the inimitable George Oppen

I have been worrying over my lazy, unpolitical, unworldly existence as a poet... occasionally philosophy seems justifiable. But poetry? What do we do for anyone but ourselves? We had dinner with someone who works for the Gates foundation on microloans and savings in Africa who'd just returned from Ethiopia. She may not buy organic vegetables, but her very vocation improves the world. And I... write.

So, here are some wise words from M. Oppen:

"So with artists. How pleasurable
to imagine that, if only they gave
up their art, the children would be
healed, would live."

- from "Some San Francisco Poems"

art instincts... against my instinct but intrigued

Denis Dutton's Art Instinct has been getting a lot of attention and recently in the New York Time Book Review I am terrified that this book on "Darwinian aesthetics" shares too much with the horrific Neo-social Darwinism in recent issue of the Economist that I whined about here. But I'm also intrigued... this is just intersection of the sorts of issues that interest me: art, biology, evolution. How can we talk about Nature and not lose sight of human-sized meaning for us? I've been thinking a lot about why evolution and speciation rarely comes up in phenomenology. It seems it's time to start talking about it with the number of Cambridge, MA evolutionary biologists making the New York times magazine. But does phenomenology have anything to say? I think it does -- what exactly I'm working out in that dissertation thing-y -- but it doesn't seem to be saying much yet. But how to begin a conversation in the dominant language ? "Instinct" is in the title of this book and not in, at least my, phenomenological vocabulary. Again, I come back to the problem of translation between two cultures...

space tools: scripts for architectural historians of the future

Last night, I joined J and another computational designer for dinner with some heads of the architectural software firm Rhino. (Yes, I was there just for the free food) J and his friend have been showing some Oregonian architects what's up with scripting in 3d and this was a dinner to celebrate their success. Now, personally I'm fascinated with how designers "think" in the digital design atmosphere. (I've written a little about it in an article that will be out next year) CAD is so Cartesian: the circuit of hand and eye is disrupted not just by a pencil but a bunch of algorithms, a pregiven geometry and a certain order in which designers can create form, volume, lighting and texture. (an order quite backwards to which they might work in the 'real' world: volume and texture come at the end for example)

So I've been mulling all this over and thinking that Rhino which uses a different geometry and nerbs modelling system is a good alternative to allow a little variety in the methods for making the built world. ... lest everything look like a textureless CAD fly-through. The CEO s of Rhino are pretty proud of their product... but surprisingly to me, they didn't seem to think much about the long-term implications for (and restrictions on!) design and the built world. They felt they were creating a neutral tool that just let architects do better what they'd always wanted to do. In no sense did they feel the tools prescribed design ... even when J pointed out that it was a little bit odd and awkward to think about volume after form.

I imagine art historians of the future looking back at the last 10 years of architectural design and excavating not tools, but scripts and codes. They'll be trying to figure out which version of Rhino or Grasshopper a designer might have access to in 2007 or 2013 in order to invent as they did. They'll be thinking about how space became something we understood in relation to the fly-through tool.

But it was a great lesson to me that Rhino developers didn't need to think about any of that to make the built-world altering tool they've created. Nor do they want to think about it in order to sell more or refine it. And they certainly aren't reading anything coming out of architectural theory ... yet again (pace my post yesterday), there seems to be a one-way sort of conversation between theory and practice, humanities and technology.

stuck between two cultures

I enjoyed this essay on C.P Snow's two cultures because I'm feeling quite caught between those two cultures right now. Well, no, more precisely I'm definitely from one culture -- the literary, humanities one -- and desperately trying to understand how to talk about the other culture. I just spent the afternoon reading up on 1950s developmental theory. This followed a week or so of trying to understand some evolutionary theory from the same time period. That actually wasn't the hard part... these articles tend to be quite readable, flush with quotes from Shakespeare and allusion to Goethe and plain language expressions of the experiments the scientists had attempted on developing cells.

The hard part was trying to figure out how these views of half a century ago compare to current views. This entails me tracking down basic developmental biology terminology that any kid with a B.A. in biology would understand. I found these newer essays much more impenetrable. Dense with abbreviations for particular genes and chemistry, they required much more work to translate into the language of my culture.

This process also put into relief some of the unique grammar of my culture. What people who might read what I write (let's assume these people might exist!) would want to know is what are the implications of these? what do these microscopic events mean for a person at a macroscopic scale? I have to formulate my sentences in terms of why and for whom. The claims should be at a person-sized scale.

And what in the world would it mean to translate those claims back into the other culture? Could there possibly be a developmental biologist out there interested in that project? Or, by definition, is this a one-way conversation? This latter possibility worries me even more than how little I know about genetics... or perhaps those are two sides of the same coin.

no, writing isn't all that fun...

Apparently Colm Toibin made a snarky comment about how he didn't take pleasure writing. The KR blog puts this in context I suppose I have to agree somewhat with Tobin... only he gets paid for his 'suffering.' So it can't be all that bad. But let me clarify... it's not that I "hate" writing. No, hardly. But it's certainly not "fun" (like, say, playing shuffleboard or going iceskating). At the least, the pleasure of writing isn't in the process but in the afterglow. A friend said that I "write like I sweat." On the surface, that's a pretty good metaphor; it implies that in order to write, I have to work myself up, work out, get through something and along the way, some writing will be sweated out. But that metaphor only gets to the initial moment of productivity, forgetting that once you've "sweated out" some images, ideas and phrases, you have to work them into actual art.

Even so, in terms of when it offers pleasure, I could say that writing a bit like going for a very long run, at least for me. (Now, I want to say first of all that the following is a completely over-used and abused metaphor... but I use it again, not under the impression that it's novel, but because it, like many cliches, has a bit of truth) The actual picking up my feet and putting them down, the getting in shape to go more than a mile or two... none of that is fun (at least for me). Likewise, actually suffering through revisions and worrying over word choice, that's not fun either. Most of the time it's nerve wracking! But the endorphins after the run and the endorphins after finishing a poem do feel pretty good. The place where this metaphor breaks down -- if it hasn't already -- is that it's not quite clear when one "finishes" a poem nor when or if the endorphins are certain. I enjoy running in and of itself; I don't need to win a race to feel good about running. (In fact, I kind of abhor races!) But with writing... I do kind of want the secondary satisfaction of publication. I do get a certain pleasure out of just finishing a poem: wow, it's there! look how pretty it is when I change the font to garamond! But often there's a secondary moment when that pleasure is taken away from me. I go back to the "finished" poem and find it's not at all complete. Or, that it's "complete" but awful. Or, that it's complete and half-way decent but no one will ever read it. It would be like believing you'd finished a 6 mile run -- and feeling as tired as if you had -- and then discovering that you'd only gone a 1.5 miles. Or finishing a race but forgetting a chip and finding that your score doesn't count.

need more quarks

It's spring break and I am absolutely craving a nice pseudo sciencey, popular physics book. Any suggestions? I want something with long discussions about black holes, strings, and flavored quarks. I don't even want science fiction! Or... well, I want popular science that is not consciously fictitious; I certainly will never be able to distinguish it from a good yarn.

But why do I want this? Well, experientially, it's just very calming to read about all these Very Big Things and Very Small Things. John and I went for a nice desert hike last weekend in a Very Big canyon; I had been haunted by some problems all week, but in comparison to the desert, they were Quite Propotional. That was comforting. After looking at the Very Big difference between the mountains in the snowy pass and the valley desert, I felt my little moods swings were Quite Negligible.

It's important that these Very Big and Very Small things also be True things. (Even if I can't tell) This is key to their calming quality. I live with plenty of fictions, makings, imaginings... but these all remind me of the human sphere. Precisely what is required is a perspective on the human sphere and all its made things and tools for making.

My inner nerd has always been calmed by a good star-gazing trip. But from our overcast Pacific Northwestern vantage point, there are few stars to be seen. So I require a virtual tour of some constellations or their contents. I do prefer the macroscopic to the microscopic, I must say; so any suggestions for my reading list might take that into acccount. Any thoughts?

Tony Gilroy and the Birth of Tragedy

I just enjoyed this classically New Yorker, long-winded-but-pleasant story about the screen writer of Bourne Identity, Tony Gilroy.Gilroy sounds like a brilliant and thoughtful writer. He's not just clever but quite up on what's needed by his era. A bit like Euripides, actually. But let me back that up....

First some clarifications: In the article, the author claims that Gilroy virtually invented or at least first truly exploited "the reversal" as a plot device. They write "The core of “Duplicity”[Gilroy's latest film] is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” Well, I hate to break it to the article author or to Gilroy, but "the reversal" goes way back. Aristotle claimed it was one of the essential components of tragedy (along with a hero, a downfall, recognition and scenes of suffering). Many stories, not just Greek tragedies, have reversals: the audience thinks the character and her plot are heading in one direction, but oops! all is not as it seems. But in the end, the audience experiences some relief at watching the character suffer through these twists and turns.

Gilroy is know for increasingly complicated reversals. He feels that modern audience have become so savvy to possible plot twists -- making use of DVDs to replay and unravel them -- that it's harder to satisfy them. The authors suggest that the trend of Gilroy's method of making dramas more and more complex will continue. But is that the only solution? What about Euripides solution?

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche noted that while the reversal method of effecting catharsis could work, sometimes plots were so complicated that the audiences wasn't getting the payoff . So Euripides introduced a figure who gave a prologue and told the audience ahead of time what would happen. That way, the audience could lose themselves in the pleasure of catharsis without needing to expend all that energy "figuring it out." Nietzsche found this decision of Euripides quite sly but also quite savvy in itself. (Notice that Nietzsche himself claims this is all philologically unjustified... so if there are any errors in this history, blame Nietzsche who doesn't mind anyway)

I suggest that film is moving in the direction of Euripides's plays. There's a limit to the complexity audiences can or are willing to take on. But, there seems to be no end to our pleasure in catharsis. So, rather than make plots more complicated, we have formulaic stories in which we enjoy for the effect and possibly for the novelty in aesthesis of the presentation of the standard plot (take Forgetting Sarah Marshall, as e.g.) Gilroy himself seems away of this with his basic rules about “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” But perhaps the solution to "not boring the audience" is not to make things more, but rather less complex plot-wise.

david foster wallace and "something so simple, really..."

Now, I don't really like to do a lot of reflecting on what I think Literature Ought To Be or how I think one should write. One should write. That's it. But I was really struck by a few things in a recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. I don't even particularly like Wallace's work per se; honestly, I've always found Infinite Jest to angsty, male and empty to get through. It's something my male friends read and cite in the same breath as the Big Lebowski. I know that's unfair to both the authors and enjoys of all those concerned, and it only reflects my personal hang-ups. But in this article, I did like what Wallace says about writing and what his writing seemed to be in his life as it appeared through the article.

After leaving a drug rehab half-way house, Wallace changed his tune and his reading interests. He found that the sorts of things that AA taught -- take it one day at time, for e.g.-- actually meant something to him, something that a lot of contemporary literature with its tricks and games didn't: "As he later told Salon, "The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important."

Again, treading lightly into the territory of what writing ought to do or be in genearl or for me, I'll dare to make some claims. In terms of visual art, I am *tired* of post-modern pastiche with its cheeky, snarky self-reflective struggle. This is something John and I have talked about countless times. Where's beauty? Why not just make something beautiful, for people to judge as such, and leave it at that? Why be cruel?

But I usually leave those grumpy claims for visual art and haven't extended them to poetry. It's easier to make definitive judgments about an art you don't practice. But in a way... I think I am starting to feel the same for poetry. I like to read beautiful poetry. I like lyrics, I like one-offs that stand on one, two, maybe three pages at most. I like them to ring and to be recitable. I like Bishop, not Lowell. I've never had the attention span to read or enjoy the epic; I tried to struggle through Lowell's The Dolphin and a few other later books as I read his biography and collected letters with Bishop. But little he wrote -- except maybe the poem for Bishop -- touches me the way her work does. Take her "Armadillo" for instance. This sayes more to me of Lowell's mania that ten of his sonnets that I have to string together to find a story.

I realize that the connection to Wallace may seem thin. What could Infinite Jest or any of his other works, finished or not, have to do with Elizabeth Bishop's poetry? Perhaps nothing in the larger scope of literary criticism. But for me, they are connected in what they mean for my intention as an artist and for my right to predilections as a reader. In a sense, I'm the intellectual's intellectual, the ideal product of an extremely liberal arts education. You'd think I'd be eating up the most post-modern, reflective of literatures, say -- I don't know -- Calvino and Ashbury. But with all my reflective tools, with all my purported knowledge of what art can do, I still just want to enjoy beautiful things that risk cliche before they risk being uninventive. There is something to the AA statement, "take it one day at a time." It works, I remember it. There's something to using a rhyme. It sounds good.

Well, that's all for now. We'll see if this leads to any good or at least pleasing work on my part.

Sounds and sense

In the December NY Review of Books, I enjoyed an article on two new books on Robert Frost, one a novel and one a biography. This of course sinks with my interest in maybe writing a biographical novel or biography, but also it called my attention to Frost in way that I hadn't considered before. I do love his work, but like an artist over-played on Starbucks' radio, I find it hard to appreciate the good bits hidden behind the over-popular pieces. I like what he says about sound in his prose reflections, for example, in this quote in that I'd like to find in its entirety to flesh out his position:
"I speak of imagination as having some part in the sound of poetry. It is everything in the sound of poetry; but not as inventor nor creator -- simply as summoner. Make no mistake about the tones of speech I mean. They are the same yesterday, today, and forever. There were before words were -- if anything was before anything else." (Collected Prose of Robert Frosted, cited in NY Review of Books, Dec 08)

To think of sound as summoning poetry is quite different that emphasizing the particular sonority or meter of a poem in reflection. Of course, it's all very useful to appreciate the meter in Hardy and to try to pound out a good anapest in your own work. But... I think this standarized, metrical / scansion model of understanding sound is only useful for criticism, not for creation. What Frost describes is how speech sounds evoke poems in the ear of the writer. With Frost's iamb's, the momentum of sound it quite strong. The iambs carrying that rocking feeling of walking, of the momentum of the walk carrying you in one direction until the next step is felt before it is thought. But you cannot see this meter as construction or appearing only in reflection; Frost had to hear that sense of sound, to get into it before thinking and then following into a poem. Hearing the "sound of sense" going before you as you write is like hearing a band playing in the other room and starting to write a melody to overlay while gradually sneaking up on them. The sound is much more than a meter: it's a sound-place, a complexity, open totality to explore. My old stand by, Merleau-Ponty, might call this the indirect voices of silence: the meaningful silence before and between speech. It's not an empty space or time but one which calls you toward speech.

Certainly, the sounds of Frost are ramifying all through American poetry. I certainly can't write without hearing a bit of "Whose house that is, I think I know..." already going before me

"this suffering business"

In one of Bishop's letter's -- sent in a time just around her own alcoholic breakdown and Lowell's first manic episode -- she slips in the following comment between chatter about lobster pounds and Eliot's criticism:

"Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I guess I think it is so irresistible & unavoidable there's no use talking about it, & that in itself has no value, anyway..." (E Bishop to R Lowell, Sept 8th, 1948)

of that which we cannot speak....

Biography, mania and mysticism

Out of basically voyeuristic interest, I dug up a Robert Lowell biography at the university library today. Some of his person comes through in the letters to Bishop, but from the sketchy details of his mania and instability in the introduction, you get the impression that there must have been other sides of his character not represented. From the biography, that indeed seems to be the case. I read (quickly) the Hamilton 1982 biography which I found about as readable as a set of note cards – very choppy and full of too many long citations – but also detailed and informative (I’d like to see if there’s another better version?). Given my latent interest in mysticism, I was intrigued by the descriptions how in certain fits of mania, Lowell ‘renewed’ his Catholicism and became obsessed with prayer; the biographer says he “confused religion and sexuality" (158). Certainly that “symptom” would describe the behavior of certain mystics… the question is then whether they shared something psychologically with Lowell or whether Lowell perhaps read too much mysticism and unconsciously imitated them.

Having sated my biographical craving – in fact, I feel a bit abashed now, having actually been overwhelmed and terrified by Lowell’s character even at this distance – I’m going to turn back to the poetry now. I stumbled on a used copy of his complete works at Magus books, and read “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” while standing up in the bookstore. That read certainly confirmed it was worth the purchase.

Letters

"We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel." - E. Bishop

On this shockingly cold day for the Northwest, I've just begun reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After pouring over reviews of this collection the NY times book review, the New yorker, and the poetry book store, I felt I had to dig in. It both pleases me and makes me rabidly jealous. What a privilege to listen two great minds thinking and living with each other! I get to watch them magpie along, collecting bits from their daily life and travels and then flipping the visible side of the world over and turning it into poems. On the other hand, I envy them their special poet friend ... and also the permanence of letters ! I feel I have enjoyed some wonderful correspondence and exchange, but so much of it drifts away over the phone and the internet. I really wonder -- I realize this is an unoriginal reflection -- how this generation will be recorded. We've even seen that problem with the email of the president; because his correspondence must be public, he can't email... just another sign, that we really haven't found out how to keep a record of this transient medium.

Back to Bishop and Lowell. I realized while matching some of Bishop's poems to the ones mentioned in the correspondence that I haven't read much Lowell... I certainly had a copy of Life Studies once, but it seems to have drifted from my shelf. I think I like Bishop more anyway, but just for justice, I'm going to try to rustle up a copy of Lowell's work as I go through the letters so I can "watch them work."

But Bishop, Bishop... she is the writer's writer's writer, as Ashbery is cited as saying. Take that first line I've cited: the iceberg is the imaginary, the narratively drawn together life, that we prefer to the raw data of the world without us. But the iceberg is also the world without us: it's not the ship, the thing we've crafted and try to sail uselessly in a sea packed with brutal things like icebergs.

astrology , therapy, Husserl?

Today I met an astrologer who knew Husserl. No, that's not a typo folks: I don't mean "astronomer." I was sitting at Peet's coffee and this man comes up to me -- after some chitchat about the Sunday market that made our coffee spot too busy -- and asks me what I'm working on . I say my dissertation; he says, "Oh, is it on Husserl?" I say - surprised - "No, but..." and this leads to a pretty cogent conversation about phenomenology.

And... somewhere along the way, he mentioned he was an astrologer. Despite his thoughtful, in depth thoughts on Husserl and Sartre, I struggled to maintain a charitable attitude. How could he both be a thinking person and an astrologer!? But I tried to keep my mind open, and he had some interesting things to say about how astrology was more like psycho-therapy than people thought. (He found it exhausting to listen to people's problems all day and respond to them. ) And then we talked just a little about how myth and astrology could have transformative, theraputic effects . Then... he started to talk about transmigration of the soul and he lost me a bit. Still, it was a healthy challenge to my latent scientism.

Plus, the kicker is that on Friday night at the company party, the very nice woman sitting to my left said, "Ah what do you do as a philosopher then? Is it like astrology?" = )

blake on mourning

I love Blake. I bought a Dover Thrift edition just to have him near me. Here's a quote on mourning from "On Another's Sorrow"

"Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.

O! He gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan."

I would think with my general outward cynicism, I would prefer the Songs of Experience, but instead I love the Songs of Innocence, the more nursery rhyme the better. I'm sure Auden would agree...

art-life-art-life, etc, etc.

Last night I had a dream that I recognized a poem by E. Barett-Browning in a book that someone had disguised as Wordsworth (someone she parodies / contends with). I'm not sure what the dream was about, but I flipped open my copy of Aurora Leigh and found a passage that echoes what I was just reading in Merleau-Ponty. Browning writes:

"What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form'
For otherwise we only imprison spirit,
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, -- so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life."

Basically... how should we write? Like we live. And vice versa. This is not a new idea... not even for a Romantic; what is beautiful but the good at which all things aim. Art should be like a living body, whole, unique, etc. Merleau-Ponty says, in turn, “the body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art” (PP 150). Any human action happens with the ambiguous unity of the art work: an action is individual, in relation to its situation “its meaning is not arbitrary and does not dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the world [like a poem] printed on some perishable page” (PP 150).

These prescriptions are pleasant... and maybe often, true. But they also feel insufficient. Certainly there can be bad art, better art, unsuccessful actions, better action, etc. So while the comparison is true, I wondered if it helped Browning at all in her writing ...

All I can think is that she chose, of all forms, the epic which requires a good amount of time to read. So her form, perhaps better than the lyric, reflects life and vice versa because both are temporal. As with reading Remembrance of Things Past, the sheer time it takes to read her book changes your relation to it.

Intruder

Intruder. What a catchy title. Violation can be so seductive. What has been violated? Or whom? By whom ? Who's on the inside now? What was valuable or taken? I for one was hooked by this title of Jill Bialosky's new book. That said, I don't actually enjoy all of the poems -- she mentions The Poet one too many times for me -- but I do like the arc of the story that springs out from the title. I also particularly enjoyed, "An Essay in Two Voices." Here is a passage:

"Perhaps under the transforming powers
of imagination, there's evidence of a positive attitude toward you.
This is what Stendhal thinks of as the 'second crystallization'' ;
and it is at this stage, he believes, that love becomes fixed."

Alan Williamson alludes to the same passage from Stendal's Love in his poem "Love and the Soul." Williamson describes the fixation of love as like "the branch gathering crystals out of the cold water.” Here is the passage from Stendal’s Love to which they both allude:

At the mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals…. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. (Stendhal 19)

For Stendhal, this mental process of crystallization means that after falling in love, “a man in love sees every perfection in the object of his love” (Stendhal 45). In love, we are not blind, but we are misguided; like some sort of cognitively disabled Oliver Sacks patient, we have the strange habit of mis-attributing all virtue to one person. We see generosity in a neighbor, and we think ‘how much better that would look if my beloved did it’ and in a way, begin to believe s/he has done it. This sort of love leads to a “girl drowned” in the love of a man who lets her crystallize under the weight of too many qualities.

In Bialosky's poem, love sustained depends on imagination . The risk, as for Williamson and Stendhal, is not necessarily that love is not requited (though this is a possibility) but that it is imbalanced, substantiated by imagination not by the actual other person. How do we know the difference between empathy and imagination? Between caring blindness to faults and ignoring the real?

I'm going to stick with Bialosky's book through a few more readings because of this poem ... many of the poems share its method of building up and then pulling the rug out from under you. She crafts a gentle domestic setting with children, husbands, flowers and walks and then disrupts it (intrudes?). I get this sense that she's set up a still life on a table -- a table with normal, boring-pretty placesettings -- and then she's tilting the table, more and more until I'm uncomfortable and then concerned and then genuinely worried everything in the nice domestic scene is going to fall off and shatter.

pursuit

I've been reading more philosophy than poetry, but since most of it has been written by Merleau-Ponty, it's still pretty beautiful writing. He says: we are each " a being which is in pursuit of itself outside" (PP 451). We are chasing after our own motivations that lead us away from our bodies toward other bodies, toward other things, toward actions, events. For M-P this is a sort of "realistic" statment: you simply are always already outside of yourself; you're made up of the stuff of the world, a hollow or fold in the world not fundamentally different (as for Sartre, Descartes).

I've begun to think of his work as a sort of virtue ethics, a praxis you must take up, not theorize. He concludes the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from St. Exupery: "Your act is you." And yet as a practice his philosophy seems to differ quite strongly from other philosophies to which I am committed, namely yogic philosophy. In yoga, one wants to stop seeking ourselves "out there"; stop looking at another person's mat to see what you should be doing. But yogic philosophy seems to have little postivie to say about desire or motivation; we are to distinguish ourselves from them.

But for M-P, to be motivated does not mean that we are not free. I wonder if M-P is only describing a situtation rather than prescribing it?

What I've been reading

I've been lazy about posting for the last month so I thought I'd just jump back in with a quicky. I took a trip to my favorite poetry book store today and got some new reading: Maureen McLane's Same Life. The text is sparse and cryptic -- starts with a fragment, makes allusion to sappho -- and it's made more compact by some ampersands and lack of capitalization ... but the content is rich, mystical, loving. I'm digging it.

(I also a copy of Field with some commentary and poems by lots of people I like) I also enjoyed reading the new poems in Linda Bierd's new collected work. Last week, I also enjoyed Jorie Graham's Sea Change... she's sort of a sure-fire fix.

Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn

I found this to be a very thoughtful and even handed review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal's latest book, Beyond the Hoax. Sokal mercilessly mocked a generation of postmodern scholars... and as anyone who's read in that area knows, some of the criticism is deserved. But not all. Blackburn does a very good job of explaining the awkward position that editors are in when facing an interdiscplinary article... and more importantly, a scientific article in a humanities discipline. So many philosophers, literary theorists, and even poets, as I noticed during the last series of WW lectures I attended, want to "interpret" or make use of the latest (or even, just the last 75 years) of developments in biology and physics. But... they just do get it. Well, they get *some* of it or they get the part the publishing scientist has put into words; but the humanities readers are not privy to the data or the technical pieces of the articles, and so they can't critique the foundations of radical claims about, for example, cognition or the relation of time and space. The Sokal hoax is not just an incident of a smart physicist showing up some poorly-educated lit crit-ers, but evidence of the difficulties communicating between the sciences and the humanities in general. Thanks, Blackburn for affirming that.

Tragedy, Logos, Mythos and Louise Gluck's "Lament"

Louise Gluck the prepares the readers of her book, Ararat, to read arguments. She perhaps wishes she didn't have to write so many arguments or respond to them, asking in the opening poem, "Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?" But the trouble is, she was "Born to a vocatoin / to bear witness / to the great mysteries" and she has realized that " these / are proofs, not / mysteries --." On that em dash, we enter the book, to read her proofs or... her readings of the proofs in nature. Throughout the book, Gluck is wishing for wholes, for neat, complete forms like circles; this "love of form is a love of endings." She wants things to be complete, including her arguments. She wants to start telling you about some problem, some situation, caused by nature -- her birth, for example -- and to complete the proposition with a definitive conclusion. But, nature resists endings. And our own nature, more than any other part of nature, resists being judged completely.

In "Lament," Gluck takes a look at her own nature. That is, she takes a look at her whole life, as it will be viewed after death. Or, more precisely, she attempts to take a look at that whole. She tells the reader firmly in the opening sentence that "Suddenly, after you die, those friends / who never agreed about anything / agree about your character." READ MORE... She says, definitively, This is how it will be when you die: everything will be visible and everyone agreed. The mourners will be "like a houseful of singers rehearsing / the same score." They will be the chorus, able finally at the end of your life, to pass judgment. They will be able to decide finally that "you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life." As Aristotle tells us in his Ethics, we cannot know things things until after a life is complete: the goodness of a person's life depends on how it finishes, on the fortunes of his or her family, on the change that person's fortune after life. The goodness of a life is not visible to the one living that life or even to those living that life with her.

Of course, those who gather at Gluck's speaker's funeral are not just a chorus, "they're not performers; / real tears are shed." And, "[l]uckily, you're dead," says Gluck because otherwise this excessive display would overcome you with revulsion. And yet... at the same time, when all the mourners have settle down, have gone over your life, have had the coffee at the reception, you might, in the end, envy these people. They are, after all, alive and you, says the speaker, are dead (that is the premise of the poem). Meanwhile, "Your friends the living embrace one another / gossip a little." And you see that, counter to Aristotle, "this, this, is the meaning of / "a fortunate life": it means / to exist in the present."

To exist in the present. This is something you are not permitted after death. It's something quite hard to accomplish even while you're alive. This is the aim of much yogic philosophy: to be fully present. Yogis struggle for many years, not to struggle with life's projects. But... is that an inhuman aim? Heidegger would think so: to live authentically, is to live in the face of one'death. That is, to live toward and in light of, one's future, not to understand existence only in terms of presence. In Gluck's model,in contrast to Aristotle, fortune is indeterminant. Neither the first nor the third person perspective reveals fortune. The mourner judging a person like a chorus after the person's death can decide the quality of life; the person living a life can never know if she fully exists in the present.

Gluck opens the poem with a hypothesis, considers one traditional response (Aristotle's), then exposes details through phenomenological research (i.e. looking at the lived experience of the situation) and finally concludes with her own assessment. The poem presents an argument, a proof. But we can't understand this proof as simply fuzzy "poet's logic." Gluck is really making a counter argument. To the logos, the account, of Aristotle, she presents another account, another logos. The logos makes use of a bit of mythos (On this distinction, see John Sallis, Being and Logos). But the conclusion we reach at the end, was hard won through this account, not just lightly presented.

Gluck changes the nature of tragedy, even while playing on the classical Greek mode. We cannot witness the lives of others and, through pity and fear, excise emotions in order to learn and live a good live, together as a health polis. There are not good actions or bad actions or fated actions that can dame or redeem us. No, no. The tragedy is that we can only learn, looking on the lives of others, that it is good to be alive, that all there is, is to be present to that life, whatever its quality.

And of course... by imagining her own death, by asking us to imagine ours, Gluck pulls herself and her readers away from the very present she has exhorted us to appreciate. Ironically, only through the lesson learned by looking away from the present -- toward death -- are we reminded to attend to the present.

Now, I'm reading Gluck's "Lament" because I also like to make "arguments" in my poems. I can help it! I read arguments all day. Of course, as a good philosopher trained in the 'continental' / hermeneutic tradition, I am also always asking myself what an argument is in the first place, how it differs from a story, and what the nature of language is that it permits us (if it does) to distinguish those categories, arguments and stories. As a philosopher, writing poetry, I am often worried about making "fuzzy" arguments: the sorts of poetic "arguments" that skip a few step, that enjoy the ad hominem, that don't care about objections. And... of course, as a poet, that I will be ruining my poems with too many arguments! Even Plato tells us in the Phaedo, that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must tell stories, not arguments. But... Gluck is certainly making a sort of argument here. And she's certainly a poet. So I must conclude that either Plato was wrong, (he was badly translated), he means something different by "story" than I do, that he didn't mean the categories as exclusive (you could have stories and arguments), or that poetry has just generally become something different than it was for Plato. I usually resist the last argument as an easy out that assumes a too-flexible view of the human condition. But the other options still leave too much room for a full conclusion.

So... let's abandon that tactic and Plato altogether, and just say that if Gluck can do it, then it's possible. Arguments *in* poems. But... the way to do it, is by way of a story. This poem would most likely fail were it not to include the rhetorical exercise of imagining your own death and the image of the mourners living through the funeral. So... the lesson is, A little of both? Well, that's a recipe that could use a few more details and it certainly won't help me write a poem. But Gluck's work affirms the possibility of this combination. And... outside of its crafty tools and rhetoric, I appreciate the content of the argument she's made. Be present. That's pretty straight forward. Isn't it?