tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49392908554382723062024-03-13T21:02:33.560-05:00Alms for OblivionModernity and its discontents.piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.comBlogger214125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-25748129016890918942014-09-03T15:52:00.003-05:002014-09-03T15:52:29.972-05:00a poem by Robert Lowell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Wallowing in this bloody sty,<br />I cast for fish that pleased my eye<br />(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends<br />No pots of gold to weight its ends);<br />Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout<br />Rose to my bait. They flopped about<br />My canvas creel until the moth<br />Corrupted its unstable cloth.<br /><br />A calendar to tell the day;<br />A handkerchief to wave away<br />The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm<br />Pouching a bottle in one arm;<br />A whiskey bottle full of worms;<br />And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms<br />To mete the worm whose molten rage<br />Boils in the belly of old age?<br /><br />Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--<br />O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,<br />Let suns stay in or suns step out:<br />Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--<br />The fisher's fluent and obscene<br />Catches kept his conscience clean.<br />Children, the raging memory drools<br />Over the glory of past pools.<br /><br />Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls<br />Its bloody waters into holes;<br />A grain of sand inside my shoe<br />Mimics the moon that might undo<br />Man and Creation too; remorse,<br />Stinking, has puddled up its source;<br />Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage.<br />This is the pot-hole of old age.<br /><br />Is there no way to cast my hook<br />Out of this dynamited brook?<br />The Fisher's sons must cast about<br />When shallow waters peter out.<br />I will catch Christ with a greased worm,<br />And when the Prince of Darkness stalks<br />My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .<br />On water the Man-Fisher walks. </div>
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<a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/robert-lowell/poems/" style="color: #005d93; text-decoration: none;">Robert Lowell</a></div>
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-61590598025429236662014-08-09T14:53:00.000-05:002014-08-09T18:58:01.400-05:00A Crisis In Physics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As those of you who have studied the history of science from, approximately, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, to Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, Feinman (the list could go on and on), probably know, Relativity and Quantum mechanics don't work well together; it would, perhaps, not be going too far to say that they are incompatible. Along comes String Theory (about which I know very little), which claims that both theories are a logical consequence of this larger and more inclusive theory. Unfortunately, the equations of String Theory are very difficult (if not impossible ) to solve and (what is even worse) they produce no verifiable predictions.<br />
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This is not a tragic tale (does it remind you just a little of that ancient myth, The Tower of Babel?) What ever made us think that it might be possible to think up a Grand Unified Theory of Everything?<br />
The failure of that dream doesn't mean that there won't be plenty of work for our scientists to do—superconductivity at normal temperatures, for example. (Which may be impossible, but we don't know that yet.)<br />
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-40507439094166551712014-01-05T21:08:00.000-06:002014-05-28T11:15:48.520-05:00Socrates, Muhammad And The Koran<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I’ve been trying to read the Koran, without much success. That is to say, I can read it ok but it is not the sort of book that rewards close attention. It’s boringly repetitive, and has no logical or narrative structure—you can see why those who study it have to memorize it because only those who have the whole thing in their heads can find their way around in it—hence the power of the Mullahs. There is one message that comes through very clearly and very often: if one is not a believer, Satan will get you and you will roast in hell for ever. (But Allah is all wise and all merciful.)<br />
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So the Koran is a barbaric book—in the ancient Greek sense of that word—to those of us at least who don’t understand classical Arabic; for those who do, reading the Koran must be first of all an esthetic experience—Mohammed must have been a great poet, which means that the believers—at least those who understand classical Arabic—are responding not so much to what he says but to the beauty of his language. . . . For them, Socrates’ deep and enduring question, “How should one live?” has been settled. Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews would seem to have a lot in common.<br />
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-49145468000982430652013-08-17T12:39:00.000-05:002013-08-19T15:31:00.235-05:00Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics and Death<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The New York Times recently (August 13) published an article about the problem of what happens to an object that falls into a black hole; more specifically, what happens to the information encoded in such an object: will that information be lost or (somehow) preserved?That was the gist of it anyway; the problem is complicated and elicited a wide range appropriately learned comments, arguments and explanations. By the time the editors had stopped accepting such contributions there were 372 of them, one of which was mine which was neither complicated nor learned but was accepted anyway.<br />
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Why all the fuss? Because that question about the loss or preservation of information is at the center of quantum mechanics in the form of a law, which says that information is always conserved. As you probably know there are a number of such conservation laws in Physics. All of these have been repeatedly tested and confirmed. Until now, perhaps.<br />
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I think that the law of conversation of information is violated every time an organism dies, or a great library is burned, and I said so:<br />
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<span style="background-color: #fafafa; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 12.727272033691406px; line-height: 17.002840042114258px;"><i>Why has no one mentioned death in this controversy about information and whether or not it is conserved? Dead men tell no tales, right? (Well, there are those who believe that there is life after death, of which I am not one.) When we die ALL the information that has been somehow encoded in our brains disappears. When the sun becomes a red giant and gobbles up this planet, all the information stored in it and on it will be gone, forever. Can I prove that? No. But I know it and so do you—most of you, at any rate.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">These remarks were mostly ignored or received with hostility—one fellow said I had my facts wrong, another that by saying I knew something which I could not prove I was revealing a religious bias.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, times, serif;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">Now, having given the problem a little more thought, I realize that I ought to have more forcefully acknowledged the fact that the conservation of information law is one of the foundation principles of the Standard Theory, and has been verified over and over again. Then, the point I should have made is that information has only been shown to be conserved in laboratory experiments at the atomic or sub-atomic level; never in the macroscopic world that we live in. A black-hole, however, brings both realms together; we know or think we know what happens to a macroscopic object that gets pulled into a black hole and disappears. Though it will probably never happen, it is theoretically and practically possible for a spaceship with people in it to encounter the gravitational field of a black-hole and be sucked into it. At that point it makes sense to ask what happens to the information encoded in that spaceship and in the bodies and brains of people in it. What I am claiming is that all that information will be lost forever. Which, of course, is what happens when we die; or, when a great library, like the one in Alexandria, burns.</span></span><br />
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-48279729716167403672013-04-14T14:55:00.000-05:002013-04-14T15:27:08.645-05:00A. N. Wilson's take on Hitler<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Whatever Mr. Wilson writes about, he illuminates—Jesus and St. Paul for example. When I discovered that he had also written a book about Hitler, I read it wondering how he could have found something new and illuminating to say about that demonic character. Well, he did find something new to say about Hitler, something new and wrong-headed. Hitler, he says is the "cloven hoof of the Enlightenment. . . . He believed in a crude Darwinism as do nearly all scientists today and as do almost all 'sensible' sociologists, political commentators and journalistic wiseacres. He thought that humanity in its history was to be explained by the idea of struggle, by the survival of the fittest, by the strongest species overcoming the weaker. Unlike the Darwinians of today, Hitler merely took his belief to its logical conclusion. Hitler's crude belief in science fed his unhesitating belief in modernity." It's surprising to hear such stuff coming from Wilson, who it seems is a more fervent and dogmatic Christian than I'd expected. It's not that Wilson is wrong in what he says about Hitler; it's irrelevant. Ww2 was a continuation of ww1, so that's where one has to start. <span class="s1">When you do that you start with the fact that Germany hated the Enlightenment and in this she had deep affinities with the reactionary doctrines of Joseph de Maistre. This is something that a great historian such as Wilson ought to have been aware of.</span></div>
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Here is how the high-minded German philosopher and theologian Ernst Troeltsch, writing in 1922, tried to explain what had been at stake for Germany in 1914 when she forced an only too willing France and Britain to go to war:</div>
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<i>The peculiarity of German thought, in the form in which it is nowadays so much emphasized, both inside and outside Germany, is primarily derived from the Romantic Movement... Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity. Confronted with the eruption of West-European ideas of Natural Law, and with the revolutionary storms by which they were accompanied, Romanticism pursued an increasingly self-conscious trend in the opposite direction of a conservative revolution. In the spirit of the contemplative and the mystic, the Romanticists penetrated behind the rich variety of actual life to the inward forces by which it was moved, and sought to encourage the play of those forces in a steady movement towards a rich universe of unique and individual structures of the creative human mind.</i></div>
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What he doesn't say is that the ruling classes in Germany wanted above all to preserve their power and privileges and hated England not only because she had the empire that Germany coveted, but especially because England—even the England of Downton Abbey and all that—had a degree of parliamentary democracy that Germany hated and feared. WW 1, therefore, was from the beginning aimed at England. Belgium, for example was to be annexed in order that Germany might have—in addition to the industrial resources of the country—a position on the English Channel from which to harass and threaten English shipping and sea-power. Anyone interested in this subject should consult <i>Germany's Drive to The West: A Study of Germany's Western War Aims During the First World War</i> by Hans W. Gatzke, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966).<br />
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[See also my remarks on Troeltsch's theory of German Romantic thought, 3-24-2008; also, <i>As Germany Saw It, 3-21-2008.]</i></div>
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-17329882234652234612012-09-30T11:18:00.000-05:002012-10-01T12:51:29.409-05:00Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">I saw a great performance of this play last night, at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Try to see it if it ever shows up at a theater near you or, even simpler, watch it on UTube. Or get a copy and read it. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Thinking about this play now, I'm tempted to call it Beckett's Wasteland—</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;">like Eliot's poem it is about futility, boredom and despair. Remember the woman who cries out "What shall we do? What shall we ever do?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">And then there are echoes, as it were, from some the great silent films of the 1920s—Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin. For despite its bleak vision of human life, Beckett's tragic play does have its moments of pure slapstick. But the humor is based on pain.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Perhaps only the murderous 20th century could have produced such play. Beckett had lived through two of the most destructive wars in human history. (The world wars were essentially a single war with a twenty year intermission). The bleakness of Beckett's vision of human life emerges naturally from our historical experience: hundreds of millions of people squashed like insects. Poland, for example, lost a fifth of its population; the Jews, almost wiped out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;">Franz Kafka is a powerful presence in this play, especially perhaps his short parable about a man who is waiting to gain access to the Law. It is called "Before The Law." Here it is:</span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-indent: 35px;">Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-indent: 35px;">During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.</span></i><br />
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piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-26088050201415079812012-09-13T12:56:00.001-05:002012-09-13T13:03:28.744-05:00W. H. Auden: Three Poems<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="p1">IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">I</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">He disappeared in the dead of winter:</div><div class="p1">The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,</div><div class="p1">And snow disfigured the public statues;</div><div class="p1">The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.</div><div class="p1">What instruments we have agree </div><div class="p1">The day of his death was a dark cold day.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Far from his illness</div><div class="p1">The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,</div><div class="p1">The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;</div><div class="p1">By mourning tongues</div><div class="p1">The death of the poet was kept from his poems.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,</div><div class="p1">An afternoon of nurses and rumours;</div><div class="p1">The provinces of his body revolted,</div><div class="p1">The squares of his mind were empty,</div><div class="p1">Silence invaded the suburbs,</div><div class="p1">The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Now he is scattered among a hundred cities</div><div class="p1">And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,</div><div class="p1">To find his happiness in another kind of wood</div><div class="p1">And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.</div><div class="p1">The words of a dead man</div><div class="p1">Are modified in the guts of the living.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">But in the importance and noise of to-morrow</div><div class="p1">When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,</div><div class="p1">And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,</div><div class="p1">And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,</div><div class="p1">A few thousand will think of this day</div><div class="p1">As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">What instruments we have agree</div><div class="p1">The day of his death was a dark cold day.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">II</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:</div><div class="p1"> The parish of rich women, physical decay,</div><div class="p1"> Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.</div><div class="p1"> Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,</div><div class="p1"> For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives</div><div class="p1"> In the valley of its making where executives</div><div class="p1"> Would never want to tamper, flows on south</div><div class="p1"> From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,</div><div class="p1"> Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,</div><div class="p1"> A way of happening, a mouth.</div><div class="p2"><br />
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</div><div class="p1">III</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> Earth, receive an honoured guest:</div><div class="p1"> William Yeats is laid to rest.</div><div class="p1"> Let the Irish vessel lie</div><div class="p1"> Emptied of its poetry.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> In the nightmare of the dark</div><div class="p1"> All the dogs of Europe bark,</div><div class="p1"> And the living nations wait,</div><div class="p1"> Each sequestered in its hate;</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> Intellectual disgrace</div><div class="p1"> Stares from every human face,</div><div class="p1"> And the seas of pity lie</div><div class="p1"> Locked and frozen in each eye.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> Follow, poet, follow right</div><div class="p1"> To the bottom of the night,</div><div class="p1"> With your unconstraining voice</div><div class="p1"> Still persuade us to rejoice;</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> With the farming of a verse</div><div class="p1"> Make a vineyard of the curse,</div><div class="p1"> Sing of human unsuccess</div><div class="p1"> In a rapture of distress;</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> In the deserts of the heart</div><div class="p1"> Let the healing fountain start,</div><div class="p1"> In the prison of his days</div><div class="p1"> Teach the free man how to praise.</div><div class="p1"><br />
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</div><div class="p2">SEPTEMBER 1, 1939</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">I sit in one of the dives</div><div class="p2">On Fifty-second Street</div><div class="p2">Uncertain and afraid</div><div class="p2">As the clever hopes expire</div><div class="p2">Of a low dishonest decade: </div><div class="p2">Waves of anger and fear </div><div class="p2">Circulate over the bright</div><div class="p2">And darkened lands of the earth, </div><div class="p2">Obsessing our private lives;</div><div class="p2">The unmentionable odour of death </div><div class="p2">Offends the September night.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Accurate scholarship can</div><div class="p2">Unearth the whole offence</div><div class="p2">From Luther until now</div><div class="p2">That has driven a culture mad,</div><div class="p2">Find what occurred at Linz,</div><div class="p2">What huge imago made</div><div class="p2">A psychopathic god:</div><div class="p2">I and the public know</div><div class="p2">What all schoolchildren learn,</div><div class="p2">Those to whom evil is done</div><div class="p2">Do evil in return.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Exiled Thucydides knew</div><div class="p2">All that a speech can say</div><div class="p2">About Democracy,</div><div class="p2">And what dictators do,</div><div class="p2">The elderly rubbish they talk</div><div class="p2">To an apathetic grave;</div><div class="p2">Analysed all in his book,</div><div class="p2">The enlightenment driven away,</div><div class="p2">The habit-forming pain,</div><div class="p2">Mismanagement and grief:</div><div class="p2">We must suffer them all again.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Into this neutral air</div><div class="p2">Where blind skyscrapers use </div><div class="p2">Their full height to proclaim </div><div class="p2">The strength of Collective Man, </div><div class="p2">Each language pours its vain </div><div class="p2">Competitive excuse:</div><div class="p2">But who can live for long</div><div class="p2">In an euphoric dream;</div><div class="p2">Out of the mirror they stare, </div><div class="p2">Imperialism's face</div><div class="p2">And the international wrong.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Faces along the bar</div><div class="p2">Cling to their average day:</div><div class="p2">The lights must never go out,</div><div class="p2">The music must always play,</div><div class="p2">All the conventions conspire</div><div class="p2">To make this fort assume</div><div class="p2">The furniture of home;</div><div class="p2">Lest we should see where we are, </div><div class="p2">Lost in a haunted wood,</div><div class="p2">Children afraid of the night</div><div class="p2">Who have never been happy or good.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">The windiest militant trash </div><div class="p2">Important Persons shout</div><div class="p2">Is not so crude as our wish: </div><div class="p2">What mad Nijinsky wrote </div><div class="p2">About Diaghilev</div><div class="p2">Is true of the normal heart; </div><div class="p2">For the error bred in the bone </div><div class="p2">Of each woman and each man </div><div class="p2">Craves what it cannot have, </div><div class="p2">Not universal love</div><div class="p2">But to be loved alone.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">From the conservative dark</div><div class="p2">Into the ethical life</div><div class="p2">The dense commuters come,</div><div class="p2">Repeating their morning vow;</div><div class="p2">'I will be true to the wife,</div><div class="p2">I'll concentrate more on my work,'</div><div class="p2">And helpless governors wake</div><div class="p2">To resume their compulsory game: </div><div class="p2">Who can release them now,</div><div class="p2">Who can reach the dead,</div><div class="p2">Who can speak for the dumb?</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">All I have is a voice</div><div class="p2">To undo the folded lie,</div><div class="p2">The romantic lie in the brain</div><div class="p2">Of the sensual man-in-the-street </div><div class="p2">And the lie of Authority</div><div class="p2">Whose buildings grope the sky: </div><div class="p2">There is no such thing as the State </div><div class="p2">And no one exists alone;</div><div class="p2">Hunger allows no choice</div><div class="p2">To the citizen or the police;</div><div class="p2">We must love one another or die.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">Defenseless under the night</div><div class="p2">Our world in stupor lies;</div><div class="p2">Yet, dotted everywhere,</div><div class="p2">Ironic points of light</div><div class="p2">Flash out wherever the Just</div><div class="p2">Exchange their messages:</div><div class="p2">May I, composed like them</div><div class="p2">Of Eros and of dust,</div><div class="p2">Beleaguered by the same</div><div class="p2">Negation and despair,</div><div class="p2">Show an affirming flame.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div><div class="p1"><br />
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</div><div class="p1"> THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> She looked over his shoulder</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> For vines and olive trees,</div><div class="p1"> Marble well-governed cities</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> And ships upon untamed seas,</div><div class="p1"> But there on the shining metal</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> His hands had put instead</div><div class="p1"> An artificial wilderness</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> And a sky like lead.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">A plain without a feature, bare and brown,</div><div class="p1"> No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,</div><div class="p1">Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, </div><div class="p1"> Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood</div><div class="p1"> An unintelligible multitude,</div><div class="p1">A million eyes, a million boots in line, </div><div class="p1">Without expression, waiting for a sign.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Out of the air a voice without a face</div><div class="p1"> Proved by statistics that some cause was just</div><div class="p1">In tones as dry and level as the place:</div><div class="p1"> No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;</div><div class="p1"> Column by column in a cloud of dust</div><div class="p1">They marched away enduring a belief</div><div class="p1">Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> She looked over his shoulder</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> For ritual pieties,</div><div class="p1"> White flower-garlanded heifers,</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Libation and sacrifice,</div><div class="p1"> But there on the shining metal</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Where the altar should have been,</div><div class="p1"> She saw by his flickering forge-light</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Quite another scene.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot</div><div class="p1"> Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)</div><div class="p1">And sentries sweated for the day was hot:</div><div class="p1"> A crowd of ordinary decent folk</div><div class="p1"> Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke</div><div class="p1">As three pale figures were led forth and bound</div><div class="p1">To three posts driven upright in the ground.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">The mass and majesty of this world, all</div><div class="p1"> That carries weight and always weighs the same</div><div class="p1">Lay in the hands of others; they were small</div><div class="p1"> And could not hope for help and no help came:</div><div class="p1"> What their foes like to do was done, their shame</div><div class="p1">Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride</div><div class="p1">And died as men before their bodies died.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> She looked over his shoulder</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> For athletes at their games,</div><div class="p1"> Men and women in a dance</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Moving their sweet limbs</div><div class="p1"> Quick, quick, to music,</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> But there on the shining shield</div><div class="p1"> His hands had set no dancing-floor</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> But a weed-choked field.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1">A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, </div><div class="p1"> Loitered about that vacancy; a bird</div><div class="p1">Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:</div><div class="p1"> That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,</div><div class="p1"> Were axioms to him, who'd never heard</div><div class="p1">Of any world where promises were kept,</div><div class="p1">Or one could weep because another wept.</div><div class="p2"><br />
</div><div class="p1"> The thin-lipped armorer,</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Hephaestos, hobbled away,</div><div class="p1"> Thetis of the shining breasts</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Cried out in dismay</div><div class="p1"> At what the god had wrought</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> To please her son, the strong</div><div class="p1"> Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles</div><div class="p1"> <span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span> Who would not live long.</div><br />
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</tbody></table></div></div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-7562783352491094912012-07-26T16:18:00.002-05:002012-07-28T10:56:20.745-05:00JESUS: A LIFE by A. N. Wilson (1992)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">This may be the most readable and as well as the most learned book about Jesus, Paul and Christianity that you are likely to lay your hands on.<br />
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Without even trying, Jesus destroyed the world of classical antiquity and wrenched subsequent history into not one but many radical new directions. If you are interested in history you should grab this book and read it cover to cover. It won't change your life but it will, without a doubt, change the way you think about Christianity as Paul more or less invented it, thereby partially taming the anarchic energy loosed upon the world by Jesus's deceptively simple, witty, ironic parables. (Though Wilson doesn't actually say so, he makes it pretty clear that the 'parabolic' style that stamps almost everything that Jesus says was a new literary invention: no one in the ancient classical world had ever talked that way.)<br />
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I think I can best convey something of the tone and content of Wilson's book by quoting some of its concluding pages:<br />
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<i>Most of the history of Christendom may be seen as a series of extraordinary accidents, but it is not purely accidental that Jesus could so easily be adopted and transformed into the Gentile God that he became. It is precisely because he refused to define himself that he was so vulnerable to the assaults of theologians and fantasists. 'Who do men say I am?' He asked the question, but did not tell them what sort of answer they should have given.</i><br />
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<i>Something with which Western minds have found it almost impossible to come to terms is the unsystematic nature of Jesus's thought. Since Jesus existed within an accepted religious framework, and was not setting out to found a new religion, still less to found a philosophical school, there is no need to search among his recorded sayings for a coherent metaphysic. He spoke in parables partly with the deliberate aim of baffling and disturbing his hearers, that hearing they might not understand. He did not wish to deliver them with a finished pattern which they could follow. The pattern was something which, if it existed, they must make for themselves. Most Christian schemes of thought have arisen from a passion to take some group of recorded sayings in the Gospels and to force them to their logical conclusion. The whole of Calvinism, for example, may be deduced from the parable of the women looking for the lost coin. If, as Calvin did, you imagine that this story is a piece of theology, then certain terrible deductions can be made from it. The Almighty is the woman, and the human soul is the coin. It follows that all human impulses toward the divine are worthless, since the initiative, in the process of salvation, must always come not from man but from above. We cannot work for our salvation; we must wait for it. It therefore follows that only those who have been called or elected to glory may be saved—with the cruel concomitant that those who are not so called must be elected to everlasting damnation. [</i>Including unbaptized infants.]. . . .<br />
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<i>Who can not believe Tolstoy when he says that oath-taking is forbidden in the Gospel; that the kingdom is within us, and not of this world; that the true followers of Jesus can therefore never wish to take part in civil systems, and never seek political solutions to the problems which beset society? And yet Jesus, who told his followers to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, is never recorded as recommended a Tolstoyan policy of civil disobedience against Rome of the sort which inspired Gandhi to defy, and ultimately to overthrow, the British Raj in India.</i><br />
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<i>The truth is that Jesus remains too disturbing a figure ever to be left to himself. Christianity in all its multifarious manifestations, Orthodox and heterodox, has been a repeated attempt to make sense of him, to cut him down to size. The extent to which no saying or story of Jesus can, in fact, be taken to its logical conclusion without being contradicted by some other saying or fact is perhaps less a symptom of how imperfectly the Gospels record him than how oblique and how terrifying a figure he actually was in history. Terrifying because he really does undermine everything. He appeals to disruptive imaginations</i><br />
<i>such as Tolstoy and Blake, but even they, in seeking to make his disruptiveness their own, systematize or enclose him. It cannot be done. 'Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.' He will not tell us. . . A patient and conscientious reading of the Gospels will always destroy any explanation which we devise. It if makes sense it is wrong. That is the only reliable rule-of-thumb which we can use when testing the innumerable interpretations of Jesus's being and his place in human history.</i><br />
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If it makes sense it is wrong— in some important ways. (Or, as Wallace Stevens says in one of his poems, "The squirming facts evade the squamous mind.") How many other theories—logical, theological, philosophical, political, cosmological etc.—can you think of that would survive this rule of thumb? No matter how sophisticated your theory, it is bound to encounter facts that cannot be explained or evaded. History is littered with the wreckage of busted doctrines and theories. Even this one?<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-82762013701554024382012-07-01T21:46:00.006-05:002012-07-05T12:19:03.086-05:00T. S. Eliot: the invention of a poetic self and voice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Thanks to Christopher Ricks (<i>Inventions of The March Hare</i>, Poems 1909-1917), we can now read the unpublished poems that preceded <i>Preludes</i>, <i>The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, </i>and the other poems that appeared for the first time in Eliot's first book, <i>Prufrock And Other Observations (1917). [</i>Not 'poems', mind you, but the ironic "observations": Eliot's first readers could not say that they had not been warned.]<br />
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Eliot was interested, from the first, in trying to see what he could make of the urban landscape—not romanticized (or etherealized) as in Wordsworth's early morning view of London from West-<br />
Minster Bridge— but <u>presented</u>, shoved in front of us, in all its ugly reality. I will show you several of these "caprices" as Eliot calls some of them (a musical term like 'preludes').<br />
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<i>First Caprice in North Cambridge</i><br />
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<i>A street-piano, garrulous and frail;</i><br />
<i>The yellow evening flung against the panes</i><br />
<i>Of dirty windows: and the distant strains</i><br />
<i>Of children's voices, ended in a wail.</i><br />
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<i>Bottles and broken glass,</i><br />
<i>Trampled mud and grass;</i><br />
<i>A heap of broken barrows;</i><br />
<i>And a crowd of tattered sparrows</i><br />
<i>Delve in the gutter with sordid patience.</i><br />
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<i>Oh, these minor considerations! . . . . .</i><br />
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<i>Second Caprice in North Cambridge</i><br />
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<i>This charm of vacant lots!</i><br />
<i>The helpless fields that lie</i><br />
<i>Sinister, sterile and blind—</i><br />
<i>Entreat the eye and rack the mind,</i><br />
<i>Demand your pity.</i><br />
<i>With ashes and tins in piles,</i><br />
<i>Shattered bricks and tiles</i><br />
<i>And the debris of a city.</i><br />
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<i>Far from our definitions</i><br />
<i>And our esthetic laws</i><br />
<i>Let us pause</i><br />
<i>With these fields that hold and rack the brain</i><br />
<i>(What: again?)</i><br />
<i>With an unexpected charm</i><br />
<i>And an unexplained repose</i><br />
<i>On an evening in December</i><br />
<i>Under a sunset yellow and rose.</i><br />
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<i>Interlude In London</i><br />
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<i>We hibernate among the bricks</i><br />
<i>And live across the window panes</i><br />
<i>With marmalade and tea at six</i><br />
<i>Indifferent to what the wind does</i><br />
<i>Indifferent to sudden rains</i><br />
<i>Softening last years garden plots</i><br />
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<i>And apathetic, with cigars</i><br />
<i>Careless, while down the street the spring goes</i><br />
<i>Inspiring mouldy flowerpots,</i><br />
<i>And broken flutes at garret windows.</i><br />
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<i>Silence</i><br />
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<i>Along the city streets,</i><br />
<i>It is still high tide,</i><br />
<i>Yet the garrulous waves of life</i><br />
<i>Shrink and divide</i><br />
<i>With a thousand incidents</i><br />
<i>Vexed and debated:—</i><br />
<i>This is the hour for which we waited—</i><br />
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<i>This is the ultimate hour</i><br />
<i>When life is justified.</i><br />
<i>The seas of experience</i><br />
<i>That were so broad and deep,</i><br />
<i>So immediate and steep,</i><br />
<i>Are suddenly still.</i><br />
<i>You may say what you will,</i><br />
<i>At such peace I am terrified.</i><br />
<i>There is nothing else beside.</i><br />
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Pretty good for a 20 or 21 year-old kid, we might say. When we read the poem that these poems were working towards, however, we can see why Eliot might have wanted to make sure that they would never be published. The poem that Eliot really wanted to write is <i>Preludes</i>, a poem that not only anticipates <i>The Wasteland</i> but in my (minority) opinion is superior to it—and less pretentious.<br />
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<i>Preludes</i><br />
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<i> I</i><br />
<i>The winter evening settles down</i><br />
<i>With smell of steaks in passageways.</i><br />
<i>Six o'clock.</i><br />
<i>The burnt-out ends of smoky days.</i><br />
<i>And now a gusty shower wraps</i><br />
<i>The grimy scraps</i><br />
<i>Of withered leaves about your feet</i><br />
<i>And newspapers from vacant lots;</i><br />
<i>The showers beat</i><br />
<i>On broken blinds and chimney-pots,</i><br />
<i>And at the corner of the street</i><br />
<i>A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.</i><br />
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<i>And then the lighting of the lamps.</i><br />
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<i> II</i><br />
<i>The morning comes to consciousness</i><br />
<i>Of faint stale smells of beer</i><br />
<i>From the sawdust-trampled street</i><br />
<i>With all its muddy feet that press</i><br />
<i>To early coffee-stands.</i><br />
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<i>With the other masquerades</i><br />
<i>That time resumes,</i><br />
<i>One thinks of all the hands</i><br />
<i>That are raising dingy shades</i><br />
<i>In a thousand furnished rooms.</i><br />
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<i> III</i><br />
<i>You tossed the blanket from the b</i><i>ed,</i><br />
<i>You lay upon your back and waited;</i><br />
<i>You dozed, and watched the night revealing</i><br />
<i>The thousand sordid images;</i><br />
<i>Of which your soul was constituted</i><br />
<i>They flickered against the ceiling.</i><br />
<i>And when all the world came back</i><br />
<i>And the light crept up between the shutters</i><br />
<i>And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,</i><br />
<i>You had such a vision of the street</i><br />
<i>As the street hardly understands;</i><br />
<i>Sitting along the bed's edge, where</i><br />
<i>You curled the papers from your hair,</i><br />
<i>Or clasped the yellow soles of feet</i><br />
<i>In the palms of both soiled hands.</i><br />
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<i> IV</i><br />
<i>His soul stretched across the skies</i><br />
<i>That fade behind a city block,</i><br />
<i>Or trampled by insistent feet</i><br />
<i>At four and five and six o'clock;</i><br />
<i>And short square fingers stuffing pipes,</i><br />
<i>And evening newspapers, and eyes</i><br />
<i>Assured of certain certainties,</i><br />
<i>The conscience of a blackened street</i><br />
<i>Impatient to assume the world.</i><br />
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<i>I am moved by fancies that are curled</i><br />
<i>Around these images and cling:</i><br />
<i>The notion of some infinitely gentle</i><br />
<i>Infinitely suffering thing.</i><br />
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<i>Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;</i><br />
<i>The worlds revolve like ancient women</i><br />
<i>Gathering fuel in vacant lots.</i><br />
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Eliot wrote a small number of great poems, but never anything greater than this. <i>Prufrock, </i>which seems to have been written before <i>Preludes, </i>is wonderful for the way it uses the urban materials and insights of the former poem for comic rather than tragic effect. The world of Prufrock is neither as desperate or as sad as that other poem had brilliantly forced us to see it. Did it ever occur to Eliot when he came to write <i>The Wasteland </i>that he had already written it?—but without the pompous notes, shallow anthropology and—most of all (from my point of view) the Christian allegorizing.<br />
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Many of the poems that Eliot published in 1917 and 1920 strike me (and not only me, I suppose) as either trivial ("Aunt Helen" or "Cousin Nancy" for example) or pursuing some mostly private symbolism, as in the Sweeney poems, or "Whispers of Immortality." The mystery is, how such a private, deliberately obscure, writer of a handful of poems could have become, so widely acclaimed as a great poet? (A similar question could be asked about Wallace Stevens.)<br />
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Here are some poem that, in addition to <i>Preludes</i> and <i>Prufrock </i>some poems that I keep coming back to: two poems about heartlessness: <i>Portrait of A Lady </i>and <i>La Figlia che Piange.</i><br />
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I also like <i>Rhapsody on a Windy Night, </i>which seems to be about another kind of failure—the failure, perhaps, of someone from the world described in <i>Preludes—</i>to escape<i> </i>or even to change his or her desperately regimented and impoverished life; that person might even be Prufrock himself. I also like <i>Marina</i> and <i>Burnt Norton </i>(probably—in the case of the latter poem— because of that Rose Garden full of children which the poet can never recover.)<br />
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It may, I know, be very old fashioned, even a trifle vulgar, to like poems that make connections between art and life. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.<br />
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You can see why Eliot despised the poetry and novels of Thomas Hardy.<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-21286948277575334272012-06-18T16:18:00.000-05:002012-06-18T16:18:50.931-05:00The Wasteland<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <br />
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</div><div class="p2">I recently read vol. 1 of Eliot’s letters—a little like reading an epistolary novel. My hero is not TS, heroic worker that he was, but poor little Viviene who seems to have done her best only to be shunted off finally to an insane asylum and heartlessly abandoned. Heartlessness, is what a lot of Eliot’s poems, including The Wasteland, are about. What did Eliot mean when he said that his marriage brought no happiness to his wife or (evidently) to him in whom it created the state of mind in which he wrote The Wasteland? I’ve never seen that remark carefully elucidated. I don’t doubt that Eliot’s unhappy marriage is in there–though maybe not in the Game of Chess section which Viviene read and seems not to have taken exception to—but I think the Great War, which is never mentioned in these letters, has to be a major and tragic presence in The Wasteland. Isn’t that—and the wars to come -what the Thunder is talking about in the final act of this five-act tragedy? “I am moved” says the voice of Preludes, “by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.” I, for my part, have always been moved by this heartbreaking poem—which Eliot messed up with his stupid and irrelevant notes; why couldn’t he leave his (and Pound’s) masterpiece well enough alone? I’ve also been put off by his use of foreign languages—with a conclusion in Sanscrit?—why isn’t plain English good enough? W. C. Williams was right to be enraged by all that stuff. And now I find that I have to take some of it back: I love the lines about the girl in the hyacinth garden—and the man who has let her down—framed by those lines in German from Tristan. How does one talk about poetry like that? For that matter, how can one talk practical criticism about this poem at all?</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">I read Christopher Ricks’ Decisions and Revisions, which smart and intelligent as it is doesn’t to tell me as much about Eliot’s poetry as I had expected and hoped for. Two-thirds of the book is about Eliot’s criticism, which no longer interests me—annoys me in fact: I’ve come to dislike the flat, dead, omniscient tone he puts on. How could Ricks have got the balance of his book so wrong? The poetry is what matters—the greatest poetry of the 20th century— not the criticism. The last section, on the delicacy of Eliot’s poetic revisions is wonderful and enlightening. I wanted more and didn’t get any more.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">I came across Preludes and Prufrock at the age of 14 in a highschool English textbook. Of course I didn’t know what to think, I wasn’t thinking at all, but the sound of that poetry was some sort of epiphany (in hindsight); it got caught in my inner ear and remained there. I fell in love with the sound of Eliot’s poetry as later I fell in love with the sound of Frost’s—but not Stevens. Eliot and Frost write about stuff that’s real—there’s no sense of a slight-of-hand man in Frost and Eliot; Stevens writes about poetry and the imagination. Well, these are real too but not to your or my common reader. Stevens was an esthete and wrote for esthetes. Once in a while, he talks about realities as in Sunday Morning, The Death of a Soldier and Hibiscus on Dreaming Shores (which is about one of the great realities, boredom), but mostly not about anything that matters to ordinary people.</div><div class="p2">That’s why snobs like Poirier, DeMan and all the others made so much of him. W. C. Williams missed his mark. He should have reserved his animus for Stevens instead of attacking Eliot.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p2">When we were in China (1983-84) both Kathy and I taught courses in American Lit to the young instructors at Hebei University (in Baoding). The one poem they all wanted to read was The Wasteland. That’s what tney knew about and had lived through, the nearly total collapse of Chinese ciivilization. Of course there was no way we could explain it to them—we couldn’t even explain it to ourselves but it didn’t matter; the poetry told them what they already knew. Now we, in the West, are seeing for ourselves what they had already experienced. Eliot was ahead of his time as well as of it.</div></div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-92216264967182358262012-04-29T14:54:00.002-05:002012-04-29T16:13:04.932-05:00Dante's Divine Comedy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div style="text-align: justify;"><div style="text-align: left;">Dante's <i>Commedia</i>, like any other poem that's worth reading is best read in the language it was written in, but that is not always possible and most of us have to make do with translations. This is especially true of Dante's epic but since I (like most of us) cannot read Italian, I have to make do with one of the many excellent translations that can be easily obtained. Poetry, as has often been said, is what gets lost in translation, which is why I don't generally read poetry in other languages than English, but sometimes a poem is so important that you have to read it in any way you can; Dante's poem, like Homer's, is one of these.<br />
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The plot line of Dante's poem is easily described: half-way through his life he says (which would have been about 1300 in his case), he lost his way in a dark wood where he would have perished had it not been for his good angel, Beatrice, who sends him a guide, Vergil (author of the <i>Aeneid</i>) to set him on the right path. The right path takes him through hell, purgatory and heaven corresponding to the three books into which the Commedia is divided: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio—a guided tour, in other words of the (then) known universe. In the first, Dante is shown the inhuman, disgusting and eternal tortures inflicted upon the damned, in all their various categories; in the second the milder forms of penance that everyone must undergo since, as the saying goes, no one is perfect; Paradise is, well, paradise where nothing much happens— though the poetry, I hear, is pretty great.<br />
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The ordinary reader (sinners, all of us) will always prefer the Inferno which is dramatic, to the other two books which are not. Part of the drama of the Inferno consists of Dante's human response to God's system of criminal justice: the appalling <i>injustice</i> of torture without end—which he and his readers are relentlessly forced to observe: he weeps for these poor devils and so do we. (What we wonder would Jesus say about all this?) Why does there have to be a hell at all; why not shut it up and send all the sinners to purgatory? These are not the questions that we are supposed (in the divine scheme of things) to be asking and they are certainly not the questions that God in all His omniscience thought he had a right to expect when he sends Dante, the greatest poet of the age, on a guided tour of his penal colony.<br />
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Did Dante intend his poem to have these effects? Of course that is a question that cannot be answered; it is a fact however that Dante's poem, like Homer's, necessarily undermines our faith in divine justice; and that both of these poets knew what they were doing—and why. That is to say, Homer and Dante were an important part of the process (historical, philosophical, scientific) that produced the essentially secular societies of the West.<br />
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When God failed us—consider all the millions of people who died in our various wars of religion—we put our faith in the rule of law which, having been largely corrupted by money and power, is now failing us as well. Having poisoned the air, water and climate of the world, we are now running out of time.<br />
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</div></div></div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-71627577684557180632012-03-29T01:05:00.097-05:002012-04-06T19:21:53.975-05:00Of gods and humans in Homer's Iliad<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The siege of Troy is in its ninth year, and the Greeks have nothing to show for it but some loot from other cities allied with Troy, and most of that has been appropriated by Agamemnon, the king. There is muttering in the ranks, by Thersites especially, which is brutally put down. This business takes up the better part of a day. The next day, as the armies are getting ready to resume battle, a curious interlude occurs: Alexandros (a.k.a. Paris) leaps forth from the Trojan ranks and issues a challenge "to the best of the Argives [Greeks] to fight man to man with him in bitter combat." On seeing Menelaos (the man he has wronged by running off with his wife, Helen) looking like a lion that has seen his prey and is getting ready to eat it, Paris shrinks back into the ranks hoping no one will notice. His brother Hektor sees it all, however, and rebukes him in the harshest terms:<br />
<br />
<i>Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling,</i><br />
<i>Better had you never been born, or killed unwedded.</i><br />
<i>Truly I could have wished it so; it would be far better</i><br />
<i>Than to have you with us to our shame, for others to sneer at.</i><br />
<i>Surely now the flowing-haired Achaians laugh at us,</i><br />
<i>Thinking you are our bravest champion, only because your</i><br />
<i>looks are handsome, but there is no strength in your heart, no courage.</i><br />
<i>Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels</i><br />
<i>Assembling oarsmen to help you you sailed over the water,</i><br />
<i>and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a fair woman</i><br />
<i>from a remote land, whose lord's kin were spearmen and fighters,</i><br />
<i>to your father a big sorrow, and your city, and all your people,</i><br />
<i>to yourself a thing shameful but bringing joy to the enemy?</i><br />
<i>And now you would not stand up against warlike Menelaos?</i><br />
<i>Thus you would learn of a man whose blossoming wife you have taken.</i><br />
<i>The lyre would not help you then, nor the favors of Aphrodite,</i><br />
<i>Nor your locks, when rolled in the dust, nor all your beauty.</i><br />
(Bk 3, lines 39-55)<br />
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Paris is not a weakling, however, and, fully recognizing the justice of Hektor's rebuke, agrees to do battle with Menelaos; the winner keeps Helen and the war will be over:<br />
<br />
<i>. . . . do not</i><br />
<i>bring up against me the sweet favors of golden Aphrodite.</i><br />
<i>Never to be cast away are gifts of the gods, magnificent,</i><br />
<i>which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.</i><br />
<i>Now though, if you wish me to fight it out and do battle,</i><br />
<i>make the rest of the Trojans sit down, and all the Achaians,</i><br />
<i>and set me in the middle with Menelaos the warlike</i><br />
<i>to fight together for the sake of Helen and all her possessions.</i><br />
<i>That one of us who wins and is proved stronger, let him</i><br />
<i>take the possessions fairly and the woman, and lead her homeward. . .</i><br />
<i>So he spoke, and Hektor hearing his word was happy</i><br />
<i>and went into the space between and forced back the Trojan battalions</i><br />
<i>holding his spear by the middle until they were all seated.</i><br />
<i>But the flowing-haired Achaians kept pointing their bows at him</i><br />
<i>with arrows and with flung stones striving ever to strike him</i><br />
<i>until Agamemnon lord of men cried out in a great voice:</i><br />
<i>'Argives, hold: cast at him no longer, o sons of the Achaians.</i><br />
<i>Hektor of the shining helm is trying to tell us something.'</i><br />
<i> So he spoke, and they stopped fighting and suddenly all fell</i><br />
<i>silent; but Hektor between them spoke now to both sides:</i><br />
<i>'Hear from me, Trojans and strong-greaved Achaians, the word</i><br />
<i>of Alexandros, for whose sake this strife has arisen.</i><br />
<i>He would have all the rest of the Trojans and all the Achaians</i><br />
<i>lay aside on the bountiful earth their splendid armor</i><br />
<i>while he himself in the middle and warlike Menelaos</i><br />
<i>fight along for the sake of Helen and all her possessions.</i><br />
<i>That one of them who wins and is proved stronger, let him</i><br />
<i>take the possessions fairly, and the woman, and lead her homeward</i><br />
<i>while the rest of us cut our oaths of faith and friendship.</i><br />
<i> So he spoke, and all of them stayed stricken to silence;</i><br />
<i>but among them spoke out Menelaos of the great war cry:</i><br />
<i>'Listen now to me also; since beyond all others this sorrow</i><br />
<i>comes closest to my heart, and I think the Argives and Trojans</i><br />
<i>can go free of each other at last. You have suffered much evil</i><br />
<i>for the sake of this my quarrel since Alexandros began it.</i><br />
<i>As for that one of us two to whom death and doom are given,</i><br />
<i>let him die: the rest of you be made friends with each other.</i><br />
(3.63-102)<br />
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And right then and there the whole damn war might have ended, if the gods would only allow their human playthings to settle their own affairs. This the gods are unwilling to do, however, for, as Homer makes very clear, the Gods have no lives of their own; without their human subjects or slaves, through whom they live vicariously (or parasitically), their lives would be empty, meaningless—an eternity of boredom. So, just as Menelaos is about to kill Paris, Aphrodite whisks him off to his bedroom in Troy, to which she summons Helen, who at first is so ashamed that she dares, in an act of extraordinary courage, to defy her patroness—but only for a moment.<br />
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<i>'Is it because Menelaos has beaten great Alexandros</i><br />
<i>and wishes, hateful even as I am, to carry me homeward,</i><br />
<i>is it for this that you stand in your treachery now beside me?</i><br />
<i>Go yourself and sit beside him, abandon the god's way,</i><br />
<i>turn your feet back never again to the path of Olympos</i><br />
<i>and stay with him forever, and suffer for him and look after him</i><br />
<i>until he makes you his wedded wife, or makes you his slave girl.</i><br />
<i>Not I. I am not going to him. It would be too shameful.</i><br />
<i>I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter</i><br />
<i>would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused with sorrows.'</i><br />
<i> Then in anger Aphrodite the shining spoke to her:</i><br />
<i>'Wretched girl, do not tease me lest in anger I forsake you</i><br />
<i>and grow to hate you as much as now I terribly love you,</i><br />
<i>lest I encompass you in hard hate, caught between both sides,</i><br />
<i>Danaans and Trojans alike, and you wretchedly perish.' </i>(3.403-17)<br />
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And so Helen obeys, returns to Paris, for whom she has as much contempt as she has for herself, and disappears from the poem—as tragic a figure in her way as Achilles is in his.<br />
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These (attempted) rebellions have not gone unnoticed by Zeus and the other gods. He is prepared to be forgiving, or so he says, knowing that his words will enrage his wife, Hera, and daughter, Athena, whose hatred of Troy is unappeasable.<br />
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<i>'Let us consider then,' he says, 'how these things shall be accomplished,</i><br />
<i>whether again to stir up grim warfare and the terrible</i><br />
<i>fighting, or cast down love and make them friends with each other.</i><br />
<i>If somehow this way could be sweet and pleasing to all of us,</i><br />
<i>the city of lord Priam might still be a place men dwell in,</i><br />
<i>and Menelaos could take away with him Helen of Argos.'</i><br />
<i> So he spoke; and Athene and Hera muttered, since they were</i><br />
<i>sitting close to each other, devising evil for the Trojans.</i><br />
<i>Still Athena stayed silent and said nothing, but only</i><br />
<i>sulked at Zeus her father, and savage anger took hold of her.</i><br />
<i>But the heart of Hera could not contain her anger, and she spoke forth:</i><br />
<i>'Majesty, son of Kronos, what sort of thing have you spoken?</i><br />
<i>How can you wish to make wasted and fruitless all this endeavor,</i><br />
<i>the sweat that I have sweated in toil, and my horses worn out</i><br />
<i>gathering my people, and bringing evil to Priam and his children.</i><br />
<i>Do it then; but not all the rest of us gods will approve you'</i><br />
<i> Deeply troubled, Zeus who gathers clouds answered her:</i><br />
<i>'Dear lady, what can be all the evils done to you</i><br />
<i>by Priam and the sons of Priam, that you are thus furious</i><br />
<i>forever to bring down the strong-founded city of Ilion?</i><br />
<i>If you could walk through the gates and towering ramparts</i><br />
<i>and eat Priam and the children of Priam raw, and the other</i><br />
<i>Trojans, then, then only might you glut at last your anger.</i><br />
<i>Do as you please then. Never let this quarrel hereafter</i><br />
<i>be between you and me a bitterness for both of us.</i><br />
<i>And put away in your thoughts this other thing that I tell you:</i><br />
<i>whenever I in turn am eager to lay waste some city,</i><br />
<i>as I please, one in which are dwelling men who are dear to you,</i><br />
<i>you shall not stand in the way of my anger, but let me do it,</i><br />
<i>since I was willing to grant you this with my heart unwilling. . . .</i><br />
<i> Then the goddess the ox-eyed Lady Hera answered:</i><br />
<i>'Of all cities there are three that are dearest to my own heart:</i><br />
<i>Argos and Sparta and Mykenai of the wide ways. All these,</i><br />
<i>whenever they become hateful to your heart, sack utterly. </i>(4.14-53)<br />
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Meanwhile, as Zeus and Hera are settling their own jurisdictional disputes, the truce established by Hektor is still in effect; if nothing is done it might become permanent: the two sides might, for example, begin to understand that they have nothing to fight about and are merely entertaining the gods. Hera is the first to say, in effect, let's get back to business:<br />
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<i>'Come then, in this thing let us both give way to each other, </i><br />
<i>I to you, you to me, and so the rest of the immortal</i><br />
<i>gods will follow. Now in speed give orders to Athene</i><br />
<i>to visit horrible war again on Achaians and Trojans,</i><br />
<i>and try to make it so that that the Trojans are first offenders</i><br />
<i>to do injury against the oaths to the far-famed Achaians.'</i><br />
<i> She spoke, nor did the father of the gods and men disobey her,</i><br />
<i>but immediately he spoke in winged words to Athene:</i><br />
<i>'Go now swiftly to the host of the Achaians and Trojans</i><br />
<i>and try to make it so that the Trojans are the first offenders</i><br />
<i>to do injury . . . .'</i><br />
<i>Speaking so he stirred up Athene, who was eager before this,</i><br />
<i>and she went in a flash of speed down the pinnacles of Olympos. . . .</i><br />
<i>[and] in the likeness of a man merged among the Trojans assembled . . .</i><br />
<i>searching for godlike Pandaros, a man blameless and powerful,</i><br />
<i>standing still, and about him were the ranks of strong, shield-armored</i><br />
<i>people. . . </i><br />
<i>Speaking in winged words she stood beside him and spoke to him:</i><br />
<i>'Wise son of Lykaon, would you let me persuade you?</i><br />
<i>So you might dare send a flying arrow against Menelaos</i><br />
<i>and win you glory and gratitude in the sight of all Trojans,</i><br />
<i>particularly beyond all else with prince Alexandros.</i><br />
<i>Beyond all besides you would carry away glorious gifts from him,</i><br />
<i>were he to see warlike Menelaos, the son of Atreus,</i><br />
<i>struck down by your arrow, and laid on the sorrowful corpse-fire.</i><br />
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</i><br />
And so the arrow is loosed, the truce treacherously broken, and the great war continues to its terrible and tragic conclusion. We should note, in passing, that Athena does not keep her promise to Pandarus, but treacherously brushes the arrow aside so that Menelaos merely suffers a superficial wound.<br />
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The significance of this moment—so close to the beginning of the great poem—seems not to have been sufficiently noticed: for the first time in human history, human beings try to break away from the tyranny of the Gods.<br />
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The only thing we know about Homer, besides his name, is that he was evidently the last of an ancient tradition of professional poetic singers or performers. We know he was the last, because he was the one who either fixed the poem forever by writing it down, sometime in the 8th century BC (which was when the Greek alphabet became established, and Greek became a written language), or by dictating it to someone who could. (There is a self-referential moment in the <i>Odyssey, </i>when Odysseus who is still unknown to his hosts on the island of Phaecia, is present at one of these performances of the poem that would become the <i>Iliad. </i>When his hosts see the tears running down the face of this stranger, they ask him who he is.)<br />
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Perhaps you should also know that the <i>Iliad is </i>the first tragedy. And what is tragedy? Aristotle's remarks in the <i>Poetics</i> are not very helpful, mainly I think because tragedy is about the basic irrationality of human existence—a very unAristotelian notion: a tragic choice is a choice in which reason is useless; a perfectly rational argument can be made for all the choices you face—and doing nothing is not an option. And it gets worse: equally rational arguments can be made for doing contradictory or inconsistent things. Such situations are not supposed to arise in Aristotle's Ethics. Homer's cosmos, founded on the amorality, unpredictability and arbitrariness of the Olympian gods, is antithetical to everything that Aristotle believed in. Nor, it seems to me, was life under Yahweh much better—despite the decalogue which always seemed to have been intended for other people. Job thought Yahweh pretty much the same as the devil and he wasn't far wrong. (The Palestinians certainly think so, justifiably.) After Job, Yahweh makes his exit, from the bible and from history. (I'd be inclined to say "good riddance" if it weren't for the fact that the Decalogue still makes pretty good sense; or would if we could alter the command to honor ones' father and mother in such a way as to give it serious moral force: "Don't <i>dishonor</i> your father and mother." All the other commands would then make sense for atheists as well as believers.)<br />
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So why was it that it was the Greeks, not the Jews, who invented tragedy?<br />
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Homer, at least, had no illusions about the gods; nor did Socrates, who was executed for saying far less subversive things about them than Homer does in the <i>Iliad,</i> one of the most widely read and admired poems of classical antiquity. You can see why, given a choice between the Olympian gods and Jesus, many Romans made the switch. <br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-58343891094849810352012-03-16T15:12:00.004-05:002012-04-01T11:39:02.591-05:00On the radical incompleteness of modern physics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Kurt Gödel published two theorems in 1930 that establish the </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> capable of doing arithmetic. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">The first of these famous "incompleteness" theorems (and here I quote from Wikipedia), "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers (or irrational or complex numbers) that are true, but that are unprovable within the system." (Should one add axioms that make the truth or falsity of these statements provable, it will be possible to find more true statements that can not proved within the axiomatic structure of this new, enlarged axiomatic system.)The second incompleteness theorem, a </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corollary" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-decoration: none;" title="Corollary">corollary</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Something analogous seems to have happened to physics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">The explanatory and predictive power of modern physics has and is being repeatedly demonstrated at both the relativistic and sub-atomic scales. The theories of special and general relativity have been tested again and again and not found wanting. The same can be said of The Standard Theory of Quantum Mechanics—the missing link of the Standard Theory, the Higgs Boson, will it seems, soon be cemented into place. But all is not well: there seems to be some inconsistency between Relativity and the Standard Theory. Every attempt to unify these two theories has failed. Both of these are field theories, which is to say that every particle or object in the universe is connected with a field and what these theories describe (if that's the word) is these fields. You can feel the electro-magnetic field of a bar magnet if you put an iron object near it and you can feel the field of gravity every time you fall; you can see it in the motion of a pendulum—or of the moon; if there is such a thing as the Higgs boson, and it seems that there is, you can feel the presence of the Higgs field, which is what gives matter its mass, every time you push someone on a swing and feel the inertia of his or her body.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">The trouble is that the equations of the Standard Theory can't be used to describe relativistic fields and the equations of relativity can't be used to describe electromagnetic fields, or indeed any of the other fields described in the Standard Theory. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">So, there's a massive disconnect between Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. For a while it seemed that String Theory (which I do not understand at <i>all</i>) might be able to bring Relativity and Quantum Mechanics together: the equations of Relativity and those of Quantum Mechanics show up quite naturally in the mathematics of string theory. There's just one hitch, and it is not a small one: the mathematics of string theory has not produced a single verifiable prediction since it was first invented more than twenty years ago. And that's not for lack of trying.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Just as Gödel demonstrated the fundamental incompleteness of mathematics, so it would seem that we must now face the fact that physics too is fundamentally incomplete—not because of some radical fault in our assumptions or our thinking or our experimental procedures, but because nature is more mysterious than we can possibly understand. It's not that we have somehow or other asked the wrong questions but that nature is so strange that we will never, ever know how to ask the right ones. Maybe there aren't any. I find that last possibility not only interesting and amusing but also satisfying.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">And then there's the fact that about 96% of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which cannot be accounted for in any of our theories.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">I don't want to be misunderstood: none of this has anything to do with religion; if you want to fill in the empty blanks with the word 'god' that's your business, not mine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">Gödel's incompleteness theorem did not slow down the development of logic and mathematics, even slightly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">The incompleteness of physics will have no effect on the work that is now going on at the frontiers of science in Astronomy or condensed-matter physics or superconductivity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 19px;">(Since my ignorance of these matters while not total, is profound, I would welcome comments or corrections from those who really know what they are talking about. I doubt, however, that I am seriously mistaken on my main point, the radical incompleteness of modern physics.)</span></span><br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-89922732497351826392012-03-12T17:40:00.002-05:002012-03-12T18:34:26.321-05:00Keats' Fall of Hyperion: Desperate Questions, Courageous Answers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">When Keats knew he was dying he took a last look at himself and his fellow poets and he did not like what he saw; that at least is the conclusion I draw from one of his last (and incomplete) poems, "The Fall of Hyperion", which is grafted onto an earlier and also incomplete poem, "Hyperion", a sort of historical allegory written in Miltonic blank verse—a style and subject matter so remote from the astonishing poetry of, say, "The Ode To A Nightingale," that, not surprisingly, these "Hyperion" fragments have been largely forgotten.<br />
<br />
The second of these fragments—"The Fall of Hyperion"—is what interests me here.<br />
<br />
It begins somewhat oddly by drawing a distinction between the dreams of religious fanatics and savages, which are lost to posterity because they were never written down; and the melodious utterances of poets which survive simply because they were. And Keats goes on to claim that poetry is a universal human right: "<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Who alive can say,/</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'"</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Why "oddly"? Because, as you will see, should you go on to read the selection which I have printed below, </span>dreamers, and especially poetic dreamers are looked upon with contempt by the priestess of the temple in the dream that Keats is here describing.<br />
<br />
I shall try to summarize this dream here (or rather, as we shall see, a dream within a dream): the dreamer finds himself in a sort of Edenic paradise, where it looks as if an inconceivably luxurious picnic has just been hurriedly, and recently, abandoned—for the food and drink spread out in such abundance is still perfectly fresh and the dreamer proceeds to satisfy his hunger and thirst. The food is harmless but the beverage he sips knocks him out—indeed, it almost kills him, and he is soon to have another near-death experience. Poetry, it seems, is a dangerous trade.<br />
<br />
When the dreamer wakes up, (in his dream), he finds himself inside an incomparably vast and ancient temple; far off, he sees a colossal statue with an altar between its feet with a priestess whose presence is never very well explained since there are no worshippers anywhere to be seen—and perhaps there hadn't been any for a very long time. As the dreamer approaches, the priestess tells him, in effect, that he has fallen into a trap, and that if he can't climb the steps leading to the altar in about two seconds he's going to die.<br />
<br />
When he reaches the top step just in time and life returns to his half-dead body, and he asks the priestess what this test has been all about, she tells him—and this seems to be the heart of the matter—that<br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"None can usurp this height . . .</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">But those to whom the miseries of the world</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Are misery, and will not let them rest."</span><br />
<div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">No one had ever defined the poetic calling in these revolutionary terms before, and had Keats been content to let his poem end with this courageous manifesto, the world might have had to sit up and take note. The trouble is, Keats own extraordinary genius had not and could not have taken this implicitly revolutionary turn. Moreover, he was too intellectually honest to let Moneta (the name of this priestess) have the last word:</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: white;">"Are there not thousands in the world," said I,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Who love their fellows even to the death;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Who feel the giant agony of the world;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"And more, like slaves to poor humanity,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Labour for mortal good? I sure should see</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Other men here; but I am here alone."</span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">To which Moneta replies:</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: white;">"Those whom thou spak'st of are no vision'ries,"</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Rejoin'd that voice; "they are no dreamers weak;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"They seek no wonder but the human face,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"No music but a happy noted voice;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"They come not here, they have no thought to come;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"And thou art here, for thou art less than they:</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"A fever of thyself think of the Earth;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"What bliss even in hope is there for thee?</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"What haven? every creature hath its home;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Whether his labours be sublime or low</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Only the dreamer venoms all his days,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shar'd,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Such things as thou art are admitted oft</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"And suffer'd in these temples: for that cause</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Thou standest safe beneath this statue's knees."</span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Keats, after all is nothing but a dreamer—the lowest of the low, a "thing", who "venoms all his days, bearing more woe than all his sins deserve." Therefore he has been admitted to this temple as a kind of favor (some favor considering the fact that he damn near dies of it.) </div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">But surely, he says "<span style="background-color: white;">not all</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Those melodies sung into the world's ear</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: white;">"Are useless: sure a poet is a sage;</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"A humanist, physician to all men.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"That I am none I feel, as vultures feel</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"They are no birds when eagles are abroad.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"What am I then? Thou spakest of my tribe:</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"What tribe?" </span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">To which Moneta replies, mercilessly,</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: white;">"Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"The poet and the dreamer are distinct,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"The one pours out a balm upon the world,</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">"The other vexes it."</span></div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">This is more than Keats can take:</div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Then shouted I</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Spite of myself, and with a Pythia's spleen,</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Apollo! faded! O far flown Apollo!</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Where is thy misty pestilence to creep</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Into the dwellings, through the door crannies</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Of all mock lyrists, large self worshipers,</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse.</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"Though I breathe death with them it will be life</span><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"To see them sprawl before me into graves."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">(I take it that Keats here is referring to Wordsworth, among others.)</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;">And this effectively ends the poem and the argument in which nothing has been concluded; though it is worth noting that it is Keats who has the last word.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
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<div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"></div><div><div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #37519f;"><i>T</i></span><span style="background-color: white;">he Fall of Hyperion - A Dream</span></div><div><div><span new="" roman="" style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;" times=""><br />
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<b>CANTO I</b></span><br />
<div style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span new="" roman="" times="">Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave<br />
A paradise for a sect; the savage too<br />
From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep<br />
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not<br />
Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf<br />
The shadows of melodious utterance.<br />
But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;<br />
For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,<br />
With the fine spell of words alone can save<br />
Imagination from the sable charm<br />
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,<br />
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'<br />
Since every man whose soul is not a clod<br />
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved<br />
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.<br />
Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse<br />
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known<br />
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.<br />
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Methought I stood where trees of every clime,<br />
Palm, myrtle, oak, and sycamore, and beech,<br />
With plantain, and spice blossoms, made a screen;<br />
In neighbourhood of fountains, by the noise<br />
Soft showering in my ears, and, by the touch<br />
Of scent, not far from roses. Turning round<br />
I saw an arbour with a drooping roof<br />
Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms,<br />
Like floral censers swinging light in air;<br />
Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound<br />
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,<br />
Which, nearer seen, seem'd refuse of a meal<br />
By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;<br />
For empty shells were scattered on the grass,<br />
And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more,<br />
Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.<br />
Still was more plenty than the fabled horn<br />
Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting<br />
For Proserpine return'd to her own fields,<br />
Where the white heifers low. And appetite<br />
More yearning than on earth I ever felt<br />
Growing within, I ate deliciously;<br />
And, after not long, thirsted, for thereby<br />
Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice<br />
Sipp'd by the wander'd bee, the which I took,<br />
And, pledging all the mortals of the world,<br />
And all the dead whose names are in our lips,<br />
Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.<br />
No Asian poppy nor elixir fine<br />
Of the soon fading jealous Caliphat,<br />
No poison gender'd in close monkish cell<br />
To thin the scarlet conclave of old men,<br />
Could so have rapt unwilling life away.<br />
Among the fragrant husks and berries crush'd,<br />
Upon the grass I struggled hard against<br />
The domineering potion; but in vain:<br />
The cloudy swoon came on, and down I sunk<br />
Like a Silenus on an antique vase.<br />
How long I slumber'd 'tis a chance to guess.<br />
When sense of life return'd, I started up<br />
As if with wings; but the fair trees were gone,<br />
The mossy mound and arbour were no more:<br />
I look'd around upon the carved sides<br />
Of an old sanctuary with roof august,<br />
Builded so high, it seem'd that filmed clouds<br />
Might spread beneath, as o'er the stars of heaven;<br />
So old the place was, I remember'd none<br />
The like upon the earth: what I had seen<br />
Of grey cathedrals, buttress'd walls, rent towers,<br />
The superannuations of sunk realms,<br />
Or Nature's rocks toil'd hard in waves and winds,<br />
Seem'd but the faulture of decrepit things<br />
To that eternal domed monument.<br />
Upon the marble at my feet there lay<br />
Store of strange vessels and large draperies,<br />
Which needs had been of dyed asbestos wove,<br />
Or in that place the moth could not corrupt,<br />
So white the linen, so, in some, distinct<br />
Ran imageries from a sombre loom.<br />
All in a mingled heap confus'd there lay<br />
Robes, golden tongs, censer and chafing dish,<br />
Girdles, and chains, and holy jewelries.<br />
<br />
Turning from these with awe, once more I rais'd<br />
My eyes to fathom the space every way;<br />
The embossed roof, the silent massy range<br />
Of columns north and south, ending in mist<br />
Of nothing, then to eastward, where black gates<br />
Were shut against the sunrise evermore.<br />
Then to the west I look'd, and saw far off<br />
An image, huge of feature as a cloud,<br />
At level of whose feet an altar slept,<br />
To be approach'd on either side by steps,<br />
And marble balustrade, and patient travail<br />
To count with toil the innumerable degrees.<br />
Towards the altar sober paced I went,<br />
Repressing haste, as too unholy there;<br />
And, coming nearer, saw beside the shrine<br />
One minist'ring; and there arose a flame.<br />
When in mid May the sickening East wind<br />
Shifts sudden to the south, the small warm rain<br />
Melts out the frozen incense from all flowers,<br />
And fills the air with so much pleasant health<br />
That even the dying man forgets his shroud;<br />
Even so that lofty sacrificial fire,<br />
Sending forth Maian incense, spread around<br />
Forgetfulness of everything but bliss,<br />
And clouded all the altar with soft smoke,<br />
From whose white fragrant curtains thus I heard<br />
Language pronounc'd: 'If thou canst not ascend<br />
'These steps, die on that marble where thou art.<br />
'Thy flesh, near cousin to the common dust,<br />
'Will parch for lack of nutriment thy bones<br />
'Will wither in few years, and vanish so<br />
'That not the quickest eye could find a grain<br />
'Of what thou now art on that pavement cold.<br />
'The sands of thy short life are spent this hour,<br />
'And no hand in the universe can turn<br />
'Thy hourglass, if these gummed leaves be burnt<br />
'Ere thou canst mount up these immortal steps.'<br />
I heard, I look'd: two senses both at once,<br />
So fine, so subtle, felt the tyranny<br />
Of that fierce threat and the hard task proposed.<br />
Prodigious seem'd the toil, the leaves were yet<br />
Burning when suddenly a palsied chill<br />
Struck from the paved level up my limbs,<br />
And was ascending quick to put cold grasp<br />
Upon those streams that pulse beside the throat:<br />
I shriek'd; and the sharp anguish of my shriek<br />
Stung my own ears I strove hard to escape<br />
The numbness; strove to gain the lowest step.<br />
Slow, heavy, deadly was my pace: the cold<br />
Grew stifling, suffocating, at the heart;<br />
And when I clasp'd my hands I felt them not.<br />
One minute before death, my iced foot touch'd<br />
The lowest stair; and as it touch'd, life seem'd<br />
To pour in at the toes: I mounted up,<br />
As once fair angels on a ladder flew<br />
From the green turf to Heaven. 'Holy Power,'<br />
Cried I, approaching near the horned shrine,<br />
'What am I that should so be saved from death?<br />
'What am I that another death come not<br />
'To choke my utterance sacrilegious here?'<br />
Then said the veiled shadow 'Thou hast felt<br />
'What 'tis to die and live again before<br />
'Thy fated hour. That thou hadst power to do so<br />
'Is thy own safety; thou hast dated on<br />
'Thy doom.' 'High Prophetess,' said I, 'purge off,<br />
'Benign, if so it please thee, my mind's film.'<br />
'None can usurp this height,' return'd that shade,<br />
'But those to whom the miseries of the world<br />
'Are misery, and will not let them rest.<br />
'All else who find a haven in the world,<br />
'Where they may thoughtless sleep away their days,<br />
'If by a chance into this fane they come,<br />
'Rot on the pavement where thou rottedst half.'<br />
'Are there not thousands in the world,' said I,<br />
Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade,<br />
'Who love their fellows even to the death;<br />
'Who feel the giant agony of the world;<br />
'And more, like slaves to poor humanity,<br />
'Labour for mortal good? I sure should see<br />
'Other men here; but I am here alone.'<br />
'Those whom thou spak'st of are no vision'ries,'<br />
Rejoin'd that voice; 'they are no dreamers weak;<br />
'They seek no wonder but the human face,<br />
'No music but a happy noted voice;<br />
'They come not here, they have no thought to come;<br />
'And thou art here, for thou art less than they:<br />
'What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,<br />
'To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,<br />
'A fever of thyself think of the Earth;<br />
'What bliss even in hope is there for thee?<br />
'What haven? every creature hath its home;<br />
'Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,<br />
'Whether his labours be sublime or low<br />
'The pain alone; the joy alone; distinct:<br />
'Only the dreamer venoms all his days,<br />
'Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.<br />
'Therefore, that happiness be somewhat shar'd,<br />
'Such things as thou art are admitted oft<br />
'Into like gardens thou didst pass erewhile,<br />
'And suffer'd in these temples: for that cause<br />
'Thou standest safe beneath this statue's knees.'<br />
'That I am favour'd for unworthiness,<br />
'By such propitious parley medicin'd<br />
'In sickness not ignoble, I rejoice,<br />
'Aye, and could weep for love of such award.'<br />
So answer'd I, continuing, 'If it please,<br />
'Majestic shadow, tell me: sure not all<br />
'Those melodies sung into the world's ear<br />
'Are useless: sure a poet is a sage;<br />
'A humanist, physician to all men.<br />
'That I am none I feel, as vultures feel<br />
'They are no birds when eagles are abroad.<br />
'What am I then? Thou spakest of my tribe:<br />
'What tribe?' The tall shade veil'd in drooping white<br />
Then spake, so much more earnest, that the breath<br />
Moved the thin linen folds that drooping hung<br />
About a golden censer from the hand<br />
Pendent. 'Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?<br />
'The poet and the dreamer are distinct,<br />
'Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.<br />
'The one pours out a balm upon the world,<br />
'The other vexes it.' Then shouted I<br />
Spite of myself, and with a Pythia's spleen,<br />
'Apollo! faded! O far flown Apollo!<br />
'Where is thy misty pestilence to creep<br />
'Into the dwellings, through the door crannies<br />
'Of all mock lyrists, large self worshipers,<br />
'And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse.<br />
'Though I breathe death with them it will be life<br />
'To see them sprawl before me into graves.<br />
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</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-63632901504211472432012-02-02T13:52:00.000-06:002012-02-03T14:46:10.827-06:00Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angel's Of Our Nature" (2011)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">You will be glad, and perhaps a bit surprised, to hear that, for some time now, our world has been in the process of becoming a less violent planet—for human beings at least. That, in short is the message of this very long book (696 pages), not counting references and bibliography which have been placed at the end. The statistical evidence is vast and Professor Pinker has mastered all of it. If the numbers and stats were all that mattered, there'd be nothing more to say; they are not all that matters, and there is something more that needs to be said.<br />
<br />
The question that Professor Pinker never manages to answer, to my satisfaction at least, is why did this revolution in our attitudes toward violence occur? Yes, there have been a number of what he calls "rights revolutions" but that doesn't take us very far. What is a 'right'? What does that word mean? Where do 'rights' come from? How do they acquire legal standing? These are historical (as well as philosophical) questions, and it will not do to say that the answers have something to do with 'modernity'—another term that Professor Pinker does not bother to examine—and with the rule of law which I don't think he even mentions and which, in any case, did not just happen overnight or even during the last two or three hundred years.<br />
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The title of this book, "The better angels of our nature," is slightly misleading; not because it might lead the innocent reader to suppose that there are or ever have been good or bad angels watching over us but because it obscures or at least ignores what ought to have been Pinkers' great truth: civilization and the rule of law—each absolutely requires the other—is and always has been a human invention. Every year, every century, reminds us of the fact that absent the rule of law, civilization in this preposterous pig of world, would count for nothing.<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-34518466402912690812012-01-27T11:27:00.000-06:002012-01-27T21:22:19.125-06:00William James and the will to believe: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">William James's <i>Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) </i>is a bold, brilliant, and justly famous attempt to reconcile science and religion—or perhaps I should say, to prevent these two different forms of human experience from turning into two mutually hostile, incompatible, and irreconcilable 'cultures.' As we can see now, it was already too late, at the beginning of the 20th century, for such an enterprise to succeed—if it ever could have—but James thought the attempt should be made; he had too much invested in both sides to sit back and watch them fight it out. It was, as he must have known, a fight that could only make religion intellectually if not spiritually irrelevant and force believers into various forms of intellectual dishonesty.<br />
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I shall try to show how and where this attempt goes awry. <b> </b><br />
<br />
First and most obviously, he failed to examine his own methodological assumptions as a philosopher and scientist. It does not seem to have occurred to him that, by treating religious experience as a "psychological phenomenon", he had already undermined the claim his book is based on: that religion is is not only as fundamental to the lives of human beings as language or music or art, or love or laughter or tears—that religion is part of what makes us human (which is not as reassuring as it sounds)—but that some people at least have really had direct, first-hand experience of divinity. Nor does he seem to have noticed that most of the accounts he cites of such direct, first-hand experience predate the modern era.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless, James's book is a heroic attempt—at about the last possible moment in modern history when such an attempt could be made in all honesty by a first-class philosopher and scientist—to keep God alive in a world that seemed increasingly inclined to get along without him (it? her?). What I find particularly interesting is James's struggle to stick up for the truth, not of religious doctrine as embodied in particular religions, but for the sort of mystical experiences that organized religion, of any kind, tends to distrust. Here, he seems to be saying, is where or how divinity makes itself known or felt; here is where the rubber meets the road.<br />
<br />
This creates a problem for James since, as near as I can tell, he had never had such an experience. The most he can do, therefore, is argue for the validity and importance of religious <i>feelings. </i>How do we know that the scientific worldview is inadequate? How do we know that the mystical experiences James has been describing are as true in their own way as the modern scientific worldview is in its? Because our feelings tell us so. As you might expect, an argument of this kind—facts on one side, feelings and the will to believe on the other—cannot be pursued without its having a dramatically disabling effect on James's style.<br />
<br />
Here is the scientific James, presenting clearly and elegantly our world with its various religions and the universe of which it is a part; it is a view of religion and the world that he dislikes but is too honest to ignore:<br />
<br />
<i>There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism . . . . This view is so widespread at the present day that I must consider it with some explicitness before I pass to my own conclusions . . . . The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it, revolves, is the interest in the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. . . . Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. Today, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearings on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of god and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing phase of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a god who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of human wants. </i>(pp. 480-483, in the Modern Library Edition)<br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
Now THAT was deeply felt by a man who had made no merely casual study of modern physics, astronomy, and biology. A little more than 100 years later, the world and the universe looks the same—to those at least who have been paying attention. Yet so powerful was James's own will to believe that he was willing to throw everything he knew about science into the dust bin of history:<br />
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<i>In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and I can now state my reasons in comparatively few words. That reason is that, so long as as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, <u>but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.</u> I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner "state" in which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous—the cosmic times and spaces, for example—whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of the mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inward state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one. A conscious field <u>plus</u> its object as felt or thought of <u>plus</u> the sense of self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the "object" is when taken alone. It is a <u>full</u> fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the <u>kind</u> to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune's wheel may be disparaged for its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existent that should lack such feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made-up. </i>(pp. 488-90) <br />
<br />
Now compare the scientific account of the world and its place in the universe, which James presents in the paragraphs I have quoted, beginning with the phrase, <i>There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism . . . </i>with the paragraphs above beginning with the words, <i>In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow . . . </i>and ask yourself if James succeeds in making his meaning clear ("<i>I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.")</i><br />
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</i><br />
I think James's confidence in that last sentence is unjustified: not only do the convolutions of his argument in defense of feeling stand in marked contrast to the clarity with which he presents the scientific world view he wants to reject, but the more closely I scrutinize that argument, the more certain I become that James is merely begging the question. Take another look at his reasons for regarding the scientific attitude as "shallow:" "<i>so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, <u>but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term."</u> </i>Here James is assuming as a self-evident truth the very thing he intends to demonstrate. And that, in general, is how he proceeds throughout the curious argument that follows.<br />
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And so the great unifying truth about religious experience constantly eludes him. How could it have been otherwise?<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-89350182425259661122011-11-22T17:36:00.000-06:002011-12-09T14:46:00.442-06:00A revolution in the meaning of 'imagination': Johnson & Coleridge<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">We take it for granted that imagination is a good thing; it is not a compliment to say that someone has no imagination. This has not always been the case; when Coleridge lamented the loss of "the shaping power of imagination" in his great poem of 1802, <i>Dejection: An Ode, </i>he was giving a new meaning to the word. Were you to consult Samuel Johnson's <i>Dictionary of The English Language</i> (1755), you would not find the word 'imagination' associated in any way with the creative energies of the mind in the arts or sciences. For Johnson the word meant <b>either</b> 'fancy': "the power of having ideal pictures, or the power of representing things absent to oneself or others," adding that "Imagination is of three kinds: joined with the belief of that which is to come; joined with the memory of that which is past, or as if they were present: "for I comprehend [and here he is quoting Bacon] in this <i>imagination</i> feigned and at pleasure as if one would imagine such a man to be in the vestments of a Pope, or to have wings"; <b>or</b>, 'conception': the power of having an image or idea in the mind.<br />
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[And here I must add a sort of foot-note: for William Blake, Coleridge's "shaping power of imagination" would have been nothing new, but Blake comes from an intellectual and religious tradition that poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley—and of course, Byron—knew nothing about; as a tradesman, moreover, and a man who worked with his hands as an engraver, none of the romantic poets would have been likely to have met or even heard of him in 1802.]<br />
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Johnson himself distrusted the imagination. And here I should like to refer you to Johnson's <i>Rasselas</i> (1759), which is by the way one of the greatest books about the search for happiness ever written.<br />
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Rasselas is an Abyssinian prince who has escaped from the boredom of the artificial paradise—"The Happy Valley"— in which all the royal princesses and princelings are kept safely ignorant of life in the real world. He and his sister (and servants) escape with the help of one of their tutors, a scholar and man of the world named Imlac, who becomes their guide and teacher in the ways of the world and especially the possibilities it offers in the way of happiness. (It will not surprise you to learn that Rasselas never finds an answer to his question about the way of life most likely to lead to happiness.)<br />
<br />
At one point, Imlac tells his little group of tourists that a visit to the great pyramid might be instructive<br />
and this visit is duly made. Imlac has a purpose in making this visit: it gives him an opportunity to warn his royal students about the way the "hunger of the imagination" can distort one's life by creating desires for things one does not really need. Indeed, <i>Rasselas</i> can be thought of as a book about the various disorders to which the imagination is prone. (Johnson thought and said repeatedly, that people need to reminded rather than informed.) So here is Imlac's lecture on the "hunger of the imagination that feeds on life":<br />
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<i>"Having <span class="s1"> </span><span class="s2">passed through the galleries, surveyed the vaults of marble, and examined the chest in which the body of the founder is supposed to have been reposited. They then sat down in one of the most spacious chambers to rest a while before they attempted to return. </span>“We have now, said Imlac, gratified our minds with an exact view of the greatest work of man, except the wall of China.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>“Of the wall it is very easy to assign the motives. It secured a wealthy and timorous nation from the incursions of Barbarians, whose unskilfulness in arts made it easier for them to supply their wants by rapine than by industry, and who from time to time poured in upon the habitations of peaceful commerce, as vultures descend upon domestick fowl. Their celerity and fierceness made the wall necessary, and their ignorance made it efficacious.</i><br />
<div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i>“But for the pyramids no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labour of the work. The narrowness of the chambers proves that it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasures might have been reposited at far less expence with equal security. It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.</i></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1"><i>“I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A king, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasures surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelesness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life, by seeing thousands labouring without end, and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the pyramids, and confess thy folly!”</i></span></div><br />
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There you have it: for Johnson there was nothing creative or even good about the imagination—or the hunger for novelty that it feeds. "I consider this mighty structure," says Imlac, "as a monument to the insufficiency of human enjoyments"—and, he might have added, the endlessness of human desires, which is a Hobbesian thought. Johnson would not have wanted to be connected with Hobbes in this or any other way, but if human desires are endless so too is the struggle for power—for without power our hunger for novelty must go largely unsatisfied.<br />
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Bear with me as I digress, briefly, on that 'Hobbesian thought', which is relevant not only to the quest for happiness in <i>Rasselas</i>, but also to be the central idea of Coleridge's poem. The following lines, are taken from Hobbes' <i>Leviathan</i> (1651):<br />
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<i>By 'manners' I mean here . . . those qualities of mankind that concern their ability to live together in peace and unity. To which end we are to consider, that the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such "Finis Ultimus", (utmost aim), nor "Summum Bonum" (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose desires are at an end, than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former being but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is, that the object of man's desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to assure forever, the way of his future desire. And therefore all the voluntary actions, and inclinations of all men, tend, not only to the procuring, but also the assuring of a contented life; and differ only in the way which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions, in divers men; and partly from the difference of knowledge, or opinion each one has of the causes, which produce the effects desired.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this, is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Turn now to the following lines from Coleridge's "Dejection" Ode:<br />
<br />
<i>My genial spirits fail;</i><br />
<i>And what can these avail</i><br />
<i>To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?</i><br />
<i>It were a vain endeavor,</i><br />
<i>Though I should gaze forever</i><br />
<i>On that green light that lingers in the west:</i><br />
<i>I may not hope from outward forms to win</i><br />
<i>The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.</i><br />
<br />
<i>O Lady! we receive but what we give,</i><br />
<i>And in our life alone does Nature live:</i><br />
<i>Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!</i><br />
<i>And what we aught behold, of higher worth,</i><br />
<i>Than that inanimate cold world allowed</i><br />
<i>To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,</i><br />
<i>Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth</i><br />
<i>A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud</i><br />
<i>Enveloping the earth—</i><br />
<i>And from the soul itself must there be sent</i><br />
<i>A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth</i><br />
<i>Of all sweet sounds the life and element. . . .</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>We in ourselves rejoice!</i><br />
<i>And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,</i><br />
<i>All melodies the echoes of that voice,</i><br />
<i>All colors a suffusion of that light.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>There was a time, though my path was rough,</i><br />
<i>This joy within me dallied with distress,</i><br />
<i>And all misfortunes were but as the stuff</i><br />
<i>Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:</i><br />
<i>For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,</i><br />
<i>And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.</i><br />
<i>But now afflictions bow me down to earth:</i><br />
<i>Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;</i><br />
<i>But oh! each visitation</i><br />
<i>Suspends what nature gave me at my birth;</i><br />
<i>My shaping spirit of Imagination.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>For not to think of what I needs must feel,</i><br />
<i>But to be still and patient, all I can;</i><br />
<i>And haply by abstruse research to steal</i><br />
<i>From my own nature all the natural man—</i><br />
<i>This was my sole resource, my only plan:</i><br />
<i>Till that which suits a part infects the whole,</i><br />
<i>And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. . . .</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>"O Lady! we receive but what we give,</i><br />
<i>And in our life alone does Nature live . . ."</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<br />
For Coleridge, the shaping (or, as we would say, creative) spirit of imagination is what makes poetry and art possible and life worth living, and I don't suppose Blake or Wordsworth or Keats, or Shelley or, any other artist would have disagreed. But Blake, at least, would not have agreed about much else, since he regarded Nature as Satanic—which is not the same thing as saying that Nature is Darwinian, though to us at least it comes close. Yet we, who know very well that Nature is Darwinian are likely to find these lines false as well as beautiful: Nature doesn't need us at all, and will manage finally to get rid of us. (But that is the rational mind talking; when I turn it off, it is the beauty and moral truth of these lines that I'm mainly conscious of. Though I am not a Christian I remember Jesus's parables and sayings<i>, </i>and especially what he had to say about the Kingdom of Heaven being within.)<br />
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<br />
<br />
Wallace Stevens said that a world without imagination had itself to be imagined, and that's what Coleridge is doing in the lines that follow those I have just quoted:<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>O Lady! we receive but what we give,</i><br />
<i>And in our life alone does Nature live:</i><br />
<i>Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!</i><br />
<i>And what we aught behold, of higher worth,</i><br />
<i>Than that inanimate cold world allowed</i><br />
<i>To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd . . .</i><br />
<br />
<br />
To conclude this shapeless mess, I should like to comment on what to Coleridge as well as Blake is the real enemy of the imagination. Coleridge blames his loss of the shaping power of imagination on his philosophical inquiries, and Blake would have agreed for it was he who first declared war on reason, philosophy or the analytical proclivities of the meddling intellect as the enemies of imagination in poetry and art—a disjunction or antipathy that seems now to be a permanent feature of the modern cultural landscape. Critics do not often write good poetry but some famous poets have been famous critics; I doubt that the same is true in the other arts—art critics and historians are not usually, or even ever, significant artists; and I know of no great artist or musician who ever bothered to write criticism.<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-72015706192193676482011-11-04T12:08:00.000-05:002011-11-04T14:46:51.233-05:00The Arts and The Sciences: Two Cultures<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div class="p1"><span class="s1">We put the arts and sciences at the center of a liberal arts educational curriculum, in the U.S. at least, and sometimes something comes of that juxtaposition: a few students learn that the arts and sciences are so radically different in their methods and assumptions, in the questions they ask and in the criteria they use in judging a piece of work; that no amount of learning in the arts is of any use in the sciences and vice-versa. That's worth knowing; it tells one something about the structure of the world we live in and try, as best we can, to understand; it tells one that modern science (including the language of science, mathematics) has nothing in common with modern (or modernist) art; and vice-versa. </span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">So one can be the world's foremost authority, on, say the art of Picasso and know nothing about relativity, or quantum mechanics, or the mathematics of symmetry; what one cannot be ignorant of as an authority on the art of Picasso is art-history. The sciences are different: one can be a great physicist and mathematician without knowing much about the history of physics and mathematics; a physicist today does not need to know very much about Aristotle or Galileo or Newton; or Gauss or Euler.</span><br />
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</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">These two cultures (art and science) as C. P. Snow once labelled them, have not always been as isolated from each other as they are now: science, engineering and the arts were once, during the Renaissance, in Rome and Florence, part of single discipline which I suppose we might call architecture. Leonardo de Vinci, possessed the sort of “unified sensibility” (the phrase seems to have been invented by T. S. Eliot), that felt equally at home in the arts and sciences.</span><br />
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</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">For a long time, no one seems to have thought of art and science as antagonistic ways of understanding the world—that one had to choose: you could be a scientist or an artist but not both.</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p1"><span class="s1">As late as 1800, Wordsworth was confident that the poet and the scientist were basically singing the same song. Here is what he had to say in his ‘Preface’ to the 1800 edition of <i>Lyrical Ballads</i>: </span><br />
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</span></div><div class="p2"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p3"><span class="s1"><i>To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure which accompanies him through the whole course of his studies, converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, through labour and length of time, the Man of Science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those particular parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow- beings. The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. </i></span><br />
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</i></span></div><div class="p4"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1">It was not to be—for all sorts of reasons, chiefly the fact that by 1800, the sciences had already progressed to such a point that the only way to understand them was to unlearn all the literary or philosophical wisdom you had painfully acquired and learn a new language and new discipline. Nothing you thought you knew would be of any use in, say, Michael Faraday's laboratory. That was something that a man like Goethe, for example, who had been born in 1749, could never have done. The wisest man in Europe, according to Santayana, he refused to accept Newton’s theory that all the colors are combined in white light; what is more he wouldn’t even consider the evidence that supported Newton’s work; nor, did he ever change his mind. He had his own more ‘organic’ theory, which he developed in a book which eventually ran to more than a thousand pages when it was published in 1810. It was a book that he was inordinately proud of; he really seems to have thought that his optical studies rather than his literary works constituted his most lasting achievement. </span></div><div class="p6"><span class="s1"></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1">Here is what one of his biographers, Peter Boerner (<i>Goethe: </i>London, 2005) has to say: “Typical for Goethe’s approach is a passage in the <i>didactic section</i> of the <i>Theory of Colours</i>: <i>The eye owes its existence to light. From neutral animal auxiliary organs, light calls forth an organ similar to itself; and thus the eye is created by light for light, so that the inner light nears the outer. We recall in this connection the old Ionic school of thought, which emphasized that only like can recognize thought; and also the ancient mystic’s words, which can be expressed thus:</i></span><br />
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</i></span></div><div class="p6"><span class="s1"><i></i></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Were the eye not like the sun,</i></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>How could we behold the light?</i></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>If no godly power lived in us,</i></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>How could we find in God delight?</i></span><br />
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</i></span></div><div class="p6"><span class="s1"><i></i></span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><i>"No one will deny the direct relationship between light and eye, but imagining the two to be one and the same is more difficult. It may be easier to grasp if one asserts that the eye has within it a still light that is aroused at the slightest internal or external prompting. In the dark we can call up the brightest images using our power of imagination. In dreams, objects appear to us as if in clear daylight. When awake we notice the slightest beam of external light; indeed when the eye is struck by accident, light and colors emanate from it." </i>(p.80-82)</span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><br />
</span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1">It is painful to hear such obscurantism coming from such a man. But Goethe was a man from another age, saturated in the literary and philosophical traditions that had defined Western culture for more than 2000 years. Though he greatly admired Spinoza, and Spinoza's <i>Ethics</i>, he could not accept the mechanistic Nature that is so central to Spinoza's philosophy.</span></div><div class="p5"><span class="s1"><br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-44302357638215998662011-10-26T11:54:00.000-05:002011-10-26T13:46:12.208-05:00Shakespeare's Julius Caesar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I've never been much interested in this play. And now, having recently seen it in action (so to speak) for the first time, at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival, in Oregon, I am wondering why Shakespeare wrote it. You would never know, from reading or seeing this play, that Julius Caesar was one of the most brilliant and charismatic men of classical antiquity, who wrote Latin prose of such clarity, simplicity and power that even Cicero who didn't like him at all, admired it. Shakespeare's Caesar is indecisive, superstitious, a spent force at the age of 56, which wasn't at all the case. Where did Shakespeare get these ideas? Not from Plutarch; I think Shakespeare's portrait of Caesar is entirely made-up. So why might Shakespeare have wanted to diminish Caesar in this way? I don't know. If anyone else knows, I'd like to hear about it.<br />
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To make matters worse, the folks in Ashland cast Caesar as a woman! What could they have been thinking of?—if they were thinking at all.<br />
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This play isn't even a tragedy. Caesar was a man who lived his life to the full and was cut down in his prime. That's tragic but not in any Shakespearean sense of that word; this play is not a Shakespearian tragedy. It is quite unlike any of Shakespeare's other tragedies. Shakespeare, who knew as much about tragedy as anyone, missed his mark. No doubt he thought he'd hit it; I just don't what it was.<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-71549449755055562342011-08-21T11:11:00.000-05:002011-08-21T16:36:31.984-05:00Nietzsche, on knowledge and the intellect<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><i>"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.</i><br />
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<i>"One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. . . . </i><br />
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<i>"There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge . . . . It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a moment in existence . . . . That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of knowledge by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.</i><br />
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<i>"The intellect, as the means for the preservation of the individual [creature] unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle of existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of deception reaches its peak: here deception, flattery, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men . . . ." </i>(1873)</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-52406649327851789142011-07-11T12:34:00.000-05:002011-08-18T09:48:01.235-05:00Byron, Byronism, Romanticism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Handsome, witty, brilliant, proud and, unfortunately, entitled (literally) to the privileges of a noble Lord, Byron was tumbled out into the world in 1788 without a father or any other close male relatives to teach him how to become a man; much less a nobleman. He had to figure it out and, often, fight it out, for himself. The personality he invented for himself (in the first two cantos of <i>Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812) </i>was one that is now hard to admire, but it fascinated Europe for almost 100 years. No other English poet was more widely read or admired in Europe than Byron. No other English poet or writer created his own personal ideology—Byronism—or for that matter would have wanted to. For it was not very nice being Byron or Byronic: he was a man beset by demons of his own creating. While he had immense charisma he did not always use it wisely or well. Sexually precocious and predatory, he despised women, especially those who were so unfortunate as to fall in love with him; these he treated badly. Though he fathered a few children, he essentially abandoned them. Lady Caroline Lamb nailed him with the phrase, "mad, bad and dangerous to know." Charlotte Brontë got the point and put him into her novel, <i>Wuthering Heights,</i> as Heathcliffe.<br />
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<i> N</i>o one but nuts like me reads <i>Childe Harold</i> today or any of the others—like <i>The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (</i>1814) or <i>Lara </i>(1814)<i>—</i>that made him famous; they're mostly unreadable now with the notable exception of <i>Don Juan </i>(1819-24) which made him infamous when it first appeared.<i> </i><br />
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I've been reading Byron's poetry out of curiosity, for it was in his poetry that Byron created his own myth, which we now refer to as Byronism: the story of a passionate man of artistic genius who though he is of high social rank—and lets everyone know it—nevertheless prides himself on belonging nowhere; a terrific snob like Coriolanus who thinks he can stand as if he were the creator of himself, apart from and superior to the reactionary and corrupt societies of the world. The story of Coriolanus ends tragically and it seems to me that Byron's story is tragic as well. It is a story of talents wasted and energies misused; unlike Coriolanus who knows at the end that he is only a fallible human being, I don't think Byron ever understands that his pursuit of fame, glory and sex had led him into a life of futility and loss. Though Byron understood the uses of irony, he never turns that tool of self analysis upon himself; irony, for Byron, was never anything but a weapon to be used on those he thought of as his enemies.<br />
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<i>As </i>W. H. Auden pointed out almost fifty years ago, <i>Don Juan </i>is Byron's one great achievement—a poem in which Byron re-invents himself—not as another romantic personality but as an ironic observer, speaking in an absolutely new anti-poetic style; <i>Don Juan</i> is a modern, comic, anti-romantic poem and the only poem of Byron's that can still be read with pleasure.<br />
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Here is how it begins:<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>I want a hero: an uncommon want,</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i> When every year and month sends forth a new one,</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i> The age discovers he is not the true one;</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i> I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>We all have seen him in the pantomime</i></div></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i>Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">The choice of a hero for this poem is, perhaps, not as arbitrary as the poet subtly implies; Byron was himself a sort of Don Juan and a pretty destructive one at that. Does that mean that he is—as usual—putting himself in his poem? If he is, it is as an extraordinarily innocent and harmless person: this Don Juan is a handsome as well as innocent young man who never learns anything; things happen to him but he almost never <i>makes </i>things happen. He is, thus, a glamorous vehicle for Byron's mockery of cant and hypocrisy in others. He is not, however, a mirror in which Byron can examine his own imperfections. That would have been too much to expect; poetic ironies are never, or hardly ever, directed inward, toward the poet. There are a few of Shakespeare's sonnets that seem to be exceptions to this rule, and possibly a few of Donne's but for the most part the kind of irony I am talking about is a modern, 20th century trope. For example? Well, how about Eliot? The voices we encounter in <i>Preludes</i>, <i>Prufrock</i>, <i>Portrait Of A Lady</i>, <i>Sweeney Among The Nightingales</i> strike me (though I couldn't prove it) as ironic stand-ins for the man Hugh Kenner calls the invisible poet.<br />
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Though Byron never saw himself ironically, others did: the theatrical persona he had invented and taken on as his very own, as well as the the ideology that went with it—Byronism—had obviously become a joke by the time Shaw wrote <i>Arms And The Man </i>(1894) in which an upper-class dolt who imagines himself to be a great soldier—and likes to strike Byronic attitudes— is compared to a real professional soldier who knows his business—and is in fact a middle-class business-man—and never pretends to be anything but what he is, a modern man.<br />
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</div></div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-2586247866603650612011-06-10T20:27:00.000-05:002011-06-10T20:27:05.826-05:00Goethe: A telling anecdote<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">In 1826, the Bavarian historian Karl Heinrich von Lang was passing through Weimar and thought he might like to meet the great man—who had a reputation for being not particularly hospitable to strangers. Here is how Herr Lang tells the story: "On my journey I stopped at Weimar, where dazzled by the devil, I sent a note that spared no subservient obeisances to the city's old Faust, Master von Goethe, in hopes of meeting with him. I was received at half-past noon. A tall, old, ice-cool, stiff, imperial councillor came toward me in a dressing gown, gestured to me to seat myself, accepted everything I told him about the King of Bavaria and then barked: <i>"Tell me, no doubt you have a fire insurance office in your Ausbach region?" </i>Yes, indeed. —Then came the invitation to recount to the last detail the procedures that were followed when fires occurred. I responded that it depended on whether the fire could be extinguished or the town or the house actually burnt.—<i>Let us, if I may say so, permit the town to go up in flames.—</i>And so I fanned my blaze and let it consume everything, with the fire engines rushing around in vain; set out on my inspection the next day, obtained an estimate of the damages and pared it down as much as possible; made some superficial sketches of the buildings that will remain neglected by the Munich supervisors, while the poor burnt-out wretches languish in shanties; and finally in two, three years paid out the compensation sums after they have been reduced to almost nothing. The old Faust listened to this and said: I t<i>hank you. </i>Then he continued: <i>What is the population of such a district in your area? </i>I said: Something over 500,000 souls. — <i>So! So! </i>he intoned. <i>Hm! Hm! That is indeed something. </i>(To be sure, more than twice the entire Grand Duchy of Weimar.) I said: Now, as I have the honor of being here with you, there is one soul less. However, I shall get myself hence and take leave of you. —Whereupon he gave me his hand, thanked me for the honor or my visit and accompanied me to the door. I felt as if I had caught a cold while putting out fires."<br />
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What does this story tell us? It tells that Goethe, that old Faust, is indifferent to human suffering and the rule of law—which as readers of the Faust poem we have already guessed. Imagine how different the history of modern Europe—or even the world— might have been had this man been a thinker instead of an esthete. Herr Lang had him pegged. Like Werther, Goethe was entirely self-absorbed. I can't think of any other Great Man of the romantic period who counts for so little.<br />
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[This story is recounted in Peter Boerner's biography, <i>Goethe </i>published in 2005.] </div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-37951933960195885732011-06-06T10:32:00.000-05:002011-06-07T10:47:37.797-05:00"The short and simple annals of the poor": Gray's Elegy and the common reader<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Does anyone read Gray's "Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard" (1750) any more? It was, once, a very famous poem. I remember reading it in 8th grade a long time ago. We didn't learn much about poetry and we didn't read much of it, but our teacher thought we ought at least to be exposed to Gray's famous Elegy. (And there were a few others which, I'm glad to say, I've completely forgotten—except for a part of a line which remains stupidly lodged in my memory: "Abu Benadem(?) may his tribe increase . . . .")<br />
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Here's how Gray's Elegy goes (in part):<br />
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<i>The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,</i><br />
<i> The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,</i><br />
<i>The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,</i><br />
<i> And leaves the world to darkness and to me.</i><br />
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<i>Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,</i><br />
<i> And all the air a solemn stillness holds,</i><br />
<i>Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,</i><br />
<i> And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower </i><br />
<i> The moping owl does to the moon complain</i><br />
<i>Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,</i><br />
<i> Molest her ancient solitary reign.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,</i><br />
<i>Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap</i><br />
<i>Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,</i><br />
<i> The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,</i><br />
<i> The swallow twittering from the straw-build shed,</i><br />
<i>The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,</i><br />
<i> No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,</i><br />
<i> Or busy housewife ply her evening care;</i><br />
<i>No children run to lisp their sire's return,</i><br />
<i> Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,</i><br />
<i> Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;</i><br />
<i>How jocund did they drive their team afield!</i><br />
<i> How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Let not ambition mock their useful toil,</i><br />
<i>Their homely joys and destiny obscure;</i><br />
<i>Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile</i><br />
<i> The short and simple annals of the poor.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,</i><br />
<i> And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,</i><br />
<i>Await alike the inevitable hour.</i><br />
<i> The paths of glory lead but to the grave.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,</i><br />
<i> If memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,</i><br />
<i>Where through the long-drawn aile and fretted vault</i><br />
<i> The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Can storied urn or animated bust</i><br />
<i> Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?</i><br />
<i>Can honour's voice provoke the silent dust,</i><br />
<i> Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid</i><br />
<i>Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;</i><br />
<i>Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed</i><br />
<i> Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>But knowledge to their eyes her ample page </i><br />
<i> Rich with spoils of time did ne'er unroll;</i><br />
<i>Chill penury repressed their noble rage,</i><br />
<i> And froze the genial current of the soul.</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
<i>Full many a gem of purest ray serene</i><br />
<i> The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;</i><br />
<i>Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,</i><br />
<i> And waste its sweetness on the desert air. . . . </i><br />
<i></i>[You should read the rest of it; consult almost any anthology of English poetry.]<br />
<br />
Death, of course, is the great equalizer, but why leave it at that? Since life is more comfortable and more fun for those who have money and education than it is for those who have neither, why not make it a little easier for the poor to better their lot? It is not much comfort for those whose lives have been stunted by "chill penury" to be told that "the paths of glory lead but to the grave." But mine are modern thoughts; no one was thinking along these lines in 1750.<br />
<br />
William Empson noticed a long time ago that those images of gems at the bottom of the sea and flowers wasting their "sweetness on the desert air" make us feel that the waste of human energies and talents that Gray is commenting on is part of natural order of things; that's just how it is. Those gems don't mind being at the bottom of the sea and nor do those flowers care if there is no one around to appreciate them.<br />
<br />
The fact that even Johnson, who knew all about the injuries of class, admired this poem, reminds us—if we need reminding—what a recent (and perhaps temporary) thing democracy is. In his chapter on Gray, in <i>Lives of the Poets, </i>he commented on the universal acclaim that Gray's poem had received and said that he rejoiced "to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be decided all claim to literary honors." This remark is of particular interest because Virginia Woolf used Johnson's idea of "the common reader" as the literary and organizing principle for her two magnificent volumes of literary scholarship and criticism, the first and second <i>Common Readers</i>, which though uncorrupted by literary prejudices or dogmatic learning are not exactly what the common readers of today are likely to find entertaining. For there is, perhaps, no one at any time who remains entirely uncorrupted by literary prejudices. I know I am, as you can see by my remarks on Gray's famous poem: to me, Gray while not being in the least romantic, is shamelessly romanticizing the desperate lives of the English peasantry. And I have an ulterior motive: I want you to compare Gray's poem with a passage from a novel by George Gissing written in 1886 and quoted byVirginia Woolf in her chapter on this now largely unknown writer. Gissing is describing a cemetery in the East End of London:<br />
<br />
<i>"Here on the waste limits of that dread east, to wander among tombs is to go hand-in-hand with the stark and eyeless emblems of mortality; the spirit fails beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toil; who when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter's sky between the former and the latter night. For them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labors but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is but a dumb cry for warmth and love of which fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway blots their being."</i><br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-12789076065483699942011-05-31T16:23:00.000-05:002011-06-02T13:31:00.737-05:00Updike's Leviathan—and ours<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I am haunted by an image from one of Updike's poems—not the serious ones, but the "light verse" that he segregated from the others at the back of his Collected Poems:<br />
<br />
. . . . blue whales<br />
Grin fathoms down, and through their teeth are strained<br />
A million lives a minute; each entails,<br />
In death, a microscopic bit of pain.<br />
(from <i>Caligula's Dream)</i><br />
<i><br />
</i><br />
I never thought about the krill that baleen whales, eat or what it might be like to be one of them; thanks to Updike that little gap in my understanding of Darwinian nature has just been filled.<br />
<br />
All over the world hundreds of millions are being treated like krill. Here in America we are destroying the lives of only 20 million unemployed people and their families; the politicians of both parties are content to regard their pain as microscopic. It isn't.<br />
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</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939290855438272306.post-75582255324891498612011-05-29T10:53:00.000-05:002011-05-31T15:25:11.191-05:00Voices of the romantic revolution: Charlotte and Emily Brontë<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The following remarks are taken from an essay by Virginia Woolf (in <i>The Common Reader, </i>1925).<br />
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"There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passion. It makes them poets, or, if they choose to write in prose, intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. It is with a description of a storm that Charlotte ends her finest novel, <i>Villette.</i> 'The skies hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms.' So she calls in nature to describe a state of mind that could not be otherwise expressed. But neither of the sisters observed nature accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth observed it, or painted it minutely as Tennyson painted it. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments to decorate a dull page or display the artist's power of observation—they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.<br />
<br />
"The meaning of a book, which lies so often apart from what happens and what is said and consists in some connection with things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to grasp. Especially is this so when, like the Brontës, the writer is poetic, and his meaning inseparable from his language, and itself rather a mood than a particular observation. <i>Wuthering Heights</i> is a more difficult book to understand than <i>Jane Eyre</i>, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote she said 'I love', 'I hate,' 'I suffer'. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no 'I' in <i>Wuthering Heights. </i>There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse that urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into a gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel—a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely 'I love' or 'I hate', but 'we, the whole human race' and 'you, the eternal powers . . .' the sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so; rather it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. It surges up in the half-articulate word of Catherine Earnshaw, 'If all else perished and <i>he </i>remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem part of it.' It breaks out again in the presence of the dead. 'I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the eternity they have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy and joy in its fulness.' It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels."</div>piershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12042745369869839918noreply@blogger.com1