Alms for Oblivion

Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angel's Of Our Nature" (2011)

2012-02-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

William James and the will to believe: "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902)

2012-01-27T09:27:00.000-08:00

William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) 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.

I shall try to show how and where this attempt goes awry.

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.

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.

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 feelings. 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.

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:

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.

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. (pp. 480-483, in the Modern Library Edition)

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:

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, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.

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 plus its object as felt or thought of plus 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 full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the kind 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. (pp. 488-90)

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, There is a notion in the air about us that religion is probably only an anachronism . . . with the paragraphs above beginning with the words, 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 ask yourself if James succeeds in making his meaning clear ("I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.")

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:" "so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term." 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.

And so the great unifying truth about religious experience constantly eludes him. How could it have been otherwise?

A revolution in the meaning of 'imagination': Johnson & Coleridge

2011-11-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

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, Dejection: An Ode, he was giving a new meaning to the word. Were you to consult Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of The English Language (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 either '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 imagination feigned and at pleasure as if one would imagine such a man to be in the vestments of a Pope, or to have wings"; or, 'conception': the power of having an image or idea in the mind.

[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.]

Johnson himself distrusted the imagination. And here I should like to refer you to Johnson's Rasselas (1759), which is by the way one of the greatest books about the search for happiness ever written.

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.)

At one point, Imlac tells his little group of tourists that a visit to the great pyramid might be instructive
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, Rasselas 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":

"Having 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. “We have now, said Imlac, gratified our minds with an exact view of the greatest work of man, except the wall of China.

“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.

“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 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!”

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.

Bear with me as I digress, briefly, on that 'Hobbesian thought', which is relevant not only to the quest for happiness in Rasselas, but also to be the central idea of Coleridge's poem. The following lines, are taken from Hobbes' Leviathan (1651):

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.

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.

Turn now to the following lines from Coleridge's "Dejection" Ode:

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavor,
Though I should gaze forever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And what we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth
Of all sweet sounds the life and element. . . .

We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colors a suffusion of that light.

There was a time, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth;
But oh! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth;
My shaping spirit of Imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. . . .

"O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live . . ."

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, and especially what he had to say about the Kingdom of Heaven being within.)

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:

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And what we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd . . .

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.

The Arts and The Sciences: Two Cultures

2011-11-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Lyrical Ballads:

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.

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.

Here is what one of his biographers, Peter Boerner (Goethe: London, 2005) has to say: “Typical for Goethe’s approach is a passage in the didactic section of the Theory of Colours: 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:

Were the eye not like the sun,

How could we behold the light?

If no godly power lived in us,

How could we find in God delight?

"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." (p.80-82)

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 Ethics, he could not accept the mechanistic Nature that is so central to Spinoza's philosophy.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

2011-10-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

Nietzsche, on knowledge and the intellect

2011-08-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

"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.

"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. . . .

"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.

"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 . . . ." (1873)

Byron, Byronism, Romanticism

2011-07-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

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 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812) 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, Wuthering Heights, as Heathcliffe.

No one but nuts like me reads Childe Harold today or any of the others—like The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) or Lara (1814)—that made him famous; they're mostly unreadable now with the notable exception of Don Juan (1819-24) which made him infamous when it first appeared.

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.

As W. H. Auden pointed out almost fifty years ago, Don Juan 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; Don Juan is a modern, comic, anti-romantic poem and the only poem of Byron's that can still be read with pleasure.

Here is how it begins:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one;

Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,

I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,

We all have seen him in the pantomime

Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.

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 makes 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 Preludes, Prufrock, Portrait Of A Lady, Sweeney Among The Nightingales strike me (though I couldn't prove it) as ironic stand-ins for the man Hugh Kenner calls the invisible poet.

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 Arms And The Man (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.

Goethe: A telling anecdote

2011-06-10T18:27:00.000-07:00

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: "Tell me, no doubt you have a fire insurance office in your Ausbach region?" 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.—Let us, if I may say so, permit the town to go up in flames.—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 thank you. Then he continued: What is the population of such a district in your area? I said: Something over 500,000 souls. — So! So! he intoned. Hm! Hm! That is indeed something. (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."

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.

[This story is recounted in Peter Boerner's biography, Goethe published in 2005.]

"The short and simple annals of the poor": Gray's Elegy and the common reader

2011-06-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

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 . . . .")

Here's how Gray's Elegy goes (in part):

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-build shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where through the long-drawn aile and fretted vault
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. . . .
[You should read the rest of it; consult almost any anthology of English poetry.]

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.

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.

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 Lives of the Poets, 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 Common Readers, 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:

"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."

Updike's Leviathan—and ours

2011-05-31T14:23:00.000-07:00

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:

. . . . blue whales
Grin fathoms down, and through their teeth are strained
A million lives a minute; each entails,
In death, a microscopic bit of pain.
(from Caligula's Dream)

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.

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.

Voices of the romantic revolution: Charlotte and Emily Brontë

2011-05-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

The following remarks are taken from an essay by Virginia Woolf (in The Common Reader, 1925).

"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, Villette. '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.

"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. Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, 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 Wuthering Heights. 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 he 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."

Updike's unmodernist poetry

2011-05-27T17:18:00.000-07:00

Updike, like Frost, Williams, Hardy and Larkin, never wrote a modernist poem. He too speaks in his own voice out of his own experience of the real, the given, the substantial world. Metaphors and other figures of speech, do not become symbols of spiritual things or meanings outside or unsupported by tangible connections with the real, the given, the substantial world. When Updike was growing up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, he felt no hankering to be another Rimbaud—or Wallace Stevens. He wanted to be a cartoonist.

He wrote his first poem when he was 21, and has this to say about it in the "Preface" to his Collected Poems 1953-1993: "The very first poem here, bearing a comically long title, yet conveyed, with a compression unprecedented in my brief writing career the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles marching across a stretch of Pennsylvania farmland. I still remember the shudder, the triumphant sense of capture with which I got these lines down, not long after my twenty-first birthday."

Why the Telephone Wires Dip
and the Poles are Cracked and Crooked

The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago.

But we, the enlightened, know
in point of fact it's what remains
of the flight of a marvellous crow
no one saw:
each pole a caw.

Here's another poem I like, written about thirty years later:

Pain

Pain flattens the world—its bubbles
of bliss, its epiphanies, its upright
sticks of day-to-day business—
And shows us what seriousness is.

And shows us, too, how those around us
cannot get in; they cannot share
our being. Though men talk big
and challenge silence with laughter

and women bring their engendering smiles
and eyes of famous mercy,
these kind things slide away
like rain beating on a filthy window

when pain interposes.
What children's pageant in gauze
filled the skulls ballroom before
the caped dark stranger commanded, Freeze?

Life is worse than mere folly. We live
within a cage wherefrom escape
annihilates the captive; this, too,
pain leads us to consider anew.

I could show you many more poems that would be worth your attention; I prefer tell you about certain qualities in Updike's poetry that I don't much care for. He has more to say about his sex life than I at least want to hear. And he likes to show us how much he knows about science—and how wittily he can write about such deep matters as entropy or the valence bonds that bind atoms in molecules. His poem about the moons of Jupiter is a tour de force; but that's all it is.

I don't understand why this poet makes so little use of rhyme—and the music of rhyme— in his 'serious' poetry. (You can feel the power of rhyme as you feel the power of "pain" as it "leads" us to reconsider our view of life in the poem I have just showed you.) Rhyme, he thinks, belongs in "light verse", which he carefully separates off from the good stuff in a special section at the end of the book. It's as if he were afraid of his own wit, afraid that his serious poetry might be contaminated by it. But wit is what makes his good poetry good; a little more music would have made it better. Remember what the Duke said: "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing."

I welcome comments from Updike's other admirers. Stick to the poetry though.

Philosophy & Curiosity (by Justin E. H. Smith, NY Times, 5-23-11)

2011-05-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

Must one be endowed with curiosity in order to become a philosopher?

Today, in the academic realm, at least, the answer is surely and regrettably no. When a newly minted philosopher goes on the job market, her primary task is to show her prospective colleagues how perfectly focused she has been in graduate school, and to conceal her knowledge of any topic (Shakespeare's sonnets, classical Chinese astronomy, the history of pigeon breeding etc.) that does not fall within the current boundaries of the discipline.

Curiosity-driven activities like insect-collecting and star-gazing have been downgraded to the status of mere hobbies.

But how were these boundaries formed in the first place? Did they spring from the very essence of philosophy, a set of core attributes present at inception, forever fixed and eternal? The answer to that latter question, is also no. What appears to us today to be a core is only what is left over after a centuries-long process by which the virtue of curiosity, once nearly synonymous with philosophy migrated into other disciplines, both scientific and humanistic. As this migration was occurring, many curiosity-driven activities such as insect-collecting and star-gazing, long considered at least tributaries of philosophy were downgraded to the status of mere hobbies. This loss of curiosity has played an important but little noticed role in the widespread perception that professional philosophy has become out of touch with the interests of the broader society.

Let me rush to qualify what no doubt sounds like a harsh assessment of the state of my own discipline. I am certainly not saying that, as individuals, philosophers will not often be curious people in the very best sense of that phrase, but only that they are habituated by their discipline to make a sharp distinction between their sundry interests and what they do professionally, as philosophers. The distinction is as clear as that between Richard Feynman contribution to theoretical physics and his enjoyment of Tuvan throat-singing.

Today's natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the real history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal's publication, we find titles such as "Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire" and "Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity." Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as the "magnetical" philosophy and as late as 1808 John Dalton published A New System of Chemical Philosophy. A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his Philosophie Zoologique. Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

One of the charges brought against Socrates in Plato's great dialogue, "The Apology" is that he speculated about the heavens above, and searched into the earth beneath. Today philosophers are more likely to pick out the other charges—sophism, corrupting the youth, atheism—as most relevant to our understanding of the Socratic-Platonic revolution in the history of Western thought. But what are we to make of this charge of curiosity? It may be that in restyling themselves as scientists, natural philosophers or curiosi, have succeeded in the past few hundred years in overcoming their bad reputation. Little awareness lingers at this point (excepting, say, the occasional nuclear meltdown, when we start to feel we've gone too far too fast) of what might have made the activity of looking into the earth and the heavens a crime.

This restyling occurred over the course of the early modern period, at just the same time as questions that were once purely speculative concerning, for instance, the nature of life, or the causes of planetary orbits, came to be much more tractable than before, thanks to the increasing mathematization of the sciences, and to newly emerging standards for scientific observation and experimentation. Their new tractability by scientists left the philosophers to establish themselves on their own. But what exactly is left over for philosophy to do once the earth, the heavens, the animals and plants, are turned over to this new breed of scientists to explain?

There will certainly always be a place for epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. But in order for a theory of knowledge to tell us much, it needs to draw on examples of knowledge of something or other. And so philosophy agrees to a partial reconciliation with the sciences some years after its divorce from natural philosophy; Philosophy comes back to physics with the philosophy of physics, and to biology with the philosophy of biology, even though physics and biology are no longer part of philosophy itself.

Many philosophers today suppose that to take an interest in a false theory from the past implies a rejection of the idea of truth itself.

Now surely it is a good thing that today there are, say, helminthologists, who can devote all their time to the study of worms without having to worry about how these creatures fit into the cosmic order, or into God's design, as you wish. But if helminthology has cleared away the cosmological dross that weighed it down back when it was part of natural philosophy, philosophy meanwhile may have lost something that once helped to fuel it: a curiosity about the world in all its detail; rather than to bound its pure activity off from the impure world of worms and so on, philosophy might approach its task through that succinct preposition, 'of', as in "philosophy of physics", or "philosophy of law" which would permit philosophy to stand apart, but not implicitly above, the mundane objects of its attention.

So long as contemporary philosophy conceives itself in that way, it is rather a difficult task to pursue the sort of research on the history of philosophy that is adequate to the material it studies, that respects actors and categories, and that takes seriously theories and entities that have long since been rejected by reasonable people. Consider Kenelm Digby's 1658 account of the "weapon salve," or the treatment of wounds at a distance by manipulation of the weapon that caused them. Digby in fact offered a fascinating, sophisticated application of early modern corpuscularianism [sic] yet many philosophers today suppose that to take an interest in a false theory from the past such as this one, to research it and to write about it, implies a rejection of the idea of truth itself. I myself was once dismissed as insufficiently postmodernist by a referee for a journal to which I submitted an article on the Digby's weapon salve.

There is no basis for such an accusation. For among the great many truths in the world is this one: a man named Digby once believed something false. To take an interest in that false belief is not to reject the truth, but only to wish to fill out our picture of the truth with as much detail as possible, and not because of some aesthetic inclination to the baroque, but rather because false theories are an important part of the puzzle that we as philosophers should be trying to complete: that of determining the range of ways people conceptualize the world around them.

This is a project, I believe, that philosophers ought to recognize themselves as having in common with the other human sciences, and most of all with anthropology, as well as with newer disciplines such as cognitive science, which takes the substantial interconnection between philosophy and the study of the natural world as seriously as it was taken in the 17th century. The new experimental philosophy movement is also returning to an earlier conception of the inseparability of philosophical reflection and scientific inquiry, though curiously "x-phi" advocates describe themselves as breaking with traditional philosophy, rather than as returning to it, which is what in fact they are doing.

But for the most part philosophers prefer to keep their distance from the world, to do philosophy of this or that, and to disavow any interest in reckoning up the actual range of ways in which people, past or present, have explained the world. For some historians of philosophy, this makes things difficult, since we find we cannot live up to the expectation of our colleagues to show the immediate philosophical pay-off of our research, by which of course is meant the relevance to the set of issues that happen to interest them. I believe it is imperative, indeed that it amounts to nothing short of respect paid to the dead, that historians of philosophy resist this demand for relevance. Scholarship in the history of philosophy must not aim to contribute to the resolution of problems on the current philosophical agenda. What it must do instead is reveal the variety of problems that have in different times and places been deemed philosophical, thereby providing a broader context within which current philosophers can understand the contingency, and future transformability, of their own problems. In this way, historians of philosophy contribute to the vitality of current philosophy, but on their own terms, and not on the terms dictated by their non-historian colleagues.

Recently I have noticed, when holding forth on, say, G. W. Leibniz's interest in the pharmaceutical properties of the Brazilian ipecacuanha root, the way in which the term 'erudite' now serves in some philosophical circles as a sort of back-handed compliment. What it really says is that the compliment's recipient cannot quite cut it as a real philosopher, which is to say as a producer of rigorous arguments, and so instead compensates by filling her head with so much historical trivia. Rigor has decidedly won out over erudition as the reigning philosophical virtue, yet it is with a curious lack of rigor that philosophers assume, without argument, that there is a zero-sum competition for space in our heads between rigor and erudition. As Laurence Sterne said, in a related context, this is like assuming that you cannot hiccup and flatulate at the same time.

It is noteworthy in this connection that in 1682 a journal was founded in Leipzig, as the German response to the Philosophical Transactions, with the title Acta Eruditorum, or Acts of the Erudite. This journal, too, contained much on the generation of maggots and other such matters. Now the figure of the eruditus was in the 17th century very close to the curiosus, and it is around the same time that we also witness the foundation of societies of natural philosophers with names such as the Societas Leopoldina Naturae Curiosorum (the Leopoldine Society for Those Who Are Curious about Nature).

It was before the members of this very society that Leibniz, in 1695, at the very peak of his innovation as a metaphysical thinker of the first order, presented what he described as his most important contribution to learning so far: a treatise entitled On the New American Antidysenteric, namely ipecacuanha, better known today through its derivative product, syrup of ipecac. It had already been known that this root, first described in Willem Piso's Natural History of Brazil (1648) could be used to stop diarrhea, and indeed its usefulness in saving Louis XIV from a bad case of dysentery was legendary around Paris when Leibniz lived there in the 1670s. But in front of the audience of German curiosi 20 years later Leibniz could claim for himself the credit for discovering the emetic properties of the root, and again, he would, evidently without hyperbole, compare this discovery favorably to everything else he had yet accomplished, and for which he remains so widely known today.

This is, to put it mildly, very curious. It shows at the very least that Leibniz conceived of his life's work, as a learned man, as a curiosus, and as a philosopher, very differently from the way we conceive of it today, and very differently from the way philosophers today conceive of their own work. And this different conception matters to the historian of philosophy, since to take an interest in Leibniz's pharmaceutical (or mine-engineering or paleontological) interests might, just might, reveal to us something we would not have noticed had we limited ourselves to the canonical treatises. And it might, finally, force us to reconsider the adequacy of our current list of philosophical problems. And even if it doesn't, something else from philosophy's past that has fallen off the list eventually surely will.

As a historian of philosophy I believe it is a terrible thing to attempt to fit figures from the history of philosophy into the narrow confines of a conception of philosophy that has really only emerged over the most recent centuries. Such confinement fails to do justice to the scope and richness of their thought. Perhaps more importantly, it deprives us of the possibility of rediscovering that spirit of curiosity that fueled the development of philosophy during its first few millennia.

Goethe's Faust—A Critique of Modernity?

2011-05-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

I shall admit first of all that I don't undertand this poem or its hero, Faust, very well; maybe that's because I don't know German though I doubt it: Goethe was trying to do too much and loaded his poem down with more philosophical and allegorical baggage than it could carry.

I may have a better idea of what Mephistopheles is all about however and shall therefore try to focus my remarks on his role in this poem or play.

Though the poem begins, like Job, with an argument between God and Mephistopheles about the faith or virtuousness of Faust, Goethe loses interest in that question almost immediately; there is nothing even remotely Job-like about Faust or this poem. And since the state of Faust's soul (damned or saved) is not in question either, as it is in earlier versions of the story, including Marlowe's, why does Mephistopheles attach himself to him? What does he have to gain?

Notice, first of all, how different Goethe's Mephistopheles is from Marlowe's. When Marlowe's Dr. Faustus tells Mephistopheles that he (Faustus) doesn't believe in hell or damnation, Mephistopheles proceeds to set him straight:

F: Tell me, what is that Lucifer thy lord?
M: Arch-regent and commander of all spirits.
F: Was not that Lucifer an angel once?
M: Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God.
F: How comes it then that he is Prince of devils?
M: O, by aspiring pride and insolence;
For which God threw him from the face of Heaven.
F: And what are you that you live with Lucifer?
M: Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer?
Conspired against our God with Lucifer,
And are for ever damned with Lucifer.
F: Where are you damned?
M: In hell.
F: How comes it then that you are out of hell?
M: Why this is hell nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus! leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.

None of this makes any impression on Faustus:

What, is great Mephistopheles so passionate
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude . . . .
Had I as many souls as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistopheles.
By him I'll be great Emperor of the world. . . .

Marlowe's Mephistopheles, surprisingly, has principles and feelings; he is appalled at Faustus' foolishness but willing of course to take advantage of it; that's his job.

Goethe's Mephistopheles, by contrast, is a cynic who has neither feelings nor principles; he does not believe in the possibility of virtuous or disinterested action: those who do strike him as funny. He stalks Faustus because he has a use for him: together they will construct the modern world. Absent from their notion of modernity is any concept of the rule of law.

But first Faust has to be shorn of his humanity. The destruction of Gretchen (first she is seduced, and impregnated, then abandoned) serves this purpose: conscience stricken at first, Faust soon forgets her entirely. So later on, when an old couple refuse to move in order to make way for progress, Faust tells Mephistopheles to get rid of them. He never looks back. He has the kind of power that Marlowe's Faustus had wanted and had never gotten (how odd that Faustus should have been willing to settle for so little) and becomes, not the great benefactor of humanity that he thinks he would like to be, but something monstrous: something like a modern dictator.

The Faustian story is one that Goethe had had plenty of chances to observe during his lifetime, 1749-1832.

Modernist Poetry and Common Readers: Notes Of A Barbarian

2011-03-29T12:29:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, something odd happened to the arts sometime around or shortly before the fateful 'turn' of the 20th century: music, art, and poetry began to become 'modern' and then 'modernist'—a process that seems to have begun with what Kandinsky called the "the discrediting of the object" in impressionist painting (something similar was happening in the 'symbolist' poetry of Mallarmé and Valery); the arts became self-consciously difficult and obscure; and the middle classes began to assume that whatever Art was all about, it had nothing to do with them—a situation that still persists.

It's significant —but significant of what?— that the modernist revolution in the arts preceded the first World War and the political revolutions—communist or fascist—that had been brewing for a long time and which that war ignited; after that war, modernism became the dominant 'paradigm' in the arts (I'm not satisfied with this word but can't think of a better).

Some of the greatest artists, musicians, poets and novelists of the 20th century came of age during years that preceded WW1—Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Picasso, Joyce, Frost, Proust, Stevens, Stravinsky, Berg, for example—and did much or most of their finest work after it. What no one has ever been able to explain, convincingly at least, is how or why or even if the extraordinary flowering of modernist art during the first decades of the 20th century is related to the horrendous political revolutions that were occurring at or about the same time. (For that matter, we still don't know or at least can't agree about what that word 'modernist' means.)

When art began (in Kandinsky's phrase) discrediting its objects, its only purpose was to free itself from the officially imposed (in France) shackles of classicism. But, like all revolutions, this one had unforeseen consequences: when art ceased to be mimetic, when it ceased to hold a mirror up to nature or life and began to strike out on its own as a self-justifying enterprise, it made itself irrelevant to all but the hyper-sophisticated literati; the masses went to the movies. Which, I suppose, was inevitable, in any case.

Different countries responded differently to the siren songs of modernism that were coming from France: England, for example—and here one thinks especially of Hardy and Larkin—ignored them; American poets, with the notable exceptions of Robert Frost, W. C. Williams and Marianne Moore, listened and were bewitched.

I've already said quite enough about T. S. Eliot. I've recently been reading a lot of (and about) Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), America's greatest symbolist poet and a man (in Helen Vendler's words) "of chilling reticence." (Someone once quipped "that the French read Edgar Allen Poe and thought they were reading Stevens.") The best way to think about symbolist poetry is to think of it as poetry written in a private language; you can see why a man bent on revealing as little as possible about his inner life (or his public life as a vice-president of the Hartford Insurance and Indemnity Co.) and the miseries of an unhappy marriage, might want to write in a private language. Add to this the fact that his interest in the way imagination constructs reality is entirely esthetic and that he took no interest whatsoever in the politics or sociology of American democracy, and you have a poet whose poetry was bound to become increasingly desiccated as he aged, increasingly devoid of moral or human or intellectual content. This is a poet who pushed the theory and practice of art for art's sake about as far as it could go and didn't give a damn about his audience; or even whether or not he had one. The experts will say that I'm wrong; the poetry, especially the later poetry—"Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction" for example—is full of beauty, vitality and intellectual power; you just have to let the experts tell you where and how to look for it. Now I have read some of these experts—especially Helen Vendler—from whom I have learned a lot; I still have to say, however, that I still don't get it—reading that poem, and not only that one but just about all of his long poems, I never know where I am.

Has something has gone wrong with our literary culture when a common educated reader like me cannot read a poem, by a person universally acclaimed as great, without the help of academic critics—help that never helps him answer such basic questions as, where am I? What's going on?

I still think that most of Stevens best poetry is to be found in his first book, Harmonium (1923), written at a time when his life was anything but harmonious. "Sunday Morning," "The Snowman," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "The Death Of A Soldier," "The Dwarf," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,"
and "The Idea of Order At Key West," will be read long after most of the later poetry is only to be found on dusty, dimly lighted shelves.

Grief, Sorrow and the consolations of philosophy: Samuel Johnson

2011-03-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

Samuel Johnson wrote “The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow” (Rambler #47) on August 28, 1750. His reflections, as always wise and powerfully phrased, are those of a stoic moralist analysing as well as calmly reflecting on a common human passion: grief, sorrow.

His beloved wife Tetty, was still alive.

“Of the passions with which the mind of man is agitated, it may be observed, that they naturally hasten towards their own extinction, by inciting and quickening the attainment of their objects. Thus fear urges our flight and desire animates our progress; and if there are some which perhaps may be indulged till they outgrow the good appropriated to their satisfaction, as it is frequently observed of avarice and ambition, yet their immediate tendency is to some means of happiness really existing, and generally within the prospect . . . . Sorrow is perhaps the only affection of the breast that can be excepted from this general remark, and it therefore deserves the particular attention of those who have assumed the arduous province of preserving the balance of the mental constitution. The other passions are diseases indeed, but they necessarily direct us to their proper cure . . . But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells on objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.

Sorrow is not the regret for negligence or error which may animate us to future care or activity, or that repentence of crimes for which however irrevocable, our Creator has promised to accept it as an atonement; the pain which arises from these causes has very salutary effects, and is every hour extenuating itself by the reparation of those miscarriages that produce it. Sorrow is properly that state of mind in which our desires are fixed upn the past, without looking forward to the future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise than it has been, tormenting and harassing want of some enjoyment or possession which we have lost, and which no endeavors can possibly regain. Into such anguish many have sunk upon some sudden diminution of their fortune, an unexpected blast of their reputation, or the loss of children or of friends. They have suffered all sensibility of pleasure to be destroyed by a single blow, have given up for ever the hopes of substituting any other object in the room of that which they lament, resigned their lives to gloom and despondency, and worn themelves out in unavailing misery.

Yet so much is this passion the natural consequence of tenderness and endearment, that however painful and however useless, it is justly reproachful not to feel it on some occasions . . .

It seems determined by the general suffrage of mankind, that sorrow is to a certain extent laudable as the offspring of love, or at least , suffered to increase by indulgence, but must give way after a stated time, to social duties and the common avocations of life. It is at first unavoidable and therefore must be allowed, whether with or without our choice . . . something will be extorted by nature and may be given to the world. But all beyond the bursts of passion or the forms of solemnity is not only useless but culpbable; for we have no right to sacrifice, to the vain longing of affection, that time which Providence allows us for the task of our station.

Yet it too often happens that sorrow, thus lawfully entering gains such a firm possession of the mind, that it is not afterwards to be ejected . . .”

Two years later his wife, Tetty, died. He was 43.

In 1759, Johnson wrote a short philosophical novel called Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which begins with the following grim address to the reader: Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow; attend to the history of Rasselas prince of Abissinia. And, Johnson might have added, don’t expect much from the consolations of philosophy when misfortune strikes, at it inevitably will. One the stories recounted in this book makes this point with poignant clarity:

As he [Rasselas] was one day walking in the street, he saw a spacious building which all were, by the open doors, invited to enter: he followed the stream of people, and found it a hall or school of declamation, in which professors read lectures to their auditory. He fixed his eye upon a sage raised above the rest, who discoursed with great energy on the government of the passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation clear, and his diction elegant. He shewed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful government, perturbation and confusion; that she betrays the fortresses of the intellect to rebels, and excites her children to sedition against reason their lawful sovereign. He compared reason to the sun, of which the light is constant, uniform, and lasting; and fancy to a meteor, of bright but transitory lustre, irregular in its motion, and delusive in its direction. He then communicated the various precepts given from time to time for the conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had obtained the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave of fear, nor the fool of hope; is no more emaciated by envy, inflamed by anger, emasculated by tenderness, or depressed by grief; but walks on calmly through the tumults or the privacies of life, as the sun persues alike his course through the calm or the stormy sky.

He enumerated many examples of heroes immovable by pain or pleasure, who looked with indifference on those modes or accidents to which the vulgar give the names of good and evil. He exhorted his hearers to lay aside their prejudices, and arm themselves against the shafts of malice or misfortune, by invulnerable patience; concluding, that this state only was happiness, and that this happiness was in every one's power. Rasselas listened to him with the veneration due to the instructions of a superior being, and, waiting for him at the door, humbly implored the liberty of visiting so great a master of true wisdom. The lecturer hesitated a moment, when Rasselas put a purse of gold into his hand, which he received with a mixture of joy and wonder.

“I have found, said the prince, at his return to Imlac, a man who can teach all that is necessary to be known, who, from the unshaken throne of rational fortitude, looks down on the scenes of life changing beneath him. He speaks, and attention watches his lips. He reasons, and conviction closes his periods. This man shall be my future guide: I will learn his doctrines, and imitate his life.”

“Be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”

Rasselas, who could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments, paid his visit in a few days, and was denied admission. He had now learned the power of money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where he found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with his eyes misty, and his face pale. “Sir, said he, you are come at a time when all human friendship is useless; what I suffer cannot be remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end: I am now a lonely being disunited from society.”

“Sir, said the prince, mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected.” “Young man, answered the philosopher, you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation.” “Have you then forgot the precepts, said Rasselas, which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider, that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same.” “What comfort, said the mourner, can truth and reason afford me? of what effect are they now, but to tell me, that my daughter will not be restored?”

The prince, whose humanity would not suffer him to insult misery with reproof, went away convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sound, and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences.

In 1776, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale on the death of her son, Johnson wrote, “I know that a whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once and nothing left but bottomless vacuity. What you feel I have felt and hope that your disquiet will be shorter than mine.” And a couple of years later, in a letter to Mr. Elphinston who had just lost his wife, he repeats this thought: “A loss such as yours lacerates the mind and breaks the whole system of purposes and hopes. It leaves a dismal vacuity which affords nothing on which the affections can fix, or to which endeavor may be directed. All this I have known.” In 1780, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Lawrence, whose wife had recently died, Johnson wrote:

“He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful”.

Poetry and Paul Valery

2011-02-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

"Did Racine know where that inimitable voice of his came from, that delicate tracery of the inflection, that transparency of the dialogue, all the things that make him Racine, and without which he would be reduced to that not very considerable personage about whom the biographies tell us a great many things which he had in common with ten thousand other Frenchmen? The so-called lessons of literary history have little bearing on the arcana of the making of poems. Everything happens in the artist's inner sanctuary, as though the visible events of his life his life had only a superficial influence on his work. The thing that is most important—the very act of the muses—is independent of adventures, the poet's way of life, incidents, and everything that might figure in a biography. Everything that history is able to observe is insignificant.

"What is essential to the work is all the indefinable circumstances, the occult encounters, the facts that are apparent to one person alone, or so familiar to that one person that he is not even aware of them. One knows from one's own experience that these incessant and impalpable events are the solid matter of one's personality.

"All these people who create, half certain, half uncertain of their powers, feel two beings in them, one known and the other unknown, whose incessant intercourse and unexpected exchanges give birth in the end to a certain product. I do not know what I am going to do; yet my mind believes it knows itself; and I build on that knowledge, I count on it, it is what I call Myself. But I shall surprise myself; if I doubted it I should be nothing. I know that I shall be astonished by a certain thought that is going to come to me before long—and yet I ask myself for this surprise, I build on it and count on it as I count on my certainty. I hope for something unexpected which I designate. I need both my known and my unknown.

"How then are we to conceive the creator of a great work? But he is absolutely no one. How define the Self if it changes opinion and sides so often in the course of my work that the work is distorted under my hands; if each correction can bring about immense modifications; and if a thousand accidents of memory, attention, sensation that cross my mind appear, finally, in my finished work to be the essential ideas and original objects of my endeavors? And yet it is all certainly a part of me, since my weaknesses, my strength, my lazy repetitions, my manias, my darkness and my light, can aways be recognized in everything that falls from my hands.

"And so, let us give up hope of ever seeing clearly in these matters, and comfort ourselves with an image. I imagine this poet with a mind full of resource and ruse, dissembling sleep in the imaginary center of his still uncreated work, waiting to seize the moment of his power which is his prey. In the vague depths of his eyes, all the forces of his desire and the springs of his instinct are stretched taut. There, intent on the hazards from which she chooses her nourishment, very shadowy there, in the midst of the webs and secret harps that she has made out of language—those interweaving threads, those vaguely and endlessly vibrating strings—a mysterious Arachne, huntress muse, keeps watch."

Jesus on inequality

2011-02-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

No one seems to have known what Jesus was talking about, 2000 or some years ago, when he said, "To those who have more shall be given, but from those who have not the little they have shall be taken away." (I quote from memory.) It would be interesting to know when people began to take note. Now, at any rate, in our bright and shining plutocracy, his meaning ought to be abundantly clear.

Some more poems by Thomas Hardy

2011-02-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

The following poems were written after the death in 1912 of Hardy's first wife, Emma Gifford.

Without Ceremony

It was your way, my dear,

To vanish without a word

When callers, friends, or kin

Had left, and I hastened in

To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you'd a mind to career

Off anywhere—say to town

You were all on a sudden gone

Before I had thought thereon,

Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear

For ever in that swift style,

Your meaning seems to me

Just as it used to be:

"Good-bye is not worth while.

The Going

Why did you give no hint that night

That quickly, after the morrow's dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone

Where I could not follow

With wing of swallow

To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

Never to bid good-bye

Or lip me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house

And think for a breath it is you I see

At the end of the alley of bending boughs

Where so often at dusk you used to be;

Till in darkening dankness

The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens me!

You were she who abode

By those red-veined rocks far West,

You were the swan-necked one who rode

Along the beetling Beeny Crest,

And, reining nigh me,

Would muse and eye me,

While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly, did we not speak,

Did we not think of those days long dead,

And ere your vanishing strive to seek

That time's renewal? We might have said,

"In this bright spring weather

We'll visit together

Those places that once we visited."

Well, well! All's past amend,

Unchangeable. It must go.

I seem but a dead man held on end

To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know

That such swift fleeting

No soul foreseeing—

Not even I—would undo me so!

[These last lines are not strictly true; Emma had been unwell for some time and he must have known it; he just hadn't been paying attention, that's all.]

After A Journey

Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,

And the unseen waters ejaculations awe me.

Where you will next be there's no knowing,

Facing round about me everywhere,

With your nut-coloured hair,

And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

What have you now found to say of our past—

Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

Things were not lastly as firstly well

With us twain, you tell?

But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily;

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

The bringing me here; nay bring me here again!

I am just the same as when

Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

Thomas Hardy as a man and a poet who noticed things

2011-02-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

Here is a poem that Hardy could have written at almost any time during his long life, but was probably written between 1913 and 1916: Afterwards.

When the present has latched its postern behing my tremulous stay
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new spun silk, will the neighbors say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things.

You don't have to have read much of Hardy's poetry or fiction to know that he was indeed a man who noticed things, especially (perhaps) the plight of the innocent creatures whom we farm or hunt or catch in traps, or who just happen to share the space we occupy, like that hedgehog scurrying furtively across the lawn. Anyone who has read Jude The Obscure will remember the terrible scene in which Jude and Arabella butcher a pig and make a mess of it. That scene didn't have to be there; Hardy forces it upon our attention partly because he wants us to know the brutal world that Jude has entered by marrying Arabella, but also for its own sake: if you are going eat pork, you ought to know something about the life and death of the animal it comes from.

Hardy also had an eye for the plight of ordinary people, trapped in dead-end lives like a man he notices coming up Oxford Street one evening, with the sun in his eyes:

A city-clerk, with eyesight not of the best,
Who sees no escape to the very verge of his days
From the rut of Oxford Street into open ways;
And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn,
Empty of interest in things, and wondering why he was born.

Hardy's poems are full of people asking that very same question.

There are also some things that, surprisingly, he didn't notice—or, if he did, chose to ignore: the modernist revolution in literature and the arts that was going on right under his nose. He seems never to have heard of Picasso or Cezanne or Matisse or Stravinsky. T. S. Eliot mentions him but he never mentions T. S. Eliot.

Hardy's indifference to modernism in the arts (if that's what it was) did not extend to modern science. In 1920, he bought and read Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory. A Popular Exposition, and took it to confirm what he believed, "that neither chance nor purpose governs the universe, but necessity." Later, thinking further about relativity and space-time, he wrote in his notebook, "Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be" and that the people he loved are still living in the past. Which is just a little odd, coming from a man who did not believe in an after-life.

If there are any other modern poets (i.e., poets of the early 20th century) who took the trouble to read up on Relativity, I don't know who they are.

Thomas Hardy and The Ache of Modernism

2011-01-25T13:29:00.000-08:00

The following lines were lifted from a conversation between Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare, the two main characters of Thomas Hardy's greatest novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

Tess: “The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,—’Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of tomorrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’. . . But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though born a milkmaid had just that touch or rarity about her which might make her the envied of her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her own native phrases—assisted a litte later by her Sixth Standard training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the age—the ache of modernism.

Tess is working as a milkmaid because that's the best job she has been able to find; Angel Clare is a gentleman who happens to be working on this farm in order to learn how to be a gentleman-farmer— much to the disapproval of his high-toned ecclesiastical family. The word 'you' in the second line does not refer to Angel who has yet to learn, as Tess has learned, to fear the future; that 'you' is generalized: it refers to all of us, but especially to her who, having born a child out of wedlock, doesn't dare attract attention to herself by using the first-person, singular, pronoun.

Though the second paragraph begins with Angel's surprise at hearing such a talk from a milkmaid, the second sentence ("She was expressing in her own native phrases . . .") could only have come from Hardy himself. Angel Clare could not have come up with a phrase like the "ache of modernism" because he has yet to feel it; nor could he have understood Tess's "sad imaginings" as any other than her own; certainly not "those of the age." (Angel Clare considers himself a free spirit but when Tess finally finds the courage—encouraged by his own confessions—to tell him her story, he turns into a cold, hostile, self-righteous prig and abandons her to her fate, whatever it may be.)

What, in 1891, might Hardy have meant by 'modernism'? Something like a way of thinking characteristic of 'modern' times. And 'modern'? Not 'modish' or 'fashionable', which is how Rosalind uses it in As You Like It; by 1891 the word 'modern' was beginning to take on the sense of 'modernity' as a historical development without precedent: different not in degree but kind from all that had preceded it. And what is it about modernity that makes us ache? For Hardy, it was all about deep time, of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as Tess imagines the future, "all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away"; but the past as well, with all our yesterdays growing smaller and smaller until they vanish beyond recall, so that the present moment which is all we've got becomes infinitely tiny, evanescent, and precious.

Again and again, in Hardy's novels and poems, we become aware of the absolute oblivion that swallows us up as soon as we die—obviously, Hardy had no illusions about an after-like—which makes especially poignant the beautiful poems he wrote about his estranged wife, Emma, after she died (in 1912)—as if, having more or less ignored her for years, he wanted to do all in his power to keep something of their love alive and precious for as long as possible. That was 100 years ago and we're still reading and, it may be, aching, over those poems. See, especially, "The Going," "The Voice," "After A Journey," "At Castle Boterel," "The Phantom Horsewoman."

Should you like these poems, there are a lot more: Hardy wrote almost 1000 poems during his long life (1840-1928) and many, many of these are worth reading. But working your way through this huge body of work is not easy. Claire Tomalin's excellent biography is helpful.

Here's a late poem I like—four lines long, it may be Hardy's shortest poem:

Christmas: 1924

"Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand year of mass
We've got as far as poison gas

Reading the Koran

2011-01-19T07:24:00.000-08:00

I have been trying and failing to read and understand the Koran. Some
would have it that it can only be understood in its original language,
but that can't be true—I can read the bible and make sense of it, so
why not the Koran? Others say, don't try to make sense of it; read it for
its poetry. Poetry always gets lost in translation—unless a poet does the
translation,and even then. So far as I know, no poet has translated the Koran.

The trouble with this book is that there is no there there, no narrative, moral
or theological logic; only the logic of the strictly local politics of
Mecca and Medina—that it to say, essentially random vicissitudes in a
struggle for power in a remote corner of the world, largely insulated
from outside influences which went on for many years. Each sura (is
that the right word?) was composed not as part of a developing strain
of thought but in response to some particular event. There is, no
doubt an overall logic of some sort in this supreme fiction, but it is
not available to ordinary readers; only to those who have committed
the whole thing to memory. Hence the enormous authority of those who,
having committed the book to memory are able to devote their lives to its
study.

For 1500 years, the catholic church wielded similar authority; but then
the bible was translated into vernacular languages and ordinary people
were able to read it for themselves, with, naturally, violent consequences.
The Church shattered into many different churches with radically
different ideas about sanctity and salvation and that, more or less,
was the beginning of modernity in the west. No similar 'reformation'
is possible for Islam because it is impossible for ordinary people to
challenge the authority of the Imams and Mullahs. So, for example,
Muhammed had very liberal ideas about the rights of woman but if the
guardians of Islamic gospel choose to ignore these teachings—and they have—
there is nothing that ordinary people can to do to force the relevant texts
out into the arena of public political discourse. Or so it seems to this
largely ignorant outsider.

Dramatic Illusion in A Midsummer Nights's Dream: The Play Within The Play

2010-11-21T16:37:00.000-08:00

The only other play of Shakespeare's, so far as I can recollect, to have another play tucked inside it is Hamlet. As you may remember, Hamlet has the players who happen to be passing through Elsinore put on a play that mimics the circumstances of his father's death—or rather, murder. It is a test, or, as Hamlet calls it a mousetrap. When the King reacts violently to this play, Hamlet knows that his father's ghost had told him the truth. What he doesn't realize is that by exposing the King as a murderer, he has also blown his own cover. Now the King knows what Hamlet knows.

The play-within-the-play in A Midsummer Night's Dream that the tradesmen of Athens put on for the entertainment of the court—"A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/ And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth"—is only slightly connected to the plot of the play. The cast happens to be rehearsing in the forest near the spot where the aristocratic lovers of the main plot have agreed to meet, which also happens to be the place where Oberon and Titania (King and Queen of the faeries) are trying—and failing—to settle their differences over who should possess a particular 'changeling' child'; he resorts to force i.e. magic. But magic, like force, can have unintended consequences: the aristocratic lovers become totally confused, and Bottom, the weaver, mischievously given a donkey's head by Oberon's agent, Puck, becomes the willing lover of Titania, the intended victim of Oberon's magic.

While Bottom is having the time of his life as the bestial object of Titania's sexual desires, the upper-class lovers are madly chasing each other through the forest in abject confusion.

When the magic spells are finally lifted, everyone is happy to be able to get on with their lives: the lovers return to Athens in perfect harmony with each other—each lad has his lass and vice-versa—Titania and Oberon are reunited as if nothing untoward had happened, and Peter Quince is able to get on with his play.

Here's is where we begin to see what the play-within-the-play is all about. The lower class players are as deeply confused about dramatic illusion as the upper-class lovers had been about their real feelings, which, thanks to the magical manipulations of Oberon and Puck, they are finally able to recognize.

When the upper-class lovers are happily married and looking for some slight diversion before bed-time, they are delighted—more so than they expect— to watch a play in which the actual and imaginary, art and life, are totally confused. What's important here is that both audiences, the lovers and the larger audience out there in the theatre, are in the same boat.

Plays are designed to draw an audience into its make-believe world so that there are moments when they forget that that they are watching a play.

Watching the clumsy efforts of the Athenian tradesmen as they try to pull off that bit of theatrical magic, we may forget that these clumsy oafs are really professional actors drawing us into another illusion—the illusion of course being that Bottom and his friends really don't know what they are doing. We laugh, not realizing that we've been fooled again.

The fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream has so many layers of dramatic illusion—more than any other play of Shakespeare's—is what makes it so utterly charming.

The Trouble With T. S. Eliot

2010-11-19T07:32:00.001-08:00

This quotation—"these fragments I have shored against my ruins"— virtually concludes The Waste Land, a poem cobbled together by Ezra Pound out of a collection of fragments that Eliot had written without knowing, it seems, what kind of poem he was trying to write. Pound did, but he had to do some pretty radical editing to make it happen.

For me, all of Eliot's poetry thereafter is fragmentary—unless one shares, as I am unable to do, his belief in the Christian doctrine of incarnation and the eucharist, or his unchristian disdain for the masses of ordinary people. When I read lines like "human kind cannot bear very much reality" (Burnt Norton) or the lines in East Coker describing the "mental emptiness" of the people in the London subway, or the lines (re: the eucharist), "The dripping blood our only drink,/ The bloody flesh our only food," I turn away. Since I cannot share Eliot's beliefs and prejudices, Four Quartets becomes, for me a poem of fragments, like The Waste Land—beautiful fragments, often, like this from East Coker:

Dawn points, and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind

Wrinkles and slides.

Or these strange and magical lines from Burnt Norton:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

And reconciles forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

I like these lines, from the beginning of East Coker:

Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotized. In the warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence

Wait for the early owl.

But the lines that I find most moving and wonderful are the lines about the rose-garden that I discussed, briefly, in my last post. Those lines, which may be about the children that Eliot

never had, remind me of an earlier poem that is probably not very well known nowadays, Marina, which may be about the daughter Eliot never had:

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What water lapping at the bow

And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return

O my daughter . . . .

What is this face, less clear and clearer

The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—

Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet

Under sleep where all the waters meet.

Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten

And remember.

The rigging weak and canvas rotten

Between one June and another September.

Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life

Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.

What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers

And woodthrush calling through the fog

My daughter.

The image of "whispers and small laughter beween leaves" will be picked up in Burnt Norton.

Eliot's contempt for ordinary humanity, implicit in that other message of the thrush— "human kind cannot bear very much reality"—will be elaborated on in the other Quartets as well as here, in Burnt Norton:

Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after

In a dim light: neither daylight

Investing form with lucid stillness

Turning shadow into transient beauty

With slow rotation suggesting permanence

Nor darkness to purify the soul . . .

Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs

Time before and time after.

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air, the torpid

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness in this twittering world.

That word "twittering" was prescient.

Do you suppose that Eliot ever felt a flicker of sympathy for those "strained time-ridden faces," or the "unhealthy souls" belching from "unwholesome lungs" into the faded air of this "twittering world"? Not a chance.

You can also hear Eliot's contempt in East Coker when he is describing how people "in the tube" respond when the train

stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about . . .

or when he is complaining about the shabby state of the "equipment" he must use as a poet—the English language—as it deteriorates "in the general mess of imprecision of feeling/ Undisciplined squads of emotion."

At this point, I want to call Eliot's bluff: what do you mean by precise feelings and how are they related to disciplined squads of emotion? That phrase has military, even totalitarian overtones; who or what is to do the disciplining? Who gets to to define the precision of our feelings? Some sort of Jesuitical super-state? (We know that Eliot, like Pound, had fascist sympathies, at least for a while.) Do we even begin to understand how feelings are related to emotions and vice-versa? And what does all this have to do with the deterioration of a language—even if we grant Eliot's assumption that such a thing is possible? For me, Eliot's language at this point is full to bursting with imprecise feelings and undisciplined emotions.

T. S. Eliot's Rose Garden

2010-11-18T16:16:00.000-08:00

Consider these lines from the conclusion of The Waste Land:

Datta [give]: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can neve retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

Dayadhvam [sympathize]: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison . . .

Eliot obligingly provides a foot-note from F. H. Bradley's book Appearance And Reality for these last four lines: "My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts and feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul."

Which was it to be? Can we connect with others or can't we? Eliot must have thought long and hard—agonized perhaps—over this question but it's pretty clear where he ended up: in his own private prison, or "citadel" as Lyndall Gordon calls it:

"Eliot's personality was self-centered enough to assume that the world and its vicissitudes—its women, its wars, seasons, crowds—existed as signals for his private conduct. The isolation and the absence of signs . . . brewed a certain wilfulness . . . .
"[He] passed his youth walled-in by shyness and vast ambition. His adult life may be seen as a series of adventures from the citadel of his self in search of some great defining experience. He made expeditions across a perilous gap that divided him from the great world, and ventured into society, into marriage, into religious communion. He tried to maintain the polite, even curiosity of an explorer far from home, but each time had to withdraw—shuddering from the contact—to his citadel, where he would labor to record, as precisely as possible, his strange encounters." (Quoted from William Pritchard's Lives of The Modern Poets, 1980.)

You can see why it was so important for Eliot to separate the "man who suffers from the mind that creates." And you can see why such a doctrine might make for a certain heartlessness in his poetry. But I can't leave it at that, because some of the poetry he wrote after he caved in, converted to Anglo-Catholicism and became a fervent believer in the incarnation and the eucharist is, nevertheless, both moving and beautiful. Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, is one of these.

Though I am not the least bit interested in what Eliot has to say about time past and time present, the still point of the moving world, incarnation, the end which is also his beginning etc., or the dance that he goes on and on about, a might-have-been that is deeply considered at the beginning of Burnt Norton is worth paying attention to. Here are the relevant lines:

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point toward one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do no know.

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

There they were, dignified, invisible,

Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves

In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,

And the bird called, in response to

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery . . .

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light,

And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

And the poem ends with the laughter of those children, hidden in the foliage:

Sudden in the shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

T. S. Eliot married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1914 and lived with her until 1932. They could have had children but either decided not to or found that they couldn't. Here is how the poem puts it:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

I guess you can read these lines any way you want. To me they seem the most nearly personal lines that Eliot ever wrote—as if the man who suffers had become very close to the mind that creates.

"Fear In A Handful Of Dust": Poetry For The Hot, Dry World To Come (with apologies to T. S. Eliot)

2010-11-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

The phrase, "Fear in a handful of dust," and the paragraph that precedes it comes as, you probably know, from the first section of The Wasteland, which was published shortly after the First World War. The rest of the material comes from the final, prophetic, section of that poem. What was prophetic metaphor in 1922 is beginning to seem, unhappily, as if it might become a more or less literal representation of the world that our grandchildren will inhabit in the not so very distant future.

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. . . .

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we would stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But the sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water . . . .

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells."

"Rhapsody On A Windy Night" by T. S. Eliot

2010-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations,
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things:
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out it tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running
along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of the stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smell of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

The music of Preludes is followed by a very different composition, a ‘rhapsody,’ which may be defined as a “musical composition of irregular form having an improvisatory character.” Reading the twelve perfectly assured lines of the first stanza, though, you would never think they were improvised. Yet there are signs that the speaker of this poem, having announced the time of day, or night—"Twelve o'clock"— is making it up as he goes along. For instance, the grammar of the second sentence—if it is a sentence—is unobtrusively confusing: there ought to be a subject and a verb but finding them is not easy. At first you might be inclined to define “whispering lunar incantations” as the subject and “dissolve” as the verb; but then you realize that this sentence does not end with a period but a comma. So, are lines 3-5 merely a long parenthesis, leading up to the sentence, “Every street lamp that I pass beats . . .”? These grammatical questions lead to a substantive one: what exactly is the moon doing to the speaker of these oddly disjointed lines?

As our nightwalker observes the seemingly empty "reaches" of the street, they seem to be "held in a lunar synthesis" i.e. they seem to form a coherent whole, but that may be an illusion, for the moon is having the opposite effect on the the structure of memory that makes him what or who he is: its whispered "incantations" "dissolve the floors of memory/ And all its clear relations. . ." leaving him vulnerable to despair: now every street lamp that he passes "Beats like a fatalistic drum" the message that all his choices are blocked off, and that he is locked into the life he has made for himself. The last two lines are truly horrifying: "Midnight shakes the memory/ As a madman shakes a dead geranium."
He is that dead geranium.

Now the character of the street itself turns mean, sordid and vaguely threatening. A woman in a dirty dress sidles towards our nightwalker out of a grinning doorway,
giving him a twisted look out of the corner of her eye, which reminds him of other twisted debris thrown up by the sea of memory: a twisted branch eaten smooth and polished, like a skeleton, a broken spring in a factory yard, almost rusted through. It is a stunning image:

Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Is that how our nightwalker is beginning to see himself?

As memory turns fragmentary, so also does the quality of what he remembers: the sight of a cat in the gutter licking up a morsel of rancid butter reminds him of a boy he saw once stealing a toy and slipping it, "automatically" into his pocket. The eyes of this boy reveal as little as the crooked eyes of that woman, or the eyes he has seen peering into or out of closed shutters, or the crab that, long ago, instinctively grabbed the end of a stick
he had held out to it. The meaning of these images, like that of the rusted spring, is highly suggestive: grab what you can, as soon as you can; don't think about it, just do it.

The street lamp that has so far been directing the speaker’s attention, randomly, toward the various denizens of this sordid street, now begins to take a more active—or ironic?—interest in his education: take another look at that moon, it says, in French, not very reassuringly: she bears no grudges (why should she?) and anyway she’s so feeble and feeble minded she doesn’t count. Forget that lunar synthesis; this senile moon is incapable of holding anything together: “She winks a feeble eye, she smiles into corners” says or hums the street lamp; she has “lost her memory”—like the speaker? “A washed-out smallpox cracks her face.” She is a study in senile irrelevance, isolation and futility:

Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.

Rhyme is used sparingly in this poem; 'Cologne'-'alone' is one of the few that the poem allows itself. When they occur, they affect us powerfully, like a spring suddenly unwinding to deliver a powerful blow—or spring shut like a trap. Lines 9-12, for example, rhyming “drum” and “geranium” hits us between the eyes, as also the rhyme “grin”-”pin” in lines 18-22. And, of course, “life” and “knife” at the end.

The street-lamp’s description of the moon as a senile old lady, reminds the speaker of sights and smells that he (like Prufrock?) has known all too well. (Line 7, "divisions and precisions," sounds like a deliberate echo of Prufrock's "visions and revisions".)

The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smell in bars.

Is this the world that speaker has been running away from? (The only good thing is the smell of chestnuts in the streets.) Lunar incantations dissolved the floors of memory at first; here that edifice is reconstructed with a vengeance. This is your life, says the street-lamp, and don’t you forget it:

Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
(Or is it death?)

The last twist of the knife.

"Tradition And The Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot

2010-10-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

I've thought about this essay and the deep claims it makes about poetry for a long time—all my life, it seems—and every time I read it I feel as if I'm missing the point. And yet the main point is clear enough: it's the poetry, stupid; if you don't know how to read it, as poetry, no amount of biographical information about the poet will help you out. This essay is aimed at bad critics i.e. people who confuse art and life.

Here is a fairly brief paraphrase of the essay which will contain much of Eliot's language (without quotation marks) and some ad-libbing of my own.

"No poet," says Eliot, "no artist of any art has his complete significance alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation the poets and artists that have preceded him; he cannot be valued alone, but must set be set for comparison and contrast among his predecessors. Indeed no poet that knows what he is doing is ever unconscious of the poets of the past—not if he is a true poet. To become a true poet, he must develop or procure, at whatever cost in labor and time, a consciousness of he past and he most continue to develop this consciousness of the past throughout his career.

"What happens in a true poet is a continual surrender of himself to something that is more valuable. The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry . . . the poet has not a personality to express but a particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and and experiences that are important for the man may take not place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality . . . .

"It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting . . . The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. Consequently, we must believe that [Wordsworth's phrase] "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is not neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a great number of experience which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation . . . . the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality.

"There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, but there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. Very few know where there is an expression of significant emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal and the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself to the work to be done.

"The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."

I said, above, that this essay is aimed at bad critics; out of it, the so-called New Criticism of the 20th century was born. But the claim Eliot is making for the complete separation of art and life, of "the man who suffers and the mind which creates," is so radical that I wonder if there may be something else going on. I'm wondering if Eliot is trying to get at something central to modernist art in general: the discrediting of the object. That was Kandinsky's revelation when he saw an exhibition of impressionist art for the for the first time at an exhibition in Moscow in 1891 (See my earlier posting on
3/5/10). Eliot's earlier poetry "discredits" the subjective self; there isn't any. The first person pronoun, 'I' which is so important in Romantic poetry, never appears. In The Waste Land, Eliot achieves what he has been aiming at all along, the discrediting of the object. That poem is a symbolist poem in which words have meaning but not references to a real world outside the poem. William Pritchard (The Lives Of The Modern Poets) makes this point in his chapter on Eliot (p. 109) and quotes Denis Donoghue:

"At first, the words seem to denote things . . . but it soon appears that their allegiance to reality is deceptive, they are traitors in reality. So far as the relation between word and object is deceptive, so far also is 'objective reality' undermined. The only certainty is that the absence in reality has been effected by the words, and now the same words are enforcing themselves as the only presence. What we respond to is the presence of the words."

T. S. Eliot: "La Figlia Che Piange"

2010-10-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

La Figlia Che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo…

STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—

Lean on a garden urn—

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—

Fling them to the ground and turn

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,

So I would have had her stand and grieve,

So he would have left

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,

As the mind deserts the body it has used.

I should find

Some way incomparably light and deft,

Some way we both should understand,

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,

Many days and many hours:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

And I wonder how they should have been together!

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

This poem, like “Portrait Of A Lady,” exemplifies (perhaps in a way that Eliot did not intend) his claim in “Tradition And The Individual Talent” that poetry “is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion.” Emotion is what the speaker in “Portrait” wants to escape from at any price, and the price is high: he becomes a heartless and diminished prig.

Something similar occurs (if it hasn’t already done so) in “La Figlia Che Piange” (“The Weeping Girl”—which, like “Portrait,” is provided with an ambiguous epigraph to stumble over: when Virgil, In the Aeneid, makes his obligatory descent to Hades (a precedent established by Homer’s Odysseus in the Odyssey) he meets Aphrodite disguised as a huntress and asks her, “O maiden, by what name should I address you?”—knowing all the while exactly who she is.

The disingenuousness of the epigraph carries over into the poem which begins with a scene which is not really being staged, as the various imperatives might lead one to think. Those imperatives are ironic: what we are really observing is a scene of cruel mockery in which the speaker, by ironically pretending to instruct the girl how to perform her scene, and ironically pretending to admire her performance, is doing his best to destroy her.

Or rather, as lines 8-12 seem to suggest, that is how the speaker might have liked to handle this break-up. But it is hard to be clear about Eliot’s use of the subjunctive, “should”, in line 13:

I should find

Some way incomparably light and deft,

Some way we both should understand,

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

In other words, keep it simple? Which, evidently is how they handle it.

The faithlessness, however, is all his—as she perfectly understands.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather

Compelled my imagination many days,

Many days and many hours:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

She, however—the person that she is, whom he at least pretended to care for—is not what compells his imagination, but her estheticized image, “with her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.”

The last stanza returns to the oddly evasive use of the subjunctive, ‘should’, which we have already noticed in line 13:

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

And I wonder how they should have been together!

I should have lost a gesture and a pose.

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

What it all come down to, seemingly, is his wonderment at this last image of this girl, with her hair over he arms and her arms full of flowers, which is the only memory of her that he values. “How lucky I am that these things should have come to together so perfectly; I should, otherwise, have lost a beautiful gesture and a beautiful pose.” The last two lines, however, hint at deeper cogitations and more troubled midnights than he has heretofore admitted to.

T. S. Eliot's "Portrait of A Lady"

2010-10-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

Taking an ambiguous quotation from Marlowe's play The Jew Of Malta (c. 1590),

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

as his point of entry, Eliot of edges his poem edges nervously into its theme of emotional entrapment and evasion with a spineless seven line sentence in which the verb is postponed for six lines and the subject, if you can find it, is more or less smeared across the previous lines. And yet it seems to make sense in an odd sort of way. It is a remarkably accomplished performance:

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon

You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—

With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.

“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”

—And so the conversation slips

Among velleities and carefully caught regrets

Through attenuated tones of violins

Mingled with remote cornets

And begins.

“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,

[For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind!

How keen you are!]

To find a friend who has these qualities,

Who has, and gives

Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

How much it means that I say this to you—

Without these friendships—life, what cauchemar!”

Among the windings of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite “false note.”

—Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in his fingers while she talks.

“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

“I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed

You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

To give you, what can you receive from me?

Only the friendship and the sympathy

Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends...”

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park

Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark

An English countess goes upon the stage.

A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

III

The October night comes down; returning as before

Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease

I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door

And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

“And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?

But that’s a useless question.

You hardly know when you are coming back,

You will find so much to learn.”

My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

“Perhaps you can write to me.”

My self-possession flares up for a second;

This is as I had reckoned.

“I have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.”

I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark

Suddenly, his expression in a glass.

My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

“For everybody said so, all our friends,

They all were sure our feelings would relate

So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

We must leave it now to fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

Doubtful, for a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon...

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful with a “dying fall”

Now that we talk of dying—

And should I have the right to smile?

The 'subject' of that first sentence is not grammatical but thematic; it is what the poem is about: the efforts of a lonely, rather pathetic woman of conventionally refined taste to alter the terms of her friendship with a younger man. She wants him to be more than a friend, perhaps a lover; he, knowing perfectly well where she is trying to lead him, wants none of it. So in the first stanza, he understands that the "scene" with its atmosphere of Juliet's tomb only seems to have arranged itself; this is a set-up: he is to be the Romeo who will enter just as Juliet wakes up and take her in his arms. That, if you remember the play, is how it was supposed to happen but didn't.

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of innocence:

"What's in a name?" asks Juliet innocently, as if names don't matter: Romeo and Juliet

think they can escape the deadly history of their families, leave it all behind, and live their own lives. Everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong.

There's nothing tragic about Portrait Of A Lady—or comic, for that matter; it's the sad little story of a hollow, heartless man who is too knowing for his own or anyone else's good.

He subtly mocks his 'friend', right from the beginning:

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips."

But she does leave herself open to mockery:

“So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room."

"Velleities" are wishes that are never acted upon: this is a woman, as the man critically appraises her, who is too weak to break out of the comfortable routine in which she has established herself. All she knows how to do is gush about music, friendships, the fragmentary nature of life, and serve tea to friends. He's heard it all before; her voice reminds him of the "attenuated tones of violins, mingled with remote cornets."

This time, his inner self rebels, and the cornets sound as if they've got cracks in them:

Among the windings of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite “false note.”

—Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

—Oh for an ordinary life of odds and ends, he thinks. But his rebellion is not final; he keeps coming back for more. In Part II he gets more than he had bargained for: what we would call today a guilt-trip, which leaves him speechless:

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?"

And that, you would think, is the end of that. The following lines have the sound of finality: "You will see me any morning in the park . . . . I remain self-possessed . . ." which indeed is what's wrong with him: he is too self-possessed, too self-enclosed for friendship or love. Or anything: this is a man who who doesn't have anything better to do than sit in the park and idly scan the newspapers for the latest gossip or the latest scandals.

The sound of some old street piano, "mechanical and tired," reiterating some worn-out common song, and the smell of hyacinths "across the garden" (whose?) reminds him of things that other people have desired—and, presumably, made some effort to obtain. So that supercilious word, "velleities" comes back to bite him. "Are these ideas right or wrong?" he wonders, missing the point: he hasn't been talking about ideas but feeling and emotions. Ideas can be, arguably, right or wrong, but feelings and emotions are things that you may or may not have; or, as in his case, have been trying to avoid.

Six months later with, surprisingly, only a slight sensation of being ill at ease he returns—he has come,

it seems, to say goodbye—and discovers that what he really feels is humiliation as well as guilt and confusion. His smile falls heavily "among the bric-a-brac" and he sees himself with his shit-eating smile for the first time as his self-possession "gutters" like a burnt-out candle-end. They are both, as he acknowledges for the first time, "in the dark." For a moment, seeing himself as the futile, empty person that he has allowed himself to become, he tries to dehumanize himself:

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

And, it may be that he succeeds:

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose,

he says, carelessly, clearly more interested in the picturesque qualities of the day than the woman whose death he is imagining. But as usual, there is something about this person, unremarkable as she is, that won't let him alone, and we know why: she is, for all her little clichés, more of a person than he is and he knows it. It may be that, unremarkable as they are, they were made for each other.

He has pretensions to being a writer, perhaps (or maybe he is at last getting round to that letter he had promised her) which is what he imagines himself to be doing when he gets the news of her (imagined) death, to which he responds—imaginatively— in all the wrong ways: not by having feelings but by talking, irrelevantly, about the feelings that he doesn't have.

This poem clearly belongs with that titannic panorama of waste, futility, emptiness and despair, The Waste Land.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2010-10-10T20:45:00.000-07:00

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", is not a love song, or even a song, by a man with a name that could not possibly be confused with the name of the poet. It seems to be an account a visit to a tea-party or salon where upper-class women like to talk about the arts in general and Michelangelo in particular. It is a visit which may or may not take place, and consists of a meditation on that subject which may or may not come to a conclusion.

We stumble over uncertainties before we even get to the poem and Prufrock's invitation, "Let us go then, you and I . . ." A quotation in Italian, unidentified—it turns out it's from the 27th canto of Dante's Inferno—blocks our way. Here it is in English:

"If I thought that my response [to Dante's question about who he is and why he is in hell] would be addressed to one who might go back alive, this flame would shake no more [i.e. he'd say no more]; but since no one ever goes back alive out of these deeps (if what I hear be true), without fear of infamy I answer you."

His name, as we may learn (elsewhere), is Guido da Montifeltro, and he is—or was—actually proud of the skills that made him famous, and landed him in this place:

"The machinations and the covert ways

I knew them all, and practised so their craft,

That to the ends of the earth the sound went forth."

Why is he in hell? On a technicality: he had repented of his Machiavellian machinations but had been lured out of retirement by a Pope who needed his help and told him that, as it was in a good cause, he'd be forgiven. Which was a lie.

So, right away, we're likely to be confused before we even begin to read—depending on how assiduously we follow up the little 'hint' that Eliot has offered us. Prufrock may be in a sort of social and emotional hell, not because of anything he has done but because of what he is: a more intelligent and cultured individual than any of the people who are likely, as he fears, to put him down—and because he doesn't have any other place to go, no one else to talk to. The fatuity of the talky-talk that he knows he'll have to listen to is perfectly caught by the lines (which will be repeated a couple dozen lines later):

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And what of the men? Surely there must be some. But it's the women who do all the talking.

"Let us go then, you and I," he says (emphasis mine), as if there were something about this invitation that might naturally follow from those lines from Dante. So, of course, we read on and quickly find ourselves in a bizarre cityscape: an evening spread out across the sky like a patient on an operating table being prepared for surgery (which may be how Prufrock sees himself) and a maze of sleazy streets in a lower-class part of town which seem to be part of a conspiracy:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question.

Anticipating our natural desire to know what he is talking about, he brushes us off:

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

It is soon clear—it may be the only clarity—that Prufrock has something important that he has been wanting to say: "an overwhelming question" of his own that he is in no hurry to ask. "And indeed there will be time" he says—twice—as he tries to get up his nerve. "Do I dare to disturb the universe?" Here he is being ironic: the only universe he has ever known is the universe taken for granted by his social set, which he knows so well that he can predict with meticulous accuracy how it will respond to anything that disturbs its routine or forces it to confront disagreeable facts.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee-spoons . . . .

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Whatever the question agitating this man, it has nothing to do with love; this is a man who is dying of boredom; and while he wants more than anything to make a different life for himself, he has no idea how to go about it.

Suppose he were to talk about a moment of insight into the ordinary lives of ordinary people:

Should I say that I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Obviously, it's going to take more than that to shake up these people; and he is afraid. Suppose, he thinks, I were to ask them a really overwhelming question. Suppose I were

To say:

"I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all—

The trouble with that gambit is two-fold: he doesn’t know what Lazarus might actually say and he hasn't even begun to about what comes next: so what? And even if he knew how that question ought to be handled, it wouldn't make any difference; he knows exactly how anything he might want to say would be received:

That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant at all.

For all his feelings of inadequacy, however, Prufrock really does have something to say and he finally says it, beautifully and forcefully, with stunning conviction, in the last six lines of the poem—but not to those arty society women who would have laughed in his face. (It’s not just anyone who gets to see memaids riding the waves and “singing each to each.” He is pretty sure they would not sing to him but so what? They wouldn’t sing to those silly women either).

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Prufrock, to his credit, is such a human voice, trying to figure out how—however ineffectually—to wake up a complacent society before it's too late and it dies in the airless, life-less chambers it has constructed for itself—so remote from the real human world they might as well be at the bottom of the sea. It should have been clear, even in 1910, which was when Eliot began writing this poem, that a genteel, privileged society that knows nothing of life on the other side of the tracks, in the mean streets,

The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells

could not long survive in the violent new world that was evidently about to be born.