affinity of Hawksmoors east London churches to Egyptian massive sculpture. Certain features are in common: extravagant design, massive, almost slave-built, strength not democratic. Each Hawksmoor building is an enclosure of force or spiritual energy-trap precisely because its own architecture has been massively, extravagantly, defined.91 Lewis, developing his Vorticist concern with logical abstraction in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), had held this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion to be prerequisites for the greatest art (ABR 338). In the encyclopaedic polemic published the following year, Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis noted his early propensity for the exactly-defined and also, fanatically it may be, the physical or the concrete: this designers constructivism was no doubt what made [him], to begin with, a painter. As a graphic artist he required that definition and logical integrity. Here Lewis recognized that the processes of creative genius, however, are not so dissimilar to those of the spirit-draughtsman. But though the act of artistic creation is a trance or dream-state, it is one very different from that experienced by the entranced medium. A world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition is built up out of this susceptible condition in the case of the greatest art, in contrast to the cloudy phantasies of the

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spiritist (all TWM 109). Vernon Watkins, moreover, maintained that vagueness is an enemy of holiness; the soul of harmony continually thirsts for definition.92 Space Discipline In his review of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings, W. L. Webb referred to Sinclairs sketches as hard and definitive as a Wyndham Lewis portrait.93 For the Vorticist Lewis, spiritual definition and visionary clarity is achieved through organization: in The Dithyrambic Spectator, as we have seen, the exemplarily otherworldly art of Egypt is held to be in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of whose potentialities we can form no conception. In Time and Western Man, when asserting the magical quality in artistic expression, Lewis similarly wrote of the artist tapping the supernatural sources and potentialities of our existence (TWM 188). The artist is tapping with intent, questioning; interrogating: manipulating: The production of a work of art is, I believe, strictly the work of a visionary. [] Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work of art an entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids. [] If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an incantation that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely. (TWM 187) Of course the artist too is being organized (and re-organized), by magico-artistic forces as Lewis suggests in The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (1931) when he writes that art at its fullest is a very great force indeed, a magical force, a sort of life, a very great reality (DPDS 69). But Vorticist art, in particular, seemed to be characterized by the artists organization of supernatural forces or impulses, when artistic creation was a type of ordering ritual. Humphreyss use of the phrase aesthetic magic ritual to describe Lewiss production in 1913, is backed up by Thomas Kushs insight that Enemy of the Stars shared with Expressionist drama a reliance on ritualized action.94 In his 1934

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essay Art in a Machine Age, Lewis stressed that art is in the same class as ritual, as civilized behaviour and all ceremonial observances such for that matter as those in which it has its roots historically: it is a symbolic discipline (WLA 272). In The Verbals, Sinclair spoke of the influence of elements of North African ritual magic on Catlings later collections of poems this refers to books such as The Tulpa Index (1983).95 But it is in relation to Catlings neo-Vorticist Pleiades in Nine, of the mid-1970s, that Sinclair most interestingly identifies Catlings poetry as an organizing defining, clarifying ritual practice. Sinclair in Servant to the Stars, like Lewis, cannot see spiritual definition or visionary clarity achieved through a diffusing performance spiritism. Pleiades sustains that urge towards a new purifying ritual magic, or transformation. Light. No pose or Yeatsian sance or scribbled automatic writ. These sentences appear immediately after the essays references to the neo-Vorticist alienated foreign quality, of a sun roaring beneath the formal English surface: for Sinclair defined extraterritorial passion, clear solar disturbance, is precisely the frequency of visionary light to which Catlings aesthetic practice of purifying ritual magic aspires. Rather as for Lewis artistic magic built up a world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition, or for Watkins the soul of harmony continually thirsts for definition, so for Sinclair the neo-Vorticist visionary stance means that the face is resolutely turned towards that beam of light that is fed with compressed images (and meanings): beyond the faint glow / of sainted domestic / fury.96 The sense is that this cognitive beam is a more violent, more compacted and more intelligent transcendental passion than that afforded by psychoanalytically-sanctioned, domestic psychodrama; that it denotes a passionate spiritual knowledge reflective of our present sharp social decay. Lewis described Vorticist art-making in a letter to Charles Handley-Read, on 2 September 1949. The way those things were done are done, by whoever uses this method of expression is that a mental-emotive impulse is let loose upon a lot of blocks and lines of various dimensions, and encouraged to push them around and to arrange them as it will (L 504). In a footnote Lewis glosses mentalemotive: [b]y this is meant subjective intellection, like magic or religion (L 505). Lewiss identification of disciplined formal design with the operation of a magical impulse, itself beam-like and intelligently manipulating (within) space, found an analogue twenty years later in Aristeas, in Seven Years, when J. H. Prynne proposed another spaceordering impulse an extension of spiritual attention, or mythic duration of/ spirit extending over lines:

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[] The Hyperborean paradise was likewise no general term but the mythic duration of spirit into the bone laid out in patterns on the ground.97 Within Expressionism however as Kracauer suggested when, in Arts Turn of Fate, he wrote of Expressionist arts texture of lines and bodylike forms, whose structure is almost exclusively determined by the inner needs of the human being transformed into a primal self it was less that a mental-emotive impulse detachedly ordered aesthetic form, than that inner impulses were themselves the aesthetic structure; our inner needs were themselves to constitute and form arts patterns.98 But before we too readily separate off a subjectivist Expressionism from an anti-subjectivist Vorticism, we could recall too Heads argument and Bridgwaters evidence, already cited, supporting this argument that the most substantial link between Lewiss Vorticism and Kandinskys Expressionism was a shared belief in the primacy of inner necessity in genuine art.99 Indeed still in Snooty Baronet the novel published in the same year (1932) as the revised version of Enemy of the Stars the narrator is driven by an impulsive inner necessity, by his nature consistent with itself, organized upon a single-gauge track so to speak (SB 99). This particular mono-track starts, Lewis stresses, from a nucleus of impulse and of passion: I pursue the pattern set up by my powerfulest [sic] sensation to its ultimate conclusion (SB 99). Snooty runs according to a psycho-predestination an extremist behaviourism so that his impulses and passions themselves become the aesthetic form of the narrative. This means that his inner needs can be seen to form inevitably into a fictional ritual; rather as Sinclair, in The Verbals, saw the narrative structure of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings to be preordinated in quite a fixed form, like a series of rituals. That novel, Sinclair felt, was a much more possessed book [than Downriver]; one which just like Enemy of the Stars enacts itself like theatre.100 Vorticist art-making, then, involves a mental-emotive impulse detachedly ordering inner necessity into ritualistic aesthetic form; but impulses, or inner necessity, are also shaping themselves into form. Head helpfully summarizes:

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Lewis did not disavow this force of inner necessity in art, but modified Kandinskys subjectivism by insisting that a principle of classicism, something nobly defined and exact but not in itself a finished thing, was needed to reinforce it with an outer necessity of a formal order.101 In Time and Western Man Lewis then held the artist to be, properly speaking, a transformed magician: one who organizes inner necessity personally (which is to say impersonally, objectively but experimentally, productively): For me art is the civilized substitute for magic; as philosophy is what, on a higher or more complex plane, takes the place of religion. [] [T]hough the artist is certainly not devoid of religious emotion, it is exercised personally, as it were; and he is in temper the opposite of the religionist. The man-of-science is another sort of transformed magician. (TWM 188) The idea is that the transformed magician is making a work which is a free ritual, a mobile ritual (Catlings performance work provides obvious performed examples). We could remember Adornos argument to Benjamin, in his letter of 18 March 1936, concerning the magical element that persists in the bourgeois work of art. Adorno stressed that the heart of the autonomous work of art [] compounds within itself the magical element with the sign of freedom. Paradoxically the very magical, ritualistic urge to dominate inner necessity into something nobly-defined and exact, Adorno suggested, ensures that the resulting art-ritual is a conscious, free, materialist mode of production or offers us a prophetic image of such rational experiment: [] precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of the technical laws of autonomous art actually transforms this art itself, and, instead of turning it into a fetish or taboo, brings it that much closer to a state of freedom, to something that can be consciously produced and made.102 We get a strong sense of Lewiss ambition that Vorticist ritualist symbolic discipline, the construction of a world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition, might become such a freedom, when in his 1956 retrospective account The Vorticists he writes that the artist in refusal of mimetic naturalism should invent

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shapes of his own, and assemble them compose them in full independence, just as the musician does his sounds (CHC 378). Hence Lewiss concept of the pictorial alphabet: Vorticist practice is to be the shuffling and reshuffling of a closely-packed, brightly-coloured alphabet of objects, with a logic of its own (CHC 380). But Lewiss builders terminology the shapes are to be assembled, and closely packed always continues to hint that Vorticism, precisely when experimentally and consciously produced, is a symbolic discipline aiming at hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion. For the construction of a world of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition aimed to enact a revelation of the Vorticist pictures buried tectonic form. As Head notes, the term vortex was never applied with much exactitude to painterly work which more often sought to articulate virtual space in constructivist, tectonic modes than by means of spirals and curvilinear forms.103 Lewiss 1934 article Plain Home-Builder: Where is Your Vorticist? stressed that Vorticism was, in a sense, a substitute of architecture for painting (CHC 278). Lewis had gone on, postwar in 1919, to publish The Caliphs Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?, because Vorticism always was aimed essentially at an architectural reform; the Vorticist was peculiarly preoccupied with the pictorial architectonics at the bottom of picture-making the logical skeleton of the sensuous pictorial idea (CHC 278). For Lewis Vorticist art was to make incarnate, make manifest the logical skeleton, rather as for Sinclairs Hawksmoor the temple is a map of the idea.104 In his 1934 essay Lewis called Vorticist images pictorial spells, as it were, cast by us, designed to attract the architectural shell that was wanting (CHC 278). You could say Lewis wanted another London conjured up out of the hidden armature of inner necessity out of the very structure of our desirous, needy cognition. The aim to define exactly so as to cast potential spatial structures persists in neo-Vorticism. Simon Perril has wondered what the fascinating diagrammatic line-drawings contained in Catlings The First Electron Heresy (1972) represent maybe planned installations, he speculates.105 At one point in A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent, Sinclair remarks that everything Catling attempts is concerned with acts of definition dowsing, aligning, recording so that he might open up a place of potential enchantment.106 The action of definition can be seen working towards Catlings creation of what Servant to the Stars called architectural fixed shape, or locked-power enclosures.107

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Sinclair, crucially, read Pleiades in Nine as itself such an enclosure: an impulse-trap. A Tarot of Value, a magical system which is also an enclosure, or trap, for what the life is. And that is the form of what these poems are. Their reason for being.108 Already in Vorticegarden, Catling had written of Shifting the rock to pin / their energies down. Catling described with Celanian exactness and menace how fractions of life are to be mensurated and pinned down within insect-level spatial division: Cockroach intervals divide the calm; tight as stars, hunting pinprick life.109 Perril suggests the social background for Catlings preoccupation with spatial definition and entrapment in Pleiades in Nine; his poetry allegorizes how the city has become an enclosure, incarcerating the terminally un-productive in the snares of the poverty trap.110 It is bureaucracy which lays down, a peg board to string out the citys pathology pins and paper marking the connections.111 These connections recall the shadow-lines linking Hawksmoors locked-power enclosures for Sinclair in Lud Heat. Each church is an enclosure of force, a trap, a sight-block, a raised place with an unacknowledged influence over events created within the shadow-lines of their towers.112 Lewis too had referred to unacknowledged influence, in his 1914 BLAST essay Fng Shui and Contemporary Form, when outlining Chinese geomancy. Geomancy is the art by which the favourable influence of the shape of trees, weight of neighbouring water and its [sic] colour, height of surrounding houses, is determined (B1 138). Lewis as a Vorticist identified with geomancers: comparing good Geomancers to good artists, he thought that their functions and intellectual equipment should be very alike (B1 138). The key attribute was sensitivity to a spaces favourable influence, to the volume, to the life and passion of lines and in fact for Lewis, as for Sinclair writing on the Hawkmoor structures, a spatial genius could be good or evil, its influence favourable or unfavourable:

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Sensitiveness to volume, to the life and passion of lines, meaning of water, hurried conversation of the sky, or the silence, impossible propinquity of endless clay nothing will right, a mountain that is a genius (good or evil) or a bore, makes the artist. (B1 138) Spiritual Violences No plain bore, the stone genius that is Hawksmoors St George-in-theEast, in Lud Heat, represents for Sinclair an expression of spiritual violence; a violent geometry.113 St George is Blakes East in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: spiritual wrath. The lions of Urizen forge the geometric shapes that underlie the material universe.114 To forge architectural structures thus is to fix them in/ their awful stations, in Blakes words quoted on the succeeding page of Nicholas Hawksmoor, his Churches: later Sinclair sees the standing stones prophesying apocalyptic threat, writing of how future suns of blinding energy do glint in the mute pallor of the stone.115 The sense is that awful stations, static built arrangements, hold in menace just as the Tarot of Value, the magical system which is Catlings neo-Vorticist poetic, is also an enclosure, or trap, for what the life is. Buildings become containers of wrathful impulses, passionate energies. Writing of how spirals of magnetism/ mesh & clench, Catling in Vorticegarden recapitulated the cone design familiar to readers of Blast, figuring an elliptical motion of visual passions; moving yet clenched in. The image frame locked hissing in the coned momentum.116 So in a sense a neo-Vorticist spatial structure does become a bore, a cone drilling and forging in, like the storm of matter [which] turns at the central mercury well, hollowed in dream architecture, in Pleiades in Nine.117 As it hisses, the dream matter can give the impression of having broken free, like the horizontal headstones strewn across the churchyard of St George-in-the-East. Appropriately located alongside the mural narrating the battle of Cable Street, this must be the most wrecked

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hallow site in London, hollowed over by the milky red light of the nearby river. Commenting on two major Vorticist works of Lewiss of 1913-14, Plan of War and Slow Attack, Cianci just like Sinclair commenting on St George-in-the-East locates a violence in geometric shapes. Slow Attack vividly anticipated, Cianci sees, imminent Anglo-German antagonism: this geometry in conflict, with its severely mechanistic forms, is war: [In Plan of War] [a] rigid constructional design [] both expresses all the energy and menacing force of these interlocking geometries and at the same time prevents their disintegration and dispersion. [] [In Slow Attack] the greater density of the shapes, as well as their more accentuated collision and interpenetration, together with the more numerous diagonals structuring the surface, again result in a composition which succeeds in locking all the turmoil of these convulsed, conflicting geometrical forms, preventing them from scattering.118 The geometrical shapes are in turmoil themselves, fixed in convulsed, awful stations, because they are repositories of turmoil. Sinclair returned to this Vorticist idea of immanent passion in Servant to the Stars, when treating Catlings way of fixing in awful stations within his sculpture spaces: Catlings concern with Place as Set. This is a sculptural consciousness: to map the potential actions in a stilled set, to plant all the possible movements in metal or wood exhibited in an apparently static condition.119 The turmoil locked within neo-Vorticist spatial arrangements hence consists of future-bound movements of impulse or energy: incipient spiritual actions, intent spiritual violences. The First Electron Heresy speaks of hungry shells waiting for epileptic vibrations to be thrown into them.120 The London neo-Vorticist association of spiritual wrath with futural possible movements recalls the prophetic apocalyptic but also potentially utopian register of early urban Expressionist art, such as Meidners. Meidner was particularly praised in Kurt Hillers memorable review for Die Aktion of the Pathetiker group show at Der Sturm gallery, in that crucial year, 1912. Hillers article took the opportunity to advocate a contemporary aesthetic spirit Jewish in modality rather than necessarily in terms of tradition or even race of spiritual violence. Urban art at odds with the contemporary kingdom of Prussia, such as Meidners, is identified by Hiller as animated, conflicted, even unashamedly hysteric: it fights through psychic pain in pursuit of a new

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morality. I personally know of few better descriptions than these sentences of Hillers of the ethical climate of the best neo-Vorticist writing, such as Sinclairs in White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings: The true fully Jewish artist would not be Jewish in subject matter, but rather Jewish in modality; he would scarcely paint something biblical, educational, or episodes from the past, but rather he would paint something contemporary with a Jewish spirit (by which I mean: with spirit). A glaringly Jewish noble spirit in the kingdom of Prussia (1912) does not look like a nave celebrant of national memories, but rather seems intellectual, future-oriented, and conflicted.121 In London: City of Disappearances (2006) Sinclair emphasizes how precisely Meidners spiritual agitation, his restless civic morality, makes him the visionary prophet of the tremble that lies beneath the confident fabric of long-established cities. In Berlin he sees the immanent turmoil of the future, the passionate shift into possible movements; he caught that instant of fracture, the rip in the temporal membrane, before it was obvious to less agitated citizens.122 Exiled in north London, reputation occulted, he studied Blake and began to write.123 The future-avid hungry shells of The First Electron Heresy of course also return us to the original Vorticist conception of the vortex as a focus and processor of spiritual energies. Pound, in 1916, famously proposed that the Image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is [] a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.124 In The Vorticists Lewis recalled that [t]he origin of the term Vorticism was the idea of a mass of excited thinking, engrossed in a whirling centre (CHC 378). Here Lewis was characteristically projecting his persona I was at once calm and whirling, [] magnetic and incandescent (CHC 378) over the aesthetic, but he was also pointing to the metropolitan essence of the Vorticist movement. In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1974 Vorticism and Its Allies retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Cork related the concept of the vortex to Pounds desire for a whirling force which drew all the most positive innovatory elements of the time into an energetic synthesis: Pound desired pre-war London, with its unprecedented blend of hectic gaiety and experimental vitality such as the Modern German Art show early in 1914.125 For Catling likewise, in

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Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes (1992), the contemporary artist is to attend to, and process through visionary hermeneutics, the citys centripetal spiritual violences. The hermits task is to absorb the demons of his chosen desert, to funnel their appetites and magnitude through his open observing soul. The central station of the city is the wilderness for this urban anchorite.126 It is likely that Sinclairs description of the transposition of the Silbury energy-vortex to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in Muscats Wrm (1972), refers to the Albion Island Vortex exhibition which Sinclair organized at the Whitechapel that year: the spiral of Silbury painted on the floor of the Whitechapel Gallery as the Ripper walks into it127 This particular central station, here reconvening the Silbury desert, is perhaps the archetypal Vorticist one. As we have seen already, the gallery was also the scene of the Twentieth Century Art show in the summer of 1914, in which Bomberg played a prominent part; the Whitechapel also hosted a Bomberg retrospective in 1979 the year of the publication of Sinclairs neo-Vorticist Suicide Bridge. Yet we could also recall Sinclairs statements in The Verbals remembering how Albion Island Vortex was only slightly Vorticist in impulse. Though it was Catlings first public show, the vortex that the exhibition showcased was only slightly urban. With its focus on sacred sites and numinous sites across Albion from Wiltshire to Wales, Albion Island Vortex understood the vortex as a spatial focus of spiritual energies in terms of the landscape of Britain as a mythological centre.128 By the time of the Shamanism of Intent exhibition or three-dimensional event, as The Verbals has it at the Goldmark Gallery in 1991, the very site of the neo-Vorticist art vortex had shifted to a defiantly nonmetropolitan station: Uppingham.129 This provincialization of neo-Vorticism may teach us something about the inertia of the London creative world. For Catling in Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes the urban vortex is a spatial focus of spiritual energies; but Catling suggests these spiritual violences paradoxically have more material presence, more magnitude and also more desirous appetites, than the enveloping wilderness, affectless non-space that is the contemporary material city. In Rude Assignment Lewis sketched modern urban capitalism as a landscape of spiritual absence. The machine-age of the mercantile classes is a polar wilderness, or a dark

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continent, for the authentic intellectual (RA 111). In the first BLAST, however, Lewis sees precisely our techno-industrial soullessness engendering Vorticist spiritual energies in reaction; as Catling would too, Lewis couples the flattened-out vacuity of the steppes with the emergence of art of great magnitude. As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for the appearance of a great art. (B1 ) Sinclair would similarly call Norwich the perfect desert in which Catling could achieve his work of the early 1980s.130 Yet Pounds September 1914 article Vorticism had described Lewiss 1912 Timon designs as addressing the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity.131 The First Electron Heresy returns to the containment of spiritual violences within an environment of contentless dullness, when Catling writes of the hard knot of cerebral violence in the impassive blankness; but again, Catlings words are revealingly ambiguous: is the weave of intelligence itself formed compacted by the enveloping inaction, or simply situated within it?132 The overall Vorticist message seems to be that spiritual violences need not simply be a product of confinement within surrounding urban soullessness: that they can pre-exist autonomously. I would argue that the vitalist primitivism of Vorticism, laid out first by Lewis in BLAST, leads the aesthetic to refuse the purposeless progressivism and stop-gap meliorism typically associated with modern citizenship, yet also to occupy a place within a traceable lineage of visionary London writing concerned with the citizens spiritual passion. This explains why Vorticism interfaces with the exilic modernist sensibility developed within central Europe, which similarly fused romantic anti-capitalism with a magical perspective. The spiritual demands made at this interface may be absolutist, but they are also freeform, shambolic and anarchic, and so offer us potent ways of resisting the authoritarian, best practice perfectibilism of capitalist secularism: The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an advanced, perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Mr.

1252 1253 1254 1255 1256

Marinettis limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man. (B1 33) Notes
Siegfried Kracauer [completed after the authors death by Paul Oskar Kristeller], History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 219. 2 Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 163. 3 Smith quoted from the BBC4 documentary The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith (c. 2005). 4 Alan Munton, Fredric Jameson: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist, in Seamus Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984): 345-51, 351. 5 Quoted in Philip Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk: Aspects of Wyndham Lewis on Art and Society (Borough Green: Green Knight, 1999), 154. 6 Ibid., 33 and 39. 7 Iain Sinclair, The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971 (London: Albion Village Press, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988), 11. Originally appeared as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). 8 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 36. 9 Quoted in Mary Gluck, Georg Lukcs and His Generation, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 74. 10 Ibid. 11 Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161. 12 Deleuze, Spinoza, 4. 13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 122. Original German version of Revolt of the Middle Classes is 1931; The Mass Ornament was originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1963 (as Das Ornament der Masse: Essays). 14 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 152-53. 15 Ibid. 16 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 165 (quoting Kracauer, History, 83). 17 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 172. 18 Charles Spencer, Anglo-Jewish Artists: The Migrant Generations, in The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in Britain 1900-1945 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1982): 21-37, 30. 19 Ibid., 33 and 32.
1

Richard Cork, Bombergs Odyssey, in David Bomberg (London: Tate Gallery, 1988): 11-52, 18. 21 Emanuel in Spencer, Anglo-Jewish Artists, 43 22 Spencer, Anglo-Jewish Artists, 31. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 Cork, Bombergs Odyssey, 18, 20, 54, and 20. 25 Ibid., 15-16 (quoting Bomberg). 26 Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 194-95. 27 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40. 1 (March 1981): 20-43, 34. 28 Quoted in David Frisby, Social Theory, the Metropolis, and Expressionism, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001): 88-111, 108. 29 Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995), 204. 30 Timothy O. Benson, Introduction, in Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: 8-11, 8. 31 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 and 101. 32 Carters words are printed on the cover of Iain Sinclair, Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath), a Narrative in Twelve Tales (London: Paladin, 1991). In academic conversation, I have found negative reactions to Sinclairs passion to range from David Trotters attribution of ungenteel backwoodsman status to Sinclairs oeuvre, to Leigh Wilsons outright rejection of Sinclairs work on account of its masculine wildness. 33 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 (quoting The Times). 34 Iain Sinclair, Servant to the Stars: Brian Catlings Pleiades in Nine, the Autolystic Defiances, in Simon Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling (Cambridge: CCCP, 2001): 46-56, 55. Compare the lines fuses saxon/ & photon/ tunes in Brian Catling, Pleiades in Nine (London: Albion Village Press, 1976), 21. 35 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 101. 36 Paul Edwards, You Must Speak with Two Tongues: Wyndham Lewiss Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature, in Paul Edwards (ed.), BLAST: Vorticism 1914-1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 113-20, 114. 37 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 103 and 104. 38 Neil H. Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 40, 44, and 47.
20

Patrick Bridgwater, Introduction, in Patrick Bridgwater (ed.),TwentiethCentury German Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): xli-lxxiii, liv. 40 Quoted in Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 41 Ibid., 103. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 143. 44 Edwards, You Must Speak with Two Tongues, 114. 45 Richard Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 31. 46 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (1957; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 272. 47 Richard Cork, Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies, in Vorticism and Its Allies (Hayward Gallery: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974): 5-28, 6. 48 Bridgwater, x (compare with xlv). 49 Sigrid Bauschinger, The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schler and Caf Culture, in Emily D. Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 58-83, 72. 50 Bletter, The Interpretation of the Glass Dream, 34, n. 58. 51 Andrew Causey, The Hero and the Crowd: The Art of Wyndham Lewis in the Twenties, in Paul Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewiss Painting & Writing (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996): 87-102, 87. 52 Quoted in William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 6. 53 Reed Way Dasenbrock, Vorticism Among the Isms, in Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3: 40-46, 45. 54 Robert Bond, A Dark Insect Swarming: The Vorticist Visionary Mode of Wyndham Lewis and Iain Sinclair, in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): 10-31. 55 Allen Fisher, Diligence and Dilemmas and Aspects of Work by Brian Catling, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 57-65, 63. 56 Brian Kim Stefans, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and High Artifice, Jacket, 14 (July 2001): http://jacketmagazine.com/14/stefans-vft.html (accessed 21 June 2012). 57 Brieger referred to in Victor H. Miesel, Ludwig Meidner, in Ludwig Meidner: An Expressionist Master (University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1978): 1-23, 22. 58 The Time and the Raven dust jacket is reproduced in Iain Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: Some Flights of Redemption (Uppingham: Goldmark, 1991), 22 (see also 51 and 52) 59 Iain Sinclair, A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent, Modern Painters, 4. 2 (Summer 1991): 46-51, 50.
39

Iain Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto, in Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: 5-19, 7. 61 Sinclair, A New Vortex, 51. 62 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 68. 63 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997), 267. 64 Vernon Watkins, The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000), 31. 65 Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Cambridge: Folio/ Equipage, 2000), 85. 66 Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 6. 67 Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson, The Verbals (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003), 126. 68 Gluck, Georg Lukcs and His Generation, 66. 69 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 70. 70 Gluck, Georg Lukcs and His Generation, 152 (quoting Lesznai). 71 Ibid., 23 and 24. 72 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 119. 73 Gluck, Georg Lukcs and His Generation, 64-65 (quoting Lukcs). 74 Ibid., 69 (quoting Balzs). 75 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (1985; Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 114. 76 Allen Hibbard (ed.), Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 167. 77 Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, 114 and 111-12 (quoting Kracauer). 78 Bridgwater, xxx and xxxi. 79 John McDonald (ed.), Peter Fullers Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art (London: Methuen, 1993), 118. 80 Quoted in Frisby, Social Theory, 104-05. 81 Ibid., 110, n. 56. 82 Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent, 17 and 19. 83 Max Beckmann, Creative Credo (1920), in Victor H. Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970):107-9, 109. Compare the article of mine referenced at the end of n. 49, above. 84 Inka Bertz, Jewish Renaissance Jewish Modernism, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 164-87, 184. 85 Gluck, Georg Lukcs and His Generation, 153 (compare 239, n. 72). 86 Ibid., 156. 87 Quoted in ibid., 19.
60

Humphreys, Lewis, 26-27. Giovanni Cianci, A Man at War: Lewiss Vital Geometries, in Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: 11-24, 19. 90 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 126 (quoting Lewis). 91 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 92 Vernon Watkins, New Selected Poems, ed. Richard Ramsbotham (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 101. 93 Webbs Guardian review quoted from the back cover of Iain Sinclair, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (London: Paladin, 1988). 94 Humphreys, Lewis, 28; Thomas Kush, Wyndham Lewiss Pictorial Integer (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 78. 95 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 126. 96 Sinclair, Servant to the Stars, 55. 97 J. H. Prynne, Poems, second edn (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), 93. 98 Quoted in Frisby, Social Theory, 104. 99 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 99. 100 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 122. 101 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 8. 102 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 128 and 129. 103 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 105-6. 104 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 32. 105 Simon Perril, A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things: A Catling Overview, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 23-45, 29. 106 Sinclair, A New Vortex, 50. 107 Sinclair, Servant to the Stars, 50. 108 Ibid., 55. 109 Brian Catling, Vorticegarden (London: Albion Village Press, 1974), n.p. 110 Perril, A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things, 32. 111 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 30. 112 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 113 Ibid., 35. 114 Ibid., 36. 115 Ibid., 38. 116 Catling, Vorticegarden, n.p. 117 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 41. 118 Cianci, A Man at War, 20. 119 Sinclair, Servant to the Stars, 55 and 53. 120 Brian Catling, The First Electron Heresy (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 8.
88 89

Quoted in Emily D. Bilski, Images of Identity and Urban Life: Jewish Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 10245, 140. 122 Iain Sinclair (ed.), London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), 7. 123 Ibid., 8. 124 Quoted in Bridgwater, lii. 125 Cork, Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies, 6. 126 Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, and Brian Catling, Future Exiles: 3 London Poets, Paladin Re/Active Anthology No. I (London: Paladin, 1992), 351. 127 Iain Sinclair, Muscats Wrm (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 22; Cork, Bombergs Odyssey, 52, n. 153. 128 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 dates Albion Island Vortex to 1972, as does the catalogue (which is in box XXVI of the Texas Sinclair Archive). Nevertheless the spectral, unfixed quality of neo-Vorticism is stressed by the shows floating date in other records. See Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent, 50, which dates the exhibition to 1973, while Perril, A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things, 26 dates it to 1974. For the reference to Twentieth Century Art, see n. 20 above and Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, 6 and 29. 129 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 and 125. 130 Sinclair, A New Vortex, 50. 131 BLAST, p. 123 n. 32 (compare the similar phrases, from Pounds Wyndham Lewis of June 1914, quoted in Wyndham Lewis, p. 89). 132 Catling, The First Electron Heresy, 12.
121